Lecturers don’t want a marking boycott, either. But we must fight those wrecking UK universities | Lorna Finlayson

Pay cuts are just one factor: working conditions are also getting worse and that’s bad for both staff and students

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.

Lorna Finlayson is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Essex

UK university staff make breakthrough in strike dispute with employers

Unions and UCEA declare agreement ‘on terms of reference for detailed negotiations’ on pay and conditions

University staff have made a breakthrough in their months-long dispute with employers during which lecturers have gone on strike, worked to rule and refused to cover for absent colleagues across the UK.

A group of five higher education trade unions and the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) announced agreement “on terms of reference for detailed negotiations covering a review of the UK higher education pay spine, workload, contract types and equality pay gaps”.

It’s not ‘wokery’ or snowflakes strangling free expression in universities – it’s the Conservative party | Kojo Koram

Students and academics know cancelling speakers is trivial compared with the structural collapse in tertiary education

• Kojo Koram teaches at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London

It was recently announced that the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is due to appoint the UK’s first “free speech tsar” in order to combat the apparent epidemic of cancel culture in England’s universities. At a time when the newspapers are filled with stories of strikes and shortages, and of the most vulnerable people in society having to endure extreme hardship, talk of the “death of free speech” must be like music to the ears of those in power.

For the best part of a decade now, column inches have been filled by claims that freedom of thought and speech is being strangled by “snowflake” students and overzealous academics. Routine annual changes in course materials to freshen up the syllabus are turned into moral panics about white authors being cancelled. Mundane invitation decisions by student societies are treated as if they form the lifeblood of British democracy.