In de University of Sussex, Brighton, hebben op 8 februari naar eigen zeggen met 106 studenten een verdieping bezet. De aanleiding: bezuinigingen en de daardoor dreigende personeelsverminderingen. “We recognise that an attack on education workers is an attack on us”, aldus de “occupiers of the 8th of february”.

Het begon met de aankondiging van het bestuur dat er een personeelsvermindering van 115 personeel zou plaatsvinden. In plaats van alternatieve plannen van de docenten- en studentenbonden serieus te nemen ontstond het risico dat het bestuur de “National Student Survey” zou gaan gebruiken om de personeelsvermindering te rechtvaardigen, door bijvoorbeeld de NSS te gebruiken om aan te tonen dat er geen correlatie bestaat tussen “student-staff ratios” en “student satisfaction”, aldus de studentenbond van Sussex University. Nadat de studentenbond al had opgeroepen de NSS te boycotten als zwak substituut voor werkelijke studentenbetrokkenheid, hebben 106 studenten nu een verdieping bezet om hun verzet tegen de personeelsvermindering te versterken.

Lees hieronder hun eerste verklaring. En blijf via deze website op de hoogte.

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Occupation Statement 1
February 8, 2010

We have occupied the top floor of Bramber House, University of Sussex, Brighton. There are 106 of us.

The decision to occupy has been taken after weeks of concerted campaigning during which the university management have repeatedly failed to take away the threat of compulsory redundancies and course cuts.

We recognise that an attack on education workers is an attack on us.

The room we have occupied is not a lecture theatre but a conference centre. As such, we are not disrupting the education of our fellow students; rather, we are disrupting a key part of management’s strategy to run the university as a profitable business.

They’re occupying everywhere in waves across California, New York, Greece, Croatia, Germany and Austria and elsewhere — and not only in the universities. We send greetings of solidarity and cheerful grins to all those occupation movements and everyone else fighting the pay cuts, cuts in services and jobs which will multiply everywhere as bosses and states try and pull out of the crisis.

But we are the crisis.

Profitability mean nothing against the livelihoods destroyed, lost homes, austerity measures, green or otherwise. We just heard we’ve increased ‘operational costs’ — they’d set out the building for a meeting and now they’ll have to do it again

We’ll show them “operational costs.”

Occupy again and again and again.

NO CUTS ANYWHERE.

THE UNIVERSITY IS A FACTORY. STRIKE. OCCUPY.

-All the occupiers of the 8th of February.