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Marching again for free tuition
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Cambridge’s Independent Student Newspaper since 1947 No. 818 Friday 18th November 2016 varsity.co.uk
Students and academics fight back against government Sophie Penney Senior News Correspondent Staff and students at Cambridge have signed an open letter to the University Council and the General Board of Education voicing concerns about its participation in the second year of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which will raise tuition fees to at least £9,250. The TEF, described by the government as a “system of recognising excellent teaching in higher education”, links the funding of teaching, and therefore fees, to teaching quality. This will be assessed by a panel of academics, employers and students, using metrics including National Student Survey (NSS) results, student retention rates, and the proportion of graduates in employment or further study. The open letter, which claims “Cambridge has no obligation to participate in TEF” and “does not need” it, has been signed by 191 members of the University, including lecturers, a Director of Studies, CUSU sabbatical officers, alumni and current students. The main concerns raised are tuition fee increases and its “spurious metrics” for measuring quality. The letter also claims that TEF encourages “competition” over collaboration and that the framework fails to consider other structural issues that devalue teaching such as low pay, pension cuts and gendered pay gaps. Fees will increase to £9,250 in 2017,
with the potential for further increases depending on teaching quality. It is not yet known if this increase will apply to current Cambridge students, as will happen at the University of Exeter. The open letter asks: “How can we expect students to be excited about and lend their voice to a model of excellence which is conditional on greater fees and greater debt?” It also claims that the rise may alienate potential low-income applicants: “differential fee caps across universities, which TEF allows, will send a clear message to the most disadvantaged students that ‘excellence’ comes with an additional price tag and is not for them… academic potential, not the ability to pay more should determine who studies here.” The government claims that the assessment process will explicitly take into account outcomes for disadvantaged groups. The letter also criticises the metrics on which judgements will be based: “Measures like graduate employment outcomes and, to a lesser extent, the blunt NSS student satisfaction scores have absolutely nothing to do with innovative and challenging teaching. For example, we know that graduate destinations are largely informed by a student’s social background, race, gender and disability.” Audrey Sebatindira, CUSU Women’s Officer and one of the letter’s Continued on page 6 ▶
Love trumps hate: Cantabs gather for show of solidarity after US election results News 4-5
Revealed: CUSU national award entry filled with exaggerations Monty Fynn News Correspondent CUSU’s self-nomination for a National Union of Students award was riddled with factual errors and exaggerations, a Varsity investigation has found. CUSU was a finalist in the ‘Small and Specialist Union’ category of the annual NUS Awards, which recognise the achievements of student unions across the country. However, analysis by Varsity showed that CUSU’s nomination for the award contained a number of factual
discrepancies. The nomination was submitted in Lent Term 2016 by CUSU’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark McCormack, and aimed to summarise the achievements of the CUSU team lead by Priscilla Mensah, last year’s president. At the top of its list of achievements is the “Abolition of ‘Class Lists’ and removal of the infamous Tompkins Table” which it said “publicly pitch[es] colleges against each other by the number of Firsts students at each college are awarded.” At the time nominations closed in May 2016, not only were Class Lists not
abolished but the Grace proposing their abolition would not be submitted to Regent House for another two months. The Tompkins Table, which ranks Cambridge colleges on how their undergraduates perform in exams, was also published by Varsity this July. Furthermore, in a referendum earlier this month, students voted to overturn a motion to campaign for the abolition of Class Lists which was previously passed by CUSU Council, with a majority of nearly 11 per cent. CUSU has now been Continued on page 8 ▶