Pragmatic Students Support Strike Action

The natural student response to hearing about staff strike action is self-pity, a deserved and valid reaction to the broken promise that students at least for their own serious financial commitment, enjoy a complete academic year. There is no ideal response to strike action affecting students particularly when our educational experiences have been stunted throughout the nearly two years of the pandemic. There is, however, a right response to staff strike action, which is of solidarity and of pragmatism.

Students of the pandemic have so much justified anger and disappointment which must be aimed at those who continue the exploitation within higher education. Strikers who stand up to this reckless, colossal, and adrift profit-orientated system stand up admirably for their own interests. Students and staff share the same basic goals: financial security, a balanced work culture, and institutional respect the defining and indispensable university experience, learning between staff and student. Without staff and student upholding their own overlapping interests, universities become rudderless, pointless, and expensive scams. Students have no choice but to be compliant, blindly entering university through a burdensome quasi-loan system and under the imperious pressure that without a degree, countless career opportunities dry up. Staff from lecturers to librarians to postgraduates possess relative power and so bravely can choose, if necessary, to exert unpopular incompliance. To strike, to refuse work, is a historically won prerogative and it defends the principle that all who facilitate specialised education spearheading society deserve decent pay.

Part of getting older is realising your three or four, or more, university stint is a drop in the ocean compared to staff who despite influence, longevity, and career aspirations, choose not to cower to systematic university exploitation. The choice of staff to strike and striking by employees in general, is all too often unfairly judged as an abuse of power. This is a misrepresentation of how strike action is here a difficult position taken by marginalised university employees who do something about it. Lecturer and tutor, the academic front-line, preserve the value of a degree as an important individual asset. Coronavirus exposed how truly insignificant the cache of any university is if enrolled students fail to receive quality in-person input from focused, rested staff. Without willing, compensated staff, a degree is an overcharged library pass.

Going to university should be momentous, exhilarating, and invigorating for any chosen course. The concern for current prospective students is not about Mickey Mouse degrees. The alarm is now that universities will slide into impersonal, increasingly online learning which certainly does not justify high tuition fees or even worryingly university at all. All universities should sensibly assess how the pedigree of a degree may soon considerably be based outright on how staff are paid. Ethical student consumerism. Pragmatic students should support staff strike action out of both selflessness and selfishness. Our radical self-interest is that supporting employee rights in what should be upstanding, forward-thinking institutions promoting wider worker rights, key for graduates as they enter the big bad job market. It is hypocritical for students to be aggrieved at the reality of likely poorly paid graduate roles with insecure contracts but permissive of the same substandard options right now within academia.

Students of today are a generation raised on pessimism and limited by the false expectation that the only direction for higher education is further marketisation. It does plausibly seem that this is the umpteenth year of strikes to no prevail, but the fundamental truth is that the governmental and administrative neglect of staff and student is a reversible political choice. Without optimism for staff strikes, students only condemn themselves for inevitably worsening labour conditions. Post-pandemic and pre-suspected political reform, the fate of university is uncertain. The relevance and purpose of university is to improve society. Strikes may be a small sacrifice, but students should join strike action to pay respect to those who make their education possible. Reforming academia to be fair for both staff and student, is a tremendous but achievable challenge. Solidarity is a shared fight.