The coronavirus pandemic has caused widespread suffering and disruption throughout society. In the process it has highlighted and exacerbated the underlying crisis in Higher Education in Britain and beyond. Prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus, and the government’s belated adoption of a lockdown, many universities in Britain were facing uncertain futures due to the corrosive effects of twenty years of botched marketisation.

As a result, precarious staff in universities have seen their pay and conditions deteriorate dramatically, and many have already lost their jobs.  BAME staff have suffered disproportionately, and all staff have seen a generalised attack on their pensions and conditions of employment. The audit culture, artificially induced competition for students, with its attendant unsustainable funding model, and a generation of unsustainable debts to finance vanity building projects, have produced a Higher Education sector that does not work for staff, students or society as a whole.

The unprecedented character of the coronavirus crisis has forced all of us to re-think the things we have taken for granted, and the government's response, for all of its many flaws, has made clear what many already knew, that austerity, cuts and privatisation of essential public services was always a false necessity.

We cannot come through this crisis unless we break with the “normal” that has produced all of the ills in our sector. As such, we need to demand a fundamental transformation of higher education, so that in future it provides safe, secure and fulfilling employment for all staff, supportive and enriching educational opportunities for students, and an essential service to society.

We need to create a system that caters to our educational needs, not one that simply reproduces class inequalities and feeds an unsustainable economic system.   We need a higher education system that is based upon socially-useful outcomes, rather than simply reproducing highly trained people for large corporations.  The current model of higher education is unsustainable, precisely because it is based upon the same principles that our crisis-ridden economy is based upon.

To do this, the organised workers and students in the higher education sector must push a national campaign. We cannot sustain these battles one institution at a time. It would therefore be a real strategic blunder for the UCU  to accept the latest employers’ ‘offer’ right now, which falls well short of the Union’s demands on pay and pensions and promises nothing but vague principles without any practical enforcement mechanisms on the questions of casualisation, gender equality and workload. Instead,we need a national campaign in Higher Education, led by our trade unions, that calls for:

- a jobs guarantee for all staff in higher education, in particular the most insecure and vulnerable staff
- the scrapping of tuition fees and the abolition of all student debt
- caps on the salaries of senior managers and the democratisation of university decision making processes
- the cancellation of REF, TEF and the NSS and with them the destructive auditing culture
- a convention on the future of higher education, led by staff and students, which will chart a course for new models of funding, assessment etc for Higher Education in the 21st century

These demands will need a sustained campaign of political and industrial pressure towards both UUK and the government. We call on our trade unions, UCU, Unite and Unison, to take the lead with members, local branches, the Convention on Higher Education and others in pushing these demands and building a national campaign to transform Higher Education and to end the current unsustainable model, based on never-ending growth.

In addition, our unions cannot continue to function under ‘business as usual’ rules. It is imperative for our leadership to actively mobilise the union’s membership. Taking a leaf out of the NEU’s book, we urgently need a series of regional representatives and members meetings to discuss the crisis and organise our collective response. The national ballot having run out, the union will also need to reballot without delay, so as to have the necessary national leverage to call action in response to the current assault. Social distancing and long distance learning does not need to mean inaction. Let’s prepare to turn off our zoom classes and ignore our inboxes.

We already know that senior management teams throughout the country are using this crisis to push through cuts, reforms and further commercialisation of Higher Education. In the face of this, we have to be organised, ambitious and resolute, to make sure that this crisis does not irreparably damage our sector and undermine the rights and conditions of staff and students further. Every crisis is also an opportunity, and we must seize this opportunity to transform our sector for the better.