We call on Professor Chris Day the Vice-Chancellor of Newcastle University to stop deducting from staff 50% of their salary for undertaking an assessment boycott and to write a joint statement calling for a return to negotiations without preconditions. Students and Staff deserve better.

UCU Open Letter to Students

Dear Students,

Our Vice-Chancellor is deducting 50% of staff pay for participation in the marking boycott until 30 September. He says he is doing this for you. An unprecedented situation now exists in which the Vice-Chancellors like our own are willing to push through to graduations without marks using emergency regulations created during the pandemic. They claim to be acting in your interests with their ‘no detriment’ policies.

We know that those third-year undergraduates now completing their studies are those that faced their first semester locked down paying rent in an unfamiliar city. The VCs wanted students paying rents in their halls of residence and on campus spending money because that is their business model. The staff union wanted to keep our members safe and have the uncertainty about the return to campus removed. We argued that moving students into halls was not safe and against your interests. Newcastle hit the national headlines with 1000 new infections across the two universities. We had to transfer teaching online, learn new skills, home-school during school closures, deal with all the stresses of the pandemic, keep the university going and deliver you an education. The pandemic had a big toll on staff just as it did on students. We sympathise enormously with you. The university employers’ long-standing agenda has been to turn the university into a business, to make more money and to lobby for increases in student fees to achieve this.

It is a national scandal that the VCs are so determined to impose a devastating real-terms pay cut (of 25% since 2009) that they are willing to conduct exam boards and graduations during a marking boycott. They are devaluing your degrees and robbing you of the marks that you deserve. The VC at Newcastle University pushed these emergency measures through Senate breaking the normal rules for exam boards that assure the quality of your degree result. They are using the regulations designed for the emergency of the pandemic to defeat the staff union.

Instead of their agenda of campus building programmes, increased tuition fees, global rankings and market share, the VCs should be joining with students and staff to say that Higher Education needs a new funding model with an end to tuition fees, a fair deal for students and staff. The first step in that is to stop punitive pay deductions of staff, to negotiate over pay and conditions, allowing students to get the marks and degrees they deserve. A marking and assessment boycott is a last resort for us and those who undertake it wrestle with their sense of professional integrity. Not to make a stand would do a disservice to the future of Higher Education in this country.

We would like to see a swift resolution to the dispute. We proposed a meeting for a joint statement calling for meaningful negotiation over pay. At the meeting, the VC refused point blank to either scale down the deductions or a statement that would include pay. There is money in the sector for a fair deal for staff on pay and working conditions. And students deserve a fair deal too. The government needs to fund education and health properly. Nurses, teachers, junior doctors and university staff have had over a decade of pay erosion and massive increases in workloads. It is time to sort it out.

Graduation too is treated as a money spinner, so it is going ahead irrespective of whether all of your work has been marked properly. You deserve better. The VC claims that there is less student opposition to what he is doing than before. This letter is an opportunity to prove otherwise to him. Please share the letter. Please sign our petition. Write to him and publish on social media.