Tuesday 20th February

Pounds in their eyes

“The lecturer who doggedly pursued an embezzlement scandal has been vindicated”.

Guardian Education 20th February

That lecturer is Dave Gibson, UCU branch secretary at Barnsley College, an English lecturer, a socialist and man of principle whose determination to expose wrong doing and corruption at his college culminated in success last week when a key culprit was jailed.

Peter Kingston has written an excellent extended article in this weeks Guardian, you can read it here. Think about the consequences that can arise from close links between senior managers and private companies when governance and accountability are poor. And salute Dave Gibson, epitomising everything that’s best about our union.

Then read the article on the next page of today’s Guardian education where Mr Andrew Colin of INTO sets out his stall for the privatisation of language centres. No one, of course, is suggesting that Mr Collin is corrupt. Nor, of course, is anyone suggesting the VCs queuing up to give him business suffer from poor governance or lack of accountability.

But very very serious concerns do exist about the consequences for university language centres of the PFI style deals Mr Collin has agreed. The concerns are over quality of teaching and access to universities, long term financial consequences for the universities, and immediate costs for staff who face pay cuts and insecurity.

What is quite clear is that only the most determined campaign will succeed in rolling back a genie that has been let out of the bottle. Once the University of East Anglia (whose then VC David Eastwood is now Chief Executive of HEFCE) was allowed to contract out its centre in March 2006 and Exeter University (whose VC Steve Smith is chair of the powerful 94 group of universities) was contracted out in Autumn 2006 also without any campaign or publicity, then it was clear Mr Collin was on a roll.

HEFCE’s annual grant letter from Alan Johnson in January 2007 steered universities towards private sector deals and Alastair Smith VC at Sussex responded to UCU’s request to sign up to a campaign against privatisation by declaring his own interest – he’d already signed his own PFI style deal!

With such a powerful alliance in favour of such deals, we need to ask what action in addition to a public relations offensive will be needed to turn round a wave of deals that will soon threaten other university services. We have a real problem now the genie is out of the bottle. Colleagues at Oxford Brookes are doing an excellent job. They deserve our full support. Please send them messages of support.

But UCU also needs a full discussion of how INTO’s activities form a tiny part of much larger changes in the labour process and market environment so we can have a clear proactive strategy. Otherwise more PFI horses will bolt, some at least after we’ve closed the stable door.