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What is a university for? Even for those outside of the higher education sector, this is a question that’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid In February and March this year, the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) organised fourteen days of strike action over a four week period, which saw staff and students standing on picket lines in freezing weather conditions, mass marches and rallies through campuses and city centres, and a significant rise in union branch membership across the UK Primarily, the strike was about pensions, but it soon became apparent that the industrial action represented a resistance to the encroaching neoliberal agenda in higher education more broadly, as banners on the picket line borrowed from Mark Fisher: ‘Against the slow cancellation of the future’ The pensions issue itself — the proposal from Universities UK (UUK) to transform the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) from a defined benefit scheme to a defined contribution scheme — is symptomatic of the increasing marketisation of the university The former guarantees its members a retirement income; the latter depends on the stock market, and represents a loss of between 10 and 40 per cent for staff UUK, which describes itself as ‘the voice of universities’, is an organisation of the vice chancellors or principals of higher education institutions, who have seen their own pay more than quadruple in less than 20 years Meanwhile, staff pay has seen a real terms decline since 2009, and pensions, particularly in the public sector, are deferred wages: the proposed changes provided proof, if proof were needed, of the political agenda behind the current drive to reform British universities   This discussion took place just after the vote to suspend strike action was passed, and inevitably, we had a lot to discuss Along-side the more visible scandals of the past few years — Toby Young’s appointment to the Office for Students springs immediately to mind, and the ongoing right-wing media attack on campus no-platform policies — university staff are increasingly on some variation of an insecure contract, something that actively works against the diversification of the academic workplace The Home Office crackdown