GUCU is deeply dismayed by SMT’s responses to student campaigns over the last weeks.
As staff members at Goldsmiths we believe that students are an integral part of the community of learning and study here at Goldsmiths, and as such have every right to protest and campaign actively for their interests. Student campaigning is commendable, and shows a deep-seated commitment to education and social justice in our institutions of learning. Goldsmiths Senior Management has in the past adopted a repressive and unhelpful approach to student campaigns and protests, including the threat of legal and police action against Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action members during the occupation of Deptford Town Hall. This student action resulted in crucial institutional changes around race and racism and demonstrated both the efficacy of student protest and its crucial role in the university.
It is therefore deeply concerning that the senior management team has responded to students organising in the Fee Strike and Goldsmiths Community Solidarity networks by threatening to withdraw more than a hundred students over the withholding of fees. This intention was announced shortly after student campaigners intervened at a meeting of Goldsmiths Council to convey the depth of feeling and opposition to the proposals in the Recovery Plan.
These actions by students are in response to the massive disruption connected to the planned redundancies and restructures as part of the Recovery Plan. These proposals have resulted in unprecedented strike action, as well as extraordinarily high levels of staff stress and organisational dysfunction at an already difficult time, with serious consequences for students. From what GUCU has been able to ascertain, no risk assessment on the impact of this restructure and redundancies on students has been carried out, and the process for applying for rebates remains opaque and convoluted. Under such circumstances, students have every right to organise and campaign in defence of their interests.
Furthermore, a letter has been circulated by some members of Academic Board regarding the students’ protest that contains inaccuracies and misrepresentations of both the context of protest and the protest itself. The protestors were not “SU” protestors. This is a clear misrepresentation of events. The protest was organised by student activists at Goldsmiths, and not by SU officers. To conflate the two is to distort both the capacity of students to organise protest independently and to make unfounded accusations against SU officers.
The first sentence of the letter’s second point contains significant misinformation. Six members of Academic Board are under the impression that the College has made public commitments to keeping MA Queer History and MA Black British History, although they have referred to them by different names. At no point in this process has there been any statement naming these programmes specifically and confirming their continuation. Instead the documents indicate a ‘preference’ that teaching in these ‘areas of focus’ will remain. This vague statement does not constitute a commitment to the continuation of either MA programme, since that objective could be met with as little as a single lecture on a team-taught module. Our members who teach on those programmes have repeatedly questioned why they remain in scope, and some have asked to be removed from scope. It is alarming that six members of ‘the principal academic authority within the College committee system’ which is ‘chaired by the Warden’ are ignorant of the present reality. Either: 1) members of Academic Board have not been provided with sufficient information by the College and Recovery Team about their plans; or 2) members of Academic Board are privy to information about the security of these programmes that must urgently be made public; or 3) these six members of Academic Board have used false statements about the safety of these programmes to impugn the actions of concerned students.
The fourth point in the letter is further revealing in what it says about these Academic Board members’ understanding of the College’s institutional structures and their role within them, suggesting that they have not done due diligence to ‘act professionally’ with ‘respect for dignity’ of the College community at large. The authors of the letter complain that details of the Academic Board meeting were ‘shared with UCU and SU protestors’. The SU president Sara Bafo is a full member of Academic Board and Council with responsibilities to the SU members she represents. Furthermore, numerous members of the Academic Board are themselves members of the UCU. It is not appropriate, therefore, to make public accusations in the form of a widely disseminated email, against these members without any evidence.
We request that Goldsmiths’ Warden demands that the letter be retracted and an apology issued.
Furthermore, we ask for clarification on Academic Board members’ understanding of the Recovery Plan and its commitments to specific subject areas (or lack thereof). It is incumbent upon Academic Board members to avail themselves of accurate, up-to-date information and material that is relevant to their role as active leaders of the College. The numerous factual errors and misconceptions in their letter suggests that they have not done so.
GUCU has been campaigning for the past months in defence of 46 jobs slated for “deletion”. Alongside threatening the livelihoods of scores of staff, senior management has now taken the additional step of threatening students with withdrawal, while senior members of staff make unfounded and wholly inappropriate accusations against other members of Council and Academic Board. This is an untenable situation; unilaterally threatening to expel members of the Goldsmiths community, whether as a cost-saving measure or as a repressive response to campaigning work, is an unacceptable course of action. We call on senior management to withdraw these threats and engage seriously with student campaigns, the Students’ Union, and the campus Trade Unions with an aim to finding a resolution to this dispute.