University students ripped off
ELEFT-WING lecturers voted for another three days of disruption this week, preferring to stand on picket lines at 58 universities rather than teach over a million of their students.
It’s not as if their current crop of students haven’t suffered enough over the last few years at the hands of the people who are supposed to be educating them. It started with strike action in November 2019 when 40,000 staff at 60 universities walked out, joined by another 14 universities in January 2020, followed shortly afterwards by the Covid lockdown from March 2020.
Students I spoke to said campuses have been closed, libraries locked, and that most online lectures have been woeful – and yet despite all that they’ve had to continue paying student fees of over £9,000 year.They have been treated appallingly, paying through the nose over the last two years – and for what? Strikes, followed by lockdown, followed by more strikes.
What I can’t understand is why they haven’t marched across campuses, demanding a refund, and confronting the striking lecturers about having their student experience ruined. Maybe some couldn’t be bothered with the aggravation of getting a refund, especially when repayment was some years away, but I know some who feared reprisals – being marked out as troublemakers, getting their work marked down and leaving with a lower degree level.
That fear has effectively silenced them.
What has happened to our universities? They should be centres of excellence, places that allow free speech and enable debate, but all too often they are anything but, with Left-wing ideology being rammed down people’s throats and the no-platforming of anyone who happens to hold a different view.
Universities should be value for money too and they should value their students (who are their customers after all) but too many seem to treat them with contempt.
Universities claim they can’t afford to give refunds and that it would put them under an unbearable financial strain.
Well, I have some news for them – that has happened to businesses up and down the country during the lockdowns.
Isn’t it time universities were made to operate in the real world, and to treat their customers like businesses have to? University students deserve a refund.
PWHEN the House of Commons changed the rules in 2019 to allow proxy voting for MPs on maternity and paternity leave, I put forward an amendment which was accepted to extend the right to a proxy vote for a short period of time for those who had miscarried.
I therefore support a Bill which came before the Commons yesterday from SNP MP Angela Crawley (right) who wants to change the law to allow women who miscarry before 24 weeks paid bereavement leave – something the current law only allows if a child is stillborn after 24 weeks. Her Bill would provide three days of paid bereavement leave.