Reclaim the Uni Action Thursday 5th

The university is a taxpayer funded educational establishment which belongs to the British public, not just to the the students. Any non-UK citizen who is a student at the university doesn't own it at all. Any student not happy with how the publically employed staff are running the place is free to go elsewhere.

I agree that students should not have complete control of the university but object that the general public could somehow run the institution. For a start, who would be the general public representative, someone voted in...?

As it stands the public DO NOT run the university (though it is their taxes which fund it they have no control over how these funds are used). A man called Alan Gilbert does run the university. He is a neo-liberal who openly believes that the university should be run on a business model with a top down hierarchical management system.

Reclaim the Uni opposes the commodification of education and the exclusion of staff and students from all decision making processes within the university.

Reclaim the Uni exists to build a university in which staff, from cooks to lecturers, and students (including those who happen to a bit of paper that says they were born somewhere else on this planet) are involved in the running of the university.

that customers (students) and employees should say how the university is run? The university is own by every Brit and funded by taxpaying Brits. Senior staff are hired by the government to run it on behalf of everyone in the country, not just those who happen to attend it or be employed by it. Students are transient parts of the university and most staff are hired to do agreed tasks, not decide for themselves how their own workplace, which they don't own, is run.

If anyone wants to run a university according to their own rules they are perfectly free to found their own university.

The University does belong to the students, the academic staff and the convocation - they are the Members of the University identified in the Royal Charter. But we should not concern ourselves with concepts on ownership, but with responsibility for the stewardship of the University and its assets and resources.

The University is run by a complex structure of committees, on which students and staff are represented. As an elected students union officer I have served on a number of these, and we certainly took our responsibilities seriously. The responsibility for the stewardship of the University is not only to its current Members, but also to future Members and the wider community. The wider community are also represented in a limited way.

Students should not consider themselves to be customers of a service, but members of an institution run for their mutual benefit. One of the problems with top up fees is that they engender a feeling of being a consumer of a service and makes students more likely to complain (and even litigate) and less likely to work within the University to put right things which are wrong.

The dispute here is not about the 'ownership' of the University, but about the policies of Prof Gilbert, the emphasis on 2015 at a percieved cost to the standard of current undergraduate teaching and disasters like the Arthur Lewis building.

I think the Administration welcomes these protests - they have revived interest in student governance, get the University into the press and provoke debate on governance issues amongst a previously apathetic student body.