Back in October I caught the train down to Coventry to visit my old stomping grounds at the University of Warwick. The occasion was the 20th Anniversary of Warwick Anti-Sexism Society (WASS), a student campaigning group at the university. Technically WASS was 21 this year, but whoever let technicalities get in the way of a good celebration?
Co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, the event brought current WASS members, including WASS president Izie Lopez-Scott and Students’ Union sabbatical officer Ananya Sreekumar, together with former students and feminist academics, including founders Sam Lyle and Cath Lambert, and early member Maria do Mar Pereira.
As I arrived on campus, it occurred to me that I must have been one of longest-running members of WASS. In contrast to the likes of Sam and Cath, I never played an organising role, instead on volunteering my time with Warwick Pride (the LGBTUA+ society), Rocksoc (for the metalheads), and later also Bandsoc (for whom I still occasionally judge the university’s annual Warwick Battle of the Bands). Nevertheless, after originally joining WASS way back in the academic year of 2005-2006, I maintained an on-and-off membership through my undergraduate, masters, and PhD degrees, finally leaving in 2016. During that time I attended numerous talks, workshops, protests, and occupations as a member of WASS, and joined fellow members as a delegate to Women’s Conferences hosted by the National Union of Students.
I wasn’t quite sure how it would feel to participate in the anniversary event. I anticipated it would be somewhat nostalgic.
Certainly the event served me nostalgia in spades. A WASS exhibition featured numerous t-shirts, hoodies, zines, posters, and pamphlets produced by the society from 2004 to the present day. I brought along a couple of zines from the 2010s – Sam brought along a huge amount of old material, much of which dated back to my undergraduate days. In a panel discussion, we reflected together on the context in which WASS was formed, why it felt so difficult and important to name yourself as a feminist in the early 2000s, and how the society’s early campaigns reflected the priorities and debates of the day (lads’ mags! feminism for men! Page 3!)
But my main takeaway was the way in which our actions can echo through time, informing and influencing others in ways we might never be aware of.
When Sam and Cath founded WASS, they were focused on the present. They didn’t think much about how it might provide a way into activism and feminist thought for hundreds of people over two decades. Looking at the exhibition, speaking in a session about what had changed and what happened, it felt clear to me that we are living in a world shaped hugely be the world of 00s feminism, even amidst an enormous misogynist backlash.
There is something here about the complexity of wins, and the importance of work over time. It is not simply the case that the world gets better or worse. At the event, we discussed the growing cultural impact of violent misogynists from the manosphere. Sam highlighted how rates of femicide remain extremely high, half a century after the second-wave feminist movement kicked into gear. Equally, we reflected on how there is far more mainstream acknowledgement, understanding, and support for survivors domestic violence than there used to be even 20 years ago. This matters: it provides more people with a way out, a route into rebuilding their lives with the support of their families and communities.
Similarly, even as racist rhetoric dominates mainstream political discourse, feminist movements have increasingly learned from the difficult discussions around intersectionality that have taken place across years, decades. Meanwhile, other social movements have got better at acknowledging sexism, and embracing feminist ideals. WASS was originally an all-white, all-cis, non-disabled collective, which struggled to build alliances with other student liberation groups. This has not been the case for years. Key issues for student feminists at Warwick in 2025 include the genocide in Gaza, and fighting back against the university’s attempts to implement anti-trans policies. Warwick’s liberation movements frequently collaborate and cross-advertise events, and current students described how activists were often involved simultaneously in anti-sexist, anti-racist, and pro-queer groups.
A young man at the event asked me how campaigners stay motivated when there is so much rollback. I said I was inspired by the fact that we can still help people, that we can still create ideas and resources that it turns out are useful to others years, decades later. This was illustrated perfectly by the most unexpected story I heard that day, from an early career academic who thanked me for my old writing on TeachHigher.
A decade ago, TeachHigher was the University of Warwick’s attempt to advance insecure employment on campus, and undermine trade unionism. Branded as “a more consistent approach to the employment of hourly paid staff who work in different departments”, TeachHigher would provide a framework specifically for casual teaching contracts, offering an alternative to full-time, salaried lectureships. As a “wholly-owned subsidiary” of Warwick, it would technically be a separate company, while still funneling profits directly back into the university. This meant workers contracted through TeachHigher would be unable to benefit from collective bargaining with the University and College Union (UCU). The intention was to expand the model already used by Unitemps, another Warwick-owned subsidiary which “offers flexible staffing solutions” (often zero-hour contracts) across the higher education sector.
An enormous struggle over TeachHigher happened in 2015. The scheme was pushed aggressively by management, and opposed vociferously by hourly-paid teaching staff: the very people TeachHigher intended to contract. In subsequent years, I spoke and wrote about how this model for internal outsourcing was defeated through collective action on the part of students and staff. Workers such as myself carefully scrutinised the university’s proposals, identified pressure points within our own departments, found allies amongst more securely employed faculty, and organised accordingly. We effectively took over our local UCU branch, while also planning outside of its structures. Loopholes in existing casualised contracts enabled us to circumvent the UK’s anti-union laws, through moves such as departmental teaching boycotts. Multiple departments declared that they would refuse to participate in the TeachHigher pilot. The final straw came when UCU announced a national demonstration on a University of Warwick open day, which would have been an enormous embarrassment to the institution.
The successful campaign against TeachHigher brought student groups such as WASS and Warwick Anti-Racism Society together with staff bodies such as UCU. Due to the unequal impacts of casualisation, we recognised – as my late, great colleague Christian Smith put it – that “TeachHigher is sexist, and TeachHigher is racist”. We built on tactics developed in previous years. For example, the idea of protesting on an open day was developed by the 2013 Protect the Public University campaign, which grew out of the 2011 Occupy Warwick encampment. WASS members, naturally, were involved in both.
The defeat of TeachHigher was an enormous win for campaigners. Not only was the scheme withdrawn: we also negotiated pay rises, better terms and conditions for all casualised staff, and pathways towards more secure contracts for some.
Yet by 2025, there was very little institutional memory of TeachHigher. For all that we won, many teaching staff remained on casualised contracts, and Unitemps continued to prosper. Meanwhile, the vast majority of those involved in the struggle have moved on, to live and work elsewhere. The university was largely under new management, and there had been an enormous turnover within human resources as well as student bodies. For those who even know the dispute happened, it can be hard to find concrete information. News platforms delete old stories, and enshittification makes it harder to use search engines to find those that remain.
At the WASS Anniversary, I learned that a key source of information on TeachHigher today can be found in my past blog posts.
Old wins echo down the years. Temporary gains are gains nonetheless. I would guess that every one of us who benefited from the TeachHigher defeat is better off now as a result. Personally, I found myself in a better place financially to finish my PhD and continue an academic career. I also learned an enormous amount about the practicalities of collective organising. I know I have draw on those gains repeatedly over the last decade to continue supporting others in turn.
Even if pay rises for casualised staff were eroded over time, the fact that we fought and that we won can continue to inspire workers facing similar struggles. Just as TeachHigher was inspired by Protect the Public University, which was inspired by Occupy Warwick, which was inspired by the Red Warwick occupations of the 1970s as well as the US-led Occupy Movement, the Spanish Indignados Movement, and the Arab Spring. These long influences don’t just happen: they rely on people writing things down, saving artifacts, and remembering together.
The funny thing is, I had no idea anyone might find my old blog posts on TeachHigher useful after so many years. I was one small part of a far larger movement, and have been involved in so many other campaigns since. Nevertheless, through chronicling events it turns out that I created a resource that remains useful to this day.
At the WASS Anniversary, I was reminded how important it is to commemorate our local histories of activism, and to share what we have learned along the way. Social progress is neither linear, nor guaranteed. But if we imagine there might be a better future around the corner, and act accordingly, then we might change the world in ways we cannot possibly anticipate.
Sunday 8th March 
Dr Ruth Pearce 