Goldsmiths Occupation

Goldsmiths students are occupying the college's Deptford Town Hall building in New Cross Road, part of a wave of occupations that has also seen similar protests at Central St Martins (University of the Arts London) and the LSE, among others.

The full list of demands is as follows:

Goldsmiths occupation demands

Counselling services:

-          Recruit more counsellors to meet demand.

-          We want to see a tangible reduction in the waiting list for the service

-          Resist the planned restructure

-          Secure jobs within the service, and stop any redundancy

DSA:

-          Resist any cuts to the Disabled Students Allowance

-          Demand more investment in making the university accessible to students with disabilities

-          Bring all services in-house and put an end to all outsourcing

Sustaining Goldsmiths:

-          Establish an all union (UCU, Unison, Unite, GSU) committee to oversee the implementation of the sustaining goldsmiths plan.

-          Resist any increase in student numbers without matching it with an increase in resources.

-          Freeze Senior Management pay for five years and reduce their pay before anyone elses is.

Lack of space

-          Move the Senior Management Team to Warmington Tower to free up their spacious offices for teaching space. 

Curriculum:

-          Curriculum should be organised by students alongside academics, and not from the top-down. Open forums should be held to consider what the students want to learn

-          Transparency in the department- including better communication with students

-          The DSC system is a broken mechanism for communicating between students. The DSCs are overloaded with work, not respected by management and this leads to students to feeling alienated and disempowered from their departments 

Wider Aims:

-          A commitment to working towards a Free University of London

-          Full financial transparency

-          A radical reduction in the pay disparity of University staff, at the maximum of 6:1

-          Cut ties with unethical companies in regards to funding including those complicit in fossil fuel 

investment

-          Liberation: zero tolerance policies on all forms of prejudice, discrimination and oppression. One way we think this can be achieved is for annual funding to be provided for a full-time Women’s Officer who would be tasked with campaigning on Women and Liberation issues

-          Police not welcome on campus

-          Free Education

-          Fight marketisation and privatisation of higher education

-          Workers’ rights for everyone who works at Goldsmiths

-          All on-campus staff including security to be brought in house, receive a living wage as minimum and solidified union recognition.

-          Solidarity with LSE, UAL, University of Amsterdam  and King’s College London who are all in occupation

There's lots of talks and other events happening, check their twitter account for further details