Is The University Prioritising Profit Over Student Welfare?

 In line with May Day’s protest over the rising cost of living for students and a perceived privatisation of the University of Exeter, keen activist Carlus Hudson delves deeper into the motivations behind the protest and points the finger of blame squarely between the private landlords of Exeter and the profit-driven mindset of the university. 

On Wednesday 1^st May, also International Workers’ Day, students in Exeter will be holding a demonstration in Queens LT2 at 6pm to challenge the on-going economic attacks on students. The tripled tuition fees introduced by the government have been implemented, meaning that students who started their courses this year and from now on will be landed with an extra £18,000 debt for a three year degree. International students have an even larger debt to pay because of going to university than that. While students are being weighed down in the long term by the increased debt burden (for the crime of wanting an education and being upwardly mobile), in the short term their standard of living is being targeted by an increase in student rents. The Students’ Guild have already taken action to freeze rents, but this should be extended to keep living costs low for students over the next few years.

“The provision of housing to students, both on and off campus, is for profit and largely in the hands of private landlords.”
Photo Credit: 401(K) 2013 via Compfight cc

The provision of housing to students, both on and off campus, is for profit and largely in the hands of private landlords. Maintenance loans are sometimes barely sufficient to cover the cheaper end of accommodation available, meaning there is simply not enough affordable student housing to go around. The demolition of old housing and the construction of new housing on campus itself largely caters to the higher end demographics. This means that not enough investment is being made into cheaper housing. This process is slowly making Exeter unaffordable to thousands of prospective and current students at Exeter. Student housing should not be to there to maximise the profits of the companies the contacts are outsources to, it should be run at cost by the university to make sure that high quality accommodation is available at a reasonable price.

A number of other services on campus have been shut down, including several of the cafes that operated on campus until the start of this academic year. This means that a number of staff have lost their jobs and those services have been centralised to the Forum, which damages the diversity of services available on campus as well as being detrimental to those who have been made redundant as a result.

Students are mobilising at Exeter University to fight these attacks, and pressure the university management to implement measures to reverse the changes that have taken place. The demonstration on 1^st May will be the start of a long-term campaign to achieve this, and this campaign will seek to organise the anger felt by many students on these issues.

Carlus Hudson

Editorial Note: This article claims that jobs were lost when cafes on campus were closed. To clarify this point, all staff affected by these closures were in fact offered alternative employment or a voluntary severance package.

Could the university be doing more to help ease the pressure of living on a student budget? Or is the cost of private housing really none of their concern? Leave a comment below or write to the Comment team at the Exeposé Comment Facebook Group or on Twitter @CommentExepose.

Profiting From Our Own Mess?

With David Cameron currently chasing trade and profit in India, Rory Morgan asks if it would be easy to forget that the country was not too long ago a British Colony vying for Britain’s attention and generosity.

A pleasing irony seems to come from a European leader wearing a Turban and shamelessly using the tactic of flattery to a rising power their country previously oppressed. Cameron has been in fierce competition with Francis Hollande to open up trade with India and recently lost out to the French in his bid for a fighter jet contract with New Delhi. In the last decade India has developed into one of the world’s largest economies and this seems to beg the question could this have happened earlier without British colonisation?

The sad truth is no. India might be an economic powerhouse but it is also one of the most impoverished countries in the world and this imbalance of wealth is something the British helped to implement. India is 129th in the world for its per capita of wealth. This shocking discrepancy indicates the country’s economic structure. Capitalism was an ideology brought by the west and is one of the key reasons India has become so rich. They are able to use their natural resources to trade and accumulate wealth and then hold onto and control this wealth by not distributing it. Who was this economic structure learned from? The British, of course.

This is certainly not something to take pride in and Cameron’s trip seems to almost condone this out-dated behaviour. But Britain cannot be too critical of India’s extreme class division as it helped to shape and define it, and poking at this structure would create some obvious double standards. But should we really be seeking trade from a country so socially backward?

The answer to this is not clear. On the one hand Britain is economically weak and needs to be forming bonds with countries that have larger and more lucrative economies and the state of India’s social system is not something we seem to have a massive effect on. But then there is still that nagging matter of principle. We are a country with a brilliant welfare system to cater for the less fortunate, but a century ago our social structure was not so different to India’s. Maybe with the right amount of international pressure and scrutiny Pranab Mukherjee, his ruling party and the more privileged would feel compelled to actively try to lessen the wealth gap. Or maybe this notion is just futile idealism.

Regardless of the outcome it still does seem important as a democratic and comparatively fair socially structured country to uphold certain principles. Going and seeking trade with a country that does not seem to have these principles and shows little interest in developing even the most basic of them feels wrong. It almost feels like the same questions are popping up as when Prime Minister Cameron visited China two years ago. The motivations can be understood, as many have already stated it is likely that the economies of China and India will soon take the reigns from America. But it is still right to butter up a country that still accepts poverty aid in the millions from us despite having the means to begin improving conditions themselves? This will come to an end in 2015, but it is impossible that India’s poverty will even slightly deplete by then.

With quite a conundrum of guilt mixed with financial reliance it seems that Britain ultimately has little power over the social mess it has created and if things don’t change will continue to ignore and profit from it.

Rory Morgan, Online Books Editor