Racist quotas bite DAS

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Nation between individual college authorities and student unions, with the Local Education Authority automatically paying it for every student who receives a mandatory grant.

Begging

Under the new scheme, if student unions want more than the maximum level of funds, they will have to beg for it from the university or college authorities, and present accounts of how they wish to spend the money.

The whole scheme is an obvious attempt to prevent student unions using their funds for any sort of political activity, whether this be fighting for better grants to combat rising prices, fighting the cuts, or in giving donations to workers in industrial disputes like Grunwicks.

The funds available for clubs and societies will also be severely curtailed.

The reaction of the NUS bureaucracy to this vicious attack on S.U. autonomy PHOTO: Chris Davies, Report Williams NUS executive has opened the way to these attacks. Instead of preparing a fight against these proposals, Sue Slipman, NUS President, has welcomed them, claiming that the DES "does not wish to impair S.U. autonomy."

She has seized on the "concession" in the document: a proposed minimum "progressives' like Shirley Williams, Secretary of State for Education, are prepared to go to. to carrv through cuts in public spending.

Already the massive increase in fees, from £270 in 1974 to £732 in 1978, with £1,500 for post graduates, has severely restricted those who can apply:

These figures are for North East London Polytechnic, where increases imposed in the middle of courses, £200 last year alone, have caused immense hardship and insecurity.

0314 Some of those unable to pay the increase, have, after pleading and bureaucratic wrangles, had the additional fees waived.

But others have been Students campaigning against summarily issued with expulsion notices.

Revoked

121 students received such letters this term including 46 about to take their finals.

After threatened joint union activity and threatened occupation and after hasty consultations with the DES these have been revoked-for the time being.

But now the Polytechnics have been asked to cut student numbers by introducing quotas.

Overseas students, defined as those who have been in Britain less than three years, must be reduced to 1975/6 levelsa cut of 3,587 students in 30 Polytechnics.

Undoubtedly whole departments will have to close. At NELP the cut of 400 students would also mean the loss of 40 academic staffing jobs, quite apart from other staffing.

Not forbidden It is not that Poly's are forbidden to take more students.

The local authorities simply will not get the £2,000 per student rate support grant for any student in excess of their quota.

Clearly our Labour politicians are relying on local hostility to paying the "extra' to enforce these WEARE discrimination in fees last year quotas.

They are hoping that nationalist prejudice will gloss over their betrayals.

A governors' document at NELP has taken this up. While expressing 'concern', it confirms:

"Clearly there should be no case where a British student is displaced by the admission of others from overseas"

Nationalist

This scandalously nationalist argument directly parallels that of import Similarly divisive ways of cutting higher education are proposed in the Oakes Report on the financing of higher education.

Pay more

This suggests that local authorities " should pay a higher contribution, perhaps 15%. Obviously many workers in areas like Newham and Waltham Forest, • who have never themselves benefited from higher education, and where primary and secondary education is starved of adequate funds, are likely to resent increased local spending on higher education.

This is the smokescreen that the Labour traitors are. trying to create to conceal further, future rounds of cuts.