The marketization of higher education poses a financial and existential crisis for SOAS and higher education. Currently, SOAS faces a seven million pound deficit. Its management team has no strategy for resolving the crisis other than reproducing the path that landed the university where it is today. By internalizing the logic of austerity confronting the wider public sector within the university, the administration plans to reduce the size of the school by attacking workers, cutting speciality courses, further commodifying student experience and endangering the status of 115 workers and the SOAS research library status - the university’s only assets sustaining it through the crisis.

Currently, management has placed 115 workers on the chopping block. Throughout this restructuring process, management has pursued a malicious misinformation campaign, slandering, intimidating and harassing workers seeking humane solutions to the crisis. As with broader austerity measures, the assault on workers and working conditions at SOAS are also profoundly gendered and racialised. The students and workers have stood in solidarity with one another and rejected these measures as an attack on workers today is an attack on future workers tomorrow and to the institution itself.

All of the strategies that the management has pursued too resolve the financial crisis have involved raising tariffs and depressing recruitment while wasting university resources on unnecessary initiatives extraneous to students and workers. This illustrates the fundamental disconnect between management and the workers who actually run the university. All three unions, UNISON, UCU and the Student Union have issued a vote of no confidence in the management to resolve the crisis.

It is claimed that the changes being brought in will improve the student experience. Workers who currently work with students from across different departments - the library, departments, widening participation, student Hub, IT services, amongst others- have repeatedly pointed out that it will be students who will bear the brunt of these cuts. It will mean longer waiting timings, less specialised services and more pressure on reduced staff to deliver the same level of service- at reduced pay. This is unacceptable. Campus working conditions are student learning conditions. Yes, there is a need to restructure SOAS but the top-down method in which it has been done is a sham.

Management is responsible for the situation we are in. While we understand the fear surrounding the disruption to student schedules posed by defensive industrial action, we stand in solidarity with the resistance of campus workers. Management’s authoritarian approach is already sowing disruption in the lives of present and future students at the university. The logic of austerity to shrink the school in order to grow, to contain some vapid notion of excellence based on entry tariffs is absurd as it is damaging. They highlight the hubris of the administration and a total lack of respect for the rest of the SOAS community - which as management is aware, is overwhelmingly against the cuts.

We call on students, alumni, workers and community members everywhere to stand behind SOAS workers resisting management’s assault on the university. We call on all those wishing to show their solidarity to visit the UnFayre Stall; the stall will be on everyday from the 30th of April to the 9th of May, between 12-2PM at the Main Building steps. The Fayre is an attempt to broaden the scope of the resistance to the financial crisis at SOAS by combining it with gender-based violence and sexual-abuse inaction, BAME attainment gaps, patriarchal and racist mental health and counselling services, and the reductionist disability procedures in place. Taken together, these systemic issues reaffirm the students’ vote of no confidence in senior management at SOAS.

We also urge you to take photos and share them on social media with the hashtag #Strike4SOAS and #FightTheCuts and #UnFayre. Don’t forget to tag @CrisisSOAS on Facebook and Instagram.

We demand the following:
- A clear commitment from management to no redundancies
- The reopening of the restructuring process to representatives of the UNISON, UCU and the student body
- No cuts to regional programmes and specialty courses
- That management assumes responsibility and absorbs the financial and social costs of the university’s crisis