How might we mark Higher Education’s senior management? Mark Perryman awards a fail.

Thursday 15th June was the deadline for my University of Brighton ‘Football, Culture and Community’ essay marks to be submitted.

I had spent hours marking them: the work was uniformly impressive and a joy to read. The marks were all ready to be submitted but weren’t.

Why? University lecturers, like nurses, doctors and others, have been campaigning over the entire academic year for a wage rise in line with inflation. If we don’t receive this, which we haven’t for several years, our wage steadily decreases.

Greedy? No, as our wage falls, more and more staff are leaving, replaced by casual, part-time, sometimes under-qualified staff, on lower wages, who do their best but the quality of my students, and future students’ university education invariably suffers.

The university had refused to recognise this and as a result were made aware that there would be a Marking and Assessment boycott. They have had months to find a negotiated solution but instead are docking all staff taking part in the boycott 100% of our wages. This is despite the fact we are doing all our other university work – marking takes up a small fraction of our agreed workload. 

This has worsened the dispute. They have destroyed any idea of the university as a community with their spiteful and disproportionate action. If I withdraw my labour entirely, that is, go on strike, I don’t expect to get paid, but this is entirely different: I’ve withdrawn something like 20% of my labour yet been docked 100% of my wage. The fault lies entirely with the university’s senior management, and specifically the Vice Chancellor.

The Vice Chancellor and senior management earn astronomically high wages while presiding over:

– Failing to notice a Head of Finance defrauding the university of £3 million;

– Closing the Eastbourne Campus requiring a takeover of a sub-standard sports facility at Falmer at a cost that has been estimated could be as high as £19 million

– Responding to one of the worst lecturer-student ratios in the country by making in excess of another 100 lecturers redundant.

I am passionate about my teaching, this module that I pioneered in particular. I make every effort to make it special, with guest speakers and field trips, pulling in favours to make these possible in the absence of funding from the university. In a further cost-cutting move, this hugely popular module is being suspended next year. I am campaigning for it to be reinstated. 

The only ones to suffer from this mess are my students.  I have made it very clear the work is marked and marks are ready to be submitted the instant senior management see sense and negotiate a settlement. But until they do so, it’s their fault these marks aren’t being handed in and their responsibility to ensure graduation isn’t affected by their actions.

Mark Perryman pioneered the Football Culture and Community module at the University of Brighton and is a member of the UCU. Follow him on twitter @MarkPerryman