Stop the Cuts? Yes we CARNIVAL!

Wednesday March 3rd has been called as a National Day of Action against fees and cuts. Stop the Cuts at Sussex will be holding a carnivalesque demonstration at the same time as other Universities, such as UEA and Leeds. Join forces with students and staff all over the country to demand an end to Higher Education cuts!

12pm, library square.

Proposed ‘Student Life Centre’ job descriptions leaked

The job descriptions for management’s proposed ‘Student Life Centre’ have been leaked onto an anonymous Google Docs account.

The Sea Life Centre (as it is better known) is set to replace the current Student Advisor service which Sussex offers. It is also expected that the Centre may try and fill in some of the work done by UNISEX.

Even from a first glace at the role descriptions, some concerning observations can be made:

1. The real reduction in the current 9.5 FTE Student Advisors to 5.0 FTE Student Advisors which could mean a reduction in numbers from the current 14 advisors to 5 advisors if the retained advisors work full time. Student Advisors have already been reduced from 12.5 FTE to 9.5 FTE since 2004.

2. The reduction of the current 5 Student Support Coordinators to 4 Student Support Coordinators. They have already been reduced from almost 10 FTE since the restructuring at the beginning of the academic year.

3.The fact that “Advisors will not be expected to carry an active caseload”. This means that in the bid to degrade the job and pay less, a vital part of the role in terms of customer satisfaction will be removed. Advisors will no longer be able to see the same student more than once. The student/advisors relationship will be reduced to one of a customer at a call centre with no continuity of service.

4. All funding issues will be dealt with by one person, the “Student Funding Administrator”. Experience this year has shown us that this job is too big for two people, let alone one person. (Prior to this academic year, the role was shared between all the student advisors and student support coordinators, while scholarships and bursaries were dealt with separately.)

5. Looking through the roles in detail, many of them require things such as a ‘customer service qualification’ and include quite a wide-ranging remit. Most of the qualities are ‘essential’ rather than ‘desirable’. This would exclude most, if not all, of the current Advisors (and other people up for redundancy) from being qualified to take up these posts.

The Argus: Threatened Sussex University creche rated outstanding

Reposted from The Argus website

A university creche which is facing closure has been rated as outstanding in every area by Ofsted.

Staff from the Sussex University Creche, which cares for the children of staff and students, were invited to a celebratory event recognising outstanding childcare at London’s Guildhall.

The creche has been open for 30 years and at the time of the inspection had 62 children on its roll.

The Ofsted report said: “The overall quality of the provision is outstanding, with the successful promotion of children’s individual interests central to the setting’s’s organisation and management.”

However as part of university management proposals to save £5 million it now faces closure.

Other options include raising fees, which are currently subsidised or finding an external provider to run it.

One angry parent said: “This is a fantastic nursery. The staff do a great job and it is such a shame that the university can’t protect what is obviously such a valuable service.”

A spokesman for the University of Sussex: “The university is very pleased to congratulate all the staff at the nursery and crèche on this recognition from Ofsted, which reflects the quality of the provision.

“It has long been recognised that the care provided by the nursery and creche on campus is of high quality.

“The issue for the university at this time is one of cost. The service provides childcare for the children of 80 members of staff and 20 students. It currently costs £350,000 a year more to run than it earns and effectively receives an unplanned subsidy from public funds.

“We have been actively exploring how to maintain childcare on campus either through an increase in fees or finding an acceptable external provider. We would want the quality of any childcare provided on campus to continue to be excellent.”

Join the Teddy Bear’s picnic to show your support for Sussex creche this Thursday from 1pm, meet at the postbox by Bramber House.

Events this week

Monday

Brighton University – lobby to save nurseries 7:30am, Mithras House, University of Brighton, Lewes Rd (Opposite B&Q). – Come show some solidarity with the campaign against the closure of Brighton University nursery facilities.

Tuesday

May ’68: The year the world caught fire, 6:30 RB24. SWSS hosted talk with Ian Birchall, May ’68 veteran.

Wednesday

Organising creative events and actions workshop, RB34, 1-2:45. Seeds for Change (activist training collective) hosted workshop for all those involved in the Stop the Cuts campaign.

Using the Media to Communicate your Message, 3-4:45, RB27. Seeds for Change (activist training collective) hosted workshop for all those involved in the Stop the Cuts campaign.

STRIKE – an open meeting with staff and students, 5:00, JMS 1A1. Save Life Sciences open meeting for all staff and students to address issues regarding the strike.

Thursday

Teddy Bear’s Picnic 1-2pm. Meet at the postbox by Bramber House, University of Sussex, and then to Sussex House. To coincide with a University management meeting where the future of childcare services at Sussex will be discussed. Don’t forget your picnic blankets and teddy bears!

1:15. Stop the Cuts, start the Music. 1:15, library square. Making music to represent each of the 115 jobs under threat.

Stop the Cuts, Start the Strikes! , 2:30, library square. Today Leeds uni staff go on strike. Join us to show support and solidarity for striking staff at Leeds and for Sussex UCU staff currently balloting.

Regular campaign organisational meeting, 5pm Falmer common room.

And future important dates…

Saturday 27 February – Teach-In at King’s College, London, followed by London/south campaign meetings
Weds/Thurs 3-4 March – National and international Days of Action, demonstrations planned at universities all over
Saturday 6 March – Brighton March for Jobs
Thursday 11 March – countersummit in Vienna to protest Bologna Process
Friday 12 March – deadline for Sussex University proposals
Thursday 18 March – full details of HEFCE cuts announced, potential demonstration outside HEFCE headquarters
Saturday 20 March – national UCU demonstration, details to come

Please add any additional events to the comments below.

Senior management read post-graduate’s private email

Cross-posted from The Badger online

A postgraduate English student at the University of Sussex has revealed he felt “intimidated, bullied and compromised” by senior management after being called to a meeting to address a group email he sent out exclusively to fellow students in his role as student rep. The meeting was with Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, Bob Allison, who had gained access to and read the email.

Dphil student Anthony Leaker, who is the English School Representative for postgraduates, as well as a Senator, sent the email exclusively to English Dphil students and American Studies Dphil students on 10 January.

The email addressed the Stop the Cuts campaign and was intended to consolidate support for an upcoming meeting. It stated: “The postgraduate community is in fact incredibly important to the University, and we do have a strong voice. But we need numbers and we need to make ourselves heard. It is vital. Because this whole thing is a very slippery slope. And if we don’t take a stand now who knows what kind of depressing spectacle we might be facing in a few years time.”

It reminded the intended recipients that five faculty members were to be made redundant, and ended with a comment about management salaries.

“Year on year salary increases for management has sky-rocketed in last 5 years. There are 12 new heads of school at Sussex, all were brought in from outside and all within the last year. Make of that what you will (and to be honest, I’m not even sure it is accurate, but the gist is true!)”

The email was sent at 4.46pm on a Wednesday, and at 9am the following day, Allison emailed Leaker asking to meet him in person.

£13.6m new building planned for Life Sciences

Sussex University has approved initial plans for a £13.6m new research
building for the School of Life Sciences – where a third of academic
staff are facing compulsory redundancy.

Outline proposals were approved by the University’s Physical Resources
Committee today. The project must go through several more stages of
planning before possible final approval for construction to begin in
2012.

According to the plans the University is hoping to win a £5m grant
from the Wellcome Trust towards the cost of the building. The
remainder of the cost would be met from the University’s capital fund
and from other as yet unidentified sources.

The project is being led by Professor Laurence Pearl, the newly
appointed Head of Life Sciences, who was also closely involved in
drawing up plans for staff cuts.

More details are available on Sussex Direct in the following papers to
Physical Resources Committee:

New Research Building – PRC/11/6
Report from Capital Planning Group – PRC/11/8

No NSS!: A letter of support

Dear Student,

I am writing to encourage you not to participate in the National Student Survey being promoted, with this University’s approval, by your Student Union on behalf of the Ipsos MORI polling organisation. Let me explain why.

Much is claimed for the NSS, yet concrete evidence of any benefit is hard to find. In reality it is an expensive exercise in reputation management, by which student criticism is deflected and blunted. It makes a lot of money for Ipsos MORI but little difference to students’ experience of university. Professor Lee Harvey, formerly director of the Higher Education Academy, has described it as “a white elephant” – “shallow, costly, widely manipulated and methodologically worthless”

Why would he do so? Not least because the NSS is statistically unsound.

You don’t have to consider for long the superficial and generalised nature of the questions to realise how futile any conclusions drawn from it must be. When the results are broken down, small departments are often unfairly compared because they’re lumped in with quite different other courses. That’s just one shortcoming; the attached
peer-reviewed analysis, which has been suppressed by the University concerned, details many more.

The widespread attempts to manipulate the NSS have been well documented: (one, two,three) but the probes and warnings quietly forgotten once the initial fuss died down. However, such practices continue. Right now Roehampton Students Union boasts “The University will commit additional funding for the Summer Ball this year on the provision that 80% of final year undergraduates complete the survey.” That’s the carrot. For academics, the stick comes in restricted freedom to speak out. Here at Portsmouth, staff are told (to quote one recent e-mail) they mustn’t “make any negative comment about the University in front of students”.

You deserve greater honesty – and a students union that will fight for it, rather than behave as junior management lickspittle for the University.

It doesn’t have to be this way. A number of SUs have not been taken in by this charade. At Cambridge (and you don’t notice their reputation slipping because of a low completion rate), they recognised the dark side of the NSS: interminable harassment by Ipsos MORI pollsters. Their campaign against it wasn’t especially successful – Ipsos MORI did agree to limit their follow up calls to eight – but at least they tried. Others, such as Sussex SU are trying to use a boycott of the NSS to achieve real change from their University [that's you!].

You can help expose the NSS for the fraud it is – just say “NO”!

Please help spread the word: my ability to do so is limited by the need to remain anonymous (I like my job). Go viral and good luck!”

As an SU activist myself many moons ago, it was refreshing to see that not everyone has been co-opted by University as additional QA bureaucrats!

All the very best with your campaign.

Links:

Portsmouth Students against the NSS

Final year students: pledge not to fill out the NSS here

Upcoming Events

Wednesday

London and South regional meeting against fees and cuts, 6:30pm – 8:30pm, Room 205, Bloomsbury Theatre, Gordon Street, London

Thursday

Regular Organisational Meeting, 5pm Falmer Common Room.

Stop the Cuts Open Discussion, 6pm TBC.

The time is ripe for a discussion of our tactics – what strategies will work best to stop the cuts? What alternative kinds of education should we be promoting? What kind of actions will give the campaign the momentum to go forward into the next term? What can we do to support out lecturers and staff?

Come along on thursday for an open discussion on these issues. There will be some very short introductions on the NSS refusal, the strike ballot, and the occupation, then everyone will be encouraged to voice their opinion on where the campaign should go next.

Events in the coming weeks….

Feb 28th, Picket the Tory Spring conference, Brighton Hilton Metropole, 11-2pm

March 6th, March for Jobs, start 12pm on the level

Leading historians call on Sussex not to abandon research into English and European history

From the letters page of the Daily Telegraph:

History cuts at Sussex

SIR – As historians who owe much to the University of Sussex, at which we were trained, we are calling on the university to stop its proposals to withdraw from research and research-led teaching in English social history before 1700, and the history of continental Europe before 1900.

We wish to express our solidarity with internationally recognised colleagues who are threatened with redundancy. We question how a university can abandon areas in which it has built such strength over half a century and expect to maintain the reputation on which it trades.

As specialists in contemporary Europe, we have no self-interest in defending early modern history. Yet to cut everything but the most modern puts in peril the public function of history, entrenching the arrogance of the present. And for a university that has long prided itself on its European links, to abandon the serious study of such pivotal areas of modern history as the French Revolution will mean depriving Sussex graduates of the mental furniture of educated Europeans.

The unconvincing replies we have received to our concerns boil down to: Sussex will continue to offer a little teaching in these areas, but by non-specialists.

We urge Sussex to think beyond potential short-term savings and bear in mind that it would be unimaginable to suggest that hard science could be taught with no research base.

Dr K.H. Adler
University of Nottingham
Dr Hanna Diamond
University of Bath
Dr Daniel Gordon
Edge Hill University
Professor John Horne
Trinity College, Dublin
Dr Katharine Lerman
London Metropolitan University
Dr David Berry
Lougborough University
Dr Jackie Clarke
University of Southampton
Professor Geoff Eley
University of Michigan
Dr Simon Kitson
University of London Institute in Paris
Dr Annika Mombauer
Open University
Dr Chris Pearson
University of Bristol
Dr Scott Soo
University of Southampton
Dr Matthew Seligmann
University of Northampton
Professor Glenda Sluga
University of Sydney
Dr Matthew Stibbe
Sheffield Hallam University

The cuts even harm the university’s reputation in the Daily Mail.

Messages of Solidarity for Sussex Occupation

Solidarity Messages from Netherlands

(i) Dear occupiers of Sussex university,
It is with great joy that we heard the news of your courageous fight against cuts by your university management. Only last week we – for the first time in over 20 years – occupied lecture-halls in our university against major cuts (around 20%) in the budget for higher education. In our fight we joined with the university cleaners who are amongst the people bound to be hit hardest by the cuts. We know how hard it can be to start fighting back. We also know the importance of messages of support and solidarity to counter attempts by the right and the media to belittle our struggles. We are impressed by the way you are organizing solidarity between workers and students at your uni. This solidarity is all the more relevant as our uni’s are increasingly being organized as factories. Around Europe students are facing the same tendency of subjecting the interests of students, teachers and other personnel to the cold dynamic of the market and of profit. Around Europe we have begun to fight back.

We live in dark times of a world in crisis. It’s our task to build movements that can inspire hope in the midst of this. As student-activists from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, we therefore offer you our full, unconditional and enthusiastic support.

On behalf of the EUR action committee,
Jeroen van der Starre
sosrotterdam.wordpress.com

(ii) To the brave occupants of the Sussex University,
How fantastic it is to hear students in Great Britain are now also organizing to make a fist against the cuts in and demolition of education. In Holland there also was a wave of university occupations. Here in Utrecht we occupied the administration management section for 3 days, to make a statement for investments in education and more student participation. In Holland we are only at the beginning of a students movement, and it’s so encouraging to see that throughout the whole of Europe, the whole world students are once again finally stepping up for their rights on quality education.
In a time where the ministry of defense gets a budget of over 20.000.000.000, we’re fighting an unsupported war, billions are invested to “save” banks, it’s hypocrisy to cut on education, health-care and other social acquirements. Education must remain accessible for all people, no matter what financial background.
Yesterday, occupiers from Austria and Germany arrived here, because they heard about the occupations in Holland and wanted to show their direct support. They brought a huge banner, which decorated a lot of universities in Germany and Austria already. In Holland there’s still the brilliant law which allows people to squat buildings that are not used for over a year. We had the honor to drop it from our squatted office building , to symbolize our enthusiastic solidarity to your occupation.

We hereby offer you our full support.
Lots of solidarity, and success we wish for you now and the upcoming struggle.
And last but not least, thanks a lot, for inspiring us and every student that cares.

Occupants, from Utrecht and cities in Germany and Austria.

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