Goldsmiths occupation against new round of cuts

 Students at Goldsmiths University of London have occupied the college library in New Cross in protest against another round of cuts threatening the jobs of hundreds of staff (academic and professional services) and leaving the future of some courses in doubt.

As the occupiers have noted, 'Goldsmiths is a microcosm of the decimation of Higher Education, the arts and our collective society'. The funding crisis is only part of it - it feels that there is an attempt to fundamentally change the nature of the institution and shift it from being a place of critical thinking and experimentation. 

Follows freegoldsmiths for updates. There is a rally on Wednesday at noon

See also - a chronology of Goldsmiths occupations (updated)

Goldsmiths: Redundancies protests/Palestine occupation

A rally in the rain at Goldsmiths College last night (15 March 2024) brought together the fight against job cuts and the ongoing 'Goldsmiths for Palestine' occupation.

 

Job Cuts

The ongoing financial crisis at Goldsmiths seems to be reaching a critical point with senior management announcing on 28th February that as part of its 'Transformation Programme' it is planning compulsory redundancies for 130 full time equivalent posts (likely to affect many more than 130 people, as many are on part time contracts). Goldsmiths management certainly deserve the criticism it is getting but the bigger picture is inadequate national Government funding of higher education which is driven not just be economic considerations but by culture war hostility to arts, humanities and social sciences subjects. As stated on this poster, 'This attempt to erode our university represents a broader assault on critical, cultural and political education across academia': 

Goldsmiths for Palestine

Meanwhile the 'Goldsmiths for Palestine' occupation of the College's Stuart Hall building looks set to continue into its fifth week, having started on 19th February

See previously:

A history of student occupations at Goldsmiths

 

Goldsmiths Occupations: a chronology

Found at the awesome 56a Info Shop archive a copy of SHIP Network News (Southwark Homeless Information Project) reports an occupation at Goldsmiths College in Summer 1991, specifically of the  Outreach Unit at 32 Lewisham Way which had just been closed down. 'the occupiers have opened it up to anyone and everyone' and proclaimed a 'free university' with a planned democratic education summer school. Not sure how far this got, as they seemed to have quickly been served a court summons. I don't know if this was the same 1991 occupation at which there was talk of Spiral Tribe putting on a party in the Great Hall only to be blocked by nervous student union officials.

There have been quite a few occupations at Goldsmiths over the years, some of which we have covered here previously. But here's an attempt at a chronology - no doubt missing many so let us know if you have any others - or have memories/documentation of the one below.

1968: Perhaps surprizingly Goldsmiths does not seem to have been directly affected by the wave of student occupations of art schools in 1968, notably at Croydon and at Hornsey Colleges of Art. It is though recorded that ‘Sixty students from Goldsmiths’ College of Art, New Cross, SE, invaded Hornsey College of Art on the first day of its new term… They crowded into the corridors of Hornsey and chanted ‘We support you. We support you’. Hornsey college authorities called police, who dispersed the students and ejected them’ (Times, 5 November 1968).

1976: Students at Goldsmiths voted to occupy as a part of a wave of protests sweeping teacher training colleges prompted by the fact that at a time of education cuts many newly qualified teachers were leaving college and ending up unemployed.(Socialist Worker, 29 May 1976)

1984:  the Administration building (later the Whitehead building) was occupied for 8 days to protest against staff cuts in the Media and Communications team (more here)

1991: 'free university' occupation at 32 Lewisham Way (see above)

1999: as detailed by Past Tense, 'Part of Goldsmiths College, New Cross, was occupied 26th February – March 5th 1999. 300 students took over college admin building, after eight students were expelled because they couldn’t pay £1000 a year tuition fees that had been imposed on them. A court granted the college an eviction order, but the occupying students refused to leave till the eight reinstated. A few weeks previously, students had held a demonstration, blocking New Cross Road outside, over same issue'. Mark Brown told me on Twitter that during this occupation they received a message of support from Kevin Rowland (Dexys Midnight Runners) and that Rob Newman, Silver Sun and Mark Keds (Senseless Things) all played.

2009: a two day occupation of the Deptford Town Hall building  by 50 or so students as part of a national wave of protest against Israel's bombing of Gaza (plus ca change). The occupation did achieve one of its demands -  scholarships for students from Palestine's al-Quds university. The blog from the occupation is still online 

2009

2010 saw a huge movement linking together university students, school students and others in the front line of austerity in the aftermath of the financial crash.  In November 2010 around 40 students occupied the old Deptford Town Hall for two days in protest at education cuts and the proposed increase in students fees. Effigies of prime minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg were strung up on New Cross Road next to a banner saying 'Education for the Masses, not the Ruling Classes'. More here.

November 2010 occupation

Then in December 2010 there was a larger scale occupation of the library, with several hundred taking part at the beginning. This lasted for almost a week from 5 to 11 December (More here and here). I believe Kae Tempest (then known as Excentral Tempest) performed at the occupation. The radical anthropologist David Graeber, then working at the College, was heavily involved, going on the next year to play a significant role in the Occupy protest in New York.  I gave a talk in the library on the radical history of New Cross.

December 2010

In March 2011 there was a short occupation of the Town Hall in support of striking lecturers. More here

March 2011

A short occupation of the Whitehead building in November 2011 declared itself 'in solidarity with the UK-wide strike on November 30th and the global occupy movement. We are here because we reject the privatisation of the university, symptomatic of the neo-liberal agenda that permeates all aspects of life. For this reason we have strategically occupied the building housing Goldsmiths’ finance offices, responsible for executing the cuts and the privatisation agenda'. More here.

November 2011

In December 2013 around 100 people occupied the Town Hall building in support of striking staff. More here.

2013

March 2015 saw another occupation of the Town Hall with a wide range of demands and a focus on the marketisation of education. More here

2015

The Goldsmiths Anti- Racist Action occupation of 2019 took over part of the Town Hall and lasted for a mammoth 137 days between March and July. Arising as part of the global Black Lives Matter movement its demands focused on institutional racism at Goldsmiths. 

2019

Goldsmiths students occupied the Stuart Hall building on 20th February 2024 in solidarity with Palestine. The occupation finished after five weeks, with the University agreeing to create an additional Palestinian scholarship:

(2024 images from Gold4Palestine)

On 29 May 2024 there was a further Palestinian solidarity occupation of the College's gallery, the Centre for Contemporary Arts, prompted by allegations of it receiving sponsorship from Zac Gertler, a property magnate described last year as 'Netanyahu’s new favorite multimillionaire, the owner of the Carlton Hotel in Tel Aviv, where Bibi spent a tense election night last November'. The occupation continued until the end of term nearly a month later.

photo by not_crime_twinc

With Goldsmiths management threatening to make more than 130 lecturers redundant as part of a brutal programme of cuts, students occupied the Council Chamber in the old Deptford Town Hall on 4 June 2024 and remained there for over a week.

photo by @phellermann

Update April 2026:

In April 2026,  students occupied the library against the latest round of  funding and staff cuts. The occupiers reckoned that this was the 15th Goldsmiths occupation, and have built on what I wrote above to find out some more about this history: 

'Goldsmiths has an extraordinary history of student organising and activism, earning itself a reputation as the first to take action against injustice. Students at Goldsmiths have occupied at least 14 times since 1968, in 1976, 1984, 1999,  2009, twice in 2010, 2013, 2015, 2019, four times in 2024. And now in 2026 we have this returned to the potency of the occupation in our defence of knowledge and creativity. 

In honour of our predecessors and to sustain the collective memory of Goldsmiths as a place for action, we have filled our occupation with archival banners, placards and zines from pa'st student organisers, campaigns and occupations.  Please visit us so together we can investigate what can be learned from past organisers and occupations, and if you have any additional material from previous occupations, please drop them off, we’ll take good care of them! (Free Goldsmiths, April 2026)

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

Students occupy Goldsmiths in support of staff strike

Students at Goldsmiths are occupying the Deptford Town Hall building on New Cross Road. In a statement issued last night they say:

'Tonight over 100 of us are occupying the offices of Goldsmiths University management, in solidarity with our lecturers and university staff who have been forced into striking for the second time on 3rd December over a 13% pay decrease in the past four years.

Our objective is simple: to escalate. UCEA, the negotiating body for universities, refuse to re-enter negotiations, citing lack of money. This simply isn't true, there is a 2 billion pound surplus in the sector. We'd suggest that if managers are looking for savings, they should start by looking at their own salaries. The university sector has the biggest pay disparity of all public sectors, with the gender pay gap widening with every new government policy of marketisation.

We also send our solidarity to other occupations around the country, and encourage other campuses to join in. We're aiming for Deptford Town hall to remain closed on strike day tomorrow and we encourage everyone to join and support the picket lines around campus. There will be a meeting at 8am inside the occupation, all students and staff are welcome!'

There is a D3 Occupation facebook page here.

The occupation comes as staff at Goldsmiths and other universities take national strike action over pay. Goldsmiths UCU (University and College Union) say:

'On Tuesday 3rd December lecturers and support staff at Goldsmiths will be taking strike action for the second time this year and we would like to make clear our reasons for this. For the fifth successive year UCEA, the employers organisation, have made an offer to increase pay by 1%, well below the current rate of inflation. In effect both lecturers and support staff have seen their incomes fall by 13% since 2008.

Over the same period, student fees have been increased to £9,000 a year for home students and upwards of £11,000 for international students. Thanks to successful recruitment and the acknowledged high quality of degree courses at Goldsmiths the University has managed to maintain a healthy operating surplus, some of which has been invested in improving the state of the teaching accommodation. Sadly this has not been extended to investing in the majority of the staff all of whom make a substantial contribution to the success of Goldsmiths.

While salaries of lecturers and support staff have declined in real terms, the same cannot be said of the Warden who has recently been awarded a 9% pay rise and benefits from a pension contribution far in excess of the annual salary of most support staff. We would like to congratulate him on his success in helping secure the place of Goldsmiths in a global marketplace but would remind him of the contribution to this of everyone who works here. A few crumbs from the top table wouldn't go amiss'.