Sussex Not For Sale

Sussex Not for Sale has been one of the most important and popular campaigns to take place at Sussex in many years. We should not be surprised that the Vice-Chancellor has been closed to criticism of his ideologically driven restructuring. If we learn from this experience, the campaign will return even stronger in the new academic year.

Tom Wills
June 2008

Sussex Not for Sale took off when the Vice-Chancellor’s Executive Group (VCEG) published plans to restructure the University. For the first time, we could all see in concrete terms the implications of the VCEG’s strategy for the institution, which had been published earlier in the year. Academic communities of students, tutors and lecturers would be uprooted and replaced with new ‘mega-departments,’ subject to close monitoring and management from the top down. Support staff were thrown into uncertainty over where they would fit in to the new Sussex – or whether they would have a place at all.

The Vice-Chancellor tried to sell the proposals to us with promises that they would bring more ‘autonomy’ and a ‘flatter structure’ – and that the only alternative would be to send the university into decline.

But hostility to the plans was not simply conservative. It was grounded in serious concerns that the changes for the university now being unveiled by the Vice-Chancellor would fail to deliver what they promised. How would heads of department appointed on five-year terms by panels chaired by senior managers – rather than chosen by their peers on a yearly rotational basis as is currently the case – deliver more autonomy? How did the creation of a new business and management school, paid for by cuts to current areas of study, square with the stated aim of defending the university’s existing disciplines?

Whereas Sussex Not for Sale had so far been a small group of concerned students and staff, now the realisation that the VCEG’s proposals would turn everyday life in the university upside down reverberated around campus. Suddenly hundreds of students and staff were meeting and debating the university’s future and how we could reclaim our institution.

However, this clamour for the university to take a different path to that of the Vice-Chancellor was hampered by a misconception of the origins of the restructuring plans. The Vice-Chancellor’s ‘consultation’ encouraged the view that all that was needed to stop the restructuring was to persuade him of the imprudence and unpopularity of his proposals. But Vice-Chancellors do not work in isolation. They are strongly influenced by ‘best practice’ and trends in Higher Education management, institutionalised in the form of numerous conferences and networking events – for example a conference organised by the HE Academy for university managers will discuss “the key criteria to be addressed within the strategic plan” and “provide advice on developing and implementing the strategy, and identifying and reducing barriers to acceptance of proposals.” Not only do they feed off each other in this way, they are highly receptive to the directives of their paymasters in government and big business. So when we examine the trajectory of higher education over recent decades, we see that what is happening to universities is part of a continuous process of marketisation, currently being openly championed by New Labour (Callinicos 2006). The character of the Vice-Chancellor’s attack on our university is therefore ideological.

This misconception in turn led to a misconception of what a successful campaign against the restructuring might look like. The demonstrations that were held on campus were well-attended, but they were seen as a means to an immediate end, meaning participants were left demoralised when they had no immediate effect. We should have regarded them as events which would feed into a broader social movement of staff and students within the university, rather than draining energy from that movement and pacifying it, as was the case.

We may not have stopped the restructuring in its planning phase, but there are several reasons to be optimistic. We have established the unpopularity of the proposals. We have opened the debate about what our university should be. Importantly, we have shown that students are willing to stand together with staff. The growing number of faculty signing up in public opposition is one reason why we should not accept the plans being forced through the university’s decision-making structures as the end of the matter.

The new academic year will likely bring further attacks on our university from senior management – the downsizing of Senate being the most pernicious. Such attacks will provide renewed impetus to organise principled opposition to the logic of the Vice-Chancellor. If we learn from the experience of the last six months there is every chance of moving forward.

Callinicos, A. (2006) Universities in a Neoliberal World (London, Bookmarks Publications)

This article first appeared in Poda Poda magazine.