When the Edinburgh branch of the University and College Union (UCU) announced their plans for a five-week strike, I’ll admit that I immediately assumed that both my English Literature and History tutors would be striking too. After all, job security and the humanities have not of late gone hand in hand.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when one by one, each of my tutors made clear in the first week that they would not be joining. The situation became more intriguing still when each expressed their solidarity and sympathies with those on strike, because, more than a little naively, I had presumed that the teaching–non-teaching divide could be boiled down to a union–non-union dichotomy.
Gradually, however, discussions with fellow students have revealed that fewer staff members than any of us expected have gone on strike this time around. For those tutors who had addressed this, the most common reasons conveyed to me were concerns about the precariousness of their positions (particularly for those early in their academic careers), potential risks to overseas working visas, the affordability of going without pay, and, crucially, the jeopardy students would be under if faced with losing teaching for five weeks.
Lucky enough to have a tutor who was willing to speak with me about his decision, I have become increasingly aware that this strike is distinctly different from any undertaken before. Aside from noting the influence of the strike’s duration, he stressed that the position within the semester poses a unique challenge to mitigating the student-felt impact. With most courses running some type of midterm assessment falling between weeks 5-7, losing teaching between weeks 2-6 “makes these courses impossible to run” without significantly truncating the course’s material and end goals.
Equally, it is worth highlighting the disproportionate impact on courses that hinge upon discussion-based seminars; when a course’s focus is not so much content, but the skills to approach a topic, the seminar room is an environment that cannot be replicated through previous years’ lecture recordings or independent study. In this case, it is perhaps unsurprising that tutors who are—often singlehandedly—running such courses have concluded that the nature of this strike is simply “more damaging than [they] find acceptable.”
The point of the strike is disruption to an end, and I believe that you would be hard pressed to find a student or staff member who does not support the goals of the current industrial action. Therefore, tutors who have chosen to continue teaching must not be seen as apathetic—while it seems easy to identify those who appear not to support the industrial action by monitoring who turns up to teach, it is vital that we do not take this as a symbol of division within the staff-student body. Neither party would have been forced into this frankly untenable moral position of choosing between politics and education had Mathieson’s administration not spent the best part of a decade ignoring calls for change.
If all else fails, I suppose the University administration can always resort to offering degrees in avoiding accountability—in this, they need not worry about achieving a First.
Image by Jenny Krasic for the Student
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To strike or not to strike? The question of continued teaching during the strikes
When the Edinburgh branch of the University and College Union (UCU) announced their plans for a five-week strike, I’ll admit that I immediately assumed that both my English Literature and History tutors would be striking too. After all, job security and the humanities have not of late gone hand in hand.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when one by one, each of my tutors made clear in the first week that they would not be joining. The situation became more intriguing still when each expressed their solidarity and sympathies with those on strike, because, more than a little naively, I had presumed that the teaching–non-teaching divide could be boiled down to a union–non-union dichotomy.
Gradually, however, discussions with fellow students have revealed that fewer staff members than any of us expected have gone on strike this time around. For those tutors who had addressed this, the most common reasons conveyed to me were concerns about the precariousness of their positions (particularly for those early in their academic careers), potential risks to overseas working visas, the affordability of going without pay, and, crucially, the jeopardy students would be under if faced with losing teaching for five weeks.
Lucky enough to have a tutor who was willing to speak with me about his decision, I have become increasingly aware that this strike is distinctly different from any undertaken before. Aside from noting the influence of the strike’s duration, he stressed that the position within the semester poses a unique challenge to mitigating the student-felt impact. With most courses running some type of midterm assessment falling between weeks 5-7, losing teaching between weeks 2-6 “makes these courses impossible to run” without significantly truncating the course’s material and end goals.
Equally, it is worth highlighting the disproportionate impact on courses that hinge upon discussion-based seminars; when a course’s focus is not so much content, but the skills to approach a topic, the seminar room is an environment that cannot be replicated through previous years’ lecture recordings or independent study. In this case, it is perhaps unsurprising that tutors who are—often singlehandedly—running such courses have concluded that the nature of this strike is simply “more damaging than [they] find acceptable.”
The point of the strike is disruption to an end, and I believe that you would be hard pressed to find a student or staff member who does not support the goals of the current industrial action. Therefore, tutors who have chosen to continue teaching must not be seen as apathetic—while it seems easy to identify those who appear not to support the industrial action by monitoring who turns up to teach, it is vital that we do not take this as a symbol of division within the staff-student body. Neither party would have been forced into this frankly untenable moral position of choosing between politics and education had Mathieson’s administration not spent the best part of a decade ignoring calls for change.
Short Rant: What happened to water bottles?
If all else fails, I suppose the University administration can always resort to offering degrees in avoiding accountability—in this, they need not worry about achieving a First.
Image by Jenny Krasic for the Student
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