Plans to sell off nearly all non-teaching services will mean the university splits along producer-consumer lines
The occupation of the conference centre at Sussex University – and the occupation of the university's medical school lecture theatre – came after a demonstration of hundreds of students and staff protesting at privatisation plans. The space has served as a hub for organisation and discussion on campus. Solidarity has come from all quarters – trade unionists, musicians, MPs and public figures from around the country and the world join us daily. Thousands of students and faculty pin yellow squares – the campaign symbol – to their lapels, and yellow cardboard covers every office window.
In May 2012, Sussex University management announced its unilateral decision to sell off almost 100% of non-teaching services which constitutes 10% of its workforce, to private investors; everything from porters and catering to printing and campus security. The announcement came as a grand exercise in university democracy, with no prior consultation, or any previous indication to students and faculty that privatisation was being explored. The university put out a tender for these services in early summer and invited private companies to bid on them.
It is hard to reconcile the overarching goal of private enterprise, profit, with the practices and aims of a public university. Will "investors" subsume their business decisions to what best serves this campus community? Campuses make for the perfect business scenario – will the printing provider give much heed to "skint" students when it is effectively operating a monopoly of printers on campus?
The 235 workers affected are at risk of losing their pension schemes as they transfer to the private sector; Tupe legislation does not cover pensions, nor can it guarantee job security or pay and work conditions under a new employer.
In the months since, management has held a plethora of "negotiation" meetings with the stated goal of "consulting" affected staff, faculty and students, well after the bidding process was under way. Students and staff who raised concerns or participated in the campaign have felt intimidated from speaking out: workers were told not to wear yellow badges and discouraged from attending union meetings.
Something that has characterised this government's policies and has spread as a pseudo-ideology to boardrooms across the country is the use of efficiency and cost-saving as justification for job losses. Here, we see fluffed discourse combine with elusive reports to reveal dire efficiency problems we never knew of. For David Willetts, minister of state for universities and science, this means a tuition fee system that costs the Treasury an extra £7bn. For management, this means that selling off parts of the university is financially prudent (if we are to achieve efficiency and avoid bankruptcy) at the same time as being nothing to do with finance at all (it's all about quality you see). So why does management seem hellbent on selling this university for parts? (Hint: It's not the deficit.)
The privatisation of higher education in Britain is a political choice. This government has adopted the policy in response to an economic crisis easily attributed to the perverse market incentives put forward by that very same rationale. The power and remit of this free-market mantra is now being extended beyond the confines of the financial sector and private enterprise, to our hospitals, schools and universities. Beyond the immediate loss in pay and working conditions, the wider effects of privatisation are the rearrangement of the university along producer-consumer lines. This will see public providers of education rapidly transformed into sites for private speculation and profit, rather than institutions geared towards the production of a public good.
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