TRUDGING through the London snow and slush earlier this month, I turned into Russell Square to see an ocean of placards and bobble hats slowly marching towards the tall walls of Senate House.

Chants and song echoed around the square as the mass came closer, emerging through a fog of misty breath and drifting sleet. 

Drain it all into monochrome, and this could quite easily be a scene from Sergei Eisenstein’s October, the Soviet film depicting the events in the lead-up to the October Revolution.

But it wasn’t bread, peace and land they were marching for. The 5,000 people gathered that cold day in London were striking university staff marching against plans to slash their pensions by  up to £10,000 a year.

The organisation which wants to implement this change, Universities UK (UUK), says that the pension scheme is £6 billion in debt and needs shoring up. 

However, academic staff union University and College Union (UCU) contends that this figure has been fudged for political gain. In any case, it will be the lecturers and workers who foot the bill if UUK gets their way. “Furious?” read one placard, “I’m fUUKing fuming.”

Strike action is now in its fourth week and universities have been taken aback by the amount of support it has garnered from the student population.

Across the country, students have been coming out in solidarity with their lecturers, joining them on picket lines and staging rallies of their own.

The assumption that followed the increase in university tuition fees was that market forces would turn the student-tutor relationship into that of customer-vendor. But student support for these strikes shows that the assumption was wrong. 

As a student, I find idea that education is simply a commercial exchange of knowledge to be fantastically ill informed. To reduce education to a transaction like buying plums in Tesco, is something that almost anyone who’s ever stepped foot in a university would refute.

Learning is a collaborative process between people, that when done properly benefits not just the direct recipient, but society as a whole. The application of over-the-counter economics does not work because understanding is not something that can be bought — it is something that can only be imparted. 

The changes outlined by UUK to university workers’ pension schemes will be hugely damaging. The argument that lecturers have had it good for years and are now finally being exposed to the harsh realities of a normal pension scheme fails to register the paltry salary that most academics subsist on by comparison with others in the workforce.

As UCU general secretary Sally Hunt wrote, pensions for university staff “have helped to offset relatively low pay and have been a powerful recruitment tool for universities seeking to attract staff from around the globe.” But if defined-benefit pensions are removed, we may well see a mass exodus from academia. 

Students realise this and understand that what is damaging to their lecturers is damaging to the process of education as a whole.

Like their lecturers, they are mobilising too. Petitions demanding repayment of fees have been particularly effective. At my university, nearly 20 per cent of students have now signed a letter to the vice-chancellor demanding that money for cancelled lectures be paid back in full, while the UCU estimates that, across the country, similar petitions are gaining a thousand signatures a day.

But just as important as grand gestures of solidarity, is for students to personally give support by telling staff that they agree with the strike action.

One lecturer told me that she almost burst into tears when a roomful of students stood up and told her that cancelling the next lesson was the right thing to do.

Though the union recently rejected proposals drawn up by UUK, there is a cautious optimism among the strikers who have been picketing up and down the country in some of the coldest temperatures recorded in ten years. 

Support for the UCU strikes among the students remain high. Our education, and the education of generations to come, depends on the welfare of our lecturers and their right to a fair and decent pension.