Newcastle Free Education Network

Newcastle University in occuption

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 09:20:00 -0500

This blog has been rather quiet recently. That’s becasue students including members of Newcastle Free Education Network are occupying the Fine Art building of the university. Check out the blog for more info here: http://ncluniocc.blogspot.com/

Photo

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 11:07:57 -0500

Photo

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 11:07:09 -0500

Newcastle walkout in the Guardian

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 09:46:56 -0500

Newcastle walkout in the Guardian

Walk-out and teach-in, 24th Nov

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:02:00 -0500

As part of the national day of action on the 24th November, Newcastle is having a walk-out and teach-in!

Meet at 12:00 outside the Union Buildinging to march down to Monument for a rally with students from surrounding schools and 6th forms.

Then come to LT1.02 in Claremont Tower at 13:30 for an afternoon of discussions, lectures and workshops to demonstrate an education without a price tag!

Details here: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=132467673475881&notif_t=event_wall#wall_posts

NSR News special report on the NUS march 10/11/10

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:59:33 -0500

NSR News special report on the NUS march 10/11/10

Meeting Monday at 5pm

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 14:48:02 -0500

What do we have to learn from the actions at Millbank?

How do we take the energy from Wednesdays demo and move forward in our campus campaign?

Does direct action work?

We need everyone to come and discuss, debate and plan. Newcastle Free Education Network open meeting, Monday 15th, 5pm in Politics Building Common Room (right next to the Robinson library).

Sign the petition

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:04:09 -0500

NFEN encourages you to sign the following petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?st53231&1

We need unity to defend education and break the Con Dems’ attacks. Stand with protesters against victimisation.

• Stand with the protestors against victimisation
• Hands off our students, our colleges and our universities
• Broken windows cannot compare to the broken hearts and dreams of a generation denied education and jobs

Wednesday’s 10th November national NUS/UCU 50,000 strong national demonstration was a magnificent show of strength against the Con Dems’ savage attacks on education. The Tories want to make swingeing cuts, introduce £9,000 tuition fees and cut EMA. These attacks will close the doors to higher education and further education for a generation of young people.

During the demonstration over 5,000 students showed their determination to defend the future of education by occupying the Tory party HQ and its courtyards for several hours. The mood was good-spirited, with chants, singing and flares.

Yet at least 32 people have now been arrested, and the police and media appear to be launching a witch-hunt condemning peaceful protesters as “criminals” and violent. A great deal is being made of a few windows smashed during the protest, but the real vandals are those waging a war on our education system.

We reject any attempt to characterise the Millbank protest as small, “extremist” or unrepresentative of our movement. We celebrate the fact that thousands of students were willing to send a message to the Tories that we will fight to win. Occupations are a long established tradition in the student movement that should be defended. It is this kind of action in France and Greece that has been an inspiration many workers and students in Britain faced with such a huge assault on jobs, housing and the public sector.

We stand with the protesters, and anyone who is victimised as a result of the protest.

Initial signatories include:

Mark Bergfeld, NUS NEC
Sean Rillo Raczka, Birkbeck SU Chair and NUS NEC (Mature Students’ Rep)
Vicki Baars, NUS LGBT Officer (Women’s Place)
Alan Bailey, NUS LGBT Officer (Open Place)
Kanjay Sesay, NUS Black Students’ Officer
Matt Bond, NUS Disabled Ctte (Open Place rep)
Michael Chessum, Education and Campaigns Officer UCL SU
Jade Baker, Education Officer Westminster Uni SU
Cameron Tait, University of Sussex Students’ Union President
Nathan Bolton, Campaigns Officer Essex University Students’ Union
Clare Solomon, ULU President
Jim Wolfreys, UCU NEC
Dr Marion Hersh, UCU NEC and Scottish Executive
Alex Gordon, President, National Union of Rail, Maritime & Transport Workers (RMT)
Lee Hall, playwright ‘Billy Elliot’
Hilary Wainwright, Transnational Institute
Alex Callinicos, Professor of European Studies King’s College London
Billy Bragg Songwriter
Noami Klein Author and Activist

All in a personal capacity

Sincerely,

Sign it here http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?st53231&1

Manchester occupation

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:52:10 -0500

Manchester University students have occupied their Uni against cuts to higher education! This is a great display of courage and determined, peaceful, direct action - please send them messages of support (manunioccupation2010@gmail.com) and check out their blog for more information as it comes. We expect this to be the first in a wave of national occupations against the cuts.
http://manunioccupation.blogspot.com/2010/11/manchester-university-students-occupy.html

Solidarity with the Millbank protesters

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:35:50 -0500

STATEMENT ON BEHALF OF NEWCASTLE FREE EDUCATION NETWORK

We need unity to break the Con-Dems’ attacks.
Solidarity with the Millbank protesters.

Wednesday’s national NUS/UCU 50,000 strong national demonstration was a magnificent show of strength against the Con Dems’ savage attacks on education. The Tories want to make swingeing cuts, introduce £9,000 tuition fees and cut EMA. These attacks will close the doors to higher education and further education for a generation of young people.

During the demonstration over 5,000 students showed their determination to defend the future of education by occupying the Tory party HQ and its courtyards for several hours. The mood was good-spirited, with chants, singing and flares.

Yet at least 32 people have now been arrested, and the police and media appear to be launching a witch-hunt condemning the protesters as an extreme and violent minority.

Regrettably, NUS President Aaron Porter has condemned these events as a “despicable” attempt by a small minority to “hijack a peaceful protest”. A great deal is being made of a few windows smashed during the protest, but the real vandals are those waging a war on our education system. Admittedly, there were a few individual actions that we do not support. However, the focus on these actions, which the media and police are using to villify the entire action, detracts from the occupation as a whole and are being used to demonise all those taking part. We don’t support those actions, it just means that next time, direct action such as this needs to be better organised, involve more people, and definitely not have the NUS denouncing it as ‘despicable’, but actively supporting such action.

We reject any attempt to characterise the Millbank protest as small, “extremist” or unrepresentative of our movement.

We celebrate the fact that thousands of students were willing to send a message to the Tories that we will fight to win. Occupations are a long established tradition in the student movement that should be defended. It is this kind of action in France and Greece that has been an inspiration to many workers and students in Britain faced with such a huge assault on jobs, benefits, housing and the public sector.

We stand with the protesters, and anyone who is victimised as a result of the protest.

After the meeting, what next?

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:41:00 -0400

Thanks to everyone who came to the meeting last night about fighting education cuts. We felt it was a very useful meeting with some interesting speeches and discussion. But what next? Well, there are plenty of things in the pipe line, but until then…

- Banner making session ahead of the National Demo is at 5pm in Politics Common Room (near Robinson Library. If you don’t knwo where it is email contactnfen@gmail.com and we’ll sort you out) on Monday 3rd November. All welcome, even if you can’t come on the demo.

- Email contactnfen@gmail.com to find out details of a ‘What next after the National Demonstration?’ meeting. We’ll send this out as soon as it’s confirmed.

- Search and join ‘Newcastle Free Education Network’ on facebook and make this campaign your campaign!

Important correction

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:05:03 -0400

The Courier’s listing section this week suggests that there is a public meeting involving NFEN on Thursday. The meeting is happening, but on *Wednesday*. Also it is happening at *5pm*, not 3pm as the Courier suggests. The meeting was also mentioned in the news story ‘Students clash in heated university funding debate’, but they got the details correct that time. So just to reiterate the full and correct details are as follows: Wed 3rd November, 5pm - Lecture theatre 3 of the Hershel building Come to this meeting to hear from the following speakers and discuss campus-wide action against the cuts.

Newcastle Free Education Network,
Student Union Society,
Labour Students,
Sussex Against Cuts,
Newcastle branches of UCU and Unite.

Browne Review protest

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:18:21 -0400

Newcastle Free Education Network staged a protest today outside the offices of Chris Bink, Vice Chancellor of Newcastle University.

The students’ outrage was provoked by Bink’s statement of support for the recent Browne Review into higher education. The report suggests the cap on tuition fees should be lifted, meaning students would have to pay upwards of £6,000 per year for their education, as well as overall cuts to education of 40%, with some departments expected to make 80% cuts.

Chants of “No ifs! No buts! No education cuts!” rang out as leaflets were handed out and placards were waved. This gained the attention of university security guards, but all that they could do was demand that the protesters not smoke (outside).

The protest was one of many upcoming actions against the cuts including a public speaker meeting on the 3^rd of November in lecture room 3 of the Hershel Building, Newcastle University and a national protest in London on the 10^th November. More info on this blog.

Public meeting against cuts, 3rd Nov 5pm

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 12:32:00 -0400

Wed 3rd November, 5pm - Lecture theatre 3 of the Hershel building:

This is an emergency meeting on defending higher education against the government cuts and proposals of the recent Browne Review, to which our VC has given his full support.

Come to this meeting if you:
- Don’t want fees to rise to over £6,000 a year at Newcastle!
- Don’t want cuts to your courses or job losses for your lecturers!
- Think that higher education shouldn’t only serve the interests of big business.
- Think that students, lecturers and staff shouldn’t have to pay for an economic crisis that was not of their making.

- YOU DO want to plan creative and effective action against these cuts! Anti-cuts campaigns at other universities have made a difference.

Come to this meeting to hear from the following speakers and discuss campus-wide action against the cuts.

Newcastle Free Education Network,
Student Union Society,
Labour Students,
Sussex Against Cuts,
Newcastle branches of UCU and Unite.

Facebook event here.

Book your place (just £5 return) on the National Demonstration in London on 10th November by emailing welfare.union@newcastle.ac.uk and join hundreds of other students from Newcastle marching to defend our education.

Vice Chancellor Chris Brink supports the Browne Review

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:31:00 -0400

Our Vice Chancellor, Chris Brink, has released a statement expressing his support for implementing the reccomendations of the Browne Review. This means that our university, as a member of the Russell Group, is likely to start charging £6,000 a year or more in tuition fees if the recommendations are implemented.

NFEN will be discussing our response to this and will keep you all updated.

There are lots of events and ways of getting involved coming up. Keep checking the blog or join the facebook group (search ‘Newcastle Free Education Network’) to keep updated.

You can read his statement here:

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/newslink/item/response-to-the-CSR

Tuition fees and the Browne review - have your say

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 13:24:16 -0400

21 October · 19:00 - 21:00

Committee Room B, Newcastle Students’ Union

Debate on the Browne review, hosted by Newcastle University Convenor of debates.

Varied panel, including someone from Newcastle Free Education Network

Facebook event here

Please come along and make comments from the floor

"…bizarrely, back then we had no money, so it didn’t matter, whereas now you’ve got debt which..."

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:03:43 -0400

“

…bizarrely, back then we had no money, so it didn’t matter, whereas now you’ve got debt which is worse than nothing. Modern kids are more conservative than us, but of course they are, because the idea that education or art was an end in itself has been lost, because the ideological push behind what’s happened economically is that you have to be productive and useful members of society. “

“In 1989, I remember a news piece on the telly where Mrs Thatcher was at an Oxford college and she said “what are you studying?”, and the student said “ancient Norse literature”, and Thatcher replied, “what a luxury”. She didn’t say “that’ll be good, how useful”, and the implication now is that things that make us better people, mentally or emotionally, are luxuries because they can’t be quantified financially.”

”

- Stewart Lee, interviewed in this week’s Courier: http://www.thecourieronline.co.uk/arts/news/182673/news_vegetable_stew_18102010/

Mass movement needed to stop this attack on students

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:43:00 -0400

Local activist Alex Snowdon has kindly agreed to let us publish this article. It offers a warning from history about the need to resist cuts to education:

Sometimes being vindicated is an unpleasant experience. When I started university in the late 90s - when tuition fees were introduced and student grants were scrapped by the incoming Blair government- I (and others like me) marched and protested and campaigned to save free education.

We warned that it could, if this was imaginable, get even worse in the years ahead. The politicians might not stop at that initial level of fees - and they might find further ways of marketising higher education, or extend the same logic to other sectors of education.

We have, sadly, been proved right. Free education has become an ever more distant memory. The terms of debate have shifted from ‘Should there be fees?’ to ‘At what level should fees be set?’ Arguing a principled defence of free education has been caricatured as pie-in-the-sky utopianism.

The Browne Report today - advocating unlimited fees - is a further leap in the wrong direction. I’d be lying if I claimed it’s what we predicted over a decade ago - I don’t think any of us imagined things getting this bad.

There is one huge reason why the previous government got away with moving so far in the wrong direction on this issue, and why the current government feels it can push even further: there has been no effective resistance. The official student movement, in the form of a National Union of Students led by right-wing Labour Students, capitulated to the idea that fees were ‘necessary’ and turned itself into a polite lobbying organisation.

There is one great lesson from this experience: fail to resist and your enemy will attack and attack and attack until they destroy you. They will do it through ‘consultations’ and ‘partnership’ and all that horrible Blairite crap, but underneath the seductive PR it’s utterly ruthless.

So here we are. People like me who graduated nearly a decade ago are still paying off debt, but we’re lucky compared with the current generation - and, if the Tories get their way, truly blessed compared with the next generation.

Is it too late for the student movement? Absolutely not. There’s a shock quality to the Browne review that can either paralyse or galvanise. Which of those happens depends partly on leadership - it’s hopeful that NUS President Aaron Porter has so far proved superior to his predecessors (though that’s not difficult) - but more importantly on the grassroots movement.

Students up and down the country will need to build bigger protests than we managed when fees were introduced. The national demonstration in November to oppose education cuts will have to be a launchpad for a mass anti-cuts and anti-fees movement, not a routine one-off gesture.

Students will need to forge stronger-than-ever connections with university staff, and seek broader public support. They will need to reach out to FE and school students who potentially face a bleak future, but who can play an active role in changing that future.

They will have to link the issue of fees with the cuts in both the further and higher education sectors, making the opposition to fees part of a bigger movement against the government’s assault on the public sphere. Today is meant to be a turning point in the ‘reform’ of universities. It also needs to become a turning point in their defence.

Northumbria Uni demonstration 20th October

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 14:12:28 -0400

Save our right to
University Access!
No to cuts and sky high
…tuition fees!

Demostrate 20th October Wednesday
12:30pm
Northumbria University Quad
(in front of Students’ Union)

Called by Northumbria Against Fees and Cuts

Nick Clegg’s selective memory. (Hat tip to Luna 17:...

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 11:22:47 -0400

Nick Clegg’s selective memory.

(Hat tip to Luna 17: http://luna17activist.blogspot.com/2010/10/nick-cleggs-selective-memory.html)

Newcastle Free Education Network

Newcastle University in occuption

Photo

Photo

Newcastle walkout in the Guardian

Walk-out and teach-in, 24th Nov

NSR News special report on the NUS march 10/11/10

Meeting Monday at 5pm

What do we have to learn from the actions at Millbank?

How do we take the energy from Wednesdays demo and move forward in our campus campaign?

Does direct action work?

We need everyone to come and discuss, debate and plan. Newcastle Free Education Network open meeting, Monday 15th, 5pm in Politics Building Common Room (right next to the Robinson library).

Sign the petition

Manchester occupation

Solidarity with the Millbank protesters

After the meeting, what next?

Important correction

Browne Review protest

Public meeting against cuts, 3rd Nov 5pm

Vice Chancellor Chris Brink supports the Browne Review

Tuition fees and the Browne review - have your say

"…bizarrely, back then we had no money, so it didn’t matter, whereas now you’ve got debt which..."

Mass movement needed to stop this attack on students

Northumbria Uni demonstration 20th October

Save our right toUniversity Access!No to cuts and sky high…tuition fees!Demostrate 20th October Wednesday12:30pmNorthumbria University Quad(in front of Students’ Union)Called by Northumbria Against Fees and Cuts

Nick Clegg’s selective memory. (Hat tip to Luna 17:...

Save our right to
University Access!
No to cuts and sky high
…tuition fees!

Demostrate 20th October Wednesday
12:30pm
Northumbria University Quad
(in front of Students’ Union)

Called by Northumbria Against Fees and Cuts