ACADEMIC FREEDOM OR INSTITUTIONALISED TRANSPHOBIA?

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives, Student and tagged academia, academics, featured, gender, glinner, HE, identity, John Collins, letter, nb, Never OK, non-binary, response, rupert read, sex, Stonewall, student unions, SU, terf, trans, transphobes, transphobia, UEA.

By Robyn Banks

Once again, an array of academics have signed a letter complaining about the increased efforts by universities to recognise and support Trans* and Non-Binary students on their campuses. Their reasons for doing so aren’t worth exploring, as they are based on the same logic, or lack thereof, as many transphobes about the realities of gender, sex and identity. The problem we should focus on is that the academics who have signed this letter, and the ones before it, hide behind the claim of ‘Academic Freedom’ in order to try and justify their views.Continue Reading

ECONOMIES OF RECOGNITION

Posted on February 4, 2019 by Norwich Radical in Arts, Perspectives and tagged academics, academy, anthropology, Axel Honneth, care, colonisation, economics, featured, gift, giving, Goroka, indigenous, Marcel Mauss, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, new labour, Papua New Guinea, philosophy, politics, social theory.

by Liv Barnett

Academics are often accused of failing to make their research matter to audiences other than themselves. Anthropologists are particularly criticized for writing theories and ethnographies that not only go unread by non-anthropologists, but are also too inaccessible to those they may be writing about. Here I hope to try and explain a central aspect of my PhD research in Papua New Guinea and share some of the ways it has got me thinking about politics and economics in the UK.

The stereotyped anthropologist gets criticized for using the experiences of a usually colonised ‘other’ for their own project of producing knowledge that counters the taken for granted understandings people have of humanity or society in ‘the West’, which are presumed to be universal to human nature. This is a legitimate argument which has to be taken seriously. Therefore, I self-consciously use some of my observations in Papua New Guinea (enabled by the generosity of those who I lived with in PNG) and the ideas of European/western social theorists.

FUCK FUTURE FINANCE – THE FRIGHTENING REALITY OF PRIVATE STUDENT LOANS

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academics, advertising, campaigning, casualisation, corporations, cost of living, cycle of debt, featured, finance, Future Finance, government, higher education, interest rates, loan sharks, maintenance, marketisation, mental health, morality, NCAFC, payday loans, predatory loans, private landlords, private student loans, rent hikes, student activism, student debt, student finance, student loans, suicide, trade unions, tuition fees, UCU, UCU strike, unethical, university, working class.

By Robyn Banks

CW: mentions suicide.

Sometimes targeted adverts reveal to you more than you wanted to know. I’ve recently been experiencing facebook ads for Future Finance, a company that offers loans of up to £40,000 to students, with an interest rate of 17.45% APR for all the time that you’re studying. To put that in perspective, if you borrowed £7000 over 5 years, you’d have repaid a stonking £11,223 by the time you’ve paid it off. This eye watering example reveals both the current state of Higher Education financing and a frightening future that is increasingly intruding on the present.

ANOTHER HIGHER EDUCATION IS ALREADY HERE – BEYOND TUITION FEES #8

Posted on May 12, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged 1963 Robbins Report, 1997 Dearing Report, 2010 Browne Review, academics, administrators, adult education, AntiUniversity NOW, authority, Beyond Tuition Fees, borders, capitalism, competition, corbyn, course closures, employability, featured, Free Education, grading, grassroots, higher education, Labour, Leicester Vaughan College, mental illness, metrics, Mondragon Unibertsitatea, nationalism, neoliberalism, privatisation, privilege, radical imagination, social inequality, Solidarity Acadamies, state funding, student debt, student loans, students, teaching, tuition fees, UCU strike, uk, Universidad de la Tierra, universities, university management, workers rights, workplace abuse.

By Sarah Amsler

It is a time of extraordinary potential for change in UK Higher Education. Labour’s promise to end tuition fees has defied the critics and united many behind Corbyn’s political project. But what will the implications for universities be if this comes to pass? And what can we do to leverage this progress? In this series, the Norwich Radical and Bright Green are bringing together perspectives from across the sector to explore these questions.

‘The university’ is a fertile space within which to practice radical imagining and world-making today. I do not mean that actually-existing universities, in the UK or elsewhere, necessarily provide space for such work. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that the spaces for critique and creative thinking in higher education have shrunk as forces of commodity fetishism, privatisation, competition and authoritarian modes of control have permeated university governance. Continue Reading

WHAT ARE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITIES MADE OF? – BEYOND TUITION FEES #6

Posted on April 28, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academics, Beyond Tuition Fees, Community, consumerism, demonstration, freedom, legislation, marketing, Notes From Below, PR, relationship marketing, Stuart Hall, student loans, students, UCU, universities, Universities UK, university communities, university management, USS strikes, workers, workers' inquiry, workplace dynamics.

By Ellen Musgrove and Max Savage

At any demonstration concerning the anti-marketisation or -commodification of education and the university you will hear the phrase “We are not consumers – we are a community.” The motive behind this message is a good one, bearing positive and uplifting implications for the demonstrators. However, to those outside the demo space, be they apathetic students passing by or workers who may not have the freedom to stop and participate as readily as an academic might, calling ourselves a community means very little in a practical sense.

HIGHER EDUCATION IN A POST-FEES WORLD – BEYOND TUITION FEES #1

Posted on April 6, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academics, activists, Beyond Tuition Fees, Bright Green, consumerism, cost of living, democracy, diversity, education, employability, featured, Free Education, future, government, HE policy, higher education, jeremy corbyn, Labour, Lib Dems, marketisation, mental health, NUS, postgraduate tutors, progressives, representation, sexual harassment, social justice, social mobility, strike action, student activism, student debt, student experience, student life, students, students' unions, Tories, trade unions, tuition fees, UCU strike, uk, universities, university staff, utopianism, welfare.

By Bradley Allsop and Calum Watt

It is a time of extraordinary potential for change in UK Higher Education. Labour’s promise to end tuition fees has defied the critics and united many behind Corbyn’s political project. But what will the implications for universities be if this comes to pass? And what can we do to leverage this progress? In this new series, the Norwich Radical and Bright Green are bringing together perspectives from across the sector to explore these questions.

Politics is in a very different place than a few years ago. Radical change feels possible, tangible, close. The Labour Party’s pledge to scrap tuition fees is one of many signs of this – welcome, and necessary to salvage higher education from the marketised juggernaut it has become. But just abolishing fees is not enough to fix all of higher education’s problems.

BREAK UUK, WIN THE STRIKE – NATIONAL DEMO AT SUSSEX UNI

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academic staff, academics, Adam Tickell, Break UUK, Brighton, capitalism, democracy, demonstration, featured, higher education, industrial action, living wage, marketisation, mental health, negotiation, neoliberalism, pensions, picket lines, privatisation, protest, strike action, students, Sussex Supports the Strike, UCU, UCU strike, uk, University of Sussex, university staff, university vice chancellors, USS, UUK, wage cuts, workers rights.

By Max Savage and Ellen Musgrove

“…in the short term I would be happy to reconstruct a social democratic compromise which aimed to decrease inequalities…I recognise that this will not remove the gross injustices inherent within capitalist structures. To reiterate, capitalism is the enemy, but neoliberalism seems to me to be worse than social democracy. Perhaps we should set our sights a little lower than capitalism and attempt to slay the neoliberal beast.”

– Adam Tickell, ‘Reflections on “Activism and the Academy”’ (1995)

Professor Tickell, once apparently an advocate of radical social reorganisation, is now Sussex University Vice Chancellor and one of neoliberalism’s torchbearers in the UK higher education sector. While it is tempting to conclude from this transformation that Tickle is a duplicitous, cowardly and parasitic individual, there is in fact a larger point to be drawn: very often our politics are not forged by our own choosing but by our position. Once you are earning an obscene salary and have turned a blind eye to staff on your campus earning under the living wage, perhaps neoliberalism isn’t so beastly after all.

AN OPEN LETTER TO VICE CHANCELLOR DAVID RICHARDSON AND THE UEA EXECUTIVE

Posted on February 19, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academics, david richardson, featured, norwich, open letter, pensions, research, retirement, staff, strike action, students, students' union, trade union, UCU, UEA, UEA executive, UEASU, Union of UEA Students, university, University and College Union, University of East Anglia, USS, UUEAS, UUK, vice chancellor.

We the undersigned are writing to complain about the mistreatment of the university’s staff, and the fact that their mistreatment has led to such a major impact on our education. We wholeheartedly believe that the staff are the greatest asset to the university. The fact that they have been forced to take strike action shines a harsh light on the lack of care UEA’s executive and you, our Vice Chancellor, have for university staff.Continue Reading

UCU STRIKE TO PROTECT PENSIONS

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academic staff, academics, direct action, education, featured, investment, KEF, lecturers, NUS, office for students, pensions, REF, solidarity, strike, tef, trade unions, tuition fees, UCU, UEA, UEA SU, university staff, USS.

The much-reported Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) strike in protest of cynical changes to university staff pension arrangements begins next week. The UEA branch of UCU and UEA Students’ Union have produced this statement for The Norwich Radical, to offer an introduction to the issues surrounding the strike. The Radical encourages all students, in Norwich and elsewhere, to stand in solidarity with the strikers by not attending classes on the dates of the strikes, and by sharing their message with your peers.

THE FATAL FLAW IN ECONOMICS FUNDING

Posted on December 19, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academics, bias, campaign, climate change, curriculum, department for education, economics, education, finance, financial crisis, funding, future, gender, higher education, inequality, Laura Bannister, learning, market, post-growth, quality of life, REF, reform, research, Rethinking Economics, students, teaching.

by REFunding Economics

As the old saying goes, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’. This week, a coalition of economics students, academics and campaigners gathered to get inside the piper-paying process – the funding of economics research – to create an economics fit for the real world.

academics

ACADEMIC FREEDOM OR INSTITUTIONALISED TRANSPHOBIA?

FUCK FUTURE FINANCE – THE FRIGHTENING REALITY OF PRIVATE STUDENT LOANS

WHAT ARE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITIES MADE OF? – BEYOND TUITION FEES #6

BREAK UUK, WIN THE STRIKE – NATIONAL DEMO AT SUSSEX UNI

AN OPEN LETTER TO VICE CHANCELLOR DAVID RICHARDSON AND THE UEA EXECUTIVE

UCU STRIKE TO PROTECT PENSIONS

THE FATAL FLAW IN ECONOMICS FUNDING

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