E455 - Master and Remander ft. Dr. Charlotte Riley

0:00Hello and welcome back to Podcasts, Plexus, I'm Dave McFronzer, he and him. I'm Jamie, my pronouns are he and him. I'm Rob, minor here in him. And I'm Alistair, my pronouns are also here in him. And we will be joined by Dr. Charlotte Riley in the main topic. But for now, you get the peanut gallery. Yeah. And let us start in the peanut gallery. Let us talk some more about global finance and get my favorite subjects of all time, because there was, I think two days ago now, an incredible long read in the financial times by you and he, Emily Herbert and Michelle Chan, basically saying that like, the AI hyperscalers, so Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle are now borrowing so

1:04much money that they are like on the verge of destabilizing the entire global debt and credit markets. Cool. Which is that we need to load up the backup spreadsheet from like 1995 and I don't have any debt. That would be good. Yeah. Now they simply have to fork Bitcoin another time to reset the values and then, you know, and that'll be fine. I'll quote the article. The fundraising binge is changing the way the world borrows money affecting where, when and at what cost companies and governments issued debt. Some have said it could be the biggest shift since the creation of the Euro bond market in the 1960s. Basically, what's happening? It's mainly happening in dollars, but the total debt issuance by these five companies is now almost $250 billion for this year alone. So a quarter trillion dollars between like five, well, four of the biggest companies on earth and Oracle, but like over the next few years, they're supposed to borrow over a

2:06trillion dollars because not even they like can or want to put up the actual cash to build data centers. This is all happening like in special purpose vehicles, in off-book management, in like little and little entities everywhere to build the data centers that everybody fucking hates. So when this whole thing goes pop, is that is that going to be, is that going to be good for for people who need, need money, use money and things like that to, you know, in exchange for goods and services? Well, the bad thing is is because they're, they're borrowing so much money and like not just in, in dollars anymore, but also Canadian dollars and Swiss francs and poundstirling and everything is essentially what it's doing is it's disseminating all that debt throughout the entire financial ecosystem of the Western world. So when the whole thing goes pop and none of those bonds can re-repeat, this is no longer, you know, like, you know how like the American housing crisis was like an American problem, but mainly confined to America that only became contagious because of financial interlinkages

3:08to the rest of the world because like turns out that everybody, you know, was was was also invested in that was like the same thing, but like by several orders of magnitude bigger because this is the only casino left in town. I mean, which is which is great. I mean, like, new ideas. I mean, like say what you will about the, you know, financial crash 2000, but at least they bought a bunch of extremely ugly and gaudy houses. Like, yeah, yeah, and now we get, you know, maybe a shed in 2029 if there's enough water and power. Oh, well, what's that? It's a fucking shed with a bunch of GPUs in it that they're going to get burnt out in like five minutes and they cost like $200,000 each. And somehow this isn't the sustainable business model. So we have to just raise incomprehensible amounts of money like larger than many like nations. No, I'm sorry, LSE, you don't understand that the GPUs burning out is like tomorrow's problem. Today we can put those on the books as full value.

4:12So don't worry about it. It's Ziz. It's, it's, you know, it's great. Yeah, man, I would, I would pay absolutely pay the face value for a fucking RTX 59 year or whatever that had been in the data center for literally any amount of time because it definitely absolutely will not immediately just infect my computer with AI somehow and then set it on fire. Yeah, I mean, you could do that, but like you could also, you know, just to just to go back to the interlinkages thing, this is again from the, for the PC and the FT. All this essentially also brings new risks. Chipmakers, data center operators and their power providers are all borrowing from public and private credit markets markets as well as financing each other, making it half a pension funds and insurance who buy the debt to assess that true level of exposure to the sector. Like everybody is borrowing from everybody else and, you know, they're all sharing the same soggy biscuits or nobody does wherever anything is any more ever. Well, if those pension funds are going to be doing that, you know, that's on them.

5:14They're allowed to take that risk on. I'm just glad I've got a nice triple lot state pension to look forward to. Yeah, why not? I mean, I'm sure that'll, that'll work out well. And like obviously needless to say almost, but like none of this debt is like contained within, you know, like metting, incorporated as it exists on like the US stock market or alphabet or whatever or Oracle. No, no, no, a lot of this is held like quasi off books in like special purpose vehicles and like weird little accounting tricks to make it seem as if the debt's not yours, even though it very much is. And the last time like we did that, a really huge scale when it turns out there was substantial fraud. It was this little company called Endron and nothing bad happened afterwards ever. I like when big companies are allowed to create like multiples of file activity. Yeah, yes, yes, I'm around the place. Yeah. And I mean, I did another sort of reminiscence of Endron.

6:17I won't bore you with the details, but like simultaneously this week, the American government has also essentially let go of the last rules that were like accounting rules that were implemented after Enron to prevent another Enron. So like they got rid of the other one. Yeah, well, they got rid of the last bit of rules that said like, no, you actually, when you do an audit, you do actually have to do an audit. When you do an audit, you actually have to check their assets and their liabilities. Yeah, yeah. So like we're just out and just stop doing that. So essentially all this like this 250 billion a year and more to come in next year if by, you know, if it still hasn't exploded by then and more in the year after that, if it still had exploded by then, all of this is essentially like the a gigantic one way bet that the God in the machine exists and also that by the end of the day, not only will the God in the machine become real, but also there will therefore be enough consumers to pay back like through these various

7:22companies, the $1 trillion plus interest that everybody's been borrowing. So like at the end of the day, either you or your boss will be paying for like an anthropic subscription and enough of us will be doing that that it will all be paid back. So all we need is fucking Facebook level market penetration for a product more than Facebook, almost like you're looking at almost universal like, I don't know, maybe not in like developing economies in, you know, fucking Western Sahara or something like that, but like you would have to have entire societies like platform, like Facebook is essentially still like a platform for your social stuff, right? And I know you can like, you know, sell secondhand books on it and stuff like that, but it's like a social platform, right? Yeah. The bet here is that these companies and anthropic and open AI in particular will be the platform that does everything from government

8:26to your job to organize your life to organize your entertainment to produce your entertainment to everything. That's the bill. Okay. How many of them? And like it's, yeah, because this is again, there's last bail quote from the article, the credit story in hyperscalers rests on a single consensus assumption that operating cash flow, I eat the amount of money that they make, triples from $600 billion to $2 trillion set of polyester economist, Torson Slog, who wrote this month, if this does not happen, then the risk is that the AI trade weekends with credits, credit, widening, capEx plans getting cut, and ultimately GDP growth slowing down. That's like the benign scenario, essentially, sue. If we don't like quadruple the income and like I remind you that like not only is there no income, but like, anthropic, which is just filed its paperwork to go public,

9:29is losing according to Reuters, I think like $8 billion this year alone. And on a revenue of $45 billion I want to say, and yet they say we are worth $2 trillion. Well, I suppose when we've like, you know, over the last 30, 40 years under neoliberal governments, we have established that eventually a wizard will come along and fix all of the problems. When someone says, hey, look, I've invented the wizard that will fix all of the problems, then, and you know, like an all, you know, government leaders across the world are credulous robes who are absolutely prepared to hawk down a bunch of that dog shit on the premise that, yeah, all these cuts that we made, all the, all the, you know, diminishing of the state and state capacity and infrastructure and all this stuff that we've done like to trash, essentially trash the post-war consensus in these last few decades will have all finally have been worth it on the on the basis of this wizard invented by a guy who you should not ask

10:32questions about what his relationship was like with his sister. So fucking ace. And not only why don't you love the fucking wizard? Yeah, well, I mean, and there's also, I mean, if you want to believe any of these people, which you're not like, I'm not saying you should, but you know, there's also the chance that the wizard kills us all because why not? Oh, yeah, I didn't leave. If you don't love them enough. Yeah. Anyway, that's your, that's your small update from things are going well. That, that is the next biggest gun that they have put to our heads to say by the AI. Yeah. Yeah, well, fucking, I'll just pull the trigger, bitch. I mean, yeah, yeah. But we are holding the silly backwards gun that was made to be wrong as a joke. Like, just fucking get it over with. This is second, fucking bullshit fake. According to at least NFTs were funny. I mean, yeah, NFTs were funny in that extremely sad and pathetic way that, um, you know,

11:36hype guy, just complete falling flat on his face is funny, right? Whereas this is like, oh, this is, this is making extremely large measurable impacts on GDP and its distribution. So, uh, it's like on the one hand, my funny, and on the other hand, oh, fuck. I mean, I couldn't give, you know, my stance on the economy, it's not real and it should go fuck itself. My bigger concern is that like, you know what I mean, it's just a load of wank and it's like fucking flooding the entire internet with like fucking slop and it's telling teenagers to kill themselves and telling pensioners to kill themselves and telling your dad to kill himself and I'll allow that one admittedly like, but you know, it's just generally a fucking net loss for humanity from every fucking angle. And I'm, you know, no, man, it can fucking, like, if it was just a fucking magic box that shags the economy, I'd be like, yeah, find not yourselves outlads, you know what I mean? But like, there's a lot of other fallout beyond the numbers,

12:37fucks Dean Piss. Yeah, I don't really care how nicely it fucks the economy and like, you know, ruins things or whatever. If it dies, it dies and that's the only outcome in goal I've really got at this point. The economy's fucked. It's not going to get better. Everything's only going to get worse anyway. I would just like to see these cancelos. If it wasn't this, it would be like pugs with famous people's nutsacks on them or something. You know what? Yeah, but I would get more joy out of that. Exactly. As we talked about last time, you reinvented NFTs. As we talked about last time, we can't even, you know, like trade Pokemon cards anymore. So truly, everything is fucked. Yeah, nothing is sacred anymore. Non-alphable tokens. All right, should we move on to something that is a lot more funny. Yes, is it. Oh, okay, maybe it's not. I was going to say, is it Danny Tom or being on remand until the first of March next year? Okay, that is very funny. That is very, very funny.

13:43Yeah, the thing is, right, if charging with criminal damage with some fucking subtitle attached to it, I can't remember what exactly. Criminal damage that endangers life or some shit like that. And also, and I can't help but think maybe he's like on remand until next year for this one, not giving the police the pin number to his phone. I think, well, I mean, they can just ask him at the next meeting. I feel like the British state probably considers that a greater crime than like almost killing a lifeboat like guy to know. Probably one person. Yeah, I think that, I think that endangering life subclothes from the child's was dropped. I think it is literally just fucking basically vandalism he's getting done for. Yeah, I was looking at the, there's like, I was looking at the, and you know, this is very much, I'm not a lawyer territory, but I was looking and apparently like criminal damage is quite a broad tear like at the lightest, it's like a couple bucks and like just go away and don't do it again. But at the top tier, you can actually go to prison for more than a year, like sentencing

14:45guideline wise. Yeah, it could, but I mean, let's be honest, it's not going to take itself to take the trial concerned. And also, as we've talked about before, there are literally no jail cells free. Yeah, but also not letting the police look through your fucking Snapchat is probably like fucking 20 to like 20, somewhere between 20 years and a whole life term for terrorism after, like, you know, I mean, I've been new labor got through. I mean, I was, I wasn't going to bring that up, but what I was going to bring up was something that is bizarrely hit the international stage with a great deal of further because in the early hours of Sunday morning, a farmer on their way back from a party saw three white vans blocking a country road. And there's were any reasonable British person would do and phone the military police. I thought you were going to say drop trial, but you know, okay. My favorite thing, my favorite thing about

15:48this story is that like everyone in that village, because it's the village around like Donald Trump's fort, right? Like, do you know what I mean? Which he built on a hill to protect himself from the picks or some shit. I don't fucking know. But like, it was very clear that it was his fort that they were outside of. And he'd been watching them for a long time from the parapet, one assumes. Anyway, because the yanks are there, and this is obviously a grave matter for British national of British national import. Everyone in the village got given like a little fucking card with the real police phone number on. You know what I mean? And they could phone that and a fucking like, you know what I mean, Thunderbird 2 would fire out of a hillside and just drop a giant container full of super army soldiers dead on the fucking like enemy and then they burst out and do war crimes everywhere. And when she rang me, I'm nobody answered. You can get into that little card that says, name, name, eat. Yeah. So, yeah, so this farmer went past before quickly turning back where she claims she saw a group

16:52of men in Balaklava scattering into the bush. Yeah. In Balaklava's unmasks, but they, they looked Middle Eastern. Yeah, and she was able to discern their ethnicity from, from a distance in the dark while they were while they were mass. Yeah. Like, how would she determine their ethnicities? Well, if they'd been, if they'd been English, they would have gloat in the dark. So they're all, you may be asking how she did that, but who said that we were taking questions? I would reply. So this is a podcast. This is the Q&A session. Subscribe to the Patreon Patreon book on form, type of practice guys. Yeah. And as Jamie was sort of alluding to, this was only a few hundred meters away from R-A-F base, Fairford. This is the base where US planes have been basing out of as part of the war with Iran, carrying out, quote, defensive strikes as the government likes to describe them. So after seeing the, the Vanzan fleeing men, the farmer called 999 or, you know, some weird

17:55hex decimal number to phone the actual police and message the local WhatsApp, telling everyone to lock their doors. Supposedly during the call, the farmer made the police told her that they had already received a tip off regarding these men. How true can that be if these guys who had been hanging around for at least some time beforehand and were only arrested after this serendipitous farmer put in a second call. I mean, I mean, that is the most British police thing of all time that like, you have to, you know, like you have to get three people to ring from three different locations before they take you anywhere in the US. Honestly, honestly, trying to get the British police to attend a fucking crime scene is like trying to get a teenage at a calm downstairs and have their tea. You know what I mean? It's never going to happen on the first call unless the League of Legends servers are down for maintenance, right? It's just like unless you phone up and hear we know.

18:58So, so this call prompted a deluge of armed police into the area as they went door to door, culminating in the entire community being evacuated from their homes with cordons and robots being being erected across the place. And we've heard a lot from this hero farmer like I swear to God, she's been on every single news channel. Just telling them what she said and I've got this, I've got this bit here from what she when she was talking to the telegraph. I'll read this to you now. Thinking about it now and what could have happened if they had tried to stop me from driving away, I'm quite lucky the farmer told telegraph. It's pretty incredible realising you had a brush with potential terrorists face to face and may have foiled a terrorist plot. It was clear they had just got there. Thank God we spotted them. Oh my fucking crap. You are not a protagonist of history. Jesus Christ, you're just, that you just interrupted some delightful dogging like honestly. That is the fucking main set of every British columnist who walks through London.

20:04Yes. She, the article continues. The woman who did not wish to be named because of concerns for her safety said the van struck her as being suspicious from the moment she saw them as a phone number and lettering on the back of the vehicles appeared to be fake. She said. What's the glittering appeal to me? That's not so at all for bit. What's up? You saw it. The van's were just covered in the car, my regolith. So one of the van's, I saw a picture. One of the van's had a fuel, you know, numeral two, you, the whole word, on the side. And this prompted an actual company called fuel numeral two letter you to say we had nothing to do with this and we are cooperating. With the police, please stop asking us questions. Nothing to do with us, go. They also, they will stop threatening our employees and we will report everybody who does that to the police.

21:09Yeah, I mean, yeah, but like they just have to just have to eat that. I'm sorry, but that's just the cost of doing business in Britain is you have to deal with angry Facebook boomers trying to burn down your establishment and kill all of your employees because they can't tell the difference between like say the R N L I and the R N I B. Yeah, every time there's like a high profile child murder, pediatricians up and down the country have to lock their doors. It's like, yeah, it's just, it is, it is what we're going to do, right? Like the British people like refuse to learn the difference between two things. And like, you know what I mean, you're just going to have to suck it up. I'm afraid. Right, I'm going to read this to the last two short paragraphs for this. She said, I just thought what the hell are they doing? Okay, any other? No, no, good. All right, shut up.

22:13She said, I just thought what the hell are they doing? I saw a group of Middle Eastern looking young guys running off through the trees. Some of them had muscle, ballaclava's on and they all scattered ahead of us as we drove back past. Some of them ran into the fields and some of them turned to run towards the airbase. We realized this was something pretty serious. Now a man ran towards the field better call counterterrorism command. So these suspects were arrested 25 minutes after the call was put in or the second call, shall we say. So if these guys were planning some kind of terrorist act, then I might idly suggest that they had not put very much thought into the execution of this plan. Yeah, no, but it's like this is just, this is just whenever you hear like, you know what I mean? Like this woman's hit the fucking jackpot for like British fucking curtain twitchers, right? Because she's like on international news now talking about like her

23:17fucking, you know what I mean? How she was like basically fucking, you know what I mean? Jack Bauer at this point, right? And she's thwarted like the fucking, you know what I mean? The crimson dawn and their latest terror plot or some shit like this. But basically like, you know what I mean? If you've ever fucking heard any British person talk about like Eve and then we saw this, you know what I mean? It's just that, she don't I mean. She's just like, you know, the police like came like fucking mobhanded. So she gets the bask in the glory of arresting some lads who were selling diesel or whatever the fuck they were doing. You know what I mean? But like, it's basically exactly the same as like all the people on Facebook saying like, someone walk past my house the other day. Does anyone recognize them? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean the only way this could have turned out any better for this woman is if they had actually turned out to have been terrorist attempting to. Yeah. Yeah. Literally the only way it could have been better for her specifically as well as the press at large. It is basically like every fucking like British

24:19fucking person's dream, right? To like, you know what I mean? Like she's in the car presumably with like, because she said we went back past them. She's in the car with someone else. Like, I imagine right? She wasn't driving and she's made whoever's driving turn around to go back past her. Either those lads look swathy and suspicious turn this car around right now. And the perfect guy's just happened to your mum, Jamie. Yeah. The perfect outcome for her would be as if as they were driving towards them and the headlights illuminated like a giant fucking TNT plunger and like the guy pushed it and the last thing she saw like, you know, the last thing before the mushroom cloud enveloped the entire fucking like, like, hill like countryside was just her turn into the fucking driver and gone, I told you. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, okay, then she would actually that's that's that's the problem. But yeah, it was it was all about to disappoint. 75 on fire into British Valhalla. That's entirely true. Yeah. But yeah, it was it was a huge

25:19disappointment for everyone involved, which I mean the police and this this farm lady, because on the 28, it was also revealed much to the chugrin of the spectators and times outlets, etc. that the apprehended subs suspects were in fact all British nationals in their 20s. The you know, you could it was palpable, the tumestcence of the media. Yeah, no, everyone was so hyped for this to have been Iran and all the Russians in collaboration with the salsa people to know the name like they would share every Corbin. Yeah, fucking like Amazon sold so much red string like in the 24 I was following this story breaking like. Yeah, I mean the fact that a bomb plot may have been foiled, not least because they could pontificate about the motives of anyone behind like a plot like that. Like for example, the times and others wrote that the police were investigating a possible Iran link to the point that Iranian officials directly

26:21denied any involvement in whatever the fuck this thing is. And like yeah, they should have made a little like fucking you know AI slopped leg or video about it. I mean, the most mind-melting factor in all these events is the fact that these five men who had been arrested after the call have now been released on bail. Yeah. Yeah, and that's just extremely significant, because you could bet your bottom-fucking dollar that if these guys had admitted to even having heard the word nitrate before they'd still be in custody. Yeah, well actually on that note, can I read you something that came out literally like I'm recording this? I just want to say right like the reason these guys are out on bail is because they let the police have the pen numbers for the forms. This is Reuters quote, Britain's counterterrorism police has said on Tuesday that no improvised explosive devices has been found as part of an investigation into the suspected plot targeting a British air-based body body. But police said that a quantity of

27:27petrol had been recovered, but you know no bombs, no IEDs, no nothing found it, either the scene or the homes of the suspect or anything. Yeah, I mean, whatever these guys were doing, right? It was something weird, but like probably trivial illegal in comparison to something like bombing an RAF occupied by gangs. It does, however, make the cops look rather foolish as a result. So yeah, there's a lot of pressure on the cops at the moment to appear competent and to end like on top of anything even approaching like a national security issue, you know, fur, which is further intensified by having someone like Donald fucking Trump sticking his aura in, about what he would have done, you know, the enhanced interrogation techniques he would have liked to have used on these guys. So at least had his eye on them for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he wouldn't have released them yet, but he's had his eye on them for a long time. They've been, I mean, apparently they were like beefing up loads of the security around the base, like they

28:30were putting like military tractors, which is a very funny thing to say in front of like the entry ways to the base. And yeah, like yanks pulled their guns, guns on like passes by at one point, prior to this, this whole situation, that's just the day ended in wife or Americans, isn't it? Yeah, but I'm fucking British soil, like I'm not to get all, you know, soil about it. It is a pretty egregious breach of like diplomatic, you know, protocol or whatever the fact. But, do you know what I mean? It'll all be fine once we're the 51st state. Do you know what I mean? They'll just, it's not like it's not like the fucking government's going to do anything about it, you know what I mean? They could have shot some bystanders and they'd get away with it. Let's be real. Well, I mean, they would have shot the bystander and then just immediately fled back to the US before they could have been prosecuted. So like, yeah, I'll just, I'll just plan on the bystander and we're hearing about that instead. Do you know what I mean? Well, yeah, like I think it would be rather plausible that the cops in this situation have

29:33somewhat stretched the truth by claiming that this was a threat that they're aware of prior to that farmer putting in that call. And after having released the suspects on bail, it has made them look, yeah, like I say, quite foolish. Not to mention once again, highlighting just how fucking much the British press loves the notion of the UK being under attack at all times, even when it fucking evidently is not. Yeah, I mean, who was the, who was the content, like fucking said, this proves like beyond a doubt that like, you know, we definitely, like all the argue, this settles forever, the argument about should we fund welfare or should we fund the military? Oh, great. I don't remember any any any end to all of them. This is what they're all fucking thinking like everything is an excuse is a justification for the like foaming at the mouth shit that I want to do like to inflict on this entire nation. And anything to the quandary is just an irrelevant trivial piece of information that should not be, you know, should be considered. So like, I mean, for the, you know,

30:40a variety of reasons is very good. This actually ended up being a whole fucking load of nothing. Whatever it actually was, whether it was just a bunch of guys stealing petrol or whatever, like just for multiple fucking reasons, very glad that that was not the case. Yeah, if the whole thing turns out to be, as you say, like just some guys who were like, what's they call red diesel again? Like that, that would be the funniest fucking outcome. Like it just incredible, incredible stuff. And just yeah, the holiness of this was reported and yeah. And just taking like a little, a slightly broader view on it, the fact that presumably if the, if these guys were nicking diesel or petrol or whatever, part of what probably prompted that maybe the fucking skyrocketing fuel prices which have been inflicted on most of the world now because of, peak countries like Britain facilitating the fucking US, waging a totally fucking legal war like Iran for no fucking reason.

31:46So well done guys, another foreign policy success. Yeah. Just win is all around it and also blowback isn't real and it can't hurt you. Yeah, make sure you're not blocking your country road if you're ever stealing diesel. I guess the list to be learned. Yeah. Don't get lost and stop your vans and get out and have a chat about how lost you're because someone may storm out of a fucking land Rover presumably need a fucking American military base and scale the show. Yeah. There's a non zero chance these guys will literally do nothing illegal. Yeah. Uh, it's entirely possible this woman saw them looking shifty and just draw the at them and that's why this guy didn't feel like. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what you get for driving this fucking truckinator around, isn't it? I mean, I will say,

32:46I think I said this earlier on the discord, but like these people must have had who, you know, how have I have a many are and you know, they've probably done nothing wrong, but like these people must have had the worst fucking 24 hours of their lives being fucking turned over by the British and American like fucking intelligence agencies. Like fucking you don't wish this shit on anybody, you know. Yeah, this is this is when you hope you have nothing even vaguely like controversial on on your like personal computer, right? Incrbit incredible. Anyway, having done all this, shall we, you know, now turn over to us at a different time, but also talking about the crisis enveloping the UK university sector with Charlotte Riley. So we're going to do that now and then we'll come back, you know, and tell you about patreon.com for such praxis cast again. Hello and welcome to part two of this episode of praxis cast. We're going to be joined now by

33:50Dr Charlotte Riley. She is associate professor in 20th century history at the university of South Hampton and the author of many fine books, including on free speech and the award-winning Imperial Island and alternative history of the British Empire. And specifically, we're going to be talking about the ongoing slow rolling yet fast moving crisis that's currently engulfing the UK university system. Charlotte, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to a very depressing discussion. Yeah, this is one of those classic ones I'm afraid where we would like to be the bear of better news, but the fact is the university, the British university system is once again in a moment of crisis. We've done this a few years ago with Dr Elane Janiger, who we talked about, I suspect things that are very related. But just to give you a quick overview of some of the things that are going on, the university of Aberdeen is planning 100 job cuts and the UCU has withdrawn from negotiations.

34:56The University of Edinburgh is looking for 140 million in budget cuts and up to 1800 staff cuts. They're also threatening to scrap 90 programs and including closing the entire humanities and social sciences department, similar jobs are happening at the University of Sheffield Hallum. Many other universities are as of now, as of next university year, cutting whole programs, dropping staff. The University of Brighton has even threatened to single handedly terminate collective bargaining and de-recognise its UCU branch. So we're really at a point where things are really starting to fall apart. And I think Charlotte, how is your own university? How is the University of Southampton dealing with this? What's your own experience? So the University of Southampton went through some quite publicised cuts in 2017 to 2018, where we lost 100 jobs from six departments. Since then we've had a series

36:00of voluntary severance programs, so not quite redundancies, but close. Some of those have been targeted at professional staff and services staff and some of those have been targeted at academics. We're currently in our second voluntary severance program since I think November of last year. We have a reasonably large amount of money that needs to be saved and there's sort of speculation about what will happen if we don't save that through VSS. Like many other universities, it feels like budgets are being cut in all sorts of ways. And at Southampton, we've had several vice-chancellors since 2017, we're on our third vice-chancellors since 2017. So it's this kind of cycle, which is really familiar, I think, to lots of people working in British universities, of cuts in an period of stabilisation and then more cuts. So we're sort of in the middle of that process at the moment, but not doing quite as badly as some other places and

37:03some of my colleagues in other places around the country at the moment. So I think maybe as outsiders, I think what some of us would say is, well, you know, tuition fees are now, I think it's just over 9,000 a year, it's 9,300 or 9,700 give or take. And that was supposed to, I mean, that's what was always being, that's how it was sort of sold these tuition fees, that this would stabilise the sector. And I think a lot of people already think, well, I'm paying nearly 10 grand a year, a lot of that student loans, which is a whole different commization and saying like, well, how is it, how is it possible if so many people are paying, you know, that much money, how is it possible that all these universities are going bankrupt? So there's lots of reasons for this. One of the reasons for this related specifically to student loans is that student loans were set initially at 9,9250 and then they've cupped up a lick a bit and they look a bit and they were just under £10,000 a year now. I mean, that's that's notionally the most that a university can charge, but in reality all universities charge the same amount

38:08for undergraduates. That amount of money has not in a meaningful way increased since tuition fees were introduced 15 years ago or whatever. So one problem is simply that the amount of money that students are paying is like on one hand an astronomical amount of money for 18 year olds to be borrowing and then having to pay back and on the other hand, simply not enough money to actually support the programs that they are studying for. 10 or 15 years of evasuation versus no rise in tuition fees is a problem. Exactly. We recently had a very small rise in tuition fees. The reason I say just under 10 grand is I can't quite remember it's somewhere around I think 9,700 or something like this because we had this little rise kind of allowed by the government, but at the same time the national insurance rules changed and obviously universities were enormous, a huge employers. So the kind of rise in tuition fees for most universities was completely, you know, completely wiped out by the fact that universities have to pay more national

39:11insurance for their employers now. So it's it's yeah, the fact that tuition fees have been static over years and years of inflation and rising costs in all other spaces has not has not been very helpful. Tuition fees are quite complicated because in the UK we don't charge different amounts for different courses at undergraduate level. So a history degree costs the same as a medicine degree or a physics degree or a English literature degree and there are really good reasons. For that you don't want to incentivise students to study things only because of what they can afford to study. It would have really negative effects on social mobility if you were charging more money for some degrees. It would silo students and push them into different spaces. What it means is that we have a cross subsidy approach so that humanities degrees essentially are subsidising the sciences because they are more expensive to teach. And so that becomes very complicated as well with tuition fee finances because the different

40:14types of students you're you're admitting and the different courses that you're running have an impact on what you can actually afford to do if that makes sense. The other thing is that universities are obviously enormous like entities running huge budgets and that means that they've done lots of things like made investments and borrowed money and the fact that we are you know things like the war in Iran for example affects universities in the same way that it affects any kind of big essentially investment fund right like universities borrow hundreds of millions of pounds to do things like capital growth projects and things like this. And so they're affected in the same way that any entity is if you're borrowing huge amounts of money and previously perhaps at quite low interest rates when the global financial climate shifts then universities can be really badly impacted by that. Yeah I mean I think this is part of we talk we talked partially about this with Eleanor a couple years ago but is it part of the problem

41:16essentially sort of what I would call sort of almost an Americanization of the UK university system where some of them at least from the vice chancellor's office as well is sort of perceived themselves more as like a financial institution with a lot of real estate specifically investments in student housing rather than a institute for knowledge production that also has some houses like what has it tipped between being a financial product rather than something that generates you know that that is the idea of the university for like a more formal term. So I don't think it helps either that you've got all this capital expenditure being spent on student accommodation and then that accommodation quite often is built to facilitate a an international student or international student who you know attracted to British University is not obviously British University is a very highly regarded internationally and then we have huge clampdowns on

42:18students who come to the UK bringing family bringing children and so on so you've got these extremely expensive student accommodation blocks that are being built I mean I live just down the road from Colchester University of Essex rather huge blocks of student accommodation and then you know that withdrawal of income for international students who have to pay the full whack and it yeah just it is a very much a system of this or series of decisions that you think you would be making if you were intentionally trying to undermine the entire institute of higher education in the UK. I think that's very true and I think there's two there's two kind of separate separate issues and so just on student accommodation that the complicating factor there of course is that a lot of this student accommodation is not built by universities but is built by companies like Moxie or Unite and you often see this at I live in East London I live in a strafford and again there's this huge kind of student blocks which are built by independent companies and yeah

43:20they are sort of explicitly there for international students who are going to stay in student accommodation for their entire degree you know the model obviously with sort of domestic students as you have accommodation for your first year of often catered accommodation and then you like move out into a student house and you live with your friends because of the way the international students find themselves in a new country and because probably because of the way the parents often are financing their degrees they tend to stay in accommodation want to stay in accommodation for the entire time and that's so these blocks are often private companies building these blocks which has really kind of huge impacts on like local communities and things as well as on universities. On universities behaving like financial institutions I think the thing is that universities were forced to enter the market at the point at which the government stopped funding university study and when government introduced tuition fees we became a marketised sector right because we are competing for students and we're getting money specifically from these students who are paying

44:21for our services. For a while universities were given a block grant for teaching for teaching specific subjects from government that block grant was gradually removed so we don't get any money now to teach the humanities basically from government and there's some government support for some subjects through block grants things like medical teaching for example but that's often the land of threat and I think Bridget Phillips in for example has talked about and I'm slightly out of date on this probably but I know she was talking about removing that block granting entirely I'm not totally sure whether that has been done history's never had block grant money so it's irrelevant to us in a way. The only space we can get money from government now in universities is for our research and the money that we get for our research is incredibly competitive some of it is awarded through the Raff the Research Excellence Framework which is the thing which is we used to kind of rank universities on their research in different topics

45:24we get something called QS funding that comes from that where the people in more highly rank get more research money from the government but increasingly research money is also kind of competitive and it comes through the research councils like for history the Arts and Humanities Research Council or the NERC or the EHRC so there's these seven research councils that fund different areas as well as institutions like the British Academy in Labour Hill but those things only fund research they fund probably in lots of cases they fund overheads and they fund you know they might fund resources being brought into an institution that can be used more widely but they're not either reliable or things that you can like actually build universities with and they don't fund teaching at all. This sounds very familiar I have several family members who are in academia and one of the things they are always chasing is grant money, government money in our case you know obviously there's there's you money that you can also compete for but yeah those are

46:24always those are research limited there's sometimes like a component where they will pay part of the salary and the university will sort of sneakily use some of that money to also cover like teaching costs but yeah those it's very limited and it's still yeah it's entirely research based and also then you get judged on your research output and not anything to do with teaching your your courses to your students. There's also filters for people who are good at submitting research submitting proposals for four research grants rather than people who are necessarily good at doing research itself which are obviously not overlapping skills necessarily. Yeah it's a self perpetuating cycle as well because once you get one research grant you're more likely to get future research grants because your research has been kind of tested proven you know someone else has shown faith in you so you're more likely to get more money. There was I think it was the was it the Mary Curie Fellowships recently they sort of big research funder kind of announced

47:29that they'd had thousands and thousands and thousands of applications this year and there was a big discussion on Blue Sky about the number of like man hours this represents in terms of applying for this fund which is incredibly incredibly small success rates like often single digit percentage success rates right like five percent six percent of applications actually get the money normally in the humaneness so in the sciences when you're applying for research money you know it's like I don't know you're buying them are I machines I don't know what those people do. I am almost exclusively buying for teaching buy out that's that's what I apply for so I apply to the British Academy I've just applied for British Academy grant and like most of the money is paying my salary so that I can spend a year researching and my university theoretically can use the money they save on my salary to pay someone to do my teaching for a year and I think I applied for £7,000 in research expenses which will you know take me to the Labour Party archive maybe you know help me put on a workshop or something. But yeah like that money doesn't it's paying for a discrete

48:33and specific thing there's some overheads money in that which will go to Southampton there's some overheads as you know like pays for my library access pays for my office so they're getting bits and pieces they might get 10 grand probably from that but like it's not. But it's it's not a stable replacement for long-term structural funding to make sure that the University of Southampton's history department stays open. Exactly yeah. I wanted to ask sort of go briefly back into history because this is an argument that you hear a lot and that I'm not necessarily fully sympathetic with but that I have some understanding of is like is part of the long problem of this essentially the sort of 1990s Blair and Brown emphasis everybody go to universities a lot of universities were either built or you know the red bricks were upgraded from vocational schools to universities and you know I think now about 50% of British 18 year olds end up going to university did we sort of

49:34did we was there an overemphasis and is this sort of I don't want to say a necessary correction because I think if anybody who wants to go to university and has the capacity to go to university should have the opportunity to go but is it sort of is it a long tale of maybe sort of an overemphasis and I don't want to become all blue labour and talk about about how we should close the universities and make everybody be a plumber again but is there a history there that maybe this is a corrective to? So firstly I'd say only about 38% of 18 year olds in Britain go to university even this year which was we had a record number of 18 year olds accepted into university this year and it's somewhere between 36 and 38% of 18 year olds so we're actually not that close to the 50 percent target which was which was Tony Blair's famous target for university study and in a way it's even more striking we haven't hit that 50% because at the time Blair said that it wasn't compulsory to stay in education to 18 in the UK and now it is so we should actually be seeing more numbers

50:37because more students are staying on to 18 so more students theoretically are taking A levels so firstly I'll say there is a misconception in Britain that like absolutely hundreds of 18 year olds go to university you know there's places for everyone who wants them and that just is not the system in the UK we still we still don't have that kind of number of students I would say that's not I mean I would of course say that's not the case for lots of reasons the firstly I'd say the sort of the transition the sort of post-92 university so the this transition from polytechnic to university that happened in 1992 in the kind of creation of new universities you know those places still had those institutions which are many of them like very historic institutions that have been educating people for a really long time they still have places before they turned into university if that makes sense there were still lots of people studying courses at those and the courses people are studying at those universities are quite similar to the courses they were studying before 1992 so that transition has not made that much difference

51:40I think it's really important to think about the multiplicity of roles that universities play across the country and in communities before we start talking about the possibility of institutions closing we're already seeing kind of subject droughts in areas of the UK where for example a student who wanted to go to university within 50 miles of where they grew up would find it difficult to study particular topics when people talk about closing universities they often cite the idea that like well as too many institutions you know offering history for example you know why do you need to be able to study history at every single university in the country shouldn't we have you know fewer universities offering history and then you kind of choose between them which might sort of on paper make sense but firstly it kind of really underestimates the massive diversity of the types of modules being offered lots of universities for example I'm going to talk a lot about history because I'm a historian and I know I know this best but lots of institutions will offer histories that really relate and are really rooted in their local communities

52:43you know at the University of Southampton we have courses that involve like the history of Southampton they're involved like walking around the city and looking at local things my master's students have just been in our cemetery this week like looking at that local local kind of death culture the idea that you know oh well we know we don't need to have a university in new castle offering history because they can just go to Durham like completely get through to that specificity and the idea that you might want to study in a particular place it's also often people often say this in quite a like neutral term or we should we should get rid of some of the universities offering these subjects because there's too many of them and I'm like okay right well there's you know there's Oxford Brooks and there's the University of Oxford which one of those do you think should close our history department you know it's not a neutral argument on when people are making this there's lots of suppositions about who would be the quote-unquote best departments that were kind of hang on Oxford Brooks does incredible work in their history department and if they were lost because they share a city with a different history department that would be a real loss to the profession and I think the other thing is that increasingly because of the rise of cost of living because

53:48student loans there is a massive scandal in the way the student loan funding works in this country in terms of parental income and in terms of household income yeah students stop getting they don't get the full kind of maintenance grant if your household income is over it's 28,000 pounds a year or something so like you need to have one parent who runs slightly more than minimum wage to not to not get the full maintenance grant so as students are not getting enough financial support to live away from home or to not have part-time jobs and so increasingly we see students commuting students so students who live at home and and commute and that means that you need to have lots of very very good regional universities because otherwise you're saying a student who can't afford to leave their family home in Bournemouth like can't study loads of subjects because the University of Bournemons only allowed to teach xy and z so there's loads of reasons I think why we shouldn't be talking about closing institutions and that's not even to get onto I always makes me laugh when when Labour MPs talk about you know potentially closing institutions

54:51and you think like how many do you know how many people in your constituency work in a university the University of Southampton employs 6,000 people University of Solan employs 1,500 people there's 7 and a half thousand people in the city of Southampton who are employed directly by a university like the idea that those MPs would would be happy to close those and just have 6,7,8,000 people in their constituency immediately out of work is laughable no I don't really understand what these institutions are doing it's I mean to me it's absolutely baffling and quite frankly I mean I have a master's degree in English literature so I'm always sympathetic to having smaller courses everywhere and also being entirely used to the discourse of you know you can't you know we need to kick you out out of your course because like your degrees only worth it to become a teacher and you know so like I never studied anything quite unquote useful but I think that has been so much part of the discussion is like a couple years ago we had that you know like she's not going to be a ballerina

55:53she's going to learn to code that ad campaign you know well I studied chemical engineering to a master's level and look at me now on the podcaster I've got an international relations master's but I sadly just a historian the the learner code advert was was in hindsight right is incredibly funny because like ballerina's AI proof and coding as an industry is being absolutely destroyed by artificial intelligence and it really highlights this idea that actually this focus on quote unquote useful skills you're always only planning for the job martyx that exists in the moment that you're talking and careers along students are graduating at 21 they're going to be working until they're 70 that's you know what's that 49 years of work and like if you're going to train them in like a very specific technical skill like you really got to hope that that that that technology in that industry just stays essentially unchanged for 50 years it's just so this is why it's also I think quite

56:57relevant as well that we remind ourselves that a lot of the drive to have more kids learn to code is to suppress the wage costs of coders for the businesses like that that is why that is such it was such a big impetus for you know successive governments it's also part of a very frustrating narrative which is often leveled at universities which is this idea that graduates are graduating without again like quote unquote like workplace skills or that they need you often will get like a kind of CBI boss like a big someone who runs a company or become think we'll go on the today program or whatever and we'll be saying oh you know I'm getting these graduates at 21 they don't know how to do anything universities need to give people more like real life skills or whatever they need to do more like training so you know you should be doing AI on your history degree because they need to know how to use AI when they get to my company and it really frustrates me because we seem to have completely lost the idea that it is an employer's job to train their

57:58employees to do the job that they are hiring and to do that like if you start in a new company that company needs to train you and that yeah that's expensive and time consuming and that's what you should spend some of your profits on as a private company like it is not my job to make sure that every single one of my you know my graduating class of 150 students a year is not my job to make sure that all 150 of them have the precise and specific skills that your company needs for my student to do you should hire them based on their abilities more broadly and their skills more broadly and then you should train them how to do the job you're part them to do and that is you know 30 or 40 years ago that was the norm that employers would train people and now we seem to have completely businesses certainly feel very comfortable claiming that people should come to them since they're fully formed and that it's our problem that we should deal with that and it just isn't I mean yeah teaching a you know 18 to 21 year old how to use Excel seems like a massive waste of a university's resources beyond what might be necessary for a specific like you know

59:03actually relevant to a course versus teaching teaching like 21 plus graduate how to use Excel while in the workplace because buddy Excel is not complicated and also like AI is going like you know we can say as much as we like AI is going to be a flash in the pan but you know big business leaders obviously think otherwise but still like teaching teaching a full like a fully formed adult really at 21 plus you were pretty much fully formed as an adult you could pick up that stuff in the workplace but of course yeah three months or something yeah we are so in hop to like business leaders as called they're going to try and shift any of the expenses of actually running a business like training employees or whatever onto other people so I don't know well so we should expect unfortunately yeah and the thing is what a history student probably is very good at his googling and so you know I would feel confident that my students would you know be able to

1:00:03to as I did when I had a job where I had to use Excel regularly I you know you just Google how to do things don't you it's a very it's a very odd a very odd kind of idea about what like what employees do day to day and how they actually develop in their roles I wanted to ask sort of and bring bring that sort of the idea of AI back into the question of the university crisis because it's a sort of this idea now from I would say the management layer of university so like the vice-chancellors offices and the various sort of consultants that that's warm around than that like well we don't have to have as many professors anymore because we will get AI in to do the teaching or the instructing or like that's the that's the rave near future so we can actually like dump off all these people whereas that is that really not quite part of the conversation I think that was certainly the fear in universities and you know we can everyone in education I think is looking with horror things like the alpha school in America which is using AI you know it to an

1:01:06enormous degree and which is a future future practice cast episode that one that's where me and Alistair are already talking about that absolutely horrific and you know very short term is but I don't so there was you know I've been on mat leave for the last year and I've been ever so slightly out of the loop and I remember there was a little bit of we there was a lot of very very cool pushback from academics where some universities in consortia and Southampton I think was one of these universities were kind of working on AI and they released a document which said oh you know AI might be really helpful for academics you know if you have to mark 100 essays in two days you could use AI to like give some of your feedback to students and we were like whoa okay I mean firstly yeah no you can't use AI to give feedback to students that students are paying to get my my feedback setting like if I have to mark 100 assignments in two days that is the specific problem not the you know the problem is that you have overloaded your staff in this sort of hypothetical scenario and so there was there was certainly some concern that AI might be

1:02:09used as a kind of argument for workload for staff a lot of our kind of unrest around labor conditions recently has been about workload and this is obviously not helped by layoffcent from health redundancies because workload increases on the people who are still there and it it felt and still does feel a little bit concerning that universities might start saying okay well you know if you if you feel that you're overworked then you know why aren't you using AI to do this this and this for example and they're even in that hypothetical scenario though I remember reading the document and even then there was this gray pain to say oh but you know it wouldn't actually be providing the feedback it would be doing something like you know putting bullet points in or there there is this idea and there's acceptance I think in universities that like it would be totally unacceptable for us to just kind of automate our responses to students that is fundamentally not what they're there for either educationally or actually you know in terms of cold hard they're paying for it's not to be automated there's some light at the end of the tunnel with AI

1:03:14and academia certainly in that I had seen a huge amount of kind of fatalism around it that universities were going oh well you know we're going to have to sort of say to students they can use there or try to try to work on assignments where they could use AI to help them do things you know that we need to embrace it we need to you know or we can't even if not if we need to embrace it like we can't stop them from using it so we're going to have to kind of work with them on air and I've seen quite a lot of push back to this so like my own department is Gen AI policy is like you cannot use it we will not mark stuff that we think is Gen AI you will fail this is not acceptable yeah we have also University of Southampton has recently stopped using the software turn it in which I don't know if non university students know about this but turn it in it's like a plagiarism checking software yeah um we've stopped using it from this academic year because turn in we're changing their u-lure to say they were going to start using student essays as AI training material and it was a very very rapid decision by my university to say no okay you know we're just going to stop using it then um from my perspective that was good for a number of reasons firstly just

1:04:19because I think that's wildly unethical um yeah it's I mean the student essays but it's it's theft the student essays but the theft like yeah exactly students can't use the opt out of using turn it submit their material because that's how they have to submit essays so you're you're not meaning fully getting consent from them to like use this material but also in a pragmatic way I was like okay but if you're using its train AI one that's interesting in terms of the very inequality of student essays in terms of what you're actually training AI on but also presumably what you were training AI to do is write realistic student essays like the only reason you would use this as a AI training material is if it's going to produce that and so I don't know why any institution would opt into the idea that um turn in wants to make their their like production of student essays more more realistic so that that was quite positive for us um we'll see how it plays out I I'm really

1:05:22firmly of the opinion that AI is a stupid bubble and it will go away and it will be like those monkeys or whatever that like it's just gonna NFTs that's what I mean not just generally monkeys um yeah no I mean this is this is your your your very in line uh with us on yeah I just I I can see how it's gonna have I'm hoping what happens is that the bubble burst and then we go back to it having utility in terms of like looking at large corpses of date you know but people using it to like look at enormous bodies of data or whatever analysis or you know photo recognition or whatever fine but like i generative AI is you know a terrible thing and and I'm hoping that universities will continue to have a hard line against there um I wanted to before we start wrapping up I wanted to ask you about one more thing because when I was preparing for for our conversation one of the things you read very much a lot in in terms of this discussion um around

1:06:26the crisis in universities is specifically the role of the vice-chancellor's office if you don't know it's usually the vice-chancellor who is the actual sort of executive of the university the chancellor is more of an honorary position that goes to I don't know you're Stephen Fry's or people who you know who the ex-politicians that have been asked is Ruby wax oh yeah is is but where do the vice-chancellor's sit because a lot of it the the discontent from university staff does seem to come from not just the the remuneration which has gone up wildly in the last couple of years but also the habit of hiring consultants to do efficiencies and you know instituting these non-transparent procedures that as we've been talked about entire um departments being scrapped and I read an interesting essay by John Heather saw um about in democracy for sale about the university of the exter where he teaches uh quote universities own financial reports show that 16 members of the university executive board are paid an average of 241 thousand pounds a 27 percent increase over

1:07:31three years while the institution has gone through financial difficulties so I mean that is an extraordinary amount of of money certainly if you consider that you could hire or maintain staff for that amount of money has there been sort of an increasing split between the university sort of executive management and the teaching staff over the last few years I mean I think over the maybe not over the last few years but certainly over the last probably 15 to 20 years um I'm slightly heretical on the issue of VCs salaries because actually I think you you see a few years ago in like 2018 was really hitting hard this idea of VCs being on very very the fact cat VCs salary and we had a campaign around it and there was some documentary work about it and stuff about like VCs fences which was nonsensical right not the expense VCs like expensing peanut coladas and things like this like really kind of unchecked behavior generally speaking though I would point

1:08:32out that like I think the problem is the lowest paid members of staff at universities not paid highly enough not necessarily that VCs themselves are paid too much and it's you know the sort of the the disparity between the lowest and highest paid is always talked about in terms of the highest paid being too highly paid and I actually think it's probably that is the lowest paid should be paid more and the reason I say this is because actually universities are huge institutions right like I'd say Southampton has 6,000 staff members we have 20,000 students we have three sites in Southampton we have a Malaysian campus we are an enormous you know we are a huge company if we were a business we would be a large employer a large company um we turn over millions and millions of pounds a year and I actually want the person running that to be good at their job and to be taking that job because they're motivated to do it well and and I think when you compare the salary of someone running a university to the salary of someone running a council or running a charity or a business

1:09:35of the same size I think actually VCs need to be on on a kind of parity with with them actually um there's a sort of weirdness in British academia and what's interesting here is that you often because of kind of online spaces kind of merging everything together you often end up with similar narratives in the UK as in America or people kind of think of it as a very similar kind of um you know we talk about like administrative um administration university administration in the UK what we use like secretaries people like doing important administrative work but in the US when they talk about administration they mean like the higher management level and they're wildly they're paid huge amounts of money in the UK um university management it is quite weird because obviously heads of department come from academics and then heads of schools and heads of faculty like these are academics who've been promoted up into management and these people don't necessarily have any management skills and VCs generally like a long time ago were academics and have kind of come up this scale and they're not necessarily that qualified to do what they're doing other than the

1:10:37fact that they've done it for a bunch of other universities before normally there's often an interesting disconnect between the work they were doing as academics and the work they do as VCs this was very famous with like Adam Tickel when he was the head of University of Sussex who as an academic had been like a geographer railing against neoliberalism and then when he was the VC of Sussex was like just swinging cuts and shutting down student protests so it's it's really interesting I think the thing that's definitely happened is that blow would like the number of people under VC so that at least 20 or 30 people who are all earning more than 200 grand and who are doing things job titles that don't make sense to anybody their job is like having a lot of meetings with each other talking about things the external management consultants element is also quite interesting because what a few people realised recently was that I cannot remember the name but there's a specific management consulting for you know for fun often comes into universities I probably

1:11:39shouldn't say if I could remember it anyway because it's probably liableist but the people realize like the slides are basically the same so someone at the University of Exeter which is undergoing these sort of huge cuts at the moment kind of shared their slides with Warrick and somewhere else and like these they're just doing the same thing in every single institution they use the same language they use the same they have the same ideas about what to cut they talk about like distinctive brands but then they do like the same thing in every institution like yeah it should one of the things we could do to my universities in this country much better is just to outlaw bringing in management consultants because it just they all they do is they have exactly the same solutions to exactly the same to what they see as exactly the same problems it's not like her it's just a completely it's just doesn't it's not solving any actual issues so I think we've got one more question left

1:12:39haven't we Rob and that's like where is the UCU there's a lot of like university-based action but there seems to it doesn't seem to be a lot at the national level yeah it's the union in all of this has been quite interesting for a while there was a lot of disquiet that we were still kind of undergoing and actually I think still are I think we have recently balleted on like pay dispute you know we universities to some extent have been in this like forever strike race since 2018 since October 2018 we've been or no earlier than that spring 2018 we've been sort of on strike on and off in essentially the same dispute around pay around pensions and around working conditions what happened then was that lots of university started to obviously enter this crisis of like redundancies and so you had this this scenario where like we were in national disputes around like

1:13:41working conditions the national pay agreement and and pensions pensions that we actually we want on pensions we were sort of stuck in this thing of trying to still with dispute around working conditions and particularly around like precarity and the sort of pay disparity between for people of colour for example but we also had these like local things where like you know each individual at university as they as they had sort of job losses threatened they would do a local ballot and then they would have local strikes and so that's what's been going on like exodus had local strike Edinburgh at the moment is in the middle of their local strike actions so Edinburgh I think are taking up first like two or three weeks of term they're on strike but they're local they're local strike action this is partly I guess like calculation on the idea of it being like more meaningful for like Edinburgh to strike over Edinburgh pay Edinburgh to strike over Edinburgh job cuts you know they're going on strike against their VC to make their VC we consider about job cuts

1:14:44it's also because of the laws of trade union like ballot in this country you need to have more than 50% turnout and more than 50% vote in favour of striking and so a national ballot always comes with the risk that you won't get 50% turnout and you can aggregate or disaggregate so you can do it so that the branches where you do get more than 50% turnout those people go on strike and the ones where you don't they don't go on strike and that's what we've done at different points or you can do it like aggregated so you get more than 50% turnout nationally and then we all go on strike which is obviously like the most powerful kind of action but for whatever reason we have in I the the fact that the law has recently changed and you can now do digital ballot I think is going to help you see you a lot um we're quite a you know disparate workforce and so being able to do like online voting for ballot for strike will probably have a big impact on turnout um which we weren't previously allowed to do but I it's also I think that whilst there is absolutely meaningful solidarity

1:15:49between individual academics like there is solidarity between academics across institutions right we see ourselves as a single workforce and particularly like sort of in fields like my historians I talk about my colleagues and I might mean someone who works with me in my department but I might mean someone that sheffield like my colleagues the people I work with on my research and things it is nevertheless obviously true that like some institutions have the institutions don't necessarily have meaningful solidarity for one another for various reasons like when we are ruled in this wild attempt to get as many students as possible to try to stay afloat then Russell group universities are hovering up every single student they can and post-92s are suffering because of that it's difficult to build solidarity in those conditions um there's been a lot of I think very justified anger that the threatened job cuts that Exeter have really overshadowed threatened job cuts at post-92 institutions that like there was this massive outpouring anger

1:16:51about the potential cuts that Exeter as there should be but like what management of proposing a Brighton is absolutely disgusting and it has been significantly less national press coverage of that and it's very difficult for um it's very difficult to build solidarity when there's this like internal competition between universities and like Russell group institutions like South Anton like my institution do not help themselves in this regard with their sort of assumption of superiority with their assumption that you know oh it's you know it is terrible that cuts are happening in other places but like it is you know this idea that it would be like a travesty of the history department at the University of South Anton more closed like of course it would be but it is also a travesty that the history department at the University of Hartfordshire is being closed right like it's not it's yeah this sort of inequality between institutions makes it very difficult to do national strikes um and there was a lot of anger that we were still balloting on our pay settlement when some universities were facing massive job cuts like there is no use

1:17:54as quibbling over a 100 or 2% or 3% pay rise when a hundred people are going to lose their jobs at Plymouth or whatever um so I don't I don't quite know why you sell you who hasn't balloted does on this yet because one of the things academics are always trying to point out to government is that the scale of job loss is in academia like 10,000 jobs were were up for being cut last year like the scale is so far beyond like what's happened in you know steel or car factories and places that labour MPs are very very happy to go along and lend their support and potentially even offer government money to is there is there anything that you know maybe our listeners could do to help like strike funds to support and so on you know if you live near a university and they're on strike going visit them on the picket line um offer your support right to vice chancellors um if you graduated from a university in the UK um and your department that you graduated from is under threat

1:18:55them write to vice chancellors or write to your local newspaper and tell them about how valuable your degree was and tell them that your department should not be closed um you know we're the thing is at the moment this is all like this is all just you know fiddling around the edges and what we need is massive government money but in the short term we need to stop job losses and we need to stop department closures and anything that people can do to support strikers and to tell vcs that what they're doing is stupid or to tell universities that like this is a public relations disaster universities are very worried about their their public image so like anything you can do to tell them like this just makes you look awful it's probably quite helpful and write to your MP as well and tell your MP that this is not acceptable and we need more support quite internationally complain to anyone who will listen and even those who won yes exactly be be a squeaky wheel

1:19:55be as annoying as possible Charlotte thank you so much for taking the time and joining us today it's been really interesting and quite frankly this is we were listening to the Andy Burnham thing yesterday I didn't hear any mention about universities and this crisis or about climate change or about trans rights or about a whole bunch of other stuff that we in our listeners really care about but you know this is this needs fixing because it is one of Britain's great if you want to be capitalist about it this is one of Britain's great export products this is you know image-defying stuff the university sector and it seems to just nobody seems to care and it's it's so treacherous yeah yeah the thing that's always missed is that not only a university is incredibly important for British soft power like you know I am the first critic of Oxland Cambridge I think there are in many ways despicable institutions but they are some of our most famous British things right and some of the things that people ask I've written no most about but also like international

1:20:55students are exports why all the public British politicians have never acknowledged this or understood this and the sort of attack on international students has been like incredibly shortsighted and incredibly counterproductive and there's completely under my end I said to say yeah it's it's really really extraordinary to watch successive you know theoretically left wing governments just absolutely found a record with this okay and I think that's a yeah and that's a great point to leave it on thank you again Charlotte for joining us and when I got now going to throw back to asked in the future present past thank you for having me okay it's now the past but also the future but somehow the part I don't know how this is working anymore but we're back thank you very much for that Charlotte Rob was terrible but I was great probably yeah so I know it's okay I'm sticking

1:21:57off for your Rob oh we're only recording half an episode tonight we'll be done in no time yeah anyway that's going to be us we don't have any comment on comment area because we don't so never mind maybe another episode maybe an episode that you'll find at patreon.com for all slash practice cast which is five pounds a month for three bonus episodes that's three chances to find some comment on comment area can you find them all also meltjaville.com and twitch streams also happen at twitch.tv for all slash practice cast on wednesdays at on 30pm and sundays 10pm and assorted other teams when we can't stick to that schedule. Yes yeah I'm feeling better now so hopefully regular regular stream schedule again.

1:22:58Anyway bye bye. I love it when we're professional.