IWW Glasgow University Job Branch Requests Solidarity
Submitted on Tue, 06/26/2007 - 12:50pm
The IWW is continuing in our support for the Crichton workers' and students' fight to save their jobs and courses. We're stepping up our fight by picketing or leafleting every major event Glasgow University is hosting on its main campus, in an effort to raise the visibility of our campaign, and we are pursuing other initiatives to force a climbdown on the decision to close the campus. However to make our presence really felt we urge you and your friends to take a few minutes out of your day to demonstrate the strength of feeling we have on this issue. Please help us by contacting the following people. It's vital at this stage that public pressure, from civil society groups and so on, is actually visibily increasing on this issue.
Contact the Principal, Sir Muir Russell and complain at the decision.
Email: [email protected]; Tel: 0141 330 5995
Contact the Scottish Funding Council and urge them to help Glasgow University find a resolution to this problem
Email: [email protected]
Contact Fiona Hyslop, Minister for Education and Lifelong Learning, and urge her to act quickly to help resolve the situation.
Email: [email protected]
POINTS TO NOTE IN YOUR COMMUNICATIONS:-
Glasgow University made a profit last year of £2 million.
The claims of the University that the Crichton Campus loses £800,000 a year have been dismissed as laughable by MSPs from across all the political parties.
The University hopes to spend the money it will gain from closing its part of the Crichton campus (liberal arts) on recruiting just 3 researchers to boost the University's image. Money which should have been directed to the Crichton campus has went to fund a new business school at the main Glasgow campus.
In a previous job, as Scotland's most powerful civil servant, Sir Muir Russell presided over the building of the Scottish parliament, which was supposed to cost £50 million, but in fact cost £400 million more
than this. This man is clearly not very shrewd with money, and this casts doubt on his claims that the Crichton is not viable, and indeed on what his plans are to do with this cash instead.
Dumfries and Galloway has no other Higher Education facility, and suffers economically from a gap in graduates, and graduate jobs, as well as a skewn age demographic as young people leave Dumfries and Galloway for the central belt to find education and work.