Anyone in the UCU?

[Closetlibrarian]

And striking at end of Feb?

I joined UCU after the last strike, so this will be my first. Even though I voted in favour it, I'm now in an utter quandary. I have an absolute monster of a semester coming up and I'm fretting about all the lectures, tutorials, etc, I'll have to cancel as part of the strike.

If you've gone on strike before how did you present it to your students so that they didn't just get really pissed off with you for cancelling lectures (that we're then, according to UCU, not supposed to reschedule)?

Also, how did you mange with the loss of income? I'm the 'breadwinner', so 14 days of strike action is going to massively impact us (i.e. I'm not sure we'll be able to pay our bills).

Brilliant post @Whiskyowl

I'll be reporting I'm striking on the 1st day - I'm travelling across the country to a research event. But not sure about the 2nd, as I'll be at that research event, and disinclined to forego a day's pay when I'm paying to do this research anyway ...

The following week I have a lecture: but on a socialist/Communist artist, so I"m wondering about whether to strike, but do a n old-fashioned "Teach in" and flip the lecture theatre in the way they did post-1968. Tell the students I'm striking, but that I want the to engage with the material - and the ideas I'm telling them about - through activism of some sort in the 90 minute lecture slot.

But although I'm old, I was only 9 in 1968, so don't quite know how they did it.

If anyone has some good ideas that I can plagiarise, please post 'em up!

how ready everyone is to lose pay, and at the same time how reluctant we are to do anything that will adversely affect anything the university does

That's the vocation thing @Whiskyowl is talking about.

I feel for the students, too. So I''m trying to find a creative way to strike but give them some of the info they'll need but in a way that they'll have to work for.

I’m not afraid to say that I care far, far more about my pension and security in retirement than I do about any cohort of students.

Thanks Mountain! I love your idea of an alternative way of learning - I don't know a lot about it, but I wonder if Freire's critical pedagogy would be useful here?

Awww, Emmeline that's really lovely. Thank you. It is heartening to feel that some students understand. I really worry that mine will feel let down or abandoned - I have a couple who are quite vulnerable, and I have honestly had a proper full-on nightmare that they both had a crisis during the strike and no-one picked up the email (ridiculous, I know).

"how ready everyone is to lose pay, and at the same time how reluctant we are to do anything that will adversely affect anything the university does"

Guffaw! True!

Really interesting thread. Good luck everyone

I’m not afraid to say that I care far, far more about my pension and security in retirement than I do about any cohort of students.

@SoupyNorman thanks for this - it's really giving me something to think about. I know my pension forecast has dropped considerably already, and I put in as much as the scheme will let me. I have only me to rely on - but to reverse the old adage, any single person will know that "One doesn't live for half the cost of two" so I have all the costs, but only 1 income. Pause for thought. A lot.

Thanks Emmeline - solidarity much appreciated

I won't be announcing my strike action in advance, but I'll respond truthfully when either HoD or HR sends out an email after the strike asking who took part. I'll only answer about days in the past, though. If I get this email after the first week of strike action, I'll only confirm those first few days and say nothing about the upcoming days.

And yes, I admit I'll probably spend at least one strike day working at home on a paper revision. Even when I'm not getting paid for it, I can't let go of my research... I won't do a tap of teaching or admin, however.

MountainsofMars I find the narrative of “caring so much about our students” increasingly toxic and just another way that the neo-liberal university exploits its workers.

“Caring about the students” makes us accept all manner of bad working conditions because, well, we care so much our students, we will just put in the extra hours, answer emails at ungodly hours, never take all our holidays, routinely work weekends etc etc.

The neo-liberal university system combines this exploitation of our vocational impulses with the worst forms of managerialism and bureaucracy, and it creates a really damaging narrative. I’ve decided to try and resist it, partly in the hope of signalling to others that it’s ok to withstand this pressure to put your students above all else (and by implication, your self, your family, your personal life, and your future plans, last).

I should have said that my post isn’t directed at any poster in particular here, more a general comment on working culture in academia.

I agree that the discourse of ‘caring for our students’ is increasingly problematic, and a tool used to exploit the academic workforce.

The fact is, the students might complain but they’ll be fine. All their assessments will take any disruption into account. We still have to put up with increasingly crappy terms and conditions (and deal with the pension repercussions) long after the students have left.

I agree with you on that soupy.

Yes, I've started resisting replying to emails outside standard hours (say 8-6) and not at the weekends unless urgent. Everyone, even colleagues, seem to be surviving.

“The fact is, the students might complain but they’ll be fine.”

What if they’re on a professional training course such as midwifery, SaLT etc?

That’s for the university management to sort out.

As for saying you want your students to ‘engage in activism’ and spend a 90 minute lecture doing so - just wow. What if they don’t agree with striking as a concept? Can they leave the lecture? Will they be told the brainwashing is optional?

Yes I know I’m using emotive language here but I can’t believe some of the comments on this thread!

Well midwifery lecturers won’t be in UCU. They’re all still registered midwives and will be in the RCM.

UCU advises the students to complain to the university management. And I believe the advice is NOT to attend lectures as a show of support.

The students may or may not be fine. Strike action this long has got to have some impact ... Or do people really think academics are lazy and sit around and do nothing?

The NUS have asked students to participate in local demonstrative action in support of the strike, so teach-ins/teach-outs would work well.

Yes. It is for the university management to sort out if the students aren’t fine. They could, for example, decide that they actually value the work their staff do and act accordingly.

I think one of the erosions of the vocational elements of the job has happened with the increasingly contractarian relationship between lecturers and students. The latter now have a much more instrumental engagement with their courses than they used to. The sad thing is that this hurts them as much as it hurts us. I used to see many more students having intellectually, socially and personally transformative experiences at university than I do now, partly because they were less anxious, and consequently were more risk-taking and more open-minded. There used to be a kind of experience that was much deeper, and that would allow certain students who were suited to it to change and to flourish, and at the basis of that was a certain level of freedom and a certain level of care. That care has now become reduced to a series of performance measures - "Do you respond to student emails within 24 hours?" "Do you turn around marking within 5 days" etc etc etc They're the kind of measures that people who don't really understand what university can be - arguably, what university should be - would put in place. People often blame this on massification, but I think that's less of a problem than the disciplinary effect of debt in locking individuals into a neoliberal order.

What I'm trying to say with all this is that I do think that, speaking very generally, the way that universities are changing is damaging to BOTH staff and students, because it strips out the kind of caring space that used to exist to allow experimentation and creativity, and replaces it with an anxiety-laden performance-obsessed nightmare where care is reduced to a series of performance measures, backed up by a counselling service in case of crisis. And this is relevant to the pensions strike, because it's not just about this frankly ludicrous and insulting offer from USS, but also about resisting the whole way in which these relationships are now set up.

So everyone striking seems happy for the students to miss out? Miss out certain topics, miss out teaching, miss out things they will need to know in the future? Lovely.

So let's turn this around. Since the new fee regime in 2012, academics have seen massive increases in contact hours, increases in student numbers, been forced to take on a lot of administrative work (cutbacks on professional staff), been asked to work weekends for free for open days half a dozen times per year, had pay rises well below cost of living each year etc etc.

So you're happy for academics to miss out on family life because of being bullied into working weekends for free? It's OK for academics to be bullied into replying to students in evenings and weekends, just to keep the students happy? It's fine for academics to see a large percentage increase in their work for decreasing pay?

The latest Times Higher Education survey indicates many or most academics don't take their annual leave; they work evenings and weekends. It's quite common for academics to be bullied into working while on maternity leave. Academics are strongly discouraged from calling in sick because covering lectures is so difficult.

I agree with PP that cutting material by a small fraction will not significantly affect the outcome for the vast majority of degrees. Note also that for most courses all course materials are made available on virtual learning platforms - and students are meant to spend most of their time on independent study i.e. there is no reason they could not use the provided learning materials to study the small number of topics that are shortened/skipped.

BTW I very much agree with Soupy that "caring for the students" (aka optimising NSS scores) is being used as a whip to bully academics into unreasonable working conditions.

Academics who are ill should not be dragging themselves onto campus to deliver lectures. We should not be having to respond to emails at evenings and weekends - particularly when many such emails come from students who haven't bothered to attend lectures or read course materials.

Sorry, returning to the thread to see if anyone knows the answer to a question I have. I'm 17 weeks pregnant, so my calculation period for SMP runs, as far as I can tell, from now until week 25. That covers the whole period of the strike. If I strike then it'll bring down my salary and thus what 90% of it is calculated to be for SMP purposes, won't it? I asked my local branch and they haven't yet got back to me. The small amount of information I could find about this online was very dismissive because it was all about other strikes (mostly teachers) that were one day, and obviously one days' salary out of the eight week calculation period isn't a big difference. 14 days out of 40 is a huge difference! The UCU FAQs just say that striking won't affect my entitlement to SMP - but it's not my concern that I won't get it at all, my worry is that it'll massively bring down what I get paid in that first six weeks. Anyone know anything about this? Sorry if it's a bit of a thread de-rail!

you're spot on whiskey. Comments like So everyone striking seems happy for the students to miss out? Miss out certain topics, miss out teaching, miss out things they will need to know in the future? Lovely. reveal a complete lack of understanding about what university education is.

University is not an extension of school. It is not a lecturer's job to download knowledge into students' brains. Our job is to facilitate learning, much of which should be done independently. So, missing a few lectures isn't going to make a massive difference in the long run. And as someone else pointed out, syllabi, reading lists, etc are all there on VLEs and the library (physical or virtual) isn't going to be shut during the strike.

What will make a massive difference to students' learning in the long run is this slow but sure devaluing of academic staff. I feel incredibly badly for people starting out in academic careers at the moment. Years of underpaid, high-hours casual contracts and doing research/writing in their own time, unpaid. People with impressive CVs unable to get permanent jobs because there just aren't many around to get. And then, when they do, a crappy pension at the end of it. Why would good people go into academia anymore, when they can have a better work-life balance, and much better pay, in a different sector? That's what will have an impact on students in the long run.