Striking professors have wrecked my university course

Students are paying over £9,000 a year for courses offering terrible value for money. These strikes are the final insult

Most university students will have jotted down the coming strike days of the Universities and College Union (UCU) by now – although some may have done so with more regret than others. I’m not surprised by the forthcoming disruption. Conversations about strikes have been floating around since my first term at university two years ago.

The teaching I receive is already sparse enough. I have only five lectures a week with a sprinkle of seminars and tutorials, bringing my total hours to around seven, on average. So when considering the strikes from a face-to-face teaching point of view I’m not necessarily top of the complaining list. But every lost class or lecture will surely have an effect, however marginal, on my likelihood of attaining a good grade.

This February, I am receiving only nine days of guaranteed teaching because of these UCU strikes. I know it’s a short month, but still! It means that one of my modules, a fortnightly two-hour seminar session, is losing two out of the four remaining sessions of my second term. In another module, I’m likely only to receive one more lecture before a 100 per cent end of year exam.

I am now stripped of invaluable in-person discussions which cannot be replicated, left hoping that my own knowledge will suffice and any emails I send will eventually receive a reply in between the numerous strike dates.

Over 70,000 staff are expected to participate in the industrial action, across 150 universities. Yet we students remain in the dark and are left to fend for ourselves. The strikes were revealed to me, along with so many others, through our student newspaper. The silence is deafening.

I have only received one empty email addressing the strikes from my institution, which came through almost a week after the dates were released. So far there has been a severe lack of attempts by universities to mitigate the impact of these strikes, and despite empty emails promising more to come, students seem to be falling down in the list of priorities.

Some 44 per cent of the days left in my Epiphany term are now affected by strikes. My weeks ahead look bleak: without in-person teaching I am simply reduced to a static position in our already overcrammed library, chipping away at endless essays as the dynamic, collaborative and stimulating part of my degree disintegrates.

I understand the reasons behind the UCU actions – the conditions are unfair and the system needs serious reviewing – but do students need to be affected so severely? How much more time at university are we going to miss out on?

The university administrators have serious questions to answer, too, because it’s quite clear that money is being spent in the wrong way. We students borrow (or spend up front) over £9,000 per annum for many of these courses; therefore university provisions are hardly acts of charity. But in return we get housing shortages near campus, sky-high rental fees and transportation problems.

Some might be tempted to check Ryanair for any last-minute getaways (don’t worry, I’ve already looked – oneway trip to Lanzarote for £15, anyone?) but this is not where our student loan and nine grand should be going, however tempting it may seem.

So, while this industrial action will give students some time to refresh, check in on their mental health, slightly lower their workloads and socialise a little more, the isolation faced by students must not go unnoticed. This simply isn’t what we signed up for.