British Academia is Dying. It’s Time for a National Industrial Response
Por Members of the University Rank and File Workers Group — Tribune
There is a point at which the crisis stops being an exception. This is now the condition of UK higher education. Across Britain, universities are cutting staff, closing courses, shrinking departments, and tearing up the assumptions on which generations of workers built their careers. It is clear that redundancies are no longer isolated incidents affecting small or financially beleaguered universities. They are spreading into the upper echelons of academic prestige.
Nearly half of UK universities are projected to run deficits in 2026, with up to 50 institutions potentially facing insolvency or closure in the following year. Recently released figures show that for the first time in more than a decade, the number of academic staff employed across UK universities has fallen. The number of job losses in the sector in recent years is estimated to be around 30,000. To put this figure into context: the official number alone is the same as the tally of jobs lost in 1992 with the final closures of deep-pit mines. Meanwhile, private degree delivery centres are fast becoming the only financially viable model in the sector. These catastrophes are the outcome of a structural crisis in the sector’s funding model, as the number of international students, on whom universities rely for tuition fees, has gone into freefall.
The long-term consequences are becoming increasingly clear. A university can cut its way out of a deficit only for so long. At some point, an institution will fail. And when that happens, it will be the result of a funding regime that has transferred risk from the state to individual universities, from universities to workers, and from workers to students. Today, in ever greater numbers, students are refusing to take on that risk.
The New Coalfields
Contrary to popular understanding, the damage caused by this crisis will not stop at the campus gates. For more than two decades, British governments have encouraged local economies to orient themselves around universities as anchor employers in an increasingly service-based economy. The language of the ‘knowledge economy’ became embedded under New Labour, when universities were cast simultaneously as engines of regional regeneration, suppliers of skilled labour, centres of innovation, and magnets for international investment.
Cities and towns were encouraged to build economic and urban strategies around them. Student accommodation was constructed; retail centres adapted to student populations; housing markets incorporated thousands of renters; local businesses became dependent on university expenditure; hospitals and schools developed partnerships with universities; cultural institutions became conduits for international research communities. In many towns and cities, the university became one of the largest employers and, for better and for worse, one of the few institutions capable of generating sustained economic activity. That model is now being dismantled.
The trajectory of contraction, privatisation and offshoring of higher education is an open secret within the British political establishment. The language of ‘efficiency’, ‘consolidation’, ‘financial sustainability’, ‘internationalisation’ and ‘closing loop-holes on migration’ disguises the more definitive restructuring that’s underway. The sector is being reorganised around expanded provision abroad, a smaller number of institutions at home and a radically reduced domestic workforce. Teaching and research functions, meanwhile, are increasingly exposed to outsourcing, corporate and military interests, international delivery models and technological substitution.
To achieve this structural transformation, the current generation of university senior managers are embarking on a process of educational vandalism. Courses and programmes have been slashed without even basic justifications. Prolific funding generators have been sacked in the name of ‘long-term financial savings’, and legal redundancy consultation processes have been universally flouted. Perhaps the biggest indignity has been the outsourcing of institutional ‘future-proofing’ to management consultancy firms with little or no prior experience of the sector. Frontline staff have been treated as unqualified bystanders rather than precious sources of institutional knowledge and market insight. The result has been the imposition of standardised cost-saving measures targeting the same disciplinary areas, leading to a concentration of competition around a homogenous academic offering.
De-Anchored
Despite the scale of the damage, few politicians have dared to ask what happens when the institutions around which entire local economies have been built begin to contract. The answer is already visible in towns and cities where universities are cutting staff and closing courses. Take the closure of the Southend Campus of the University of Essex: the decision, it is estimated, will remove £101 million in direct economic activity from the city, with local businesses already feeling the impact.
The consequences will only cascade. Fewer jobs mean less spending. Fewer students mean less demand for accommodation, hospitality and retail. When a university becomes financially unviable, the economic shock will spread through the community that grew around it. New Labour’s ‘knowledge economy’ was sold as a route out of regional decline. The very real risk today is that the collapse of its economic foundations will simply sharpen it. And with that, the economic and social conditions in which the far-right have prospered will be generalised.
In the face of the most significant attack the university sector has ever seen, how has the largest of the unions in the sector, the University and College Union (UCU), responded? After regular national industrial actions over pay, pay-related issues and pensions during the period of 2018-23, in 2023 the UCU won a significant victory in restoring USS pensions to pre-pandemic levels for pre-92 universities. But on pay and pay-related issues, it suffered a devastating defeat in the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) later that year.
By the end of 2023, UCU members in higher education were demoralised and disorganised, with some members facing extremely punitive pay deductions for taking part in the MAB. Since then, members have been fighting reactively, branch by branch, to stave off redundancies after university managers announce cuts. Vital local fights against cuts have been taking place in the context of an energised student and staff activism, focused mainly on calls for BDS and solidarity with Palestine, but this has not altered the underlying industrial impotence.
In the absence of a national response to the shrinking of the sector, a new organisational current began to take shape across higher education: rank-and-file day schools. Run every other month, these have become laboratories for bringing together workers from different institutions and trade unions, and creating spaces where people can talk about the sector as a whole. The politics is straightforward: workers need to understand the forces shaping their workplaces and their unions if they are going to change them. In order to do this at a sectoral level, they need to talk and organise with other workers outside their own workplaces and union branches.
Towards a National Fightback
In the two years they have been running, the day schools have covered how to respond to redundancies, casualisation, outsourcing, industrial strategy, and branch organisation, creating a space for workers to think politically about what universities are for.
At the beginning of 2025, discussions at the rank-and-file day school turned towards the sector’s financial crisis. Based on the harrowing experience of fighting local redundancy campaigns, the questions posed were brutally practical. If the crisis is caused by the funding model, why are workers only fighting its consequences? Why should trade unionists at different universities be engaged in separate struggles against redundancies, when the job cuts are being driven by the same structural pressures? Why not confront the political authority responsible for the system itself? The strategy that emerged was a proposed national trade dispute with the Secretary of State for Education over funding in the sector: the Secretary of State dispute.
For years, sector employers, represented represented by the Universities & Colleges Employers Association (UCEA), had already laid the ground for such an escalation: during national negotiations, they repeatedly claimed that casualisation, workload and equality could not be resolved at the institutional level. As the financial crisis deepened, senior managers and UCEA itself went further, arguing that the underlying funding model was unlikely to change and that redundancies were therefore unavoidable. In other words, these issues could not be resolved by institutions themselves, with meaningful progress instead ultimately requiring state intervention.
Rank-and-file activists then raised money through branches to get legal advice, which corroborated the approach sketched out in the day schools. On the basis of that advice, we developed a motion and took the argument back into branches. In May 2025, the motion was carried at the UCU Higher Education Sector Conference — making the strategy union policy. The resolutions of the motion were clear: to open a trade dispute with the Secretary of State over higher education funding; coordinate the strategy with other higher education unions and students; and campaign around the connection between funding, employment conditions and student experience.
The following day, the Congress resolution and SoS dispute strategy made the headlines. It was said at the time that if the Labour government did not respond to the crisis, the union would have no other choice than to take industrial action against the state. More than a year later and the dispute has not been opened.
What Now?
Rank-and-file activists are now renewing their organising efforts in response to this delay. Dozens of UCU branches are coordinating to push the Secretary of State dispute back to the centre of the union’s strategic discussions, and have called for an emergency conference to determine the future of its national industrial strategy.
In the coming months, this kind of cross-branch coordination will be needed to restore members’ confidence in the union’s national industrial capacity. Workers in the sector also know that there are no wins on a branch by branch basis. Higher education is a national, and international, ecosystem. In the current regime one department’s closure might feel like another department’s windfall, but the reality is a sector in terminal decline where no worker or student is ‘winning’. Branches need a national fight.
It may seem that now, of all times, is not the right moment to be talking about building rank-and-file structures in the union. But despite the pain inflicted by sackings in the sector, many UCU branches have emerged stronger from local struggles. Branches which had barely any internal infrastructure now have consolidated teams of representatives, regular member meetings, communication channels, casework teams, departmental representatives; they know how to run local ballots and industrial actions, to negotiate with bosses, to listen and mobilise their members and students, and they know their rights and how to use them. In this respect, branches are in a far better position to carry out industrial actions that hold real leverage.
If led by branches, a national industrial dispute with the Labour government over sector funding could harness these energies and give them political direction. A national industrial dispute could be coordinated with other education workers; the National Education Union (NEU) is balloting members at the end of the year in a comparable dispute with the Secretary of State. A window is opening for a major national industrial confrontation over the state of education, the likes of which was never experienced by Keir Starmer, but could seriously test Andy Burnham’s government.
If university workers are to succeed in this strategy, it will need to make clear that the fight over higher education is not only about the jobs and conditions of lecturers. It is also about workers across the university and the local community. It is about our current students and everyone who might want to study in the future.
We believe in universities not just as a vehicle for investment in the so-called knowledge economy, but as parts of a wider social infrastructure, opened up to communities with an expansive conception of education as a common good. Students should be able to learn critical theory and carpentry, programming and anthropology. Cost and the fear of one’s job prospects afterwards should not be the main reason for choosing a course — or not. Winning the Secretary of State campaign will not in itself be sufficient to end the permacrisis of UK Higher Education and transform the sector for the better. But what it does offer is a roadmap for how university workers might organise to make this alternative vision into reality.
Fonte: Tribune
