by Albijon Kurtolli
On 10 September it was announced that, beginning at the start of the 2026-27 academic year, the University of Kent and the University of Greenwich would merge into the UK’s first ‘super-university’.
It is clear to pretty much everybody that this is not a merger of convenience as the universities are about an hour’s drive and a two-hour train journey from each other. The University and College Union (UCU) general secretary Jo Grady believes it to be a ‘takeover by Greenwich’ to save Kent from ‘the brink of insolvency’. Her comments argue that this merger was a financially motivated one and the evidence to the claim is undeniable. The University of Kent had a £31 million deficit in 2023-24 and was planning to cut jobs in January 2025 in a bid to try and save £19.5 million.
Photo: Cashkid121/CC
Higher education has been in a wretched state since Tony Blair introduced tuition fees, with them trebling under Tory austerity. Calls to raise tuition fees therefore seem completely asinine considering that the fees-based system hasn’t prevented the influx of cuts and redundancies thus far. Higher fees will only ensure that more working-class students will not be afforded the education that every government has blathered on about being so crucial; if they truly believed this, they would’ve made education free and accessible to everyone a long time ago.
Kent and Greenwich will not be the only ones to adopt this method of merging. The Higher Education Statistics Agency forecasts that 43% of UK universities will be in deficit by the end of the financial year.
We must stand with all university workers who are threatened with being laid off and students being exploited in search of profit. We must pressure the Labour government for full funding not fees. We are the future and not an economic burden!