Jacob Lloyd, Cardiff graduate tutor and UCU member (personal capacity)
Neoliberal policies make university life harder for all, be it unmanageable staff workloads or increased student fees. These have been issues at Cardiff University, with controversies surrounding vain and costly capital projects, unsustainable international recruitment, exorbitant upper management salaries, and, most recently, the shock-and-awe announcement of hundreds of staff redundancies.
The departments of modern languages, music, history, religious studies, and archaeology have been proposed for closure. The university executive board has begrudgingly scaled back its plans to cut nursing, after our protests.
University finances are murky. It is imperative that the university’s financial books are opened to public scrutiny and democratic workers’ overnight.
Vice chancellor Wendy Larner has a basic salary of £290,000, supplemented with a recently refurbished mansion and private family healthcare. Outrageously, she has repeatedly refused to use any of the university’s £188 million accessible reserves to ease the current crisis.
Yet, she is leading a cruel and callous quick-fix approach, motivated by the spurious decision to chase a 12% operating surplus. Pursuing unrealistic profit margins, at the expense of the wellbeing and livelihoods of loyal staff, reveals utter disconnect from this not-for-profit institution’s original mission statement.
Meanwhile, the University and College Union (UCU) has mobilised. The militant mood is manifested in hundreds rallying in protests to express their outrage. Cardiff UCU has overwhelmingly voted 83% in favour of strike and other action, on a 64% turnout.
Most universities in Britain are heading towards deficit. What happens at Cardiff will set a national precedent. It is therefore essential that there is a fighting trade union response.
At Cardiff University, the current levels of engagement from staff, students, and the general public are immense. Socialist Students campaign stalls on campus are proving particularly popular for cutting through to the crisis’s root causes.
Strike
Cardiff UCU will be holding its first one-day strike on 1 May, followed by a proposed marking boycott from 6 May, and a series of strategically targeted strike days, if the compulsory redundancies are not withdrawn.
There are Senedd (Welsh parliament) elections in 2026. While Cardiff’s Labour MPs have publicly expressed concern, they have gone little further in applying meaningful pressure.
UCU general secretary Jo Grady seems set on a strategy of partnership with the Labour government. But there lies no future in hoping for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves to drop a few crumbs our way.
The Welsh Government’s recent £19 million injection into the university sector is welcome. But it constitutes a drop in the ocean of this national crisis. Alone, Cardiff uni claims it is losing £30 million a year. University workers have no democratic control to ensure this money is used properly.
Under Jo Grady’s UCU leadership, the national strike in 2023 petered out, with minimal returns for members’ hard-fought efforts.
Labour
We must pressure the Labour government to fund education properly, and to abolish exploitative student fees. A militant, socialist-led union is key in this fight. There are now two Socialist Party members elected to the UCU’s National Executive Committee, reflecting the membership’s appetite for a pro-working-class programme that challenges the bosses.
Rather than punish staff who have given their professional lives to Cardiff uni, or students who have spent tens of thousands of pounds on their education, we call for the university to demand better funding from the Labour government. Just a 4.3% increase in corporation tax could be used to scrap tuition fees, and provide free university education for all students.
Universities must be run democratically, by committees of elected staff, students, and the local community for the benefit of everyone, rather than by a closed and self-protecting circle of grossly overpaid, disconnected, and incompetent elites.
Socialist Students’ ‘Funding Not Fees’ campaign calls for full public funding and democratic control of education, paid for by taking the wealth off the rich.
