Thursday 18-11-2021 - 17:45

Postgraduate Academic Officer, Declan Merrington, shares a blog on the UCU strike action.

Since I came to this University in 2017, almost every one of my academic years has been affected by strike action or Covid-19. I know how frustrating this is: we as students pay our tuition fees and are told that this gives us the consumer right to complain when the provision of our degree is deemed inaccurate. Every time strike action has come up, I’ve watched the discussion morph into a “staff vs student” rhetoric. I don’t think this is a coincidence, but rather the intention of those who have caused our staff (and some students!) to vote in favour of industrial action.  

Whilst the UCU were balloting, an article titled ‘My students never knew’: the lecturer who lived in a tent | Universities | The Guardian circulated. In it, a PhD student detailed the harsh realities of casualised working conditions, barely affording rent. I think this is something a lot of us can relate to at Durham, regardless as to whether we are teaching or learning, considering the high price of rent relative to other universities. When the argument is boiled down to “staff are striking, so students are effected” we lose a lot of the nuance of the strikes. Our fellow students who are teaching are also affected by the market of the university and are also deciding as to whether to sacrifice security by striking. 

As someone studying a postgraduate degree, I hope one day that academia will be my area of work. More and more, however, I am told not to pursue this due to casualisation, the precarity of work, the instability of the job and the question of whether I would even get a decent pension at the end of it. I don’t want this for myself, I don’t want this for other students, and I don’t want this for our lecturers. 

The argument that “their teaching conditions are our learning conditions” is an oversimplified one, but I believe at its core it is right. We are all frustrated, and we are all angry that our degrees will be disrupted due to the fact that the UCU have had to strike, but we need to direct that anger to the right place, which isn’t to our staff and students. It is to those in charge that weaponize our anger against our staff and students. If you are a student and do not want to experience more strikes, the best thing to do would be to lobby senior management and email the VC. We cannot vote to stop the strikes from happening, but we can support our staff and students in order to get a quick resolution.