Where is the line?
Amidst ever increasing living costs and in spite of their huge surplus, the university continues to make cut after cut. When are we going to tell them enough is enough?
With only a week’s notice, College has told us they’re shutting the pub menu food service in h-bar. This is the latest in a long line of cuts: they’ve hiked up the fee at Ethos, they came after the SCR breakfast and the pool at St. Mary’s, and they’ve raised the price of food on campus and rent in halls every year. While this might not be their most egregious decision, for me it’s the straw that’s broken the camel’s back.
Their justification for this change is that the food service was costing College around £20k a month to maintain. It is unclear as to whether this figure includes the rent College “charges itself” to use the kitchen space, as they do for labs in departments. It is also unclear whether this is net of College’s share of the profits from drinks sales, which are divided with the Union. In other words, they may be overstating their costs and understating their profits: we’ve yet to be presented with clear numbers in writing.
However, even if we were to take their £20k figure at face value, an effective subsidy of under a quarter of a million pounds per year is small change on the scale of the institution. Last year, we ran an £80m surplus, and hold in reserve £1.6bn.
Nobody’s arguing that we have an unlimited amount of money to spend: we need to be financially solvent. But we are a university, not a corporation. We have a duty to be motivated by considerations beyond the bottom line.
h-bar is one of the few outlets on campus dedicated to postgrads; where staff and students are often seen dining together. For a university that struggles to engender a sense of community, particularly between its staff and students, withdrawing this service in a manner which could soon lead to the bar being closed entirely - consider what’ll happen to drinks sales once the food is gone - is irresponsible. Supporting such a service, the beneficiaries of which are otherwise under-served, at the cost of some tiny fraction of our surplus (if indeed this is the case), is by no means disproportionate.
The other troubling aspect of College’s decision is in how it was communicated. Despite their claim that conversations with the Union have been ongoing for eight months, the sabbatical officers didn’t know anything until after College had already decided to cut the service a week or two ago, and the bar staff had no idea until even more recently. Given that the bar has historically been run jointly (food by the College, drinks by the Union) with any profits shared, this unilateral move is outrageous and demonstrative of the lack of respect the decision-makers here hold for the Union and, by extension, the student body.
I believe that this decision should be halted until a more thorough dialogue has taken place between all relevant parties. This includes (but is not limited to) College management, the Union, graduate students and staff. The service need not remain unchanged, but we should not allow decisions like this to be made unilaterally and sprung on us at the last minute, not as students and especially not as partners. That’s no way to run a large organisation.
This may not affect all of us directly, but we have to draw the line somewhere. If you, like me, are sick of the university making these kinds of decisions over our heads - without proper forethought and to the exclusion of the people that are affected by them - I would urge you to contact the Provost, Ian Walmsley, at provost@imperial.ac.uk, and ask him to halt this. It would be extremely helpful if you encouraged your staff members to do the same: senior management are more likely to listen to them than us. Beyond that, please sign the online petition at tiny.cc/hbar and let the university know they cannot keep making these decisions with impunity.
