Since late April, staff at 145 UK universities have been refusing to mark students’ work. The marking and assessment boycott is the most recent action by the University and College Union (UCU), which represents academics and other university staff. With graduation ceremonies now upon us, the boycott is causing significant havoc. Just how significant is a matter of some dispute. But what is indisputable is that many students have had their marks delayed, and some will be unable to graduate as normal this summer.
Industrial action by (mainly) academic staff is always a hard sell. Lecturers are seen as relatively privileged people. The students being hit by their latest action have already had their studies disrupted by a pandemic and a series of strikes. Seen this way, the current marking boycott can look like a selfish step too far.
It’s true that lecturers are, on average, better paid than other workers. Arguably, some senior academics are paid too much (though nowhere near the obscene salaries of vice-chancellors). But while a few may be paid handsomely, many are not. Universities increasingly rely on low-paid and temporary academic workers to “deliver” teaching. Overall, staff have seen their pay fall by more than a quarter in real terms since 2009. Of course, workers elsewhere are worse off. But lecturers taking successive real-terms pay cuts on the chin does nothing for them, and pay foregone by university staff will not find its way into the pockets of poorer workers. On the contrary, weak unions and falling pay in one sector tend to create a race to the bottom in which everyone loses.
And pay is not the half of it. This point can hardly be emphasised enough, whether in the case of university staff or teachers and doctors. In all cases, real-terms pay has declined substantially in recent years – but a great deal of these educated professionals still get paid more than many. Yet by fixing attention narrowly on the issue of pay, it is easy to pit workers in different sectors against one another and to present those on strike as merely greedy.
That’s why media reports of industrial disputes often include charts depicting the standard pay scale of a teacher, doctor or lecturer: you are supposed to think, “That’s plenty! I get less than that. What are they moaning about?” But ask teachers or doctors why they are striking, and they talk above all about the cuts to classroom assistants that mean they cannot give pupils the attention they need; the short-staffing of wards that means they cannot keep their patients safe.
It’s a depressingly similar story in universities. Higher education may not be a matter of life and death in the way that medicine is, but staff at universities are quite familiar with the moral distress that comes from not being able to give those in your care the help that they need. Cuts to mental health support for students in schools and universities mean that teaching staff end up picking up the slack, a heavy responsibility for which many are not properly trained or qualified. As in schools and hospitals, overwork and exhaustion are taking their toll on the physical and mental health of university staff, two-thirds of whom are considering leaving the sector. The official framing of the current dispute in terms of “four fights” – not only pay, but also workload, casualisation and equality (there are persistent gender and race pay gaps) – show that the erosion of pay is only one aspect of a wider crisis.
The conditions that are making staff ill and driving them out of the profession are bad for students, too. “Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions”, as the picket-line slogan goes. That may be a bitter pill to swallow for the current cohort, who are unlikely to benefit directly from any gains from strike action. Yet many are supportive, just as many patients support strikes by NHS staff. They understand what many commentators pretend not to: it is only by causing some disruption and inconvenience that strikes can be effective. A strike that inconvenienced nobody would be a strike that nobody noticed.
The trouble is, strikes by university staff often do go unnoticed. When lectures are cancelled, students may or may not care. Does it bother employers? Not really: they can pocket the docked pay and carry on regardless. That’s part of the reason why many have long thought that marking boycotts were the answer. There’s not much point merely disrupting education, because university bosses don’t care about education: they make that clear in everything they do. But assessment is surely the beating heart of the modern university. Hold on to the marks and hold up graduation ceremonies, and students will be up in arms – and concessions will finally be won.
At least, that was the theory – and the supposed tactical superiority of a marking boycott has long doubled as a pet excuse among self-styled “moderates” for crossing picket lines (now that their bluff has been called, they oppose the boycott on the grounds that it is too disruptive; go figure).
But it turns out that a marking boycott is not the magic bullet that some had hoped. Work unmarked? Simple. “Zero-weight” it – ie discount it and give the student a mark based on assignments already assessed. Another solution is scab labour, of which there is a plentiful supply, so long as you’re not too picky. Those who protest that substitute markers are often ill-qualified, and that zero-weighting and “no detriment” schemes (which guarantee that students’ marks will not be lower – but can be higher – than they would otherwise have been) will devalue degrees are surely right, but they perhaps underestimate the nihilism of university managers.
The truth is that the downward slide of British higher education is driven by structural causes – chiefly, marketisation and fees – and will not stop without fundamental reform of a kind that is resoundingly absent from the agendas of the main political parties. That might seem to imply that actions like the current boycott are pointless, inflicting pain on students – not to mention creating a bureaucratic cluster headache for admin staff – for nothing.
But this would be the wrong lesson to draw. There is a sense in which the strikes of the past few years have indeed been ineffective: relatively little has been won, conditions have continued to deteriorate. But to stop there is to ignore the crucial counterfactual. If things are bad now, imagine what they would be like if the wreckers of the higher education system were able to fulfil their wildest dreams with zero resistance. You only have to look at workplaces without unions for a glimpse of what this looks like. Holding that dystopia somewhat at bay, slowing the decline, is not glamorous or satisfying work. The alternative is worse.
Lorna Finlayson is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Essex