Strike to save University of Leicester from cuts!
The University of Leicester UCU has overwhelmingly voted in favour of extensive strike action (79.5 percent on a 62 percent turnout).
Commencing on 29 September, academics will strike back against university management, who intend to axe several departments within the university including the schools of education, chemistry, geography, geology and the environment, as well as severe cuts to others.
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The Leicester Revolutionary Communist Party wholeheartedly supports these workers. We encourage the student body to come out in solidarity with staff in their struggle against management’s attacks.
These cuts are not just an assault on the workers who face redundancy, but on the students whose quality of education is at risk.
The mindless search for profit, in Leicester and across the country, is what caused this crisis. The only way we can protect our higher education is to kick capitalism off campus!
Christopher Snyders, Leicester
UK’s first ‘super university’
From Autumn 2026, the University of Kent and Greenwich will be set to merge under the proposed title ‘London and South East University Group’.
A BBC report stated for students, “there will be no visible change”, but this is a blatant lie.
The reality is that students are already facing changes they didn’t agree to, including module cuts and extra terms for no extra credits. On the other side, lecturers are being given as many as five separate classes to teach whilst other academics are losing their jobs, and they pick up the extra weight.
Across England, the UCU estimates 5,000 jobs at universities have already been lost, with senior lecturers being the most vulnerable.
At the start of the 2024 academic year, students and lecturers at Kent received a letter announcing that there needed to be cuts of over £19.5 million over the year in order to pay off the debts the university had spiralled into. Reports have projected a further deficit of £31 million for 2023-2024.
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Students have not taken this lying down however. There has already been a small movement in 2024 called ‘stop Kent2030’, which was a response to management’s announcement that a long list of arts and humanities subjects would be cut from the university’s courses by 2030.
A small number of students were camping outside the library in protest, spreading petitions to ask the university to stop.
Students have also not forgotten the ignorance towards the Palestine encampments on the campus in Summer 2024, when the management blocked posters that compared the genocide in Gaza to the holocaust as it may “affect the wellbeing of students” – a term they throw around so much it’s lost any meaning.
This ‘super university’ is just one more quick fix for the top-down university bureaucracy, at the expense of their students, their workers, and their dignity.
Naoise Jacques, Canterbury
Death by one hundred thousand cuts
With two weeks before the start of freshers week, Anglia Ruskin University management has cut £100k from the students’ union’s yearly budget.
This means hiring freezes for front-line jobs like triage workers for Student Advice (an already overworked department), cuts to student society grants and reducing services across the board. And this isn’t just happening here; it’s the same bleak picture at universities all over the UK.
Student life is already a struggle, with the number of students having to work alongside full-time studying rising to 68 percent in 2025, many of whom are working over 20 hours a week.
Now the university, to maintain the extravagant salaries of its vice chancellors – which average over £300k a year – is attacking every single thing that might offer a slight respite from the intensity of student life today.
The senior bureaucrats and careerists in students’ unions have been taking all this lying down, with student bars shuttered and welfare programmes dropped across the country. They’ve done nothing to mobilise the student population against these attacks.
But higher education doesn’t have to be miserable. If universities nationally were collectively run by students and staff for the purpose of furthering human knowledge rather than lining the pockets of management, we could reinvest these back into student services.
Alongside the billions sitting in banks and major monopolies, the money clearly exists for properly funded higher education.
Every pissed-off student who agrees with this should join the RCP on their campus and help build the revolutionary leadership necessary to overthrow this rotten system!
Anglia Ruskin University Marxists
Outsourced UCL workers under attack
University College London (UCL) cleaning staff, contracted through Sodexo, are preparing to protest significant cuts on student ‘move-in day’ on 20 September.
These cuts will see the loss of 195 full-time equivalent cleaning roles to “modernise” services and “maintain financial sustainability”.
UCL recorded a £100 million surplus in 2024. Despite claiming to “highly value” cleaners, UCL stubbornly refuses to bring them in-house, denying them the rights directly employed staff enjoy.
These cuts will mean even heavier workloads and less time for essential tasks. Student accommodation services have already seen a 93 percent rise in maintenance tickets over five years. Last year, they registered over 220 mould cases and backlogs of up to 27 days. Fewer cleaners will only worsen overstretched services.
In a cowardly move, UNISON officials settled for a voluntary resignation scheme and a 30-day extension of the consultation until 3 October. This is despite cleaners reporting no contact from UNISON about the cuts!
The only contact workers have had is from the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB). With a record of empowering workers through collective struggle, the IWGB is mobilising for a strike in the coming weeks, while appealing for students’ support in the fightback.
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In solidarity, the UCL Communist Society will call for a class-based programme during the university’s freshers week: UCL must open their financial books, halt the redundancies, and bring all outsourced staff into direct employment, with equal rights to all other employees.
Students and staff must unite and push for democratic control over our universities!
André Maltez, UCL Communists
