Opinion: Our courses and conditions are being ruined – the strike is our chance to fight back

Demonstrators hold a protest outside the University of Leicester on June 16 2025. The crowd gathered to rally against job cuts. Image Credit: Joseph Herbert

Freshers’ week should see students and staff arrive at uni refreshed and ready to embrace new horizons, but that will hardly be the case this year. Students and staff will come to uni worn down by a 2025 full of crisis-on-rotation – and we will not be warmly received, thanks to a system in meltdown and its puppets in uni management.

On 9 June 2025, the University of Leicester’s bosses announced ‘pre-change engagement’ for a strategic review – the first step before lay-offs. Particular targets include geography, geology, history, modern languages, film, and education. Ever merciful, the administration had already offered staff an easy way out through a voluntary severance scheme in late 2024, leaving courses pre-slashed. PhD students whose supervisors were sacked have been left in the dark and told to find new supervisors themselves – supervisors who have reported being pressured to take on dissertations they are less qualified for. 

At the same time, rent in student halls and international student tuition fees (both major sources of income for the university) are being increased. Most halls at Leicester have increased by 4-5% every year for years, including the most affordable: a twin room in Beaumont House has increased from £65 to £72 since 2022. The government has already increased home student fees by £285, for the first time since 2017, and could increase them again as the university bosses beg the state for a solution to this crisis. Already the Office for Students (our supposed ‘advocates’) has proposed tying fees to teaching quality (a clever way to increase student fees and pressure staff to work harder at the same time).

All the while, the maximum maintenance loan (for students away from home and outside London) struggles to keep pace at £10,544, far below minimum wage for either 18-20 or 21+ age groups. Few students can expect a max loan anyway, meaning outside income sources (in a shrinking jobs market) are a stone’s throw from mandatory. 

Furthermore, in chasing short-term boosts of capital, the university has sold off, closed, and neglected the maintenance of various buildings. Neglect forced the sudden temporary closures of the Bennett and Physics buildings (due to structural corrosion) and Ken Edwards (due to flooding), leaving students and staff scrambling to find spaces for lectures and work.

As this new term settles in, we will look out across Uni Road from the rain-bled scapes of concrete that swallow our ambitions. We will ask ourselves if a graveyard sits on both sides of the street.

This is the story at Leicester, but it resonates at unis across the country. Over at DMU, things have been worsened by failed gambles on out-of-city campuses, its management now preparing to demolish dozens of staff careers. The situation goes far beyond Leicester too: according to the latest House of Commons research briefing on higher education finances, “total direct government funding for teaching has fallen by more than 60% since 2010/11”. From Bristol to Edinburgh, this is no isolated crisis. It points to a deeper cause.

And what of the vultures perched over these cemeteries, over sunken promises of better education and brighter futures? What of the vice chancellors, like UoL’s Nishan Canagarajah or DMU’s Katie Normington, who take home base salaries of (on average) £340,000 to make two speeches per year and fly business class to fancy conferences? It shows how much of an illusion of free choice we have that every government, regardless of party, has made cuts to education to serve their boss class (hell, the Lib Dems raised tuition fees despite running their election campaign on abolishing them!). Since the 1980s, they have imposed defunding and commercialisation – having unis be run like businesses, with students as ‘customers’ buying an education – especially after the introduction of tuition fees in 1998.

Essentially, these are ways to reduce government spending on education. The high profit rates of the post-war boom, which could take the cost of increased social spending to placate workers, have been falling since the 70s – and so governments worldwide have continued to slash social spending. Why do these bosses, these millionaires and billionaires, demand more when they already live so lavishly? Simple: under capitalism, infinite growth is a feature. To persist within capitalist competition, accumulation must be constant; eventually, someone has to be the last boss standing.

Even as annual profits reach numbers the mind can’t comprehend, even as corporations merge into ever-swelling homunculi, and even as the gap between those that work for a wage and the vampires that live off profit becomes obscene, the system will demand more. The parasites at the top will preach the value of reforming our system, or pin its consequences on immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and other scapegoats – all a mirage to strip us of any welfare we have left and throw our remains into the war machine’s meat grinder.

Uni management will continue to destroy staff livelihoods, leave our living spaces to buckle under mold and rot, brutalise students for protesting ties to genocide, and allow our courses to sink into decay. They will try to make us pay for mistaken gambles with vanity projects, an overreliance on international student fees, and the economic crisis of a system that wants only one thing: more.

Fuck that!

We're going to fight them the only way we can: by uniting all sectors (students, academics, cleaners, security, etc.) against the bosses. As it is, staff are divided between three or four different unions; solidarity is often limited to empty union slogans; and students are mostly relegated to ‘supporting’ staff rather than truly joining forces. This sectoralism is a sham; in truth, we all have a common interest and a common enemy.

Looking at the history of similar struggles, we can take both inspiration and lessons. In the 2010s, the last generation of students launched a nationwide campaign of demonstrations when the coalition government massively cut public spending, tripled tuition fees, and scrapped the Education Maintenance Allowance. They joined picket lines, blocked deliveries, and even held rent strikes. Unfortunately, although some were inspired to start questioning capitalism itself, students were largely unable to escape the illusion that higher education could be reformed, and were absorbed into dead-end Trotskyist parties and Corbyn’s Labour.

Now we have a chance to try again. We can use these tactics and more to build a united struggle – unburdened by sectoral divisions or the illusions of reformism. This is exactly why a group of staff and students have founded Leicester Student-Worker Action Group (LSWAG), a forum for all university workers to bridge the gap and allow us to coordinate ourselves together. 

Capitalism will only lead us into more crises, and we’ve already seen how replacing one boss with another through the ballot box can't change this – but you can. 

Academic staff at UoL will strike on 29 September. By joining them, first of all at their pickets, we have a chance to fight back yet another attack on our conditions, and build a working class movement that could challenge this system with the hope for a different kind of society. Don’t sit back and wait for a saviour; instead, join the picket lines and stand together.

Will you let the bosses eat you alive, or will you join the strike?

– Two students