Dear students,

As your teachers and colleagues at the university, we are writing you at a time of crisis in the higher education sector. As you know, our union, the University and Colleges Union (UCU), is currently undertaking a national marking and assessment boycott. We know many of you are anxious about progression, graduation, and dissertations.

We want to let you know that our action is not aimed at you. We are taking action over years of falling pay rates, increases in workloads, pay inequalities in the sector, and rampant casualisation – where most teaching is now delivered by staff on insecure and short-term contracts.

Our action is exclusively aimed at our employers, and, indeed, resolving this dispute is in the power of Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA). But UCEA has walked away from the negotiating table and claims to be unable to afford increases in pay.

This scandal is unfolding as the finances of UK universities show a growing surplus. Our union has calculated that the total income of UK universities is £44.6bn, £3.5bn more than last year, the biggest year on year increase in at least five years.

Meanwhile, the total surplus is £2.6bn, the highest it has been for at least four years. The cash and current investment holdings have reached £19.6bn, £1.3bn more than last year. But staff expenditure is just 51% of income, a record low.

Instead of trying to settle this dispute, managements across the country have docked pay for those participating in industrial action and attempted to keep the ‘degree factory’ going.

The University has reallocated marking and has introduced guidance on a range of new strategies for assessment and calculations of degrees. This guidance has not been made available to all staff or to students but includes major changes to assessment processes and quality standards, such as provision for single marking of dissertations and potential reweighting of courses using partial marks.

Predictably, this has led to many students having their assessments marked by overworked staff without the relevant expertise and knowledge in the subject area, who are trying to meet tight deadlines, just so that graduations can take place. Students have also been issued with degrees with a classification, but with full results pending, or degrees without a final classification. Some have not been issued degrees at all.

Senior management here at the University of Glasgow has also decided to hand out devalued, dodgy degrees, but not to make a public statement with our union saying that the two sides should return to the negotiating table.

With PGR progression and PGT marking now on the horizon, we are likely to see further disruption in an area that universities across the UK see as the cash cow of their institutions. But it is not too late for our senior managers to change course.

We would like to ask you for your support. Our working conditions have been and will be your learning conditions and those of generations to come. Please take to social media and write to our Principal and Vice-Chancellor to demand a fair settlement for staff at the University of Glasgow. Generate and sign petitions of support for your teachers. Appeal your grades where you feel let down – do not feel you need to accept worse. We all deserve better. And solidarity is our strength.