Students and staff at Sydney Uni are leading the way in the fightback against cuts on campus. With the Liberals announcing new plans to increase student fees, we need to escalate the fight to defend our education.

Sixty arts units are currently on the chopping block at the university. Casual staff have been told they are unlikely to have jobs next semester, with further cuts expected until revenue returns to “normality” in 2024.

Despite not being on campus, students have spent the last few weeks of semester building opposition to the cuts, passing motions in over 80 Zoom classes.

At a 100-strong protest in the last week of semester, students stuck a photo collage of the classes that had passed motions, as well as an open letter to the Vice-Chancellor with 700 signatures, to the wall outside the administration building.

Students are organising within their departments against the cuts. Government and international relations units are being heavily targeted, with 20 courses threatened—so students held a speak-out at Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence’s subsidised mansion. Seven history units are in jeopardy including American Slavery and Fascism and Anti-Fascism. On 2 July history students will hold a teach-in outside the Great Hall to highlight the attack on critical thinking.

Units in Sociology, Anthropology, English and political economy will also be suspended.

Despite quietly gutting Indigenous Studies over the years, rendering it what staff call a “skeleton” major, more Indigenous focused units are set to go.

Already protest action has forced Sydney University to revise down their list of arts subjects being axed.

Whilst the majority of units being cut are elective, management is trying to reduce staff even in compulsory units for degrees. Permanent staff are being asked to teach courses run by expert and experienced casual and fixed term staff. The outcome will be an erosion of teaching quality and higher workloads for permanent staff.

Whilst the revenue shortfall due to reduced international student enrolments is real, staff and students should not have to foot the bill.

Sydney Uni has the funds to avoid cuts, including $600 million in borrowing capacity plus $482 million in cash reserves. Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence’s $1.63 million salary would pay for around 10,000 hours of casual tutoring, according to NTEU policy and research director Paul Kniest.

No fee increases

The Liberals could fund the $5 billion hole across the university sector for a fraction of their $60 billion underspend on the JobKeeper program. Instead they have excluded university staff from JobKeeper and refused any extra support for the sector.

Now the Liberals want to make students pay more for their degrees, and push people into courses that serve the needs of business.

The government has announced a doubling of fees for humanities degrees. For these courses Commonwealth contributions will fall to 7 per cent and students will pay 93 per cent of the cost or $14,500 a year. Fees for law and commerce will also increase, while those for nursing, teaching, maths and science will be reduced. But overall students will pay a higher share of the cost of degrees, up from 42 to 48 per cent.

At a time where our Prime Minister claims slavery never existed in Australia, and defends statues of colonial figures including Captain Cook, fighting for a free, accessible education that critically engages with history and politics is of great importance.

Large student protests can help give staff the confidence to take the unprotected industrial action needed to win.

The rank and file staff networks that formed to fight the union’s now-defeated National Framework, which would have conceded across the board cuts to wages, need to be deepened and used to mobilise a fight against cuts and for federal funding.

We need to fight for a University education that is free and publicly funded, not one where big business and politicians dictate what students learn.

By Jordi Pardoel

The post Sydney Uni students and staff start the fight against cuts and fee increases appeared first on Solidarity Online.

The latest attacks on tertiary education are unprecedented—thousands of jobs and hundreds of courses are slated to be slashed. USYD Chancellor Belinda Hutchinson isn’t mincing her words, “We are putting into place an austerity program.”

Vice-Chancellors across Australia are using the crisis to cut jobs and slash courses. Universities Australia have announced they expect to cut 21,000 jobs across the sector. At USYD, management is forcing through a 30 per cent cut to Arts courses to decrease costs.

The fight over uni jobs has broader implications than students’ education: it will help set the tone for workers’ resistance to the looming economic crisis. More than half of all workers are either unemployed or on Job Keeper. And unions everywhere are proposing the strategy of compromise and concession. The NTEU rank and file are putting up one of the most serious fights against this.

Uni students and workers need to unite and set an example of what kind of fight can save the jobs, stop the cuts and win the vision for a publicly funded university made for education, not profit.

Liberals and the Vice-Chancellors: two edges of the same sword.

The Liberals’ claim they cannot afford to cover the cost of the $5 billion shortfall caused by coronavirus. This is nonsense. $5 billion is a drop in the bucket compared to the $320 billion total stimulus spending. The Liberals are choosing to prioritise bailing out private profits at the expense of workers and students.

Across the board VCs pass the buck and blame the government for the austerity they are trying to implement on campus. But the Liberals and the Vice-Chancellors are two edges of the same sword.

The free, publicly funded uni enjoyed by today’s politicians was dismantled in the 80s. Funding was withdrawn and replaced by HEC debts and fees. Vice-Chancellors were transformed into high paid CEOs on a mission to squeeze profit out of staff and students. Meanwhile corporate tax was slashed from 45 per cent to less than 30 per cent.

Vice-Chancellors operate as the Liberals’ attack dogs on campus. They help to enforce the consequences of government underfunding. But they don’t stop there. The logic of a uni system infected with the logic of profit drives them to try to squeeze every last cent out of staff and students even when they can afford to weather a temporary fall in revenue like we are seeing now.

Usyd is a case in point. Usyd is a massive institution that could easily absorb revenue losses without any cuts—they have $482 million in cash reserves, plus almost $5 billion in assets that they could borrow against. According to analysis by the NTEU they have well in excess of $600 million borrowing capacity.

Yet Usyd VC Michael Spence is wielding the axe while refusing to ditch his own $1.5 million salary. Arts is facing a savage 30 per cent course cut and casuals won’t have work in Semester 2. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The uni is blatantly using Covid as a cover for cuts it wanted to make anyway. A uni spokesperson told the Sydney Morning Herald that the course and job cuts are unrelated to the coronavirus crisis, but rather are designed to make the school “operate sustainably in the medium to long term”.

Fighting for an alternative to the dysfunctional corporate uni also means a fight for every job and course here and now. We cannot allow the Liberals and Spence to sacrifice staff livelihoods and students’ education in return for the university’s balance sheets.

Students, the union and the fightback

Given the significance of the battle ahead, it is tragic that the Executive of the NTEU staff union have proposed a deeply flawed solution to the attacks: to strike a deal with the Vice-Chancellors. Their deal would see uni workers trade a 5 to 15 per cent pay cut for staff, in return for a promise that VCs limit sackings to around 9,000 jobs. The NTEU executive are pushing for staff to accept the cuts in a plebiscite on this “National Jobs Protection Framework”.

Tellingly, USYD Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence has actually indicated he doesn’t intend to use the NTEU’s ‘national framework’. Management is already pursuing massive cuts without needing to resort to it.

And although most students cannot vote themselves in the upcoming national union plebiscite, we can stand in solidarity with staff campaigning for the ‘no vote’. This includes the Sydney Uni branch of the NTEU which has shown an important lead. As well as saying no to the National Framework they have also called an in-person protest at Sydney Uni as part of the NDA.

This is exactly the kind of fight we need. There is an alternative strategy that refuses these massive cuts to jobs and wages: mass mobilisations of students and staff can stop the job cuts, and build a serious campaign for public funding. We must build a political campaign that can both embolden the “no vote” and stop the cuts. 

In 2012 340 job cuts were justified by falls in revenue. Thousands protested and students went on strike and launched occupations saving half the academic jobs. In 2016 a 65 day occupation stopped Sydney College of the Arts being closed and saved half of the jobs and several studios threatened by the closure. This year when the Liberals refused to include uni students in their package of increased centrelink payments campaigning forced them to back down.

The National Day of Action (NDA) against the Liberals needs to be the first step of building this campaign: a campaign that says no to the Liberals’ corporate uni and no to every wage cut, course cut and job cut. Solidarity students and others have organised motions in more than 20 classes in support and 200 have signed a statement supporting the NDA and opposing all cuts. Staff successfully contested the attempt to cut the political economy course ECOP1001. We need to build the power that can win.

The post We need a fight to stop every cut to jobs, pay, and courses: USYD Solidarity Students’ Statement appeared first on Solidarity Online.

What’s the distribution of sexual orientations among first-year undergraduates who are majoring in philosophy? Eric Schwitzgebel (Riverside), Morgan Thompson (Pittsburgh), and Eric Winsberg (South Florida) looked at data from Higher Education Research Institute’s “Freshman Survey” to find out that and other information.

[photograph by Muholi Zanele]

They conclude that “Students intending to major in philosophy are more likely to identify as non-heterosexual than are students in other majors.” Here are the numbers:

Overall, across all majors, 92% identified as straight, 4% as bisexual, 2% as other, and the remaining groups 1% each. Philosophy majors were more likely to report non-heterosexual sexual orientation: 88% straight, 6% bisexual, 3% other, 2% gay, 1% queer, and < 1% lesbian. (p < .001, comparing the proportion straight).

Non-response rates of 10% for philosophy majors and 8% for students over all was “an issue”, they say, but “the proportions, absolute numbers, and effect sizes are large enough to permit some confidence in the conclusion”.

They add, “Unsurprisingly, philosophy isn’t the queerest of all disciplines.” That designation would go to Women’s and Gender Studies, with 42% of the students identifying as non-heterosexual.

They also found that “43% (485/1132) of intended philosophy majors were women (1%, or 7 total, declined to state), compared to 58% of first-year students overall.”

They attempted to determine the proportion of philosophy students who are transgender, but, they say, “given the small number of self-reported transgender students and these resulting interpretative difficulties, we are hesitant to draw conclusions about the proportion of students who are transgender or about whether philosophy students were more likely than other students to be transgender.”

You can read more about their study here.

Related: “The Personality of Philosophy Majors“, “The Political Views of Philosophy Majors“, “Philosophy Majors Are Less Likely To Marry Each Other“, “The Philosophy Major Sees Increase in Numbers and Diversity“, “Proportion of Philosophy Majors Who Are Women Varies Widely Across Schools“.

The post The Sexual Orientations of First-Year Philosophy Undergrads appeared first on Daily Nous.

Flying around social media yesterday were cheers that Oxford University had issued a “Statement on the Importance of Free Speech” in response to a motion from the Oxford Student Union allegedly to “ban ‘ableist, classist and misogynist’ reading lists”.

Here’s Richard Dawkins on Twitter, for example:

I checked out the widely circulated Oxford Blue article linked to in Dawkins’ and others’ tweets, as well as the Oxford Student article first reporting on the Student Union motion. Though there were a few snippets here and there, neither article included or linked to the whole text of the motion, or even a substantial block of it.

And what of the “Statement on the Importance of Free Speech” that Oxford University “released”, according to the May 3rd Oxford Blue article? Fortunately, the authors of the article included the entire text of that statement. However, it appears to be the exact same text already posted last year on at least a couple of Oxford sites and released at least as early as May, 2017. It’s not clear what actually happened here. Perhaps the university simply referred the journalists at Oxford Blue to this pre-existing statement. [Update: according to the reporter, yes, this is what happened.]

Oxford Blue also reports that “the university” (they don’t specify who) said, “I can confirm that the University has no plans to censor reading materials assigned by our academics.”

Censor reading materials? Is that what the students were calling for? Not exactly.

Jenny Saville, “Stare III” (detail)

A fellow twitterer answered my request for the actual motion, and from the looks of it, the students were basically aiming for four things:

1. For Oxford University to add gender identity, disability status, and socio-economic status as protected classes to its policy on acts of hatred and hate speech, which currently only concerns race, religion, and sexual orientation (as it is modeled on Part III of the UK’s Public Order Act of 1986, which concerns “acts intended or likely to stir up” hatred or violence).
2. For Oxford University to not require students to take any courses whose content would “amount to” criminal hate speech, were the policy amended as in 1.
3. For Oxford University to require faculty to consider the impact of “including prejudicial articles” on the well-being of protected groups as they finalize their reading lists and to include content warnings if appropriate for any of the readings.
4. For two Oxford University Student Union officers—the Vice-President for Access and Academic Affairs and the Vice-President for Welfare and Equal Opportunities—to “condemn… the use of hateful material” in required courses. [Note: initially this was reported with the mistaken assumption that these vice presidential positions were administrative positions of the university. Rather, they are student union positions.]

What to make of these demands? The first thing to note is that none of this is censorship. So, for “the university” to say that it has “no plans to censor reading materials” is not, strictly speaking, to reject the student union motion. The closest we get to censorship in the motion is in the condemnation called for in #4, above. That isn’t technically censorship, but it may have similar effects (I don’t know, as I don’t know anything about those particular offices or whether Oxford faculty care about whether they condemn their reading selections). [Note: in light of the correction of #4, above, I think it is safe to say that #4 does not come close to constituting censorship.] #2 might strike some as censorship but it seems “pro-freedom” to me, for if its effect would be to give students more choice—here, not to take a course they otherwise would have been required to.

(In one line in the original document, the students complain about the lack of “criminalization” of certain forms of biased speech, but what they end up calling for from Oxford isn’t the criminalization of speech.)

The extent to which these demands are anti-free speech turns in part on what material is actually covered by it. I don’t know enough about the legal context to know exactly what kinds of texts would be picked out by “intended or likely to stir up” hatred. Are historical documents and older writings ever included here? Has the assignment of a hateful text for the purposes of study ever been the target of the Public Order of 1986 or university policies based on it? Readers, help us out.

Here’s the actual text of the motion (courtesy of Eric Sheng):

As you can see, the students named one example of a text they think would fall under their expanded hate speech proposal: “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children” by Julian Savulescu, which appeared in Bioethics in 2001. In this article, Savulescu argues that prospective parents “should select the child, of the possible children they could have, who is expected to have the best life, or at least as good a life as the others, based on the relevant, available information,” which they took to be objectionably ableist.

I don’t think the students did themselves any favors with this choice of example, in which Savulescu distinguishes between identifying conditions, such as poor memory, that tend to make people’s lives worse (a claim he endorses) and saying that people with those conditions are less deserving of respect or are less valuable (a claim he rejects). Regardless of whether one thinks Savulescu’s argument is any good, this article is certainly neither intended to, nor likely to stir up, hatred against disabled persons. The students are just mistaken that it is an example of hate speech.

Suppose, though, that they weren’t mistaken. Even if it were hate speech, note that the students are not calling for Oxford to ban Savulescu’s essay. Rather, they are arguing that students be given the option to take a course in which it is assigned, and that students be warned about its content. One way to put this is that they’re arguing for “informed consent” for encountering hate speech.

Unfortunately, they are also asking for administrators* [students actually; see the correction to #4, above] to condemn the assigning of the reading. Though I tend to favor “more speech” approaches to allegedly objectionable speech, without measures to separate the authority’s expressive actions from its coercive ones (a la Brettschneider), this is an overreach. [Note: in light of the correction of #4, above, which makes clear that it is students, not administrators, being asked to condemn the readings, I retract this criticism.]

So what to think about all of this? Here are three takeaways (feel free to add your own):

(a) The students care about the welfare of the vulnerable among them and are pointing out what they take to be a problem of arbitrariness in law and policy (that there are protections on the basis of, say, race and religion but not gender and class).

(b) The students are arguing for a more-freedom, more-information, and more-speech approach to solving this problem, rather than censorship.

(c) The students seem to have an overly inclusive conception of what counts as hate speech.

I think (a) is good, (b) is a mixed bag owing to the vague call for official condemnations and  [see the correction to #4, above] the confused language of “criminalization”, and (c) is not terrible but not good, either.

The problem with (c) is not really the legal point, but rather an apparent tendency towards a kind of “affirming the consequent”. Here’s an example. We might expect an atheist to criticize the ontological argument for the existence of God, but someone who criticizes the ontological argument for the existence of God is not necessarily an atheist. That is, it doesn’t follow from one’s making an argument an atheist would make that one is an atheist—it depends on the argument (among other things). Similarly, it doesn’t follow from one’s making an argument a racist or sexist or classist would make that one is a racist or sexist or classist—it depends on the argument (among other things). For example, we might expect a racist to argue against affirmative action, but it doesn’t follow that one is a racist in virtue of arguing against affirmative action.

It isn’t surprising that students are susceptible to this mistaken reasoning. For one thing, they’re still learning how to think carefully. For another, it’s not always a mistake to reason this way, and in some contexts (or for people with certain backgrounds) it could be a reasonable heuristic to employ.

Ironically, this kind of reasoning might have been in play in the widely shared descriptions and attitudes expressed about this story, which framed the students as censors. We might think that someone who favors censorship might express the same kinds of concerns the Oxford Student Union did in their motion. But it would be a mistake to conclude, as many seemed to do, that because they expressed such concerns, the students were calling for censorship. They weren’t.

I suppose an additional takeaway would be that, as with some other disputes over speech, the combatants may have more in common than they realize.

The post Free Speech at Oxford (updated with an important correction) appeared first on Daily Nous.