In 2014 Marxist Historian Peter Linebaugh opened his farewell address to the University of Toledo in Counterpunch with “These reflections originate in rage…” before offering up a dictionary definition of rage as “poetic or prophetic enthusiasm”. A reference to his former tutor E.P Thompson reminds us that the initial catalyst for Thompson’s resignation from Warwick University after publishing ‘Warwick University Ltd’ (1970) was a student occupation in response to a lack of provision of informal space supporting social interaction and student-led activities. Taking Linebaugh’s lead, the following words are offered up more in a spirit of resignation, so we might turn to the dictionary again:
Resignation: 1. The action or an act of relinquishing, surrendering, or giving up something; the returning of lands by a vassal to a feudal superior. c1380 2. The action or fact of resigning from one’s employment, from an office, as a member of an organization.
This can be pulled down into an increasingly uncertain role as Lecturer in BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (CSM), part of the University of the Arts London (UAL). And pulled down further to a dawning realisation of creeping modes of student exploitation permeating educational environments. An awakening might be prompted by the aggressive encroachment on departmental studio space enacted by the UAL Timetabling Team in line with centralised administrative plans to ‘optimise’ the use of space across the entire UAL estate. This general sense of relinquishing, surrendering, or giving up something and in this case, a returning of lands by a vassal to a feudal superior was tempered during a recent UAL All Staff Briefing when the UAL Students for Justice in Palestine (UAL SJP) disrupted the newly appointed Vice-Chancellor, Karen Stanton’s announcement of ‘financial controls’, including proposed cuts, staff recruiting freezes and a voluntary severance scheme. These acts of student-led resistance continue to represent a direct challenge to university management regimes worldwide, particularly those caught up in glaring acquiescence and complicity in the face of Israel’s genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza. In this case, the students made links between contradictions in the university’s outward facing positioning and its internal actions:
We condemn UAL’s complicity in genocide, and we condemn the so-called restructuring of the cost of the quality of our education […]. They use progressive language like climate justice, erasing its radical and transformative meaning, praising themselves for their race equality and sustainability accolades while ignoring advice from academics who make anti-imperialist, environmentalist and anti-racist reasoned critiques of UAL.[1]
This UAL SJP action also occurred within the shadow of a recent National Association for Fine Art Education conference purporting to “question and speculate on whether a counter-hegemonic alliance between mainstream and alternative art schools is possible?”[2] A timely reminder that counter-hegemonic solidarities between students, staff and other institutional workers remains alive and kicking within ‘mainstream art schools’. Any such future alliances might also factor in whether the mainstream as such, is already deeply inscribed in the alternative where, according to artist and writer Dave Beech, “Since the alternative art school set itself up against the neoliberal capture of the old art schools that had already been captured by the polytechnic and university, the question that must be raised, from my point of view, is whether it is thereby opposed to neoliberalism or is another expression of it.”[3]
Never mind the alternatives, the existence of autonomous workers’ education programmes orbiting and at times, passing through mainstream educational institutions, opening sites of antagonism, resistance and class conflict deserves attention. Of particular note and related to current labour struggles, these include the United Voices of the World’s (UVW) successful campaigns against ‘indirect racial discrimination’ linked to outsourcing at St. George’s, University of London and the App Drivers & Couriers Union’s (ADCU) resounding victory against Uber at the UK Supreme Court over the employment status of on-call casual labour or ‘gig economy’ workers around 2021.
But where does UAL’s proposed land grab on departmental studio space figure in all this? How is the introduction of student attendance monitoring software connected to the allocation of resources? Why are those under threat of being dispossessed of studio provision simultaneously offered up as voluntary and ‘contingent labour’ to various companies, organisations and local authorities as part of UAL’s Diploma in Professional Studies? What are we to make of the recent formation of UAL Arts Temps Ltd, a spin out subsidiary recruitment agency offering a “a diverse talent pool of over 8,000 students and alumni, […] to meet the needs of any employer”? Or the subtle transcoding of the curriculum where ‘social engagement’ segues into students and alumni providing ‘social prescribing’ services both in-house for UAL Counselling and as part of UAL’s outward facing Knowledge Exchange programmes? These questions open out onto a range of contradictions and myriad forms of student ‘dual commodification’ occurring at a hollowed-out educational institution. Let’s call it an Incidental University, in reference to the pivotal role of St. Martin’s School of Art in the formation of the Artist’s Placement Group in 1966 and Barbara Steveni’s post-artist figure of the ‘Incidental Person’:
Incidental: 1.a. 1644– Occurring or liable to occur in fortuitous or subordinate conjunction with something else of which it forms no essential part; casual.
In the sinkhole opened up by the Incidental University’s inability—and in some cases refusal—to register the rich stream of staff/student-led initiatives and social alternatives intersecting its various departments from the 1960’s to the present, we also now find a number of in-house ‘astroturf’ type initiatives. Let’s take UAL’s Research Centre Afterall as a starting point with its ArtSchool programme claiming to engage the current crisis of labour, education and issues of visibility.
Dual Commodification
In the period following the global financial crisis of 2008, the Carrotworkers’ Collective and Precarious Workers Brigade focused attention on labour conditions and wage relations across the arts and education sectors in Britain, targeting a significant number of organisations and institutions’ employment practices. This resulted in a toolkit for educators ‘Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability and Reclaiming education’ (2017) and a series of open letters outlining potential violations of UK employment law and in some cases, the displacement of workers by unpaid interns and volunteers.
Around the same time and against a backdrop of worker suicides at Foxconn Technology Groups’ City Park factories in Shenzhen, China, the world’s largest contract electronics maker ramped up its recruitment of coerced student-worker and secondary school age interns.[4] The company had previously signed a series of employment agreements with Chinese technical schools whereby it became compulsory for students to work as interns at their factories often under the threat of non-graduation if they refused. In exchange for entering into these agreements the technical schools received equipment and funding to offset the widespread financial crisis faced by many institutions in the wake of the 2008 financial Meltdown. Although student-workers receive the same basic monthly wage as other factory workers’ they are denied basic employment rights and social insurance, for example. The structure of the work-study programmes saw full-time students take on internships outside the timetabled curriculum, in their ‘spare-time’, such that through a legislative loophole these student-workers are not protected under domestic labour laws for their factory labour. These ‘internships’ thus constitute the cheapest and most flexible form of labour. This combination—students paying tuition fees to educational institutions which in turn receive funding and commission fees from the companies in which the students were placed––has been referred to as ‘dual commodification’.
A student-worker rebellion against dual commodification and the conditions at Foxconn’s factories in September 2010 revealed something else: the extent to which the company, in collusion with technical schools had gone to connect employability to education and coerce students into labour not aligned with their studies. Critically, it also revealed how the dispersal and atomisation of students across departments, factory lines and dorms had been orchestrated by management as a means to obstruct and disable communication and potential solidarities forming. During student training for example, management focused on various strategies to make them scatter and “not be able to organise to fight against the company” according to interviews reported by Yihui Su in her comprehensive coverage of Chinese student-worker struggles and dual commodification in the Journal of Workplace Rights.[5]
In the US during the same period and an increase of suicides linked to debt, including a spike in student loan delinquency and “financial trauma”,[6] Foxconn’s client Amazon introduced its own variant on ‘Learn While You Earn’ offering a 95% Fee Reimbursement Scheme primarily for its hourly-paid workers. Linked in part to employee retention and initially restricted to areas of study which had a direct correlation with those sectors aligned with its business and logistics operations (e.g. Transportation, IT, Administration and Business Service, Data Analytics, AI robotics etc.), this has since expanded to include those areas of the US economy with skills shortages (e.g. Healthcare). The ‘Career Choice’ upskilling programme for example, now lists over 600 ‘education partners’ globally with courses available online or in-person, offering “flexibility to fit employees’ schedules”. This ‘flexibility’ extends to opening up factory-based onsite classrooms to allow students to continue their studies in what the company euphemistically call ‘Fulfillment Centers’, those warehouses where products are stored, packed and shipped.[7]
Turning back to dual commodification briefly and tracking its adaptation elsewhere, this time in Zimbabwe, we find students coerced into additional forms of labour exploitation, this time inside the university. As reported in University World News in 2018, unpaid student internships or ‘attachments’ have been challenged as a new form of slavery with many students at institutions of higher learning required to undergo mandatory unpaid internships or ‘attachments’ ranging from 6 months to 1 year, during which they continue to pay full fees. With some companies reported to be dependent on workforces consisting entirely of unpaid interns, Archibald Madida, former president of the Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU) asked for the introduction of a law compelling companies to “at least provide students with a transport allowance and lunch”.[8]For those without student loans and/or struggling to pay fees to study and participate in unpaid internships, the government introduced a ‘Work For Fees’ programme in 2022 offering to cover a percentage of tuition fees in exchange for students working for the universities in construction, cleaning or catering duties on campus in their free time during holidays, at night or during weekends.
Learn While You Earn?
Moving into this landscape linking discourses on future employability to education and in some cases, unpaid internships to fee paying students, is the University of the Arts London’s Diploma in Professional Studies (DPS). This is offered up as an optional one-year ‘sandwich’ programme where students extend their studies in the form of industry placements for at least 100 days/20 weeks over the course of an academic year. The term ‘placement’ is critical here as it shunts the labour category into a contested area in UK employment law allowing employers to appoint students as unpaid interns as part of their studies if for less than one year.[9] On this basis, formal contract negotiation is generally handled between the student and employer, guided by the university’s placement framework, although students can also opt for Self-Initiated Placements where they initiate their own arrangements for a specified period.
In order to participate in the programme, students on the UAL/CSM BA Fine Art Course for example, relinquish their access to studio provision, negotiate workshop use on a case-by-case basis, and pay UAL 20% of their annual fees. DPS claims to provide students with three individual tutorials and a series of workshops over the course of the year, and is structured to allow students flexibility to continue paid employment alongside unpaid placements if necessary. The scheme is presented to students as an opportunity to enhance employability skills and networking etc. and a cursory glance at the jobs on offer shows some notable linguistic dexterity from employers from a range of companies, organisations, charities through to individual artists and former students looking for studio assistants. Unlike the Foxconn variant where Chinese student-workers receive a wage for coerced labour which is unaligned with their studies, or at Amazon US where worker-students get their fees covered on condition that areas of study are aligned with the company’s profile, student-workers in Zimbabwe and some of those on the UAL DPS programme in Britain, pay for the privilege of working as unpaid interns to supposedly acquire skills linked to ‘future employability’. Where they might be seen to differ from their counterparts in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, is that these self-initiated placements and internships are optional and include ‘lunch and travel expenses’. The ratio of paid to unpaid student placements and internships for BA Fine Art students on the UAL/CSM DPS programme is unclear.
From here we might turn to one of the ‘hosts’ for DPS student placements/unpaid internships, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation Ltd (TBFAF). with its small team of key salaried staff consisting of a full time Managing Director, four part-time employees and 19 young people in placements, including a number of unpaid internships according to its 2024 trustees annual report filed at Companies House. Set up as a charity in 2015 offering low-cost artist studios, TBFAF currently manages five buildings in central London, contributing to what some have called the model of ‘temporary urbanism’ offered by the introduction of Meanwhile Use Leases by the UK government to offset the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on commercial property landlords. The terms of the lease allow tenants, such as local voluntary groups and charities, to take on empty buildings with massively reduced business rates or exemptions under short-term agreements with landlords and 28-day notice periods, should more viable commercial tenants be found. In return for low cost TBFAF studios, artists are required to provide two weeks of voluntary labour which is then offered up to various partners from a list including local councils some in the process of reviewing or cutting frontline services, whilst elsewhere others are bankrupt or on the brink of bankruptcy.[10] With revenue derived principally from studio rents, more than enough to cover the remuneration of a small number of salaried staff, some of whom then coordinate placements and unpaid student interns offered up by TBFAF for “enrichment opportunities” with resident artists and local schools or community centres. In a what might be regarded as a perverse twist TBFAF recently hosted ‘Gathering’ an exhibition by the UAL Student Union curated to “bring together artistic practices from UAL students to explore the essential support needs of art students today […] focusing on three critical areas: sustenance and nourishment, creative materials and resources, and financial hardship.”
Temps “R” Us
Emerging from the covid pandemic and at a point where a number of educational institutions and organisations had been forced into a retreat on or review of outsourcing, UAL held its ground.[11] by promoting its very own version of responsible outsourcing. With no hint of irony and under the heading ‘The World Needs Creativity’, it also announced its desire to become a Social Purpose University with a commitment to addressing “great challenges like economic inequality, climate change, disinformation and racial justice” (James Purnell, former UAL President and Vice Chancellor). Here, running alongside various regeneration and employment business ventures (e.g., The Knowledge Quarter in conjunction with partners including Camden Council), we also find the beginnings of UAL’s Social Purpose Group, headed up by Polly Mackenzie, former director of policy and special advisor to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg during the 2010–15 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.
According to its own literature UAL Arts Temps Ltd (UALAT) is an ‘in-house job shop’ for students and a not-for-profit social enterprise registered at Companies House in 2018 although dormant until it commenced trading in April 2021.[12] Around 2022 and in response to a “reduction in creative opportunities” UALAT proudly announced the success of its partnership in placing a number of its candidates as ‘processing operatives’ to staff a pop-up Covid Testing Centre in King’s Cross. These ‘responsibly outsourced’ candidates would have been made up of UAL alumni and presumably students paying full fees at the time. More recently and In tandem with the widespread post-pandemic growth in the use of fixed term and temp contracts by employers’ UALAT has shifted its focus towards offering up to external contractors the services of a reserve army of “exceptional talent to businesses”: “When we need talent, we don’t have to look far—we’re right where the creatives are”.[13] Not only do they know where the creatives are but can be found offering them up to UAL’s outsourced ‘independent hospitality provider’ BaxterStorey Ltd and having “a blast helping them find the perfect creative talent for many of their events”. This is the same company caught up in a dispute with UVW in late 2019 at the University of Greenwich over “understaffing, low pay, disrespect and less sick pay than other university staff” along with strike action for the London Living Wage.[14] Taken at an ideological level and given its own outsourcing ambitions this may also help explain UAL’s continued resistance to bringing its own outsourced essential workers in-house and persistent lip service to its commitment to ‘responsible outsourcing’.
In line with the university’s adoption of Social Purpose, UALAT is London Living Wage accredited and claims to “work to reduce exploitation within the creative industries”. In this instance and with dual commodification in mind, UAL generates income directly from student fees, then again via its UALAT subsidiary company from commission fees on farming out those same students on predominantly temporary and fixed-term contracts. The success of this might be measured against UALAT’s turnover of £9,620, 606 for the year ending 31 July 2024. The claim to reduce exploitation can be measured against the findings in its 2023/24 Annual Report which lists one of its ‘key campaigns’ of hiring 120 Student Ambassadors. This can in turn be matched to a recent advertisement for a UALAT contract to field online enquiries and questions from prospective UAL students on the ‘Student Rooms’ platform. The advert called for applications from those with “strong communication skills, enthusiasm, and a genuine desire to help others”. The successful candidate would be signed up to a 10-week fixed term contract and remunerated at 1 hour per week. To give a sense of the workload involved, another platform used by UAL, Unibuddy, offers comparable services for which “ambassadors are all paid a minimum rate of 30 mins to 1 hour per week. In order to qualify for their weekly or monthly payment, ambassadors are expected to answer a reasonable number of questions each week (10–15) and upload a social post during quieter weeks”.
As these developments continue to unfold, in early 2025 UAL Timetabling released their Policy Consultation questionnaire to staff for feedback. The consultation drew on focus-group inspired three-word slogans (e.g., think ‘Take Back Control’ or ‘Stop the Boats’) proposing that the provision of dedicated studio space for studio-based courses be reconstrued or reimagined as ‘Zoned Not Owned’. Already endorsed by the Executive Board, the core of this was ownership and management of space, an increase in the length of the teaching day and an ‘effective’ use of space in support of net zero goals. Critical in this regard is a proposed ceding by academic departmental staff to the principle that “all space is owned by the colleges and managed by the Timetabling Team, with pro Vice-Chancellors signing off through college executives or agreed special governance”. This has been rolled-out alongside the introduction of the Student Engagement and Attendance System (SEAtS) where all students might now be said to be ‘owned by the college’ and compelled to download apps which register their attendance and personal data including applications for authorised absence via mobile phones. The data captured and metrics derived from this has been presented as part of “improving the student experience” in the knowledge presumably, that it has been roundly condemned by Goldsmiths Student Union as having a detrimental impact on students wellbeing along with concerns raised about Data Protection and the monitoring of international students.[15] Less immediately clear is the potential it offers up to the university’s wholly owned subsidiaries, including UALAT and UAL Short Courses Ltd. as an opportunity for students and employers to locate time in and around the curriculum in support of those irregular work patterns and temp contracts. The fact that the vast majority of learning and student ‘socialisation’ at UAL/CSM occurs, has always occurred, in unsupervised settings in and around the studio and time outside the programme is entirely lost in the attendance metrics.
Ghosts
Our Art Schools are haunted by the ghosts of studios past: phantasmagoric echoes of teaching from long ago, now stuck in the present, mis-figured and unable to pass on to the other side. These spectral remains imprint themselves on our understanding of art school today; we would be wise, however, to resist their enchanting allure.[16]
A key feature of UAL’s transition to an Incidental University has been the simultaneous dismantling and recasting of its social political history, leaving a spectre of sorts roaming an institution that now exists for the most part, in name only. In this regard, it’s disingenuous to refer to “phantasmagoric echoes”, “spectral remains” and “enchanting allure” without first acknowledging that the ghosts of studios past, at least in terms of UAL/CSM, have long since been exorcised due to oversight, neglect and successive waves of institutional restructuring and relocation. The formation of CSM in the late 1980’s for example, was later accompanied by a transfer of assets from the public to private sector following the 1988 Education Reform Act. Out of this mix, its successor, UAL’s increasingly complex enmeshment with capital can also be found in its controversial sale of flagship central London college buildings around 2011 to enter into partnership with Kings Cross Central Limited Partnership as an ‘anchor tenant’ attracting other creative and knowledge based organisations to the 67-acre site (incl. Google, Meta, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, etc.). In the run-up to the move from one of its former sites at Charing Cross Road to 1 Granary Square, there was a frantic scramble to salvage remnants of Fine Art departmental files and documents, archives destined for shredding. To get anywhere near an understanding of the history and social, political implications of the current landgrab by UAL Timetabling, it is necessary to first locate the numerous shadow archives which have escaped various institutional enclosures, have been withdrawn or withheld altogether by former staff, students and others. For Sergio Bologna, founding member of ‘Workers Power’ (Potere Operaio) in the late 1960’s: “the preservation and elaboration of memory should be one of the commitments of democracy. From a cultural point of view, this way of doing history is the absolute antithesis of an academic culture, counterposed to it in mentality, intentionality, tone and language.”[17]
The shadow archive of former St Martin’s School of Art tutor Ken Adams for example militates against the current reconfiguration of educational space enshrined in the ‘Zoned not Owned’ proposal. Here we get a glimpse into more politicised social dynamics between staff and students resulting from the early implementation of permanent studios on the ‘DIP.A.D.’ Combined Painting and Sculpture course set up by Peter Kardia (nee Atkins) in 1964–5. Of note is a fragment from the minutes of a student-led democratic voting system from 1964–5 on matters directly linked to organisation and management of the studio after students in one of the allocated studios began to “eject the staff and run their own arrangements” forcing staff into lengthy negotiations. This included a voting system on a range of matters, from whether staff should continue to hold the key to the room to the abolition of the formal teacher-pupil relationship as “non-conducive to […] an advanced liberal education system”. By way of illustration that this early incarnation of the Fine Art studio was regarded principally as a site of social exchange we find that the following motions were carried unanimously by the student vote: “Granting of responsibility to the students individually and as a group [and the provision of] facilities for a free interchange of ideas between students and staff, and amongst the students themselves.”
Other shadow archives offer up further examples of a productive collision of external social forces unravelling within St. Martin’s and which repositioned the studio as a site of contestation, experimentation, with links to struggle elsewhere. These resolutely counter-hegemonic tendencies can also be found in the little-known ‘RCA- Redefined’ from 1971 (proposing a “community of shared interest according to former St. Martin’s student and member of the RCA Working Party of the Student Representative Council at the time, Jeff Sawtell), the student-led parallel art school ‘Manydeed’ in 1972, and local community interventions and disruptions like the ‘Bell Lane School Project’ in 1973. Facing outwards and connecting with those from other colleges, St. Martin’s students also participated in the production of educational, social and political campaign posters as part of the Poster Film Collective from the early 1970’s, whilst others went on to establish Platform Films releasing the Miners’ Campaign Tapes’ between 1984–85. Another shadow archive St. Martins News and Student Troubles pre: 1980 tells us that Student Union funds in the 1970s were directed in support of the National Abortion Fund, Squatters Action Council, Advisory Service for Squatters, Cinema Action’s ‘Hands off Student Unions’ and ‘viva Portugal’.[18] In a recent interview, former St Martin’s student and filmmaker Steve Sprung, linked to both Cinema Action and the Poster Film Collective, and who went on to direct The Year of the Beaver (1985) and The Plan (2018), puts it succinctly:
For me seeing those workers talking in Fighting the Bill, the way they talked, the sense they talked, it was incredible and that’s what got me fired up. It made our college lecturers look tame and somewhat lame. This was stuff that mattered […] with people who came across as able to do something useful about it. And when the lights went up and the discussion started the type of working people who’d been on the screen filled the room and had lots to say. And what did I know? What did any of my University lecturers know that mattered so deeply?[19]
A significant number of those who studied at St Martin’s School of Art and many other art schools during this period developed what might be referred to as ‘adjacent’ practices which dissolved into various social and political frameworks and class formations in which they were active. Which is to say outside the category of ‘individual artist’ prescribed in and through the art programme. Some have described this role as ‘functional’, particularly in terms of offering up know-how and skill-sets in support of political campaign work while remaining relatively anonymous, thus escaping the trawl nets of academic and art institutional mediation. The character of social engagement in this regard is predicated on institutional invisibility and remains opaque to those seasoned art writers, curators and academics we may now associate with discourses on socially and politically engaged practice. Adrian Piper attends to this directly and uncompromisingly in her 1996 Ian Burn Memorial Lecture when reflecting on Burn’s post Art & Language dissolution into the Australian Labour Movement in the mid-late 1970’s. His subsequent Union Media Services produced essays and commentaries, offered up support and cultural programming for trade union members and curated exhibitions of their work leading Piper to conclude leading Piper to conclude that in so doing, he had unravelled the social political potential of conceptual art by attending to “his own status as an artist in the international art scene, as a white male, and as an Australian [[…leading]] to consequent political action which was guided by that reflection, and was dedicated to effective social change. That is exactly what this brand of Conceptual art would require, and that is exactly what Ian did.”[20]
Spectral Remains
These ‘spectral remains’, certainly in terms of offering up any possibility of effective social change, can be found in the actions of UAL Students for Justice in Palestine and those who find their way to Black Lives Matter, Sisters Uncut, UAL So White, Reclaim These Streets, Anti-Raids Network, London Renters Union to name a few and also with a number of BA Fine Art students either founding or participating in Feminist Internet and H.I.S.S. Collective. Returning to one of the few remaining institutional sites in which these tendencies continue to find expression, along with additional support and articulation, it seems imperative to factor in those indirectly employed essential workers who maintain and keep the university’s studios up and running. In the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the midst of the Covid pandemic, UAL and many other institutions and organisations were caught in a number of glaring contradictions after issuing public statements in support of Black Lives Matter. By way of example, an embattled and emboldened migrant-led workers movement noted and acted on structural racism in direct and indirect employment practices and a number of institutions and organisations were directly challenged, particularly on the disproportionate number of Black and Brown workers that made up their outsourced, indirectly employed workforce. A campaign by the Cleaners And Allied Independent Workers Union (CAIWU) pitched against the British Medical Association (BMA) in 2021 is a case in point, where those ‘ghosts of studios past’ gathered for a brief moment and we find UAL/CSM BA Fine Art students playing an active role in the formulation of CAIWU’s campaign strategy. As a direct result, H.I.S.S. Collective was formed by a small group of students working remotely to co-develop an online ‘shaming’ campaign linked to the BMA’s statement on Black Lives Matter, in consultation with its CAIWU workers and the Wealth of Negations[21] group. The resulting visuals in combination with a press release launched on social media had an immediate impact, gaining traction among Junior Doctors and prompting members of the BMA executive board to request a sit-down negotiation. This resulted in the immediate reinstatement of those threatened with redundancy and a commitment to “matched pay and conditions” with BMA in-house workers.
These types of unpredictable social collisions and solidarities formed in and around the studio, have been a critical component in the shaping of the art school and in the case of CSM can be tracked back at least as far as those students who turfed the staff out of the Fine Art studios in 1964. This more recent unstructured communication or ‘knowledge exchange’ between H.I.S.S. Collective and CAIWU was extra-curricular hauling in traces of Cinema Action, Platform Films, Poster Film Collective, Latin American Workers Association and many others, along with additional ‘phantasmagoric echoes’ offered up by a new generation of workers originally hailing from Latin America and Africa in this case. The fact that all proved adept in the rapid and unprecedented shift to hybrid communications and routing round or moving within social-distancing rules imposed during the Covid pandemic is also notable, with social media campaigns and various impromptu protest activities catching many employers off guard.
One of the many discarded documents salvaged from a flooded and soon-to-be-abandoned basement at CSM’s Charing Cross Road building in 2010 was writer and former member of the Situationist International, Alexander Trocchi’s teaching contract with St. Martins School of Art from August 1965. Of note is that it’s signed and dated a few years after Trocchi published ‘A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’ in the journal New Saltire and around the time of the student take-over of the Painting and Sculpture studio highlighted in the Ken Adams archive. The precise date of Trocchi’s subsequent dismissal from his post at St. Martin’s remains uncertain but is presumed to be around 1966. In the full text, his proposal for a ‘Spontaneous University’ is predicated on an economic model which shares striking similarities with today’s Incidental University with its invisible coercion of a million minds. Taken at this level, Trocchi’s proposal includes the formation of a limited company (International Cultural Enterprises Ltd) whose profits were to be “invested in expansion and research” with “income derived from money earned from patents or by subsidiaries exploiting applications (industrial and commercial)” and “The university will house a living museum, perhaps a fine restaurant. A showroom will be rented in the city for retail.” Fast forward 60 years and UAL’s Social Purpose Group, set up to underpin and lubricate the economic ambitions of the university, can be found offering up the following managerial flim-flam on its website: “University of the Arts London (UAL) has a social purpose, not a commercial one”, and elsewhere: “The incentives of a neoliberal context have led many organisations to neglect the negative social, economic and environmental consequences of their ventures.”
Moving into this particular contradiction, in late March 2025, the Office for Students (OfS) fined the University of Sussex for failing to uphold “freedom of speech and academic freedom” with the “chilling effect” of self-censorship in relation to the university’s Trans and Non-Binary Equality Policy Statement. This was followed in mid-April by what for many was and remains a devastating UK Supreme Court ruling that the Equality Act 2010 definition of ‘sex’ means biological sex only (that a ‘woman’ is a person born female and a ‘man’ is a person born male). Shortly after this, towards the end of April Polly Mackenzie, UAL Chief Social Purpose Officer announced a review of UAL’s own guidance on policy relating to trans and non-binary inclusion, removing all access ‘for the time being’ from the staff section of the university website. This resolutely anti-social act could be seen unravelling as a group of UAL/CSM students accompanied by ghosts of studios past, went through the prescribed channels to book a spot in the Street area at the CSM Granary Square building for a modest info stall and cake sale organised by the Trans+ Fundraising Group. As chance would have it they were displaced, in part due to a ‘booking error’ presumably linked to the book launch in the lecture theatre for The Brand New Future: How Brands Can Save The World, an event UAL/CSM had co-organised with brand agency FreshBritain and Design Co with a panel of leaders from finance, government, culture, media, education, technology and fashion in attendance.
The contrast between the Incidental University’s lack of support of students in the midst of a struggle against increasing institutional repression, compared with its fully-funded encouragement of students to participate in a branding event as “an opportunity to network in the company of around 300 guests from creative brands, private equity and government” could not have been more stark. We might recall Saatchi & Saatchi’s rebranding of the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1988 as ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’ as the University of the Arts London segues into… A top temp recruitment agency with quite a nice university attached.
In memory of Leigh French and dedicated to CSM students past and present.
Postscript 25 May 2025
This is a revised version of the text originally published in the Variant Special Issue, Spring 2025. In the days leading up to the Variant launch, UAL Vice Chancellor Karen Stanton announced that Polly Mackenzie was “stepping down” as Chief Social Purpose Officer and according to Mackenzie’s statement, she will now focus on her “research, writing and campaigning”. In the same UAL Big Picture bulletin, HR Director Karen Gooday, announced UAL’s Trans and Non-Binary Inclusion Policy and Guidance consultation sessions with staff and the results from the UAL-wide consultation on Timetabling policy were published. In response to concerns raised by staff regarding course identity and the loss of dedicated studio space for particular subject areas, UAL Timetabling responded with predictable disregard on the matter of ‘Ownership of space’ and ‘Increasing shared spaces: “We will take a collaborative, iterative approach to implementing this principle, which in the longer term is vital to more effective use of space across our estate.” and “We fully understand and respect that identity is something staff and students are reluctant to lose, but more flexibility is crucial to make better use of our estate
On May 23rd, ‘Better Making’ at UAL/CSM was launched with an invite including the following statement: “At the intersection of social prescribing, public art commissioning, and art education, Better Making represents more than just a new programme – it’s a statement of intent. Better Making is a response to the question of the future role of art schools in shaping practices of care and creativity in civic space’. On the pressing and outstanding matter of UAL senior management responding to serious questions raised by UAL SJP and attending to the structurally racist outsourcing of its essential workers… silence.
UAL SJP statement at the University of the Arts London All Staff Briefing. March 2025. ↑
Culture Co-operative: Moments, Spaces and Alternatives for Art and Cultures of Learning. Feral Art School, Hull. Friday 25th April 2025. ↑
Dave Beech. ‘The Alternative Art School and the History of the Social Reproduction of Artistic Labour’ in Co-operative Education, Politics, and Art. Creative, Critical, and Community Resistance to Corporate Higher Education. Hudson-Miles and Jackie Goodman eds. Routledge 2024) ↑
Foxconn stops illegal overtime by school-age interns. Financial Times, Yuan Yang, November 2017 ↑
Yihui Su ‘Student Workers in the Foxconn Empire: The Commodification of Education and Labor in China’. Journal of Workplace Rights Vol. 15. Issue 3–4, 2010. The section on dual commodification and student-worker struggles at Foxconn is a summary of Yihui Su’s research. See also: He Blew the whistle on Amazon. He’s still paying the price. Yuan Yang. Financial times, December 2023. ↑
The Impact of Student Loan Debt and Student Loan Delinquency on Total, Sex‐, and Age‐specific Suicide Rates during the Great Recession. Roderick W Jones. Sociological Inquiry 89, April 2019 ↑
Amazon will spend $1.2 Billion for its employees to attend College. Michael T. Nietzel. Forbes. September 2021. See also Amazon company website ‘Training’, January 2019 https://www.aboutamazon.co.uk/news/operations/training ↑
Tonderayi Mukeredzi. ‘Students interns work for no pay – A new form of slavery’. universityworldnews.com 19 January 2018. ↑
Employment rights and pay for interns. https://www.gov.uk/employment-rights-for-interns ↑
Thirty English Councils granted exceptional financial support packages. Patrick Butler. The Guardian February 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/20/english-councils-exceptional-financial-support-packages ↑
‘Such folk are treated like shit’: artists urge University of the Arts London to improve cleaners’ working conditions. The Art Newspaper. April 2023 ↑
UAL Arts Temps Limited. Report and Financial Statements July 2019 -July 2024 https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/public-information/financial-statements. ↑
Three quarters of employers used flexible contracts in 2023. HR Magazine. 26 April 2024 ↑
UVW workers dispute against BaxterStorey in 2019: https://www.uvwunion.org.uk/en/disputes/university-of-greenwich/ and See also: https://www.thecaterer.com/news/baxterstorey-brunning-and-price-minimum-wage . Email correspondence between the author and BaxterStorey Ltd confirmed that UALAT ‘contractors’ temp jobs include: rebranding campaigns, social media coordination and a “food related knit workshop”. ↑
SEAtS: Goldsmiths Student Union. We Will Not Comply. January 2023 ↑
Apparitions. Ecstatic Visions of a Future Art School, UAL/CSM Fine Art Department. April 2024 ↑
Nazism and the Working Class 1933–93, presented at the Milan Camera del Lavoro, 1993, https://libcom.org/article/nazism-and-working-class-sergio-bologna ↑
Film Screening and Talk with Chris Reeves at ‘In Exchange’. Lethaby Gallery. Central Saint Martins. February 11, 2011. https://inexchangecsm.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/12-2-2011-film-screening-and-talk-chris-reeves-on-whose-conspiracy-justice-for-the-shrewsbury-picketss/ ↑
Political contexts of 1970s Independent filmmaking. Steve Sprung and Anthony Davies in Other Cinemas. Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970’s. 2017. ↑
Adrian Piper. ‘Ian Burn’s Conceptualism’. Inaugural Ian Burn Memorial Lecture, Monash University, Melbourne 1996. Conceptual Art: theory, myth, and practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004 ↑
https://wealthofnegations.org/ ↑