Recipe for the perfect strike – ‘proper’ chips and cookies

While you’ve been worrying about Russia, British academe has been all aflame over the threatened and quite severe curtailment of their pensions, a dispute with Universities UK (UUK) that has led to several weeks of lecturers’ strikes. Personally, I’m wary of unions, particularly in trades such as this, where less rather than more regulation is desirable. So I have been merely watching.

Watching and sometimes giggling. For if this was ever a strike about pensions, it’s now about anything but.

Some, like the trendy anthropologist Jason Hickel, put this in grand terms, writing on his website that: “This isn’t just about pensions anymore – there’s a revolution afoot.”

Indeed, Hickel seems to be urging the complete overthrow of capitalism with this strike, declaring that: “What we’re really after is nothing short of reclaiming our universities from the banal and reductive logic of neoliberal capitalism.” Oh, I say.

Revolution aside, the strike has also been, to some degree, about picketline lifestyle choice. During the cold snap, striking lecturers donned snazzy, social media-ready winterwear and cute woollens, and posted artful pictures of delivery by supporters of “proper” chips, tea trolleys and baked goods. One strike-happy geographer tweeted a picture of the chocolate chip cookies he’d baked for the picket line. “I call them cUUKies because, like @ UniversitiesUK, you’ll bite off more than you can chew!”

Of course, this strike was never really going to be just about pensions. After all, many academics – a Leftleaning bunch, if ever there was one – are politically enamoured of industrial militancy. Many have devoted years of study to industrial disputes, class revolt and the evils of neoliberalism, and now it’s their turn.

Which helps explain why last week the lecturers’ union roundly rejected the UUK offer with the hashtag #nocapitulation.

The fun’s not over yet.