Hey ho everyone, in case you are looking for some relaxing reading over the long weekend, those nice people at the Journal of Cultural Economy has just posted an online archive of some of the material generated on Twitter and on blogs over the last month or so investigating the wider contexts for the strike action by staff at pre-92 higher education institutions in the UK. This includes collated twitter threads by Gail Davies on the role of consultancy in shaping the landscape of HE pensions ‘reform’, Felicity Callard on the way in which what’s going on now in 2018 stretches back at least as far as 2014, and @etymologic on the cross-cutting networks that connect up UUK, USS, and other high-level HE advocacy and regulatory agencies; and re-published blog posts by Philip Roscoe on the construction of the USS deficit as an economic ‘fact’, Penny Andrews on what has been exposed by this dispute, and a re-versioned blogpost by me orn The Means and Ends of Higher Education (this includes a slightly filled out analysis of the example of the University of Exeter’s attachment to its capital investment programme – a reminder, ahead of further developments in this dispute next week that the key issue in all this is not the valuation of the USS scheme per se, but the question of how much risk Universities are willing to bear – that’s the issue that connects the pensions dispute to a series of broader issues that extend far beyond this dispute and will not be resolved by it whatever the outcome, all the way down to how we are micro-managed through annual reviews, income targets, poorly designed student appraisals, etc etc).

Thanks ever so much to Liz McFall and others at JCE for putting this together. It’s an important step in curating material that deserves wide accessibility both in the immediate term – this material leads off in directions that all UCU members should consider before deciding on the UUK-written ‘proposal’ to be balloted next week – and going forward, in facilitating ongoing rigorous scrutiny of UUK and other powerful actors in the future.