Free education/Occupy KCL

OCCUPATION STATEMENT

Why we are Occupying

In response to the recent occupations at the University of Amsterdam, London School of Economics (LSE) and University of Arts London (UAL), we, the students of King’s College London (KCL), have decided to continue the movement as a part of i) a nationwide protest against our increasingly neoliberal, undemocratic and restrictive education system and ii) a chance to unite existing campaigns at King’s that are demanding reversals of the many unethical and regressive practices currently being committed at our university.

Our aim is to create a constructive and open space to discuss how an alternative and free education can be sought. This demand for free education has a material meaning in the form of the immediate alleviation of financial debt, but also describes a freedom to challenge accepted orthodoxies and to embrace knowledge as an intrinsic good, irrespective of the ‘business case’. Our current profit-driven system marginalises the issues of liberation, accessibility, worker’s rights and ethics; we want to demonstrate this alternative and free education in action by hosting informative and diverse workshops that celebrate these many underrepresented and neglected causes.

What is the problem?

Our university has become a business. A regime that is more interested in efficiency, hitting targets, competitiveness and making money than providing the best education it can for its students. This is exemplified by the recent “restructuring” of the Health Schools, where 120 academic staffed were threatened with redundancy if they had not brought in certain levels of funding or taught classes above the threshold number of hours over an arbitrary period of two years. In this callous process, nearly 60 staff were regarded as disposable units and eventually discarded by King’s, leaving significant gaps in our education which are now being plugged by academic staff and postgraduates working longer hours, often teaching students outside the area of their expertise. As such, our education at King’s has already been attacked by a dogmatic pursuit of an improved bottom line.

Owned and managed by a select few, highly paid figures make unaccountable decisions that do not have the student body’s interests at heart and instead pursue enhanced status, prestige and profit. This is increasingly the model for how education is constructed and it is something which needs to be amended. No longer are we, the students, the most important part of the university, but instead we have become irrelevant units that help generate improved profit margins and subsequent elevation up the business table of rankings.

As a high profile London University we need to demonstrate that is no longer acceptable to run our universities on the basis of profit; instead it needs to be done democratically by the students and staff members. We want everyone’s voices to be heard, not just those at the very top who operate with under a thin veil of transparency.

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