UCU to “take a stand” against GC feminists?

'I resigned from UCU in the autumn and joined Affinity. I had been a member for 30 years. When I resigned I ticked a box to explain the reason - I ticked ‘dissatisfied’. I have never been contacted to ask why I was dissatisfied. If I had known that a union does not bother asking long term members why they were dissatisfied with it, I would have resigned from it years ago.

Me too.

Exactly my experience as well. I left about a year ago and no contact from them

@Maray1967 similar experience here - I left UCU a few months ago and never heard a peep except for a letter saying my direct debit had been cancelled, and was this a mistake? 🙄

@Maray1967 Just googled Affinity, thanks! Been getting ever more unhappy with UCU over the last few years but didn't know where else to go.

The UCU have being a militant bunch of twats for a number of years now.

I resigned from UCU in the autumn and joined Affinity. I had been a member for 30 years. When I resigned I ticked a box to explain the reason - I ticked ‘dissatisfied’. I have never been contacted to ask why I was dissatisfied. If I had known that a union does not bother asking long term members why they were dissatisfied with it, I would have resigned from it years ago.

the most marginalised

ie women.

Still around a 20% pay gap between male & female academics.
Still fewer than 20% of the professoriate nationally are women

We could go on ...

As far as I can see it’s only the UCU (with their marking strike action) that is causing lgbtq+ students and lecturers distress and real problems. But I suppose they are not marginalised in this case because all sexualities etc of ‘graduates’ of 2022 have a chance of not graduating or graduating but without a classification.

And once they get rid of the GC people (that's a LOT of people they will be harassing out of their positions) - who will they turn on next? All the gay, lesbian and bi students.... all students of colour....

"The UCU spokesman said that “ministers and others should address the real problems in the sector,” rather than “pretend that defending the rights of the most marginalised constitutes a threat."

Perhaps this UCU spokesMAN can define for the rest of us the EXACT nature of this "marginalisation" and the EXACT nature of the RIGHTS to which he refers?

I have never yet seen anyone define any of these aspects.

I've retweeted someone else's tweet suggesting that this motion is disgraceful, and added my view that the UCU shouldn't be policing members' individual beliefs, and contrasting this motion with beliefs in other areas which are protected characteristics (eg religious beliefs with which I do not agree).

It's interesting to see who is liking/retweeting it - people I know in person.

We've talked in here (and in the Academic's Common Room area on MN) about how one can tell who amongst one's colleagues might be a feminist (I refuse to say "gender critical feminist" because being critical of gender is fundamental to feminism). I'm finding out! It's very heartening. Not that I'll act on the information, but it's just good to know that others whom I like & respect can see the totalitarian nature of the proposed motion.

If you cut and paste a paywalled article's url/web address into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine you should be able to access an archived copy (or archive it yourself if one hasn't been saved already). It's pretty straightforward to use.

web.archive.org/

From the THE article: Professor Phoenix, now professor of criminology at the University of Reading, said academic freedom was the “primary cornerstone” of what it was to be an academic and argued that it was a “sad and sorry” state of affairs that some within UCU seemed prepared – as she saw it – to sacrifice this, particularly at a time when “academics are under such attack generally and their conditions are deteriorating”.

“A trade union is meant to protect all its members’ working conditions and this importantly includes freedom from harassment on the basis of one’s political beliefs,” she added.

Absolutely spot on - I hope the UCU's members have the sense to reject this misguided and divisive motion.

Surely the role of UCU (or indeed any Union) is to stand up for workers’ rights and not pursuing ideological vendettas.

well, quite. It’s fascistic and deeply anti-intellectual.

I am hanging in there as a member of UCU but only just.

I wish there was an alternative

UCU is a joke. They're aggressively pushing the TWAW agenda to the point of zealously hounding feminists out of the union and celebrating them being bullied out of their jobs. They support decriminalisation of prostitution (SWIW). They are calling members out on strike over and over again, to huge detriment to members and without any chance of winning. DH left over the Kathleen Stock incident. He was horrified by it all. Jo Grady is driving the union into the ground.

Appalling on every level. Fundraiser for Mermaids?! @NecessaryScene has it spot on above.

Wow. That is Hunger Games stuff.

…as my Dd said, there’s a hell of a lot more LGBTQ+ students who are very, very worried and in tears they’re not getting a degree now. What do they do in interviews for employment?

Depending on the university, they will probably find someone to mark things, and possibly it will be post-graduate researchers.
Lots of marking in lots of institutions is completed already.

Fingers crossed your daughter won't be too badly affected. They surely have to give her her grades at some point otherwise they haven't delivered on their contract.

This agenda is really damaging. Jo Phoenix's former unit at the Open University was given the top rating in the OU in the Ref 2021.It also improved its overall ranking. Jo has tweeted:

"Imagine what we could've done if OpenUniversity had dealt w/ harassment & discrimination I (and GCN) faced."

twitter.com/JoPhoenix1/status/1524697045755469824
I wonder how the unit will fare in future refs.

I was a Unison shop steward in the 90s. If I'd started a campaign to get people sacked my members would have voted me out promptly. Indeed it may have been safer for me to move to a different workplace.

The UCU are worse than useless. My Dd should be graduating after 3 years of (understandable) disruption and £40k+ of debt. However just after they handed their honours projects in, the university informed them 1) they may not graduate or 2) they may graduate but it would be unclassified because the UCU are threatening a marking ban strike. This is happening in dozens of institutions. The lecturers either don’t want to strike or feel awful for backing action and are actually worried about money - they cant afford to strike.
So, my Dd went to look at what the UCU were saying about it. At look at the tweet Jo Grady puts out on the day they are told the above. An insult to students and lecturers.