We’ve only just picked up the desperate news that the Strathclyde University Community Education course is facing the  axe.  Howard Sercombe writes:

The short story:

At 10am Tuesday 10th May, the staff team at the University of Strathclyde was delivered with a decision from the Dean that the Community Education course (youth workers, adult educators and community developers) at Strathclyde will be closed.

The core reason is that our publications are not high enough status.

We are fighting this.  We want every academic, every practitioner, every  student, all of your friends, all of your family, any networks, across the world to email in. We want a thousand emails saying this is not a good idea. Jam their email boxes. Let every colleague or student or constituent know.  This is an attack on us and our profession. It isn’t even about money, they say: its just that we aren’t high status enough.

So act now. You don’t have to say much. Just that the course is good, is valuable etc, or even not about the course but about this field of practice.  If  you are in networks of various kinds, get them to email too. Time to stand up and be counted.

The relevant addresses are:
Dean: anthony.mcgrew@strath.ac.

Faculty Manager: l.dougall@strath.ac.uk

Principal: j.mcdonald@eee.strath.ac.uk
with a copy to campaign headquarters ce-cld@orange.net so we know what is going  on.

And now we’ve just received this update from Howard. Please circulate the info and encourage your contacts to write etc. and keep up the pressure.

Dear Friends

First of all, apologies if we haven’t been able to reply individually to your email.  The pace of the campaign has been continually shifting, and the time and space we have to react and respond changes a lot.  But your email has been read, and we have thanked you for it, even if that may not have been in writing at the time.  And, this won’t be the last time we say it, thank you.  We wish we could circulate every email we have received – maybe one day we will be able to – because we have never seen such a collective affirmation of our work.

And I don’t mean Strathclyde’s because that’s not what this is about, it has never been what this is about.  I mean the work of youth workers, community workers, adult educators.  Strathclyde is just a way we have to put people in communities: and maybe to put them there with the tools to unpack the world around them and see how it works and how its structures break and contain people, and how maybe people can find  a life that belongs to them despite poverty and injustice and all of those things.

In these emails – and there are over 200 of them now – there is the passion, the outrage at what this university management sees itself doing, and the raw, personal experience of people’s own lives and as workers and advocates.  There are the stories of people who never finished school, who lived at the bottom of the socio-economic whatever-it-is until someone said to them, you know, there is this access programme at the local college, or, we need someone to help staff the centre on a Thursday night.  There are the voices of old warriors who have been in this place a dozen times before.  There is the witness of workers who haven’t had the opportunity to be trained, whose own training courses were withdrawn and who have learnt what to do only because there is an old guy mentoring them who did his training back in the day when there was a course.  We have emails from rich people, bureaucrats, politicians, outraged at the withdrawal of this resource for Scotland’s most deprived communities.  Workers, students, managers, local councillors, parents, academics.  Not just in our field: doctors, police officers, teachers, social workers, clergy.

And it is working.  Nothing has changed, and we can’t back off, but there is an almost imperceptible turning from the managers.  They are reading these emails, and they know they have done wrong.  They know that they have ignored the responsibility that a university has to its community, and especially to the poorest in its community, and in their focus on this single status symbol of academic research reputation, this single number, they are selling off generations of service and goodwill.  And, paradoxically, the potential to do real social research in the future.

Anyway.  It is Friday night, the end of week 2, but I just wanted to thank you for what you have already done.  What you have already done is already enough.  But if you want to do more, the media now starts to become important, starting with Letters to the Editor.  The addresses are below.  The Herald has been the most active, with the Evening Post likely to start up next week, so we should keep that momentum up.  It would be great to get into the Metro and the Big Issue (but feel free to spread them around) and spreading emails over the next two weeks would be a good idea.  If there are networks that aren’t firing yet, encourage them.

Y’know, I think we might win!

Best wishes, and thank you all so much yet again, on behalf of Annette, David, Brian, Gordon, Anne, Janis and lots of others.  Feel free to circulate this email too.

Howard

Howard Sercombe Professor of Community Education University of Strathclyde Glasgow

Big Issue Scotland: editorial@bigissuescotland.com Third Force News:  TFN@scvo.org.uk Daily Record: News 0141 309 3251 reporters@dailyrecord.co.uk Evening Times: letters@eveningtimes.co.uk The Herald: letters@theherald.co.uk The Scotsman: letters_ts@scotsman.com Scottish Daily Express:  scot.news@express.co.uk Scottish Daily Mail:  scotland@dailymail.co.uk Metro:  editorial@metroscot.co.uk

Sunday 29^th May.  Week 3 of the campaign.

This last week has moved into a new stage.  The great surge of emails of the last two weeks has surprised Faculty management, I think.  They have been forced to redefine the issue: the needs of communities and the profession have been pushed to the fore: the Dean is saying now that this issue and the question of academic standards have been conflated, and need to be kept separate.  Perhaps.  But your work, my friends, demonstrates that neither can be ignored, that a modern, managerialist university still has obligations to its community, not just to its own prerogatives.  And day by day, the rationale for closing the course recedes as the agenda is widened and criteria and the evidence are challenged.

As a general strategy, the approach of starting change by cutting was always a mistake.  The great constraint to change is always about fear.  If you start a process of change by destroying things, how can people trust you?  And how can you make something bigger, fuller, simpler, healthier, and more creative, if fear is the driver?  There are problems in the Faculty, mostly to do with the tension between recruiting practitioners who know their stuff and career academics who generate research output.  But to define that as a problem of ‘weak’ research areas and ‘strong’ research areas with the ‘weak’ to be eliminated is not only wrong, it won’t work.  Amputation is a quick way to lose weight, but it isn’t going to help your fitness in the long run.

Meanwhile, we have been doing our own redefining: the closure represents a transfer of resources from poor communities to rich communities and from poor students to rich students, and in a place like the West of Scotland, that matters.  Meanwhile, the emails have continued to pour in, and we have printed off the first ten days worth (about 200) and pasted them up in the corridor around the School office, so the Head of School has to walk past them whenever he moves outside his room.  We did fire off an email to Barack Obama, as a former community worker, for support: he’s a bit busy touring at the moment, but we expect a long and warm letter soon.  And one of our supporters was in contact with Noam Chomsky, only to find that he already knew of the campaign (truly), and was certainly interested in making a contribution (that one had me dancing down the corridor and squealing like a groupie!)  Students are gradually adding newspaper clippings and banners and posters so the whole corridor is turning into a Freedom Wall.

The coalition of change-agents is growing.  The disquiet among our colleagues in other courses, expressed in an uncomfortable and awkward and inconclusive Faculty Board meeting last week, surged in passionate, principled and articulate rejection of the proposals in Wednesday’s less formal Faculty Forum.  The unions are working cleverly with the resources they have for legal challenge as well as industrial action.  The student union is mounting a classy, intelligent and well-organised campaign. The students are up for it (they are saying that this is the best part of their degree so far) and the facebook and email and online petition drums are throbbing.  Key sector networks have been magnificent (Youthlink deserves special mention.  Alex, their newly appointed media officer is on the case pretty much fulltime).  Our academic colleagues across the world have put thoughtful, scholarly, honest and robust assessment of the contribution to the sector of our academic work.  The Parliament and the Scottish Government are getting interested.  As they should: closure would shut off the feedstock of practitioners who will carry through policies of engagement on sectarianism, knife crime, community ownership of community assets, community/ school engagement etc etc.  There are a couple of motions before Parliament at the moment with strong cross-party support.  Key bureaucrats are quietly agreeing that this cannot happen.

Of course, this is probably the most dangerous part of the campaign.  With stakes high, positions can harden.  It feels like the challenge is now to find way out of this which will help us all to learn what we need to learn and move forward in a different way.    That’s how it feels to me.  But we are still very much in the thick of the battle, and as Kenny Rogers said, there’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealings done.  Fortunes wax and wane still on a daily basis.  But at the moment, it feels ok.  Massive amounts of work still to do, but it feels ok.

IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK, IN DEFENCE OF COMMUNITY EDUCATION, IN DEFENCE OF CRITICAL THOUGHT AND RADICAL PRACTICE

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES : SOLIDARITY WITH STRATHCLYDE