What has happened
Following Goldsmiths Council’s rubber-stamping of the senior management team’s job cuts on Friday 8 April, 16 staff were sent redundancy letters. This included 4 staff in English & Creative Writing (ECW), 5 in History, and 7 in Professional Services in roles on pay grade 6 and above. Over the following fortnight, some staff received their dismissal notice before a stage three meeting had taken place, in violation of the College’s own policy on managing organisational change.
Just prior to the announcement of these cuts at 7.08pm on a Friday evening, on Tuesday 5 April the college proudly announced the appointment of six new senior posts in the new centralised Professional Services (PS) structure, and have since begun sacking PS staff on pay grades 4 & 5. These staff have decades of experience, expertise and institutional memory, with some having worked at Goldsmiths for as long as 22 years. This attack on front-line student facing administrators is designed to clear the way for under-resourced, centralised teams that will not be able to provide academic staff and students with the kind of support that has sustained teaching and learning throughout a global pandemic. Staff in Professional Services have worked tirelessly to keep the institution going during an unprecedented time, and ‘deleting’ them in this way is utterly reprehensible and indefensible.
The 16 redundancies also include the GUCU branch co-president, one of the branch treasurers and both reps in one of the affected departments. Throughout this year GUCU activists, particularly affected staff, have fought tirelessly to defend the rights of every staff member who has threatened with redundancy and the downgrading of their working conditions. Their work and the mobilisation of the branch is the reason why SMT were not able to sack 46 people in November 2021. In targeting these specific people for redundancy, SMT have made it clear that having failed in their aim to push through mass redundancies with no opposition, they are now seeking – in what is a clear case of union-busting – to target the activists who resisted them.
The Warden has professed a commitment to ‘liberating the curriculum’, and decolonising approaches, particularly with regard to race, gender and “social justice”, as stated in her twitter bio. However, the 9 academic staff who have received dismissal notices have been targeted precisely because they work in these areas, demonstrating that these professed commitments are not only performative but are being cynically deployed to justify the removal of activists and teachers. Furthermore, the redundancies are also targeting academics whose research and teaching focuses on Islamic history, the History of the Modern Middle East, Arab migrant literature and African migrant literature. If these redundancies go ahead, these courses, which are among the most popular in their departments, will no longer exist at Goldsmiths.
Among those made redundant will be scholars and teachers working on the Middle East and North Africa, whose work is not only crucial for understanding the modern history and contemporary politics of the region, but also outlines pathways for liberation and resistance to the depredations of imperialism, settler colonialism, and autocratic regimes, notable for their repression of anti-colonial and popular movements, and the imposition of austerity and neoliberal restructuring at home. These are teachers who are committed to real and substantive liberation against and above the corporate virtue signalling and performative politics around “decolonising the curriculum”, which is often pursued with alacrity by management as part of a larger branding exercise.
The redundancies also target academics who have devoted their careers to teaching students on Foundation courses which are often the only route into universities for students who have been marginalised, alienated and excluded from Higher Education. All 4 staff teaching on the Foundation Year of the Integrated Degree Programme in History are to be made redundant, which will threaten the future of this course – the only one of its kind in London.These students are taught by academics working on areas such as working class activism, gender and migration in Britain, the history of empire, postcolonial history and literature. Coupled with all staff in the college’s Widening Participation team leaving due to insecure contracts, this is a major failing in Goldsmiths commitment to removing barriers to Higher Education. Senior management obviously do not see striving for equity in education as profitable, and so the teaching of students from working class, Black or migrant backgrounds is not considered by them to be a part of the future ‘strategic direction’ of the College.
In total of the cuts to academic staffing amount to 5 full time posts, and a likely saving of less than £250,000. This is in context of Goldsmiths’ senior management team increasing in size to the tune of £150,000. There is simply no financial rationale for any of these redundancies, and little to no saving for the college. The lack of financial justification begs the question, why are management making these specific staff redundant? The answer is ideological, and is tied to an assault on the union and attacks on teaching in the critical arts & humanities. Goldsmiths management are not only targeting union activists, they are using the redundancies to push through an attack on academic freedom and the teaching of critical and decolonial approaches to students who are not from wealthy or elite backgrounds.
Not only that, but as predicted by unions, management have chosen to target women, often on the most badly paid and insecure contracts in these redundancies. It appears that staff on part-time and teaching and scholarship contracts have faced discrimination in the selection process, and staff have been selected for redundancy with complete disregard for HERA role profiles. Staff who are not contracted for research have been penalised for having done insufficient research, and staff who are not contracted to participate in department management processes have been penalised for insufficient ‘leadership’. Again, as campus unions predicted, the majority of staff selected for redundancy are colleagues on part-time or teaching-only contracts.
The aim of Frances Corner’s restructure of the College is clear – to turn Goldsmiths into an institution that embodies the vision of higher education being promulgated by the current Tory government – to strip universities of any genuinely critical approaches, and to make higher education a playground for the rich and privileged, rather than a right for all.
What are we going to do about it
We are going to continue to fight this. Recent resignations at the senior management level show not only the cynicism of the process, with its architects leaving for well-paid roles elsewhere after wreaking havoc on our workplace, but also the total lack of legitimacy of the recovery process – clearly even the people pushing it through have no faith in its viability.
Goldsmiths UCU are currently pursuing a marking and assessment boycott, which in combination with the inevitable organisational disarray that will accompany the restructuring of administrative support, will have a massive impact on assessment processes. In addition, the branch has voted for further strike action at the start of the next academic year to coincide with induction week. As part of our action short of a strike (ASOS) the branch is also calling on its members not to comply with the Connected Curriculum Review (CCR), in order to resist any efforts to further cut staffing or alter departmental autonomy as a result of the CCR’s ‘strategic principles’.
Both GUCU and Goldsmiths UNISON are supporting members to challenge these redundancies in appeals. Students are continuing to mobilise in support of staff and in defence of their own learning conditions. As well as supporting members in appealing these dismissal notices, GUCU will be mounting a legal challenge which will require significant fundraising. The branch is asking for everyone who can afford to do so to donate to our campaign fund (mark the payment “legal” to support our fundraising for appeals).
We are going to continue to fight to get every one of these redundancies rescinded and ensure that the Recovery Programme is brought to a halt. In order to do this, we are going to need the support and energy of every member of the Goldsmiths community, both in sharing the situation at the college as widely as possible, and in building our campaigning and collective actions. Now is the time to attend branch meetings, action committees and working groups. Now is the time to stand with staff threatened with redundancy and show management that this institution is ours – it is made what it is by every worker and every student, not overpaid managers who will leave as soon as they can no longer further their own careers.