SENIOR academics confirmed yesterday that they are set to shut down the University of London Union, recommending that ‘ULU in its current form ceases’ from the summer of 2014.
The university’s collegiate council, composed of the academic heads of the ‘self-governing’ colleges that make up the University of London, met early yesterday morning and endorsed a vice chancellor-commissioned review’s conclusions.
The plan is directed at destroying the ability of the Student Union to mobilise students in the capital against the the savage cuts and austerity policies of the Tory-led coalition government. These have so far put one million youth out of work, including many thousands of university graduates who have been reduced to seeking unpaid employment as ‘interns’.
As well, the introduction of £9,000-a-year university fees has transformed higher education from a basic right to a commodity that only the very rich can afford.
With the introduction of huge benefit cuts, including cuts in housing benefit and bedroom taxes, accompanied by savage wage cuts and increases in the cost of living, the government is now fearful that they will face a hurricane of working class and youth anger, in which the country’s students will play a leading role.
Under the plan of the senior ULU officials, ULU would retain its social facilities but lose its role as a student union with elected officers.
Michael Chessum, its president, has already described ‘any move to abolish ULU’ as ‘totally illegitimate and hugely negative for students in London’.
Supporters of ULU had asked the university to reconsider the proposals and rallied outside yesterday morning’s meeting. They complain that the review panel had no student members and that the recommendations come despite ULU’s own suggested reforms to expand into a pan-London union.
Yesterday morning they were turned down again.
They know that ULU is being targeted because of its role in recent years as a hub of campaigning activity and mobilisation against the gigantic rise in tuition fees, the onslaught on the Welfare State and Cameron’s permanent wars of oppression.
Chessum said yesterday that, if adopted, the plan would ‘set a dangerous precedent for university managements to move in with no mandate and shut down democratically run unions.
‘Universities and colleges need vibrant, democratic organisation and debate as part of their academic culture. If the university goes ahead with this on Friday, they will be saying far more about their own mortality as an institution than they are about us. And the battle won’t end there.’
In fact, the battle has just begun. Many universities and all university staff and all students face the menace of privatisation.
Salford Uni is currently facing its 12th round of job cuts, while Sussex University was recently occupied against the move to privatise the university workforce, that would see mass sackings, wage cuts and a massive collapse of university standards.
Every university in the UK faces the same threats from this privatising, job cutting, wage cutting, union bashing, profiteering regime.
The ULU closure report now needs the final approval by the university’s board of trustees, who are due to meet later this month.
The NUS leadership must be made to act at once.
ULU must be put under a permanent occupation, that will have the full support of the NUS nationally.
A national demonstration, to which all students and all trade unions are invited, must be called through London to ULU, on the date that the university board of trustees are due to take their final decision.
A final decision to close must be met with a national occupation, as part of a huge NUS campaign for the trade unions to call a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government and socialism.