This statement was drafted by the Centre for Cultural Studies on the 19th of May, 2009.
Since then, it has also been supported by the departments of Media and Communications and Visual Cultures. We encourage all other departments to support the statement.
Statement text:
We are strongly opposed to the implementation of the new attendance
monitoring policy and related policies that have been imposed on our
university by the Home Office under the new points based immigration
system recently introduced in the UK. We invite our colleagues in at
Goldsmiths and across the University of London to join us in voicing their
opposition to these policies and in fighting their implementation.
The new regulations make us do a policing job in our classrooms, turning
both academic and administrative staff into agents of the UK Border
Agency. We object to this for reasons both political and professional. We
are concerned that the regulations represent possible breaches of European
human rights conventions and seriously threaten our students’ rights to
mobility, privacy and education. Although recent changes to implementation
of the law have expanded the scope of student monitoring and
reporting--with the result that policies explicitly targeting the
monitoring and reporting of information about non-EU students have been
expanded to include the monitoring and reporting of information about all
students--this does not disguise the fact that these policies are
discriminatory in intent and will very likely be discriminatory in
practice. International students are an integral and valued part of our
community, and we do not accept any measures that will lead to the unequal
treatment of non-EU students as a result of their enrollment on our degree
programmes.
As will be evident to anyone involved in teaching and learning in a
university environment, the new regulations are ill adapted to that
environment and out of touch with the lived realities of our work. They
detract from academic freedom and will have profoundly negative impacts on
the relationship between staff and students, which should be one of trust,
not of spying and control. The turnaround time stipulated for the
reporting of student absences is unrealistic, and the new regulations will
lead to increases in workload for both academic and administrative staff.
In the case of our own academic unit, the very premises of attendance
monitoring fundamentally misconstrue our mission as a postgrad teaching
and research centre. Finally, the regulations raise questions as to the
security of staff, placing them in a position where they are probing into
and ultimately violating students’ rights. Because staff will be unwilling
to inform on students in a way that results in their expulsion from the
UK, the regulations may also have the effect of discouraging staff from
enquiring after students’ well-being, interfering in our ability to carry
out pastoral duties and threatening students’ security as well.
In raising these concerns, we join colleagues at Goldsmiths and at other
higher education institutions in the UK, who have publicly stated their
opposition on related grounds (Goldsmiths UCU; UCU Black Members’ Standing
Committee; UCU Black Members, University of Kent; Manchester Metropolitan
University; a coalition of institutions in Liverpool; as well as the
Institute of Race Relations and the National Critical Lawyers Group). We
also join, significantly to our mind, Goldsmiths Student Union, which in
November 2008 passed a motion asking staff not to comply with the new
rules.
Finally, the new immigration policies are of urgent concern to all at a
time when our university communities are facing unprecedented economic
pressure. Due to new (and excessively stringent) financial requirements of
students applying for visas to study in the UK, the new policies will have
negative impacts on recruitment. These will hit us immediately, at a time
when we are under pressure to increase international student enrollments
college-wide. The difficulties recently reported by postgraduate research
students who have applied for visa renewals in the final months of their
degree work are also worrisome and stand as further evidence that the new
immigration rules will detract from the quality of teaching and learning
and are ill-adapted to our mission as a university.
We sincerely hope that Goldsmiths will insist on being a teaching and
research institution, and that it will maintain its commitments to its
educational mission by opposing the implementation of the new Home Office
regulations both on our campus and in the context of the growing national
campaigns.
Scott Lash, Director, Goldsmiths CCS
CCS Staff
Jennifer Bajorek
Josie Berry-Slater
Matthew Fuller
Graham Harwood
John Hutnyk
Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay
Luciana Parisi
