My students have had more contact from me, not less. Contact hours have gone up, not down. The fact that those hours take place (mostly, but actually not entirely, online, despite public health concerns) is a shame but also: we are in a pandemic. https://twitter.com/ucu/status/1349987621875937280

Virtually no academics that I know support student fees. All three main parties colluded in introducing student fees. Universities were part of that too, but teaching staff largely were not. We are exhausted and we’re working very hard. We deserve to be paid.

Also: online learning sucks sometimes. It certainly sucks for me, rewriting and recording all my lectures to an empty bedroom. But students like being able to replay them, so it probably isn’t that they object to. Seminars can be a bit stilted and odd, but no more than usual (!)

And my office hours actually are more accessible online than in-person. I used to have queues of students waiting down the corridor for 2 hours each week to speak to me. Now they pop me a chat message & I videocall them back when I and they are free. It’s private and convenient.

So what do students really miss? I would guess the “student experience” — sitting in the library, meeting for coffee, lolling around on the tables and seats scattered about the department, going on pub crawls, doing society events, making new friends. And yeah! It sucks!

But that isn’t what the fees are for.

Also as other people have pointed out: our job is not just teaching. 40% of my contract is research and 20% is admin. I’m still expected to do those things. I would like to finish writing my book. But teaching this year has taken over *everything*.

TL; DR: yes, please do abolish fees and give students grants and make education a lifelong possibility and fund research properly and hire enough staff on proper contracts to deal with the workload and maybe even give us the payrise we’ve been asking for...