TO DIVEST FROM FOSSIL FUELS, UEA MUST DIVEST FROM BARCLAYS

Posted on September 8, 2020 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged Barclays, BP, careers events, climate change, climate emergency, Divest Barclays, divestment, education, employment, energy, engineering, ethical investment, featured, fossil free, Fossil Free UEA, fossil fuels, graduates, higher education, Loughborough University, media, norwich, oil, people and planet, Portsmouth University, recruitment, Shell, student activism, students, students' unions, UEA, universities, zero carbon.

By Henry Webb

Higher Education institutions have the power to decide whether the fossil fuel industry lives or dies. The dominant players in the energy sector may seem unstoppable. After all, as long as the oil keeps flowing, they’ll find someone to buy it. Their lobbyists will make sure of that. But these behemoths require resources beyond those of just the raw coal, oil, and gas that we are so dependent on – they need capital. Without investment banks to finance everything from pipelines to offshore rigs, the costly infrastructure needed for fossil fuel extraction just wouldn’t exist.

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.

THERE’S MORE TO STUDENT ACTIVISM THAN #PEOPLESVOTE

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged Amatey Doku, Brexit, bursaries, class, defend education, featured, fossil free, Free Education, george osborne, grants, grassroots, guardian, higher education, history, marketisation, NUS, politics, Remain, solidarity, student activism, student movement, student politics, students, students' unions, The People's Vote, tony blair, tuition fees.

By Robyn Banks

Amatey Doku is right: student activism isn’t dead. In a recently published interview with the Guardian, the NUS Vice President of Higher Education proclaimed that students’ response to Brexit and their engagement with the People’s Vote campaign has shown that student activism is thriving anew, after years without a “unifying cause”. But what about the fight for free education that has been active on our campuses since 2012? For many activists in the last few generations of students, it was the issue that brought us together and gave us the skills to take the fight to the powerful. But for Doku, it was too “inward looking” to inspire a “genuine” movement.

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.

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.

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.

THE FUTURE OF STUDENTS’ UNIONS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #4

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged activism, Arts SU, Beyond Tuition Fees, block grants, bureaucracy, Charities Act 2011, Charities Commission, charity law, checks and balances, co-operatives, consumer culture, consumerism, corbyn, democracy, Education Act 1994, Free Education, grassroots, hierarchy, higher education, Labour, legislation, Lincoln SU, NUS, online voting, Parliament, policy, politics, representation, sabbatical officers, Sahaya James, Stop the Elephant Development, student activism, students' unions, SU finance, trade unions, transparency, trustees, tuition fees, UAL, uk, union bars, university management.

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 series, the Norwich Radical and Bright Green are bringing together perspectives from across the sector to explore these questions.

Students’ Unions are meant to defend students’ rights, fighting with and for them during their time at university and beyond. However, modern SUs are often dominated by corporate thinking, consumer culture and cosy collusion with university management. Radical, grassroots democracy is often muted or discouraged, channelled instead into more temperate, gradual and piecemeal avenues by Unions centralised in their functioning and timid in their approach.

THOUGHTS FROM THE FRONTLINE OF MARKETISATION – BEYOND TUITION FEES #3

Posted on April 19, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged Beyond Tuition Fees, collective action, consumer law, consumer rights, consumerism, contact hours, corbyn, counselling, course closures, education, Free Education, funding, government, higher education, Labour, market regulators, marketing, marketisation, office for students, picket lines, policy, postgraduate, postgraduate education officer, postgraduate tutors, precarious contracts, profit, public, regulation, research, risk, specialist courses, state-funded education, student protection plans, students, students' unions, Success as a Knowledge Economy, taxation, tef, Tories, tuition fees, UCU, UEA SU, uk, UK Research and Innovation, universities, university collapses, USS strike, utopianism.

By Maddie Colledge, UEA SU Postgraduate Education Officer

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.

CW: Mentions suicide

It’s common for arguments in favour of free education to be dismissed as abstract or utopian, and for students who promote it to be belittled as naïve. I fear that in our attempts to try to portray the significance of free education, we have fallen into a trap where the concept has become so expansive and broad, and the term so overused, that it has lost all meaning. We need to move away from talking about ‘free’ education, and towards articulating a vision more explicitly centred on ‘state-funded’ education or ‘public’ education. For me, the description ‘free’ makes the concept feel distanced from the viable possibility of education funded through public taxation, and does us no favours in making it reality.

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.

“NUS IS YET TO FULLY EXPLORE THE VALUE ADDED BY INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS” – NUS ELECTIONS 2018: RIDDI VISWANATHAN

Posted on March 24, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged #NUSConference, #NUSNC18, democracy, higher education, NUS, NUS conference, NUS Elections 2018, politics, student activism, student life, student movement, students, students' unions.

The Norwich Radical was born in the student movement, and we continue to play an active role within it. We recognise that while official structures are not the sum total of the movement, they are undeniably important. Following a highly controversial year for both the National Union of Students itself and the higher education sector as a whole, we contacted all candidates standing for the President, Vice-President and National Executive Council roles and offered them the space to write about their election campaigns, why they are standing and their visions for NUS.

students’ unions

TO DIVEST FROM FOSSIL FUELS, UEA MUST DIVEST FROM BARCLAYS

By Henry Webb

THERE’S MORE TO STUDENT ACTIVISM THAN #PEOPLESVOTE

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

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

THE FUTURE OF STUDENTS’ UNIONS – BEYOND TUITION FEES #4

THOUGHTS FROM THE FRONTLINE OF MARKETISATION – BEYOND TUITION FEES #3

“NUS IS YET TO FULLY EXPLORE THE VALUE ADDED BY INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS” – NUS ELECTIONS 2018: RIDDI VISWANATHAN

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