UCU again

[CatandtheFiddle]

Has anyone seen the moves they're making to suggest another round of strikes?

Activists in my branch seem up for it. I maybe should send them links to some of the really VICIOUS posts about academics here in MN. Or the petition with over 300,000 signatures about refunding fees for 2019-20?

Led by donkeys, in all sorts of ways ...

I feel uncomfortable about saying this, though, as she makes it quite clear on her twitter profile that she has mental health issues. But then it would not be the first time that I have seen an academic talk about his or her mental health issues while at the same time verbally attacking and shaming others publicly, often when the target is not in a position to reply. Ill mental health is rife in academia and that should be acknowledged but I’m uneasy with the way it’s deployed by some on twitter. But I digress ...
I’m not re-joining UCU for my subs to pay the union salaries of academics who smear and abuse other academics.

Yes, I agree that MH issues are no excuse for aggressive and often defamatory comments about anyone who disagrees. I also have suffered from MH issues but I don’t call for women to be fired. I sympathise with the obvious difficulties she has had but I just think that someone who is utterly unable to deal with someone having a different viewpoint should not be a union rep or serve on HEC.

I’ve seen someone I follow tweeting their rage that they can’t be on research leave next year and have to help out with teaching. Same person is also active in UCU and laments the number of precarious posts in academia. Not sure if he’s made the mental leap that when he gets research leave, the university recruits a fixed term teaching fellow to cover his teaching and that if it didn’t do so, it would be unlikely that he would get a year to do his social science research that can hardly be described as ground-breaking or even influential.

I know some UCU members/reps who are actually good eggs and not the selfish and short-sighted type you describe. Is it a generational thing? A lot of the younger ones do seem to be in it for a) self-promotion, b) getting a class pass or c) convenient way to vent frustration at powers-that-be.

I think there are some people who believe very strongly in particular things and some people who want to be seen to believe very strongly in particular things and you just hear a lot more from them.

At our recent branch meeting the discussion was dominated by a few people with very strong opinions. You would imagine, based on that meeting, that we would be out on the barricades tomorrow.

But when it came to the actual voting, members voted overwhelmingly to end the Four Fights dispute and to either accept the USS offer or not accept it but to pause the dispute. The proportion of members who were in favour of continuing on with the current disputes and possibly striking again was under 10%.

I am still a UCU member, partly because I generally believe in unions, and partly because I think my own branch does a very good job supporting its members and our branch representatives are sensible people who have become our representatives because they have considerable knowledge of the intricacies of the issues at hand.

I do worry, though, about how marginalised and disillusioned the more moderate branches (and members) are becoming. Our representatives are now talking quite openly about how dismissively they feel they (and by extension their members) have been treated recently and their concerns not just about the appropriateness of the direction we are heading in, but also the methods the UCU leadership are employing to ensure they get to do what they want.

I totally agree. The majority of the membership is reasonable and there are some very hard-working committed branch leaders who do their best for the local members (although sadly not at my institution where it’s the opposite). However, their voices are being drowned out both by the Grady4GS faction and UCU Left. UCU Left in particular are extremely keen to avoid members being allowed to vote on offers made by employers. Jo McNeill suggested that only ‘activist’ union members should be allowed to vote. I don’t know what on earth she means by that, but it sounds undemocratic in the extreme. Voting against strike action is also activist but she obviously only means people who side with her.
The Grady4GS faction (which denies being a faction) appears on paper to have more moderate views but it actively supports the harassment of female academics and many of its proponents have engaged in online hostility and no-platforming themselves. The GS is also the person who rallied the membership in favour of a totally pointless strike action last year and is the reason why those who took action lost nearly a month of wages to now be contemplating an offer that is worse than what was offered by the employers before the action started. Totally useless.

I stay in UCU because I believe in unions, and have needed the support of a union (accusation of "transphobia") and I had an excellent local case worker. But I despair at the national leadership. They are incompetent - I strike broke in Jan/Feb: I struck on the first day to show willing, but that was all. It was a pointless strike and as a single person with a big mortgage I literally couldn't afford it. I sometimes think a lot of activists have private money (indeed, I know of one famous feminist activist who is supported by her & her wife's property investments)

Oh gosh, yes, lots of them have private wealth. A person I know who is v vocal tweeted that there is zero excuse for not striking. When she was reminded that some people have mortgages, dependents, elderly parents with care home fees etc, she said ‘strike fund’ and didn’t seem to understand that this wouldn’t cover the lost income. Her partner is wealthy and she has no perception of the financial pressures faced by some of the people she labels as ‘fat-cats’ just because they have a permanent position.

The thing Ive also noticed is that a lot of activists in UCU are not doing any research. Our branch exec has a lot of people on teaching-only contracts. I think that they have a rather different view of academia than those of us trying to do it all. No expectations of REF contribution, PhD supervisions, grant getting targets ...

My local UCU branch contains several academics who sign letters to deplatform women whose ideas they don’t like. I don’t want to be associated with that.

There was an interesting article on left-wing authoritarianism in the new statesman recently, based on recent psychological experiments. One personality trait that stood out was that left-wing authoritarians tend to punish others for ‘wrong’ opinions. Which leaves everyone else with two options: conceal ‘wrong’ beliefs and keep authoritarians away from power.

I struggle to understand how the activists in my branch think. They are, today, up in arms because the university has put a message on Facebook saying we are doing everything we can to be open for business for the new academic year. This is, apparently, outrageous. Do they really, really not understand that no students = no jobs, not just for the normally precarious but for a lot more of us. They think the university should sell property to pay wages instead.

I should say this is in total contrast to everyone in my own circle who has accepted that we need to put in an extraordinary effort to meet the challenges and maintain our student numbers and survive intact. I’m pretty confident that we will put together as good an experience for first year students as we can and maintain a good experience for the rest, but summer is going to be a slog to get there.

Sorry for the horrific grammar there. Just about to start day 12 of marking exams.

Strength to you, Chemenger - I'm just coming to the end of my marking.

Solidarity from me too with the marking. In the middle of it too. I also wonder whether they live in the real world but at the same time I am not surprised. But I saw some of this with the strikes too. People were expecting the students to be totally cool with it all and feel sorry for them (the permanently employed ones with a generous defined benefits pension) and not mind about the fact that they were missing out on tuition. Well, guess what? Unless you try your best to offer something that resembles value for money, students won’t sign up for it and many universities would then have a few years at most before the sector collapses. Most of them don’t have the reserves to deal with more than a few years with a drop in income and it’s not financially viable to spend the reserves that do exist on maintaining an unsustainable status quo.
Like you, I am also heartened by the fact that most people I know are taking a common sense approach to this and realising that this is not university managers deliberately trying to make our lives hard for us.

Yes, I’ve seen some academics getting a bit stroppy with students who complained about the cumulative impact of covid and the strikes. Made me cringe ...

Despite marketisation, academics are still in a powerful position relative to students, and telling them off for complaining about the impact on them is an abuse of that position, in my view. Which is why, again, it’s vital for UCU to restrict membership to postdoctoral researchers upwards.

Looks like precariously-employed staff are brassed off with some of the UCU hierarchy:

twitter.com/jordinasb85/status/1268616992468000768?s=19

twitter.com/kestontnt/status/1268815168575811585?s=19

I am pleased that they are speaking up against it. Precariously employed staff have been used as a pawn by this UCU leadership, whose chief concern has always been pensions (and virtue-signalling of course). Now there’s an actual pressing issue and the GS is doing FA apart from doing her usual social media fluff that totally lacks substance. I hope those who jumped on the Grady bandwagon are starting to regret it because it’s made the union worse, not better.

Interesting and justified but hardly any likes, retweets or comments. I think it’ll take more to derail the Gradytrain ...

Those of you who are not members anymore - you won't believe Grady's latest!!!

She's now imposing a compulsory level of £15 to all members to go to the Fighting Fund!

After this I'll definitely be out if they don't backtrack.

Btw it's nice to see lots of criticism on Twitter (mostly the fact that it's a flat rate - perfectly affordable for professors, perhaps not so much for precarious and unemployed members), including from BRANCHES who had no idea this was coming: twitter.com/search?q=UCU%20levy&src=typed_query

The Grady4GS faction are busy tweeting that this has nothing to do with them because it was decided in Feb and that it’s all the fault of UCU Left. Lolz. First of all no effort seems to have been made by them to timetable a motion to overturn this. Second, Jo McNeill has tweeted that this was actually problematic posed by.... Jo Grady herself!
At least people are starting to wake up to her incompetent leadership. Seriously, people are losing their jobs in droves, she does fuck all and rakes in a 6 figure salary. Anyone who thinks this is an improved leadership needs their head examining.

Sorry, dunno what went wrong with autocorrect there. Should say *this motion was proposed and timetabled by Jo Grady. Apparently with no warning that it was coming.

Shambles. The timing is shit too as people are still paying for her pointless strike (this being the reason they need to top up the strike fund).

Advice if you’re a UCU member: join a different union or get legal expenses cover. These jokes ain’t got your back.

I was ready to leave UCU in March. I decided to hang on because I was concerned about job cuts in HE. My job is not at risk itself, and things would have to be pretty bad before it is, but of course it's difficult to know these days what might happen a few years down the line. I am also increasingly concerned about academics being punished for wrongthink, not necessarily in the gender critical issue - apparently things have gotten as bad as people being reported to HR for liking tweets. But it looks increasingly unlikely that the UCU will stand up for the academic and against the university in such matters.

OMG what a shambles this whole thing is: twitter.com/JomcneillUCU/status/1276447990165667840