Introduction

Writing this critical review chapter has been made more difficult by a series of strikes paralysing many UK universities in the spring of 2020. Academic and support staff at a total of 67 universities in the UK have been taking industrial action in what are called the ‘four fights’: disputes between staff and managers regarding salaries, pensions, precarity and employment opportunities. The strikes reflect a feeling among many academics – repeated across blogs and social media – that the cold winds of marketisation and austerity that have blown across UK society as a whole have also severely negatively affected UK academia and urgently require addressing. A Labour government introduced a degree of marketisation by introducing tuition fees in 2002 but it was the 2010 Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government whose reforms sought to remove any sense of social purpose from higher education.

These strikes cast into sharp relief a long-standing problem with writing about universities and their contributions to social development, social justice and social inclusion. It is tempting to write about universities through the rose-tinted lenses of their strategic orientations, their institutional visions and strategies, and their managers’ aspirations and encomiums. Yet, these strikes are by staff who feel that they are being denied social justice in the workplace, fair contracts and dignified working conditions. It is the same staff that have been standing on the picket lines at universities that carry out the research, teaching and social engagement activities that interact with society and build societal capital. It is those staff who went on strike to highlight universities’ own unjust approach who create the successes then claimed by management in arguing that those universities are contributing to social justice. Therein lies the contradiction: an institution may have employees who are contesting austerity and promoting social justice but the strikes make it hard to claim that universities as institutions have some kind of social justice mission when they deny basic justice to their own staff.

The case studies in this volume lie in the North East of England, and a visitor arriving in Newcastle cannot help but spot the St James Park football ground. Looming over the city as a monument to local passion, it too has become a site for contesting austerity.