As the new academic year rolls around, Scottish students will be returning to a higher education system in turmoil.
Years of government underfunding are being compounded by university management siphoning the dwindling funds out of education and into their pockets.
Over the last year, Dundee University has been brought to the brink of total collapse. A clique of senior managers had been running the institution into the ground. Now, realising the coffers are empty, these scumbags have run off, leaving the staff and students to foot the bill. Seven hundred jobs are being cut.
It’s the same story across the country. The University of Edinburgh (UoE) has revealed a deficit of £140 million, a figure announced by the highest-paid person in Scottish higher education, the hated Peter Mathieson.
As ever, it’s the staff and students that are at the sharp end: jobs, pay, and entire departments are being cut to the bone. My own supervisor was made redundant with no warning a few weeks ago, while in the middle of several vital projects, for no other reason than to shed staff.
The crisis won’t be felt by the colossal salaries of Mathieson or any of these parasites. Neither will the universities give up their hoarded billions in assets, which make them some of the biggest urban landowners in Scotland. In fact, more money is constantly being sunk into pointless vanity projects.
Complicit in genocide
And that goes for more than just our conditions: many of the universities in Scotland are complicit in militarism and the genocide happening in Palestine.
From Heriot-Watt university’s (HWU) cozy relationship with the company that makes components for Israel’s fighter jets, to the University of Glasgow’s £67 million in investments and research for arms companies, to the UoE’s ranking as one of the institutions most ‘financially entangled’ with Israel, the complicity of our universities in the genocide in Gaza is clear.
Many students and staff have been fighting back through waves of protests and encampments, which management responds to with silencing and repression. At HWU , the arms company Raytheon was granted full access to the university’s surveillance to watch for and quash potential protests.
At Edinburgh, the police were called on one of the Revolutionary Communist Party’s meetings just because the topic was Palestine, and another meeting was cancelled on bogus claims. At St. Andrews, the rector was removed from her role for condemning the Israeli regime.
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But the staff won’t take this without a fight. Strikes are coming in the universities of Edinburgh, the West of Scotland and Dundee, which students must put their full support behind. The only way to stop our universities being hollowed out is to fight shoulder to shoulder with our teachers.
The strikes and protests show the way forward: it’s the ordinary staff and the students that universities should be for, and it’s us who should control them.
This week, Scottish branches of the Revolutionary Communist Party are mobilising on campuses to put forward revolutionary ideas and organise a new generation of class fighters. Get involved in the fight for our future! Join the Communists on campus!
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What happens when our university is run like a business?
Sara Al Disi, UCU Edinburgh University (personal capacity)
On Welcome Week, I will be taking strike action alongside other University of Edinburgh workers organised within the University and College Union (UCU) to fight against budget cuts and mass redundancies implemented by the bosses.
What Edinburgh UCU has been emphasising is that the university still makes a surplus of at least £25m and has £1bn in assets. Many university staff are wondering, “why the hell are we enduring all these cuts, then?”
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Due to decades of our university being run like a business with decisions made by highly-paid, out of touch bureaucrats who have ties with big business and the British elite.
It should come to no surprise then, that with its net profit going down, the bosses are going on the attack against workers (and students) with no care for education.
The solution is then clear: It is those who really run the university and understand what students need, who should be making the financial decisions. Only then will they re-invest surplus in our education instead of vanity projects or arms manufacturers.
Only under the real and democratic control of staff and students is a better university possible. One that is not run like a business.
