Sussex Students and Workers Unite Against Cuts

Posted on November 27, 2009
Filed Under Issues and Debate, News

250 Students and staff at Sussex University staged a demonstration against cuts and redundancies on Thursday. The demonstration was came the day after management announced 115 redundancies, cuts to the student advice service, Informatics, Life Sciences, Human Sciences, History, English and undergraduate foreign language programmes. The closure of the Environmental Sciences degree and a substantial cut to the students’ union funding had been announced during the past few weeks.


Students have been organising since the beginning of term, but this demonstration was only the start of a militant campaign. The unions UCU, UNISON and UNITE have announced the formation of a cross campus campaign committee, and are talking about strike action. Students are organising a campaign with the aim of mobilizing the whole student body – building the campaign every day on campus, and organising within individual departments and schools within the university.

Thursday’s demonstration showed that students are willing to take action against cuts – hundreds dodged security in an attempt to get into a university council meeting to hand the Vice Chancellor a giant P45 form.

Management have proved time and time again that they are waging a war on students and staff. They are deliberately seeking compulsory redundancies so that they can target specific members of staff, and they have banned students from booking lecture halls to hold meetings, claiming that all lecture halls are undergoing ‘equipment checks’ every evening between now and the end of term. The 20 top bosses at Sussex earn £2.6m, and the vice chancellor has just seen his pay rise to £277,000.

Bosses are waging a full-frontal attack on the university – constant ‘restructuring’, redundancies, cracking down on student protest (an injunction was served against students last summer), and cuts to courses which do not generate huge amounts of income, or which do not conform to the neoliberal agenda in education.

Students and university staff are responding to these attacks by stepping up for a battle – watch this space!
Send messages of support to the campaign to sussexstopthecuts@gmail.com, and join the facebook group here, and check out the blog here.