ONLINE LEARNING, COVID AND CLASSISM

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged class, coronavirus, Covid-19, education, employability, featured, higher education, mental health, online learning, privilege, stress, student finance, student life, university, working class, working class students.

By Kasper Hassett

Although UK universities boast that their online teaching provision is adequate to the current crisis, deep-rooted inequalities in the class system cause the poorest students to suffer the most. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, working-class students are faced with more challenges than usual, and are also less able to access online teaching than their middle- and upper-class peers. Despite their disproportionate struggle to engage with remote teaching, universities are refusing to show leniency with deferrals and adjustments, feigning blindness to a violently unjust class system. The response of universities to this pandemic is insufficient at best, and places those students facing hardship at an even further disadvantage.

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

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.

ELITISM REFUSES TO DIE – THE UNIVERSITY FUNDING PROBLEM

Posted on June 9, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged arts, charity research funding, community colleges, Connecticut, Connecticut University System, conservatives, course closures, cuts, david richardson, education, elitism, employability, fossil free, Fossil Free UEA, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels, Freddie DeBoer, government, higher education, higher education funding, humanities, inequality, Ivy League, marketisation, mental health, mental health services, pay inequality, people and planet, public funding, rent hikes, russell group, STEM, student accommodation, student activism, Student Support Services, tuition fees, UEA, uk, UK Funding Councils, UK Research Councils, university management, USA, wages, Yale.

by Robyn Banks

Last month, Freddie DeBoer wrote about the failure of the university system in the United States to equally fund different institutions across the country. Looking specifically at Connecticut, DeBoer shows how Yale, one of the prestigious Ivy League universities, fuels social inequality by receiving public funds as well as other sources for revenue whilst other, more accessible community colleges are “cut to the bone”.

TAKING ON THE SPECTRE THAT HAUNTS HIGHER EDUCATION

Posted on April 21, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged 1968 student demonstrations, academia, academics, apolitical, arms trade, autonomy, Belfast, Campaign for Lincoln Democracy, capitalism, co-operative HE, consumerism, democracy, divestment, economics, elections, elitism, employability, fossil free, Fossil Free QUB, fossil fuels, grassroots, leisure, Lincoln, Lincoln Social Science Centre, management, market, marketisation, national student survey, neoliberalism, occupy, privatisation, profit, protests, Queens' University Belfast, student accommodation, student activism, student experience, student life, student loans, students, students' unions, SU officers, tobacco, tuition fees, universities, University of Lincoln.

By Bradley Allsop

We’ve all seen the headlines – tripled tuition fees, retroactive changes to the student loan book, the nefarious uses of the National Student Survey. Often treated as isolated issues, these policies are in reality the foot soldiers in a war being waged to undermine the very foundations of our universities, twisting them from hallowed halls of challenge and transformation into bland centres for corporate training and indoctrination. This spectre haunts academics, senior managers and even Students’ Unions alike, forcing them all to dance to the mantra of the market, to the profit agenda. This spectre’s name is capitalism.

OXFORD’S PUBLICITY STUNT WON’T CLOSE THE UNIVERSITY CLASS GAP

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged bill clinton, Boris Johnson, buzzwords, capitalism, class, consumerism, degree, discrimination, diversity, education, elitism, employability, employment, family, graduate, graduate employment, graduate jobs, graduate unemployment, higher education, history of art, inclusivity, language, law, learning, lower income backgrounds, margaret thatcher, marketisation, middle class, module guides, nss, NUS, Phillip Hammond, politics, pressure, publicity stunt, student as consumer, student debt, student experience, student life, student loans, student satisfaction, students, students' unions, SU officers, Sutton Trust, teaching, tef, theresa may, tony blair, transferable skills, tuition fees, UCU, university, university management, University of Oxford, white, working class, working class students.

By Robyn Banks

This month Oxford University, in conjunction with the Sutton Trust, launched a summer school aimed at attracting more “white, working class boys” to the university. While this has received praise from some sectors of society, it does not address the real reasons why working class people (not just boys or men) are not attending universities like Oxford.

BUILDING CITIZENS

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged citizen, citizenship, education, employability, PGCE, school, student, teachers, teaching, university.

by Josh Clare

Disclaimer: One of the reasons I most enjoy writing for the Norwich Radical is the freedom I get to make sweeping generalisations and the ability to dress up my ‘reckons’ as hardened, well researched fact. With this in mind I invite you to continue reading and take a tour of my most recent ponders and speculations.

Universities are the place where the leaders of tomorrow are squashed into being. The people that pass through university doors go on to be the business owners, the entrepreneurs, and the politicians. They go on to be the citizens who, on average at least, are more likely to be those people who shape the lives of many others. So what do these people look like? Well, even I’m not brave enough to try and generalise all students into a homogeneous group but there’s certainly some conversations to be had about the changing ‘average student’.

The way we view ourselves as a part of (or not a part of) the society around us really shapes the way we act. The way we view ourselves alters the view of our neighbours, near or far. So, how do we create ‘good’ citizens? (If I can fall upon a perfect enough definition we might come back to what a good citizen looks like…) Let’s take a whistle-stop tour of life before uni.

employability

ONLINE LEARNING, COVID AND CLASSISM

ELITISM REFUSES TO DIE – THE UNIVERSITY FUNDING PROBLEM

OXFORD’S PUBLICITY STUNT WON’T CLOSE THE UNIVERSITY CLASS GAP

BUILDING CITIZENS

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