Published: 5th March, 2018
Wow! What a day… it’s difficult to know where to start. Our third week of strike action began bright and breezy as always, with pickets out and about well before 8am. The snow had thawed, the Beast from the East receding, and UCU strikers and their supporters all had a spring in the step. There’s always been plenty of music on our picket lines and today was no exception, the usual drummers now augmented by a strummer.
Over the past two weeks we’ve been wowed by the solidarity expressed by students, in Leicester and up and down the country. But we’ve also received expressions of solidarity from educators elsewhere. In West Virginia, teachers and other workers in public schools have now been on strike for 8 days, demanding a 5% wage rise.
Support from philosophers in the Czech Republic and, on our very own picket line, from Finland…
What even is a ‘pornstar Martini‘? and other thoughts…
Are picketers hanging out Paul Boyle’s dirty laundry down at Entrance 2 on University Road?
Whose university? Our university!
And…. in ongoing news … the magnificent Leicester students decide to occupy the ‘executive corridor’ of the Fielding Johnson building – location of Paul Boyle’s office and those of other members of his ‘leadership team’… here are some photos from the inside, the demands – hastily written by the look of it, but right on-point nonetheless – and the wholehearted support from outside. (Our statement of support is here; and here is our statement in response to some reported violence to occupiers by University of Leicester security.)
Leicester… we are not alone. One of three new occupations today:
Elsewhere on campus, the programme of Free University of Leicester continues. In the students’ union building speakers ask ‘why is my curriculum so white?’, discuss privatisation, casualisation and the gig economy, and talk about racism in colonial US education.
There was also a last-minute room change – familar to all staff and students at University of Leicester – with one session (appropriately titled ‘the fire last time’, on the legacies on May 1968) being moved to the Fielding Johnson building…
Events are obviously unfolding too fast, so if you can’t get down to a picket line in person, then keep up-to-date on our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter @LeicesterUCU. Be sure that VCs everywhere, if they dare to look out their windows, see this sort of scene…
and we’ll say ‘goodnight’ to the FJB Occupiers, enjoying their ‘protest pizza’. See you in the morning…
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