F inalienable year students affected by marking boycott

[fUNNYfACE36]

How is your final year student being affected?
Dd(dutham) will graduate on the planned date with a transcript of grades so far ,but not receive a classification until October.

I think you meant to quote someone else. This isn’t related to my posts

But you mentioned working in professional services in pp, can you go back?

Agreed. I am lucky that my kid is ‘only’ in their first year. My heart goes out to final year students as the timing of this is cruel and not just ‘inconvenient’ but career-affecting.

As you say, all worried parents can do is support their children.

Engaging with ranting staff who seem to be enjoying this, is unproductive so I am out too.

Look, you came on to the thread to complain and bewail. If you think people explaining the reality of working in the sector is “toxic”, then you can’t be very bothered with the debate. I’m sorry for the DC that they are being encouraged to think in such an entitled way about higher education, to be honest.

For many on this thread, pointing out that this is the logical consequence of government policy and the sector itself is clearly not something they want to think about.

Lecturers and staff in HE have been treated like disposable fodder by employers (and often, yes, by students), for a long time now. There isn’t any use trying to guilt trip us with shucked eyes and big moralising gasps about how dreadful we are and how we should get other jobs.

The best people already are. But do you want your kids to be taught by mediocre poorly-paid staff giving them pretend “customer service”? That’s basically what the parents on this thread seem to want. Or don’t you really care, as long as your kid gets what you want?

Have no idea why you think I am encouraging my DC to think in an entitled way
Please don’t feel sorry for my DC
Have been really disappointed by the responses from Uni staff

I wouldn't bother.

Any feedback on my suggestions, please? If your DC is worried, I hope they may have helped?

@myveryownelectrickitten Excellent posts. Absolutely agree. I have a dd about to graduate this year. I am concerned about this year's graduates. However, I am also concerned about the following year's. But I'm also concerned about the ones after that; and after that ... and this is why I am wholly supportive of the MAB.

I guess you would be supportive.

Is this you?

"muggleswick · 09/05/2023 16:47
Has anyone who is taking part in the MAB had a random sum of money labelled 'UCU Support' deposited in their bank account over the weekend?

I definitely didn't claim for this as have only claimed once re the Fighting Fund in February and was waiting for the evidence by way of my May payslip before submitting another claim"

You are absolutely deluded if you think higher education has any relation to “care” any longer. This has been totally rooted out of every area of the sector.

Well I'm sorry your uni sucks but I just want to reassure parents reading this that it's not like this everywhere

In my department we take pastoral care very seriously, it is part of our admin workload and we have dedicated admin officers for this area. You can't compare us to shop workers, who see customers for a few minutes once -- we spend years with our students, our work shapes their daily lives, they live in uni housing, etc etc. We have enormous influence over them, and with that comes responsibility too.

You can argue it's a Tory attitude to expect lecturers to care, but I would say that your attitude of 'it doesn't say in my contract I have to care about my students' is far more Tory.

Also people opposed to the MAB aren't saying you have no right to strike. But why not withdraw your labour on things that actually hurt the uni administration and not the students? Refuse to publish or submit grant proposals, refuse to do all the unpaid admin labour, prepare for REF, etc etc.

Student income is already sitting in the uni accounts. Strikes that hurt students are not going to get very far because the uni already has their money and doesn't care about them. Strikes that threaten current and future income (from grants/REF) would force them to pay attention.

@dreamingbohemian I’m very sceptical that you’re a lecturer, if your reading comprehension is so poor as to think the very opposite of the actual point. How long have you worked in HE? You don’t seem to have any sense of the issues facing the sector. And you are also confusing “pastoral support” with “lecturers personally caring about students” (the topic of this thread), which are not remotely the same thing at all.

It was a Tory policy to strip HE of any public service or care, and turn it into a marketised product. Very explicitly so. I would prefer that wasn’t the case. But that’s what the right wing voted for and what they got — marketised HE.

On another note, “pastoral support” has also been sold to students and parents as a product, too, though largely “delivered” via support staff and “wellbeing” initiatives, which replace any actual real “care” or duty on behalf of lecturers. Are you a HE lecturer? What training have you had in “pastoral care”? Is it explicitly included in your contract, and how is that phrased?

Those things only hurt individuals’ careers, not the university. The university largely doesn’t care about that stuff — hardly any income comes through the REF now anyway, because the government removed most of it! So whilst the universities pretend to care about the REF, they haven’t really been that bothered since a couple of rounds back.

The entire point of withdrawing labour is to withdraw labour that makes a difference. There’s no point withdrawing the bits you’re meant to be doing in your spare time anyway 😂🤣

Do you really have to LAUGH about this?

The pp sounds a muddled on this. You’re right it is a longer term relationship which is further away from a few minutes in store.

“Student income is already sitting in the uni accounts. Strikes that hurt students are not going to get very far because the uni already has their money and doesn't care about them. Strikes that threaten current and future income (from grants/REF) would force them to pay attention.”

My employer very much cares about the student satisfaction surveys, which do influence application numbers and future income.

Good grief — have some perspective! Save your energy for ranting about the nurses’ and junior doctors’ strikes.

21 year olds getting their final uni results a little bit late is not an Earth-shattering catastrophe, whatever the helicopter parents think.

And you probably need to think a little bit about the use of the emoji.

So anyone who disagrees with you couldn't possibly be a lecturer? I'm just a liar? Stellar debating technique there.

Publishing and grant work is not 'bits you do in your spare time'. Our standard academic contract is 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% admin. Right now strikes are only withdrawing their teaching, my point is that it makes more sense to withdraw research and admin as that is what the university actually cares about.

I have no idea what your university cares about but mine cares deeply about grant income and the REF, especially as our Europe-based funding has dropped quite a lot since Brexit. They don't really care about impact on students because A) they already have their money and B) as you can see from this thread, a lot of people blame the lecturers and not the unis.

You literally confused pastoral support with the idea of whether lecturers should personally care about students - in your post. And used as evidence the fact that your institution has dedicated pastoral “admin officers” as evidence. Don’t you see that makes no sense? Admin officers are not lecturers.

And you also seemed to think that “it’s a Tory attitude to expect lecturers to care”. Seriously? That’s the very point that’s being argued against.

Many subjects - unusually the ones that are most unionised, and will be most affected by the MAB, such as the humanities - bring in next to no grant income (there is simply none to bring in). And there is very little funding that comes via the REF any more. So why do you think most unionised departments aren’t boycotting grants and the REF? Do you think it would be fruitful to boycott something that takes five to six or more years to work through (the REF); or doesn’t really exist in a large number of disciplines (grant income)?

That's true, I shouldn't say universities don't care at all. But I think they're not equally vulnerable on student numbers. Especially if student satisfaction goes down at all universities, which it probably will if they're all affected by strikes, then the universities who usually do well on recruitment will probably still be ok.

Ideally each university branch would have its own strike strategy because there is such huge variance across the sector, as this thread shows, universities care about different things. Obviously it's not going to happen this way though.

The pay spine and conditions are national/sector wide, so it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to have institutional-specific strikes, since the very aim is to put collective pressure on all the universities.

And neither would it make sense, in a cost of living crisis, to decide to boycott REF2028 in five years’ time. How would that work? We would like a pay review perhaps in seven years please? Not very effective as a strike. Or I could decide not to apply for the non-existent grant income in my subject. Hardly putting pressure on the university, is it? The entire point of a strike is to withdraw labour in a way that is effective (and time limited). What else is there?

1. I was refuting your assertion that there is no longer any element of 'care' in the university sector, by noting how my department (and I know of many others) does explicitly prioritise student welfare. I mentioned the admin officers as part of this overall programme, I did not say they were lecturers.

I don't see the point in asking whether staff 'personally care'. What matters is whether staff care within the context of doing their jobs, and I think that's all that parents are asking -- on this thread, for example, asking that lecturers communicate what's going on to their anxious students. Or that the union consider the hardships this will cause students.

2 I agree that turning students into customers and then expecting staff to provide free labour (e.g., a lot of the pastoral support we provide) is a very right-wing/Tory thing to do. But to turn around and say it's not in my contract to care about my students is just playing the same game. It's turning students into inconveniences and arguing over how they should expect to be treated.

I would argue the best way to confront both the Tories and the universities would be to forge a real campaign of solidarity with the students, to work together to push back against the commodification of education and improve conditions for everyone. But that is not going to happen when the only labour we are withdrawing is teaching.

At my university, grant/funding income is about two-thirds as much as tuition income, i.e. it's a lot of money to threaten (hundreds of millions per year). And they have already set up REF training sessions and review committees -- all unpaid labour of course, which people could resist now, not in 5 years.

This is the problem, not all universities are the same. Potentially you could still put collective pressure on them by having a strike at every university, but with different strategies to reflect these differences.

What is your preferred outcome?

Funding from government for higher salaries - any ideas on how much, higher fees paid by students, or is it something else

It might be two thirds as much as tuition income (at my institution it’s more), but that is largely concentrated in a very few disciplines/departments which have a high percentage of non-U.K. and soft money funded staff who aren’t unionised for the most part. Whereas the heavily unionises departments don’t bring in Anna grant income. So how would a grant income boycott work?

A strike is meant to be a singular collective action that has the most impact on an employer. How would a few individuals refusing to serve on REF committees now, for an exercise in five years’ time, for results in six years’ time, for funding allocations in seven years’ time, work? Half of my department would have left by then! (We have a large proportion of postdocs.) The university wouldn’t give a toss.

my autocorrect is going crazy this morning. Any grant income! No idea who Anna is 😂