In the midst of a mental health crisis within universities and wider society, Art Psychotherapy students wholeheartedly reject the continuing and increasing cuts and restructuring due to be imposed that will put the well being of workers and students at risk and also threaten training courses such as our own as future practitioners within the mental health field.

The neo-liberal marketisation of universities has resulted in the continuous dwindling of care for the individuals who create them: Us. As students, lecturers, technicians, estates, security and cleaning services it is our coming together within these buildings that constructs a university and it is this that the senior management and university governing bodies want to prevent us from accessing.

They see education as a quantifiable transaction that they can arbitrarily apply a costing to or deem un-viable due to a corrupt value system based solely on profit. But that is not where we see value. Value is in the learning which comes from such a breadth of instances so great and varied to leave them almost indescribable: A discussion with a peer over coffee, discovering a new author by chance in the library, the way a tutor describes a concept in a new way. You cannot put a cost to experience.

This challenge of perspective is one that we face beyond the university. In the places where we work, unpaid, in placement as trainee art therapists within schools, charities and NHS services so deprived by neoliberal hegemony they are left unable to cope with the demand and needs. We face the daily challenges of providing therapeutic intervention for some of the most vulnerable people within society, within services that are drowning and we can only practice due to invaluable courses such as our own.

Within our universities the pressures of precarious work contracts, expecting ever greater work loads for no extra pay whilst putting pensions at risk is leaving university staff at crisis point. The demands on lecturers are greater than ever and this directly impacts the wellbeing of staff. Furthermore students are facing a mental health crisis of their own with ever increasing fees and demands from universities combined with untenable rents, cost of living and poverty wages leaving many of us barely able to cope with university life. This always impacts the most marginalised within our communities first and most and as such cuts to services, pensions and wages are classist, racist and sexist.

Evolving Goldsmiths uses the language of the universities radical, political and activist histories in order to decimate funding with the massive further 15% cuts due to be slashed in April. This is another top down neo-liberal restructuring to increase the size and money going to senior management whilst dismantling funds at student facing services. This was decided without proper staff and student involvement and clearly has embedded aims of depriving those within the courses from what power or voice we still have within the university.

The cuts that are proposed by Frances Corner and the university put our course and its ability to run how it needs to at great risk. In fact it is already there, as students are affected from the overworking and underpaying of staff creating a turnstile of employment, less face to face contact with tutors and delays through understaffed course administrator rolls.

Responsibility for strike action stands solely at the doors of the Universities and the Wardens who preside over them who have failed to credibly negotiate with staff and unions. Furthermore responsibility for supposed deficits also lie at the heads of universities who despite having more money than ever, which we as students bare the burden of, are either too incompetent to manage or are purposefully miss managing.

If Frances Corner and the senior management team fail to come to agreement with striking workers then they will knowingly be disregarding the wellbeing of staff and students. If this university cares about mental health services at all it would in no way continue to enforce the proposed cuts that they know will impact the university's ability to adequately train individuals to work as mental health practitioners.

We call on Francis Corner and the senior management team to support the demands of the UCU and retract the proposals of Evolving Goldsmiths.

Goldsmiths Art Psychotherapy Students
ArtTherapyStrikes

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