The below is an open letter from Goldsmiths students. It underlines what the Business University means in 2024. Will a knew Government step in? It should if political change means anything at all
London Socialist Historians Group @LSHGOfficial
Dear all,
Goldsmiths University as we know it, is in its last hours.
We, Goldsmiths students, write these lines with extreme sadness. We are heartbroken, but also outraged. This letter is us crying out in the fact injustice.
Last March we published an open letter that you signed, informing you of the catastrophe looming ahead of us. With this letter we want to tell you all that we are eternally grateful for your support. Your signature along with almost 4000 more have helped us feel less alone and dispensable. We want to update you on our situation. We are also adding more people to this mailing list as we believe the information may be of interest to others.
On July 1st, 97 members of Goldsmiths teaching staff received letters notifying them that they had been provisionally selected for redundancy. In a few weeks, on August 5th, a Redundancy Selection Committee will meet to sign off on these redundancies. Frances Corner, Warden of Goldsmiths, and her Senior Management Team (SMT) have disguised the university’s circumstances as an economic crisis, in attempts to justify an ideologically-motivated attack on 11 of its 18 departments, and the sacking of almost one third of the teaching staff.
To date, we students have only received 3 vaguely worded emails from the College, promising to transform the future of our university. The SMT are hiding this whole process from us, taking our tuition money and destroying our studies. They are offering modules and programmes to new students that will disappear in September. They are cancelling modules and programmes that students are currently enrolled on. They are firing PhD and Masters supervisors without giving any alternative or information to students. They have also cut opportunities for doctoral students to gain teaching experience. They are cheating and lying to students in order to force through this extreme restructure.
This restructure, its form and the speed in which it is being pushed through, along with the dismissal that students constantly face from senior management, has severely impacted the mental health of the Goldsmiths community, particularly affecting members from minoritised communities. There is no acknowledgement of this from Frances Corner – whilst she sits on the boards of the Maudsley Charity and is the co-chair of the Goldsmiths’ Race Justice Strategy Board. No impact reports on wellbeing or diversity have been produced in consultation with the student community.
We have been doing everything we can to fight this. Amongst many other things, we cast a Vote of No Confidence through our Student Union in Frances Corner and the senior management team. The vote, unprecedented in the UK, resulted in nearly 10% of the student body voting unanimously for the senior management to resign. Frances Corner and her team have refused to acknowledge the results of this vote, treating all complaints and correspondence from students with the same email template response that dismisses our concerns and rights. The Council, the board that should be overseeing the governance of the university, is not intervening. We feel scammed and ignored by Frances Corner, Council and the rest of the SMT. We were led to occupy one of our university buildings, demanding for a series of meetings between the management team and students. Frances Corner and senior management’s response was to threaten to take us to court, criminalising our protest and denying our basic demand for a meeting to address students’ concerns. Since all this started, Frances Corner and the senior management team have refused to engage in meaningful conversation with students as well as staff. They have denied students the fundamental care and respect that is so vital in pedagogical practice. They are not fit to run a university.
For many of us, it used to feel a source of pride to be a part of this university. But Frances Corner is destroying the departments that gave Goldsmiths its name. The impact of senior management’s Transformation Programme on the reputation of this college is immeasurable. The careers of respected academics and the hard-earned prestige they’ve brought to the College is being erased.
Frances Corner and her management team are advancing their careers by destroying our education and the lives of the community at this university. While we go into debt for a service we never receive, this managerial class sets in motion a culture of restructuring for the sole purpose of adding a line to their CVs. No university benefits, but financial figures and redesigned websites are manipulated to make the situation appear otherwise. This is the case at Goldsmiths.
We are writing this as witnesses of what is to come for you. Our case is one of the canary in the coal mine. If we want to survive, we need to work and think collectively of ways to resist this decimation of higher education. Our testimony is a call to start this collective thinking. Despite her attempts, we refuse to be silenced by Frances Corner and we raise our voices here.
Finally, our movement cannot be understood without mentioning our friends from Goldsmiths for Palestine (G4P). At the same moment in time that we occupied the main Council Chamber of Deptford Town Hall, G4P were occupying the Centre for Contemporary Art gallery, marking their third occupation of buildings on campus this year. G4P questions Goldsmiths’ complicity in the genocide, and we, SaTP believe there is a connection between this complicity and the Transformation Programme. It is not by chance that one of Frances Corner’s plans is to expand towards Artificial Intelligence, prioritising the development of a technology used right now to target civilians in Gaza, over the social sciences and the humanities – the fields of research Frances Corner is targeting right now in our university.
This is not a done deal, we still have time to fight this before August 5th. Please, help us by sharing this letter, writing articles, tweeting us, tagging our senior management and using hashtags. Please keep thinking about ways to collectively fight this managerial culture of violent restructures in your own institutions, your unions, with your colleagues and friends. Let’s imagine new forms of resistance.
In solidarity,
If you want to contact us, please reply to this email or DM us on instagram (@studentsagainsttp) or twitter (@Official_SATP).
LIST OF PEOPLE TO TAG/HASHTAGS
#NotADoneDeal #GoldStrike #NoJobCuts #DefendArtsAndHumanities #goldsmithsuniversity #universityoflondon #goldsmithsuniversityoflondon #highereducation #binthetp
Students against the Transformation Plan (DaTP)
Teaching staff union (GUCU)
Goldsmiths for Palestine (G4P)
Goldsmiths Student Union
https://www.goldsmithssu.org/news/article/6013/TP-statement/
You could also tag or send an email to our Senior Management team expressing your concern:
FRANCES CORNER
IMRAN CHUGHTAI
ERNEST CALDWELL
DAVID OSWELL
ADAM DINHAM
STEPHEN GRAHAM
MATTHEW CRAGOE
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