TVSTRANGERTHINGS
titsay
Kiana Khansmith
Stranger Things
JVL
Xuebing Du
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
JBB: An Artblog!
★
No title available
sheepfilms
almost home
Game of Thrones Daily
No title available
Three Goblin Art
@theartofmadeline
cherry valley forever
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
macklin celebrini has autism
No title available
seen from Austria
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom
seen from India
seen from Japan
seen from Germany
seen from France
seen from Singapore
seen from France
seen from Malaysia
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from United States
seen from United States
@imaginaryparty-blog
This from Students Against Boredom perhaps suggests away out of the Malaise Wednesday's demonstration threatens...
The student movement cut from the shards of Millbank has departed to a world of unaffordable debt and unattainable jobs - but has the dream departed with it? We think not, but we must be pragmatic about where we stand: chancellors are lobbying for even higher fees; the government is privatising...
Senate House, Malet Street, May 1st Meet 6PM, set off 7.30PM
The University has seen mass pickets by cleaners, caterers, students and other insubordinates, arm in arm before the gates of a paint splattered university HQ. Watching through clenched teeth and the multiple lenses of their surveillance...
SHARE // TWEET // PHOTOCOPY // REPEAT !!!
Management are the Police: Abolish them. #sacksmith #copsoffcampus NATIONAL DAY OF FUN, February 28, ULU, 1PM ALL OUT! https://www.facebook.com/events/574503732634294/579134545504546/?notif_t=like
#SACKSMITH #COPSOFFCAMPUS Reclaim the university! They can't manage us... Feb 28, 1 PM, ULU - See you on the streets! share / tweet / photocopy / repeat! Hi-res PDF here - http://www.mediafire.com/view/cdc38n6wm6hvya8/Poster.pdf
THE UNIVERSITY IS DEAD …AND COP FREE ZONES!
VIOLENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY
Make no mistake: to threaten someone with a stick is the ultimate anti-intellectual gesture. And if one thing has become clear in recent months, this is the first—really the only—impulse of the current government when faced with challenges to their vision for higher...
Lets be honest with ourselves, its not that the cops have been attacking ‘peaceful’ protests, it is the police who organize peaceful protests in collaboration with ‘acceptable’ and ‘legitimate’ groups, this is why they are allowed, they are completely ineffectual – what the police have been...
VIOLENCE AND THE UNIVERSITY
Make no mistake: to threaten someone with a stick is the ultimate anti-intellectual gesture. And if one thing has become clear in recent months, this is the first—really the only—impulse of the current government when faced with challenges to their vision for higher...
Refuse to be intimidated.
This is a call out for an urgent mobilisation at the University of London Union (ULU) in opposition to the continued practices of police intimidation, surveillance and assault on students, workers and higher education activists.
On the 14th November Michael Chessum, the current President of the...
look out for these guys on the demo tomorrow. lets raise some cash 4 antifash
Don't feel down .... This is a life's work. A life's joy. The next one hundred years are ours.....
National Student Demo. Sussex University. March 25
Housing Speculation, Student Debt, Fees and Dispossession - a 21st Century Love Story - Communique concerning UCL Stratford
There are several questions we have all been asking over these last few years. Where will we live? How will we be able to afford such expensive rent in London? How will we find jobs that pay enough to enjoy ourselves and live in comfort? When will we pay back our student debt? How? We must be clear from the beginning, all the questions articulated above maintain a certain tie to one another. They are not unrelated problems, haphazardly assembled by the hands of mundane serendipity, the chaotic and capricious whim of fortuna, the inevitability of everyday life. No, we insist that they are all preciously constructed, maintained and reproduced in order to cultivate a certain set of social relations and a particular way of doing things. What ties them all together is debt, your debt, and the surplus that it creates being appropriated by Swiss private equity firms, Gulf state sovereign wealth funds, US and Japanese pension funds. The Financial Times writes with earnest regularity on how the London student residential market represents a major source of income in these hard times for our mendicant investors, now on average making ten times the returns when compared to residential property from elsewhere in the UK. The student housing sector has ballooned from a fringe investment 10 years ago to a global market worth $200bn today with it becoming a ‘must have investment for most large funds’. At the same time that we observe huge speculation on student accommodation and the ferocious entrance of private equity into the sector, we also see universities, now both sides of the Atlantic, issuing bonds secured against future earnings from tuition fees. The primary example here is the University of California which is presently in $13 billion debt as a consequence of various bond issues over the years and now, much as is the case with the sovereign debt of Greece and Spain, has to issue new bonds to ‘roll over’ the repayment of old ones. For institutions such as UCSC within the University of California the fact that there is no cap on fees, combined with the perpetual demand for college degrees (this is after all the only way one may enter the labour market for the overwhelming majority of ‘well paid’ jobs) means that despite their status as heavily leveraged institutions which for potential investors would not seem like a particularly good bet - they remain investment grade.
Subsequently the capacity of UCSC to raise tuition fees to whatever level it likes is advertised in every bond prospectus. Despite its high levels of debt UCSC is still seen as investment worthy precisely because it can charge what it likes, and as is meant to be the case, there are more applicants than places. This is not regarded as academic competition by university management however, rather it is seen as a situation of over-demand and insufficient supply, and hence the signal to further increase tuition fees until equilibrium and the ‘just’ price is found. Market equilibrium magistra vitae est.
We feel it important that students are in full receipt of these facts and are confronted with the inevitable outcome that the present cap of £9000 on tuition fees will not remain with us for long. Already we expect that the Russell Group of universities is lobbying to have it removed. Elsewhere those institutions such as De Montfort who, like UCSC, have begun to issue their own bonds will also need the cap to be abolished in order to guarantee the lowest costs for the debt-financing of future projects - a necessity in light of government funding being all but scrapped.
The present cap will soon go, and institutions as disparate as Cambridge and De Montfort are now issuing their own bonds. The university increasingly resembles little more than a debt factory. This is not glib comment, a casual and speculative refrain, but merely a statement of observable fact. Our future looks like Santa Cruz, only without the beach.
University College London have recently embarked on a £1 billion project - the extension of their London campus into Stratford. The fact that an institution which is failing to balance budgets in the short-to-medium term amid the most volatile period for higher education funding in decades is choosing to embark on such a large and unprecedented expansion is remarkable. Remarkable, but also of its time, in so much as it brings together many elements of the present moment and various catalysts for future crisis and present suffering. The dispossession of the land of those 300 people who still live there and the debt-financed investment in real estate and speculation on student housing, primarily for wealthier non-EU students. Social housing replaced by student housing funds run by private wealth managers, education no longer about capabilities and learning but merely a means by which to create returns from a relationship of debt.
UCL Stratford thus brings together many of the problems that you yourself face - impossible rent, debt, high fees. As a fee-paying student you are a cash cow - not just when you study, but even when you live in student accommodation. The institution does not serve your needs, rather you serve its need to service its debt and finance an ever larger number of managers who wish to ‘invest’ in land speculation and high-end residential buildings and perhaps even a few research centres. You may think of yourself as a part of the student body, but for the ‘bond guys’ and the more intelligent ones in university management you are simply thought of as what creates ‘returns’.
Universities are increasingly disposed to entering into what can only be described as PFI agreements with private equity and these ‘student housing funds’ to fund the construction of housing that students can live in throughout their university ‘experience’. We see this in the recent £1billion development in Cambridge that will see 3,000 new residential units for students - paid for in part by a £350 million 40 year bond - in partnership with private capital.
As UK universities increasingly employ financial instruments like those seen in California such as long-term bonds (which should really be called securities) students will be seen as no more than producers of the means of repayment, their debt the axis that produces the wheel turning for private investors seeking safe and strong returns and keeping the university afloat as public funding contracts to the point of an almost infinitesimal gesture that borders upon nothingness. This is your future as a debt, a debtor, the guarantor of returns for private equity and pension funds. You will be the assurance against loans that will pay for building facilities and housing that will mean more students who can pay more fees and more rent in order to secure yet more facilities and housing. And so on. All the time fees increasing in order to find equilibrium, rent increasing as there is quite literally nowhere else for you to live and the sons and daughters of the wealthiest families from across the globe are willing to pay.
UCL Stratford represents an active act of dispossession, taking people by force from their homes if necessary. It is pure, unadulterated violence. It has a direct relationship to your debt and the fact that rent in London is increasingly untenable for all but the very wealthiest individuals. Like the university, student housing is a debt factory. UCL Stratford, much like this whole miserable future on offer, can not be allowed to happen. If it does, if these projects and this system continue unimpeded, our lives will be miserable, brutish and shit - make no mistake about it.
Find each other. Educate, Escalate, Destroy.
Courtesy of the Imaginary Party Collaterized Loan Obligation Escalation Working Group (IPCLOEWG)
