The Great Collective University Inertia

My Open Letter to All the Leeds Universities Aigust 21 2020 Dear Universities, This is it. It is 10 weeks of relentless antisocial distasteful partying on an industrial level, by “entitled” young so-called adults who treat us, all year round residents like dirt, and by not pulling them up on their appalling, selfish, life-threatening behaviour, you are treating us like dirt. It’s one excuse after another. “They’re not all from our university. “ “Are you sure it was No 6?” “We can’t do anything until October.” “We don’t have all their addresses” “They’re not back at university until autumn.” “It’s the landlord/lady’s responsibility”. Out of the long-term residents in just one small street there are now three that we know of down at the local surgery on a regular basis, ill, signed off, or unfit for work, who have serious illnesses, all originating in stress-related conditions. The cost to the health service, to social services, just in monetary terms is already stacking up. Then we read there is an article in the local newspaper about why we should learn to love our universities. Apparently it’s because they benefit the Leeds economy, as so many people work for them. In Hyde Park and all over Headingley people’s careers, lives, health, happiness, families everything is in ruins and tatters just so that Leeds can be the best (really!) city in the north. In Moorland Road and Avenue alone we are teachers, university lecturers, doctors, builders, charity workers, retired people, social workers, garage mechanics, musicians, visual artists, university admin assistants, and real students (as in came here to study), a total mix of people who maintain this area the whole year around have been abandoned and left and hung out to dry by an uncaring council, incompetent police force and self-serving, self-seeking, entitled universities. Colleges who are spending their money rebranding themselves as universities and conservatories in order to enhance their status, universities spending millions on fancy new buildings, and heaven help anybody who went to university in Leeds, liked the area, and stayed on loyally to preserve and look after it. Heaven help anyone who mistook a beautiful Moor and beautiful Victorian architecture for a place of beauty and safety in which to pass a decade or two of their post-graduate life. There is a great collective inertia, and one part of Leeds in which society's have just been abandoned. Bad enough in a "normal" year, but inexcusable in a global pandemic.