Cuts in funding leave York tutors very well fed
The students at York are left starving for some financial support whilst university staff feast off our tuition fees.
If you were to read the University’s Annual Financial report, an exercise that is quite an enlightening experience, as mind-numbing as it sounds, you would discover something rather amazing. If the figures alone were anything to go by, any York student would think they were attending an institution so awash with cash as to put the vulgar little nouveaux riches colleges of Oxbridge to shame.
Snippets read “there has been a 12% rise in the University’s total income over the past 12 months” and “operating cashflow was the highest it has ever been” or even “the increased consolidated income of £187 million is almost £20 million more than the previous year”. These would suggest that we walk along pathways of gold, sipping Dom Perignon from champagne fountains in Vanbrugh as we chat to each other on complimentary BlackBerries about the difficulty of employing good staff these days.
Instead, it is nigh on impossible to walk around campus at the moment, with bridge closures and swamp-like conditions on the routes which are open, and if you avoid the physical pitfalls there is always the constant money grabbing by the University for, books, gym membership, course packs and fees. Reports that YUSU officers have begun assaulting students to steal their phones and wallets remain unconfirmed.
So where is all this money going? Not to the Library, which has faced massive funding cuts, or to Your:Books, which is shutting down after. And certainly not to Nouse and Vision, whose courageous reportage is currently in jeopardy because of increased print costs which the union, and by implication the university, cannot cover. So although the campus and our education is supposedly “a priority”, according to the University, it seems that money is actually disappearing down two metaphorical black holes.
The first is Heslington East. The development, estimated to cost around £500 million, will double the size of the student population, give us a swimming pool, student union venue, and basically our dignity back. We will finally have the features of a campus which most other students across Britain take for granted. However, the second reason is altogether more mundane and predictable, and all the more depressing for it.
The restaurant where I work in York, which shall remain nameless, is one of the upmarket eateries on Fossgate. The average bill for two people usually comes to around £80. And who do I see traipsing in, week after week, and whipping out credit cards with ‘University of York’ embossed on them for meals of £500+ for parties, or the odd couple of hundred pounds here or there in groups of three or four? Thus far, I have served and chatted to members of the English, Philosophy, Law, Politics, Psychology, Physics and TV, Film & Theatre departments, some of them a handful of times each. The need for expense accounts to attract clients is understandable, but I only work two shifts a week, which means that I probably meet a fraction of the actual number of university staff who are spending our fees drinking yet another £25 bottle of wine to go with their venison in truffle juices.
Bloated expense accounts are why, to return to the financial report, “plans to manage resources more efficiently failed to reduce expenditure overall”. Perhaps a quick glance at their receipts would remind the departments who casually consume our money that the implications for students, and for York’s financial future, are far-reaching and a shameful mark on the record of this university.
