Sussex Students occupy

Over 100 Students occupy the main conference room at the University of Sussex in protest against ill-advised and shortsighted proposed cuts to the university. After a demonstration attended by over 300 staff and students, with speeches from Simon Burgess Labour candidate for Brighton and Kemp Town, Tom Hickey of the UCU National Executive, Paul Cecil President of the UCU Sussex branch, Jon Mason of Unison and Pat Hawkes of Brighton and Hove City Council, students at Sussex University have occupied the main conference centre of Falmer Campus

This is a statement from the 106 students who have occupied the top floor of Bramber House, University of Sussex, Brighton, in protest against the proposed cuts at the university:

The decision to occupy has been taken after weeks of concerted campaigning during which the university management have repeatedly failed to take away the threat of compulsory redundancies and course cuts.

We recognise that an attack on education workers is an attack on us.

The room we have occupied is not a lecture theatre but a conference centre. As such, we are not disrupting the education of our fellow students; rather, we are disrupting a key part of management’s strategy to run the university as a profitable business.

They’re occupying everywhere in waves across California, New York, Greece, Croatia, Germany and Austria and elsewhere – and not only in the universities. We send greetings of solidarity and cheerful grins to all those occupation movements and everyone else fighting the pay cuts, cuts in services and jobs which will multiply everywhere as bosses and states try and pull out of the crisis.

But we are the crisis.

Profitability means nothing against the livelihoods destroyed, lost homes, austerity measures, green or otherwise. We just heard we’ve increased ‘operational costs’ – they’d set out the building for a meeting and now they’ll have to do it again

We’ll show them “operational costs.”

Occupy again and again and again.

NO CUTS ANYWHERE.

THE UNIVERSITY IS A FACTORY. STRIKE. OCCUPY.

-All the occupiers of the 8th of February.
Sussex Stop the Cuts
e-mail: sussexstopthecuts100@googlemail.com
Homepage: http://defendsussex.wordpress.com