Burns had set out why my report for Intergenerational Foundation, False Accounting?, was significant. Willetts has missed the point of the report and has avoided addressing Burns’s main concern: the lack of statutory and contractual protection for borrowers.

I have sent a full letter to THE but you can learn more about the issue of protection by referring to the Student Loans post here.  There is also an e-petition and I would encourage you to consider signing it.

Reblogged from Critical Education:

Timetable for this event now available: http://www.flickr.com/photos/79258235@N08/7256180224/in/photostream/

The newly available articles include:

•  a short history of bond issues by English universities,
• how bond issuance is linked to higher tuition fees in California and more,
• a three-part series on loans.

The first article in the three-parter on loans has been superceded by False Accounting? which corrects some out-0f-date information I had been using about accounting for student loans. 

“Shifting the Risk” includes an interview with Nick Barr about the viability of independent loans provided by private lenders. It outlines how a generalised loan regime achieves the “financialisation” of higher education.

“Into the Shadows” , the final installment of the loan trilogy, concentrates on attempts to sell or ‘monetise’ the loan portfolio. Again, Part 3 of False Accounting? covers the history of this policy approach in much more detail but there are some ideas floated in ‘Shadows’ about kinds of derivatives that might make sense in the HE context.

FInd it Here.  And please also look at the Campaign around getting more protection for borrowers (with petition).

It’s titled “False Accounting? Why the government’s higher education reforms don’t add up”. It has a foreword by Liam Burns and ties into the NUS ‘Come Clean’ campaign.

A press package with an advanced, embargoed copy of the report is available.

Please contact me on andrew@acute.co.uk for details.

Conference & Campaign launch

Saturday, 26 May 2012

Venue: SOAS, London                         Time: 2pm

Facebook page.

Graduate teachers face unique pressures from Universities:

Experience of teaching is invaluable for career progression, whilst institutions face a crisis in funding due to the coalition governments attack on education. This means that many institutions are increasingly relying on graduate teachers for the bulk of undergraduate class teaching, and feel able to offer terms and conditions that are unacceptable.

This conference aims to bring together graduate teachers from across the country to share experience, launch a network that can work with the UCU and NUS, and plan a campaign that can win.

Speakers & Sessions
* Professor Les Back, Goldsmiths Sociology Department:

The Importance of Social Research
* Haldayne Law Society

Is your employer breaking the law? How to read a contract of employment
* Andrew McGettigan: Education Researcher

The Governments Plan for Higher Education
* Regi Pilling, UCU Anti-Casualisation Campaign

Getting the UCU onboard
* Dante Micheaux: NUS Post Graduate Research Officer:

Getting the NUS onboard

*Plenary: Where next for the campaign?

University of Lincoln

9am-5pm

Doing and Undoing Academic Labour

In recent decades, a wealth of information has been produced about academic labour: the financialisation of knowledge, diminution of professional autonomy and collegiality through managerialism and audit cultures; the subsumption of higher education into circulations of capital, proletarianisation of intellectual work, shift from dreams of enlightenment and emancipation to imperatives of ‘employability’, and experiences of alienation and anger amongst educators across the world.

This has also been a period of intensifying awareness about the significance of these processes, not only for teachers and students in universities, but for all labour and intellectual, social and political life as well. …

This conference brings together scholars and activists from a range of disciplines to discuss these problems, and to consider how critical knowledge about new forms of academic labour can be linked to struggles to humanise labour and knowledge production within and beyond the university.

More details here.  The conference is free and open to the public but registration is required.

Why Britain? The Privatization of the World’s Best Public University System

Professor James Vernon, Astor Visiting Lecturer and Chancellor’s Chair in History, University of California, Berkeley, will lead a discussion on the development of higher education in Britain in the Sheldonian Theatre from 5 – 6.30 pm on 22 May.

 There will be responses from:

 Andrew McGettigan, commentator on HE through his blog ‘Critical Education’

David Sweeney, Director (Research, Innovation and Skills) Higher Education Funding Council for England

Professor Shearer West, Head of the Humanities Division and former Head of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Professor Vernon will argue: Disinvestment of publicly funded university systems is a global phenomena stretching across the Americas, the Middle East, South Asia and Europe.  Yet the de facto privatization of the British university (Scotland partially excepted) since the Browne report has been the most rapid and complete. The past year has witnessed a good deal of protest and hand-wringing but few effective analyses of why and how this has happened.  This discussion seeks to answer those questions in a historical examination of the post-Robbins university and the emergence of a critique that it failed to achieve its promise of improving access and social mobility.

 All members of the University are welcome to attend.

Reblogged from Critical Education: