THIS ELECTION IS THE FIGHT OF OUR LIVES – HERE’S HOW WE CAN WIN IT

Posted on November 15, 2019 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged art, Brexit, campaigning, doorknocking, environment, family, fascism, featured, general election, general election 2019, green new deal, higher education, inequality, jeremy corbyn, Labour, marketisation, memes, momentum, music, NUS, political art, politics, public services, register to vote, social media, student debt, students, unions, universities, vote, young people.

By Bradley Allsop

The world is on the brink. A shattered environment, gargantuan inequality, a burgeoning mental health crisis, fascism openly spreading across Europe, public services at breaking point… but also the possibility of more radical and progressive change than we’ve seen in decades. Higher education specifically also faces two radically different paths ahead of it: continued marketisation, eroding academic integrity, burdening a generation with enormous debt, crushing academics under enormous workloads, increasingly insecure employment and workplace stress – or publicly funded higher education that opens up space to imagine and create a different sort of campus.

IN DEFENCE OF STUDENT POLITICS

Posted on August 26, 2019 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged 1968, activism, anti-apartheid, climate change, criticism, featured, fossil free, higher education, Hogwarts, marketisation, medicine, mental health, nurses, NUS, palestine, politics, postgraduate, precarious labour, privilege, science, social work, solidarity, stereotypes, student activism, student debt, student politics, students, students' unions, teachers, trade unions, vietnam war, voting, working class.

By Bradley Allsop

The only way to make the word ‘politics’, that great indicator of all manner of corruption and trickery, more contemptible is to plonk the word ‘student’ in front of it. It almost feels like you‘re not pronouncing ‘student politics’ right if you do it without a sneer, or at least a shudder. Student politics has an image problem.

UNITED IN THE FACE OF CRISIS – THE STUDENT LEFT NETWORK

Posted on January 10, 2019 by Norwich Radical in Inter|national, Student and tagged campaigning, casualisation, climate change, corporate, democracy, education, far right, featured, fossil fuel divestment, higher education, individualism, inequality, Labour Students, left, living wage, marketisation, mental health, NUS, NUS turnaround, prevent, profiteering, rent strike, representation, social justice, student activists, student debt, student left network, students' unions, uk, universities.

By Bradley Allsop

Make no mistake – higher education in the UK is in crisis. After decades of uncertain policy and three successive Tory-led governments with a clear desire to marketise and corporatise our campuses, we’re left with a generation burdened with debt, with an explosion in mental health issues among students, with universities bereft of democracy and increasingly fuelled by precarious labour, with Students’ Unions that are often little more than marketing arms of their universities, and with continuing inequalities in educational attainment. The passionate learning, debate and inquiry that should be the soul of education has become little more than a thin veneer pasted over profiteering and corporate-style expansion.

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.

BEYOND TUITION FEES #11 – MUCH TO LEARN, MORE TO DO

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged activism, adult education, associate tutors, Beyond Tuition Fees, campaigning, capitalism, co-operatives, Community, consumerism, corbyn, crisis, exploitation, featured, food, Free Education, government, higher education, housing, international students, labour party, learning, market, marketing, marketisation, neoliberalism, NUS, postgraduate, profit, resistance, strategy, student activism, student debt, students' unions, tuition fees, uk, unions, universities, university management, university staff, utopia.

By Bradley Allsop and Rowan Gavin

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. In this series, the Norwich Radical and Bright Green have brought together perspectives from across the sector to explore the possibilities of post-fees HE. In the final instalment, the series editors summarise the visions for the next chapter of UK HE that the series has laid out.

There is more energy, debate and innovation on the left now than there has been for decades. Capitalism’s multiple crises, and the inability of its defenders to respond to them, are beginning to translate into tangible political opportunity. This series sought to capture the essence of some of this historical moment and direct it towards thinking about what we want our university campuses to look like, beyond the staple progressive policy of scrapping tuition fees. A project in unashamedly utopian thinking, it recognised the very real possibility that free tuition might be a reality in the near future, and sought to explore how this requires the left to think practically about what comes after and where our energy should be focused next.

NO PRAISE FOR ‘HYMN’

Posted on June 3, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Arts, Student and tagged animal welfare, art world, arts funding, capitalism, creativity, culture, Damien Hirst, elitism, ethics, featured, gentrification, hidden course costs, Houghton Hall, Hymn, market forces, Neil Powell, neoliberalism, NUA, rebellion, student artists, student debt, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, tuition fees.

By Laura Potts

In recent weeks, Damien Hirst’s anatomical sculpture Hymn (1999–2005) has been installed outside of my university, Norwich University of the Arts (NUA), where it will be on show until July 29th as part of his exhibition at Houghton Hall. Although the term ‘hymn’ refers to a form of praise, there are a number of reasons why neither Damien Hirst nor the institutions choosing to associate with his work should be praised.

A CO-OPERATIVE FUTURE FOR STUDENTS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #9

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged BDS, Beyond Tuition Fees, Birmingham, Birmingham Student Housing Co-op, block grants, Brighton, co-operatives, Co-ops UK, coalition, corbyn, cost of living, democracy, economics, Edinburgh, Edinburgh Student Housing Co-op, ethical procurement, exploitation, featured, food, food co-ops, free range, free trade, Glasgow, Glasgow Student Housing Co-op, grassroots, housing, Labour, landlords, local food, maintenance grants, nestle boycott, norwich, Norwich Association for the Co-operative Housing of Students, nursing bursaries, NUS, NUSSL, organic, private renting, profit, property, Sheffield, Sheffield Student Housing Co-op, student accommodation, student activism, Student Co-operative Homes, student debt, student housing coops, student loans, students, Students for Co-operation, students' unions, SU reform, Tories, tuition fees.

By Robyn Banks

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.

Up and down the UK, from Edinburgh to Brighton, students are building alternatives to existing, exploitative housing and food practices. How? By creating co-operatives! These alternative ways of organising are expanding and flourishing at a rate never seen before, as students look to take their lives into their own hands, in defiance of the rising cost of living and exploitative landlords and businesses. The founding of Student Co-operative Homes, a launch pad organisation for potential student housing co-ops across the UK founded by the grassroots network Students for Co-operation and supported by national co-op federation Co-Ops UK, demonstrates the growing support for these independent, democratic projects.

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

THE MYTH OF THE MILLENNIAL

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives and tagged avocado toast, bloggers, clickbait, Community, conservative, cp, diverse, educated, entitlement, featured, generation, generation y, Instagram, internet, labels, liberal, millennials, myth, narcissistic, pet peeve, pm, political correctness, racist, satire, socialist, student debt, traits, work.

by Jonathan Lee

Ten Things Every Successful Social Justice Blogger Does.
Exasperated Writer Was About to Give Up, What Happens Next Will Have You In Tears!
The Five Worst Millennial Clickbait Headlines That You Just Won’t Believe.

Horrific isn’t it.

I was recently asked what my biggest pet peeve is about the way people talk about my generation. Perhaps the phrase pet peeve is one of my pet peeves. Maybe the fact that even the words – pet peeve – make me cringe, may say something about me and my reluctant membership of Generation Y.Continue Reading

FREEING EDUCATION FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #5

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged academic staff, activism, apathy, Beyond Tuition Fees, borders, Community, consumerism, culture, diversity, economy, elitism, Free Education, government, higher education, individualism, international students, internationalism, jeremy corbyn, Labour, learning, lecturers, maintenance loans, marketisation, migration, politics, privatisation, solidarity, stress, student debt, tef, theresa may, Tories, tuition fees, UCU, UEA, USS strikes.

By Lotty Clare

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.

We face many challenges as students in 2018. Painfully high tuition fees along with eye-watering maintenance loans means that lower income students will leave university with over £50,000 of debt. Bafflingly, Prime Minister Theresa May only recently came to the realisation that poorer students are getting deterred from going into higher education. By contrast, the Labour Party’s promises to scrap tuition fees and bring back maintenance grants are of course a welcome relief for many prospective students – UK national students that is. Labour have seemingly barely considered the possibility of doing the same for international students. At the University of East Anglia, non-EU international students pay about £14,800 annually, on top of having to prove that they have access to thousands of pounds for living costs. If education is a right, why are we privileging wealthier international students in this way? What would Britain look like if we abolished or at least dramatically reduced fees for international students?

student debt

FUCK FUTURE FINANCE – THE FRIGHTENING REALITY OF PRIVATE STUDENT LOANS

BEYOND TUITION FEES #11 – MUCH TO LEARN, MORE TO DO

NO PRAISE FOR ‘HYMN’

A CO-OPERATIVE FUTURE FOR STUDENTS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #9

THE MYTH OF THE MILLENNIAL

FREEING EDUCATION FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #5

Support the Radical

Subscribe

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Support the Radical

Subscribe