COBAS UK

Shake the city

2009-05-28T02:11:00.000-07:00

After Salvatore started work for the University in its School of Computing and IT (SCIT) on 1st September 2004, I was on the University campus on that and almost every subsequent day on which Salvatore attended work. We discussed the difficulties he encountered at work regularly and I accompanied Salvatore to various meetings with the University.

When Salvatore was appointed to work for the University, I was very pleased because the advert had said they were looking for somebody with an academic focus in Human Computer Interaction and this was his area of research. Salvatore applied because they were requesting HCI expertise and his qualifications exceeded the requirements of the post.

Salvatore was in good health and enthusiastic when he started work for the University.

From September 2004 onwards Salvatore confided to me of various incidents I would describe as bullying. I started to notice Salvatore was tired and irritable after work quite early on in his employment. He would usually work until quite late at night and on the weekends on his research, his postgraduate studies and on developing ideas for improving the curriculum, in addition to preparing his teaching. He was enjoying his research and only became stressed as a result of the actions of the University. He was clearly keen to try to make the job work out.
From about October or November 2004 until Salvatore had to stop work due to ill health in October 2006, I heard recordings of several meetings between Salvatore and the University. I heard these because, after Salvatore made clear to me that he was feeling bullied within the University’s School of Computing and IT, I asked to hear the recordings he took of his meetings. I understood that he did so to assist in remembering what had been said and provide a possibility to reflect on the meetings afterwards (instead of taking notes). These tape recordings subsequently became helpful because I could hear them and understand what was happening at his work and try to help by discussing the problems.

The first recordings I heard were of two meetings in October or November 2004 between Salvatore and his line manager, Peter Musgrove. Salvatore raised a grievance about the behaviour of Alison Bunce. Peter Musgrove told Salvatore that he was not going to do anything about the incident with Alison Bunce and that “Alison has problems which are nothing to do with you” or words to that effect. He instructed Salvatore to “forget about it”.

They also discussed Salvatore’s staff development funding for research and that Salvatore was paying his own PhD fees. Peter Musgrove said there was about £2000 a year available for Salvatore. When Salvatore attempted to discuss his ideas for curriculum development, Peter Musgrove indicated that it did not interest him and Salvatore should talk to Helen Ashdown.

I heard a series of recordings of ‘probation meetings’, which took place between December 2004 and July 2005, between Salvatore and Helen Ashdown. I clearly recall from these meetings that Salvatore raised complaints about the unprofessional conduct of colleagues he had experienced during the initial months of his employment, breaches of procedures including his probation by the University and failures by the University to address his complaints. He put forward many ideas for curriculum development but was persistently told he could not participate in curriculum development at that time.

I heard Helen Ashdown make intimidating comments during the meetings including ‘nobody likes to work with you’ and threatening that there were not likely to be enough hours to timetable Salvatore to.
At no time did I see or hear anything to suggest that the grievances Salvatore had raised had been investigated or resolved. In the meetings I heard, Salvatore was consistently and without investigation, blamed by Helen Ashdown for every complaint he raised.

In early 2005, I heard on recording, Jennifer Davies, who was Salvatore’s Postgraduate Studies mentor, subject Salvatore to a series of insults and acts of harassment, saying that Salvatore should ‘lose’ his ‘thick Italian accent’ and accusing him of ‘flirting with’ and ‘hectoring’ students amongst other things.
On 20 April 2005 or thereabouts, I accompanied Salvatore to meet with Neil Gordon, Personnel Services Manager for the University. We asked for advice about how to complain formally about Jenny Davies. Neil Gordon said that he would not advise, but would only tell Salvatore which policy was applicable. At the same meeting, Salvatore made Neil Gordon aware of the irregularities in the conduct of his probation by the University. Salvatore also raised an additional complaint regarding Peter Musgrove who had refused to replace the chair assigned to Salvatore for use in his office since the start of his employment, which was broken and unusable. Neil Gordon did not take note of these grievances and refused to advise or help him.
These grievances were again raised in a meeting between Salvatore and Robert Moreton at around the same time, of which I heard a recording. Robert Moreton sounded as though he did not want to accept Salvatore’s complaints and sounded annoyed that Salvatore was bringing them forward. They discussed the misconduct of the probation process by Helen Ashdown and Salvatore agreed to complete the forms although the probation procedures had been breached, so that his complaints could be recorded formally and addressed. Robert Moreton promised to investigate all his complaints. Robert Moreton said he regarded the conduct of the colleagues Salvatore complained about to be ‘unprofessional’ and later sent an email with an attachment, which I saw, stating this.

On 15 July 2005, I heard a recording of another meeting between Salvatore and Robert Moreton. Salvatore again pointed out his unresolved complaints, referring to a bullying culture in the department and Robert Moreton promised to investigate, citing specifically a complaint against a colleague, Tony Mansfield. He said he needed to adjourn the meeting for this purpose and promised it would resume in a couple of days, but this never happened.

On 12 September 2005, I accompanied Salvatore to see Roger Williams, Head of Personnel for the University, for Salvatore to denounce a breach of contract as a result of the way his probation had been mismanaged by the University.

On 13 September 2005, I accompanied Salvatore to a pre-scheduled meeting with Robert Moreton and Neil Gordon. It was established during this and a subsequent meeting that Salvatore’s probation had been successfully concluded on his part and that there had been a breach of contract arising from the mismanagement of the probation by the University.

During the meeting on 13 September, Salvatore complained of harassment by Robert Moreton saying he had used the phrase ‘bloody Italians’ during a public speech he had made in September 2004, after Salvatore had introduced himself as a new member of staff. Robert Moreton admitted to this but laughed, which made me feel angry and sick. Personnel Manager Neil Gordon did not do anything when the issue was raised and did not offer Salvatore any advice or assistance.

Salvatore met with Peter Musgrove on 11 October 2005 or thereabouts. I heard a recording of this meeting, which was very informal. Peter Musgrove talked about some problems experienced by other staff in the past and suggested that Salvatore should ignore breaches of procedures in the department. There were no targets set for Salvatore about research or otherwise and Peter Musgrove did not suggest during this meeting that there was any issue with Salvatore’s performance, including his ability to follow procedures.

At around this time, I accompanied Salvatore to the Personnel department. He informed Personnel that appraisal was not being carried out within the SCIT department. While Personnel confirmed that appraisal was mandatory for all staff, they did not record the grievance.

On 10 November 2005, Salvatore was unwell and couldn’t go to work. The day before, I had been at the University while Salvatore had given an extra workshop for students for a module called CP1045 at 2pm and he commented afterwards that the students were ready to submit their coursework the following day.

On the morning of 10 November the University was informed of Salvatore’s ill health. The same morning I took a phone call from Stuart Slater, a colleague of Salvatore who would teach the class in his absence. I took a contact number and when Salvatore was feeling well enough, he returned the call. Stuart Slater asked what he was supposed to teach. He seemed concerned because he had not attended previous classes or meetings and was consequently ignorant of the module contents. Salvatore told him the students were ready to submit their assignments. Stuart Slater promised to publish the slides of his class on ‘WOLF’ (the university online learning environment). He seemed content at the end of the phone call and did not at any time suggest that there was any problem in understanding the assessment.
On or around Friday 11 November 2005 I heard a recording of a meeting between Salvatore and Peter Musgrove. Salvatore explained that he felt that the granting of an extension by Peter Musgrove to the students on CP1045 for the coursework due on 10 November, was an act of bullying and a direct breach of the university procedures.

He said the extension was unfair to both him and the students. Peter Musgrove was clear that he had been approached by Jas Singh and Stuart Slater and had granted the extension, but that this was an “error of judgment”. Peter Musgrove nonetheless refused to withdraw the decision, apologise or even admit his error to the students and others involved, saying he was interested only in keeping the students happy.

On 14 November 2005 or thereabouts, I heard a recording of a meeting between Salvatore and Kamal Bechkoum discussing the formal grievance entered by Salvatore against Peter Musgrove. Salvatore said the students had been ready to submit their work the day before. Kamal Bechkoum admitted that the granting of the extension had been an “error of judgment” by Peter Musgrove. Salvatore was very clear that he believed an investigation needed to take place and the meeting ended with an agreement that they would meet with Peter Musgrove to discuss the grievance the following day.

I saw Salvatore very stressed by these events and the continuing bullying towards him. He felt unable to go to work the next day. He was on sick leave from 15 November 2005 until 12 December 2005.

Salvatore returned to work on Monday 12 December. He was still very unwell and at 5.45pm on Wednesday 14 December 2005, I accompanied Salvatore home as he was feeling very distressed and sick. I understood from our conversations later that he felt that Peter Musgrove and Steve Garner, a colleague he was working with on a module, were setting him up to look inadequate in front of students.

On 15 December 2005 or thereabouts, I spoke with Robert Moreton by telephone to ask for Salvatore’s leave to be authorised to allow him some time to recover. It was also established during this conversation that Salvatore would have a return to work meeting when he went back to work. I told Robert Moreton Salvatore wanted some independent advice regarding the bullying he had experienced from the University but was very clear that he was not refusing to have a return to work meeting as this was also his wish. Robert Moreton said that getting advice was Salvatore’s prerogative and that some forms would be filled out about Salvatore’s illness on his return to work.

Salvatore remained off work until 09 January 2006. He was ill throughout his leave and attended hospital on 25 December with a serious Bronchial infection. When Salvatore returned to work he was clearly still unwell with stress.
On 11 January 2006, I accompanied Salvatore due to his ill health, to a meeting with Robert Moreton. Whilst we waited outside his office, Robert Moreton acknowledged Salvatore’s ill health and told us that the meeting was an appraisal meeting. After we entered his office a few minutes later, Robert Moreton immediately said that the meeting was not going to be an appraisal meeting after all. He said he had not made any enquiries but questioned what had happened the previous day with Peter Musgrove. He was referring to an argument between Peter Musgrove and Salvatore. Without discussing the matter in any depth, Robert Moreton then suspended Salvatore by reading a scripted text from a piece of paper. I asked if he was also suspending Peter Musgrove for his actions. He said no and repeatedly read from his piece of paper whenever a question was asked. Salvatore questioned Robert Moreton’s motives and asked repeatedly why Robert Moreton was suspending him and what he had done wrong. Robert Moreton refused to give any reason relating to the content of the argument and just kept reading from his piece of paper. He only seemed interested in the fact that the argument had been loud and nothing to do with what was said. The meeting was undignified and seemed to have been prepared beforehand by Robert Moreton. Robert Moreton did not seem at all interested to establish the facts of the matter.

As a result of the argument with Peter Musgrove, a hearing was held in February 2006 resulting in Salvatore receiving a disciplinary warning. Salvatore was refused a request to call me as his witness at both this and the subsequent appeal. I heard a tape recording and clearly heard the Chair promise at the conclusion of the hearing to engage in a process to address the causes of Salvatore’s stress and the instances of bullying. He also stated that the grievances outstanding that Salvatore had entered, should be progressed by the University.

In January 2006, Salvatore and I met with the University Occupational Health Advisor, Vicky Ubhi, at Salvatore’s request. Vicky Ubhi was told of the pending disciplinary action and of the bullying Salvatore had received.
At Salvatore’s request, he and I also met with the University Occupational Health Physician, Dr O’Connell on 26th January 2006. Both Vicky Ubhi and Dr O’Connell were fully aware of the causes of Salvatore’s stress within the bullying he had experienced at the University. A subsequent report by Dr O’Connell discussed later with Vicky Ubhi in another meeting I attended, suggested that the grievance against Peter Musgrove should be addressed as a matter of urgency.

After Salvatore returned to work on 13 February 2006, I heard recordings of two meetings between Kamal Bechkoum and Salvatore. Although Kamal Bechkoum heard from Salvatore regarding the causes of his stress, he did not offer to investigate and did not question Salvatore about how the University could assist his return to work. The emphasis was upon Kamal Bechkoum communicating to Salvatore what he needed to do to catch up with his work and seemed to be more an exercise of reinforcing the disciplinary sanction imposed. He did not offer to address the grievance against Peter Musgrove or any others and said that he would be acting as Salvatore’s line manager for the time being. During these two meetings, I heard Kamal Bechkoum agree that Salvatore would take a lead role in the development of the HCI curriculum and the revalidation process for the coming year. There was no mention of how Salvatore’s stress would be addressed or discussion about what the University might to do to help, despite a request from Salvatore to this effect.

Salvatore again became ill with stress after further incidents and took time off work in May 2006.

On 15 May 2006 I wrote to Vicky Ubhi expressing concern at the lack of effort by the University to address the causes of Salvatore’s stress and failure to implement their own procedures. I requested that she ensure the return to work procedure be properly implemented.

On or around 19th May 2006, I was present when Salvatore asked Vicky Ubhi for a meeting with herself, personnel and Salvatore’s line manager in accordance with the University’s stress absence procedure, as no such invitation or any other contact had been forthcoming from the University and they had not implemented the procedure.
I heard a tape recording of the resultant meeting, which took place on 30 May 2006. I heard Salvatore state clearly that he did not feel it would help to pursue a grievance. He asked for an independent investigation into this and the other causes of his stress to be conducted, to which Kamal Bechkoum and Neil Gordon agreed.

On 03 July 2006 I heard a recording of a meeting between Salvatore and Andrew Bridges, who had been appointed by the University to carry out the investigation. During the meeting, it was agreed that Andrew Bridges would look at Salvatore’s personnel or other files held by the University for details of previous grievances Salvatore had entered, as Salvatore did not want to describe them again. Salvatore talked about some earlier incidents of bullying and harassment and then described how on 08 May 2006, colleague and union representative John Roche had intentionally disrupted an assessment presentation with some students which Salvatore had been chairing and how John Roche had on the same day walked over and slammed the door of the office they shared, in the faces of Salvatore and another colleague, Ros Hampton. Andrew Bridges said that he would speak with John Roche and other relevant individuals and seemed to be content to continue his investigation based on the information Salvatore had provided. He was clear that he could contact Salvatore for any further details.

In November 2006 I contacted Ros Hampton by telephone to ask her about the incident involving John Roche on 8th May 2006. She admitted to me on the phone that she had been upset by the incident but did not pursue a grievance against John Roche. She initially agreed to write down her feelings about the event, but shortly afterwards changed her mind and refused to help, saying it was because I had asked her, rather than Salvatore himself asking her.

On 31 August 2006, I heard a recording of a meeting with Kamal Bechkoum. The day prior, I had accompanied Salvatore to a meeting with the Head of Personnel, Roger Williams, to complain because a request made several weeks prior by Salvatore to Kamal Bechkoum for the reimbursement of expenses incurred by Salvatore for timetabled activities in March 2006, had been ignored. The meeting with Kamal Bechkoum took place as a consequence of this meeting. During the meeting, I heard Kamal Bechkoum threaten Salvatore in a disciplinary way. He refused to explain why he had not approved reimbursement of the expenses, despite requests from Salvatore. He told Salvatore that all expenses needed “authorisation from Rob” beforehand. He further added that authorisation was needed to submit a paper to a conference. Salvatore pointed out that this was not what the finance website and university procedure required. Kamal Bechkoum was reluctant to listen and gave Salvatore an ultimatum of being disciplined or leaving. Salvatore said that he would leave then, indicating that Kamal Bechkoum was not in his right to discipline him for following normal procedures.

On 12 September 2006, I heard a recording of a meeting between Salvatore, Kamal Bechkoum and Neil Gordon in which the results of the stress investigation conducted by Andy Bridges were reported. During the meeting, Salvatore emphasised that he did not feel the investigation had been conducted appropriately and not as had been agreed with Andy Bridges when they had met previously. Kamal Bechkoum said that Salvatore would be provided with another office, as he had been working out of the coffee bar since May after the incident involving John Roche.

On 13 September 2006, I heard recording of a meeting between Kamal Bechkoum and Salvatore. During the meeting, Kamal Bechkoum acknowledged that Salvatore had never had appraisal before then. Various research and curriculum development objectives for Salvatore were discussed but no reference whatsoever was made during the meeting to any disciplinary issues or allegations of misconduct or other problems.

On 14 September 2006, I heard a recording of a meeting between Salvatore, Kevan Buckley and Robert Moreton. Salvatore had requested this meeting to clarify some issues concerning Salvatore and Kevan Buckley. Salvatore submitted a written complaint about events involving Kevan Buckley and in particular his previous insinuation that Salvatore should resign from the Learning and Teaching Committee. However, Robert Moreton refused to accept the document, making clear that he wanted no record of the grievance. Salvatore explained how he had raised his complaint verbally during a previous learning and teaching committee meeting, but that Kevan Buckley had not responded. As Robert Moreton had claimed that Salvatore had “stormed out” of the committee meeting, Salvatore asked who had made such an allegation. As I had heard a recording of the committee meeting, I knew that Salvatore had in fact left quietly and without comment several minutes after raising his complaint. Robert Moreton refused to say who had made the allegation and was clearly not interested in investigating. He accepted without question when Kevan Buckley claimed to have received an email of resignation from the committee from Salvatore. Salvatore asked Kevan Buckley to produce the email, but Kevan Buckley said he would only do so after the meeting. Robert Moreton then began a critical tirade against Salvatore, telling him that “people don’t like your perceptions” or words to that effect. There was no resolution at the end of the meeting, which had been turned into an attack against Salvatore by Robert Moreton, supported by Kevan Buckley. Robert Moreton was not interested in receiving the email Kevan Buckley had referred to and refused to allow Salvatore to lodge his grievance formally in writing.

On 11 or 12 October 2006, Salvatore again became ill with stress and worsening depression. He could not face going back to work after being away. We sought to see a GP and the doctor confirmed that Salvatore should avoid the stress of work and began a course of treatment for Salvatore’s stress, anxiety and depression.
Throughout this time my primary concern was for Salvatore’s health. I was extremely worried to see him so ill. He would become suddenly highly agitated. He also would suffer tremendous periods (from hours to days) of distress, anxiety and depressiveness, often sleeping for most of the day and rarely going out.
Salvatore was called to a disciplinary hearing for 18 October 2006 but he was absolutely unfit to represent himself or attend such a hearing at the time and it was postponed.

On 10 November 2006, I accompanied Salvatore to meet with Maggie Burton, the University Occupational Health Advisor. Salvatore had requested the meeting by phone on 09 November, after receiving no contact from Occupational Health since he went off sick. During the meeting, the instances of bullying and harassment were recounted in detail. I handed Maggie Burton a letter describing some of my observations regarding Salvatore’s symptoms and Salvatore also left with her a written grievance regarding the lack of support up to then received from the University to address the causes of his stress. She expressed her opinion that Salvatore was not fit to return to work. She did not make any assessment of Salvatore’s health and neither did she refer to any medical evidence. She offered Salvatore the choice of seeing the Occupational Health Physician, which he declined and she accepted this. It was agreed that Salvatore’s General Practitioner could be contacted by Maggie Burton for his professional opinion. Towards the end of the meeting, I stated very clearly that I expected her to follow the procedures this time to help Salvatore return to work in a fair way, as the university had previously failed in this respect and she promised to do so.

On 24 November, I phoned to Maggie Burton to complain about a report she had written to Neil Gordon after our meeting on 10th November 2006. I told her I believed her conduct was not befitting of a health professional and that she was not interested in Salvatore’s wellbeing. I made her aware that I had a detailed record of the meeting we had held and that her report was a false record of it. I told her that Salvatore was not fit to attend a disciplinary meeting and that I was disgusted by the report she had written because it did not reflect what she had said at the meeting we had at all. I made her aware that Salvatore was also feeling worse and now did not feel like leaving the house at all.

On 27th November 2006, I sent a fax to Geoff Hampton, explaining that Salvatore was not well enough to attend or represent himself at a disciplinary hearing and was still on certified sick leave. He subsequently phoned and told me that he would not want to proceed with any disciplinary hearings for any member of staff who was not well enough and said he would postpone the hearing.

Between December 2006 and March 2007, a number of appointments were scheduled with the occupational health physician of the University, which were cancelled because Salvatore did not feel well enough to attend and was receiving treatment from his GP, who would often visit him at home when he felt too ill to attend the medical practice.

In or around January 2007, I telephoned to Dr O’Connell, the Occupational Health Physician Salvatore had previously met with. I told Dr O’Connell that the recommendations he had made in his previous report had been ignored by the University. He responded by telling me that the university could choose to ignore his reports, saying something like ‘I can say A and they do B’.

Salvatore’s health was worsening during this period. In January 2007, his GP wrote to the University. After the reassurance from Geoff Hampton, I believed that the University would consider and act on this medical report, which again pointed to the causes of Salvatore’s stress illness.

Each time Salvatore was reviewed by his GP, I sent the sick note in to the University by post and/or fax.

On 16 April 2007, the GP reviewed Salvatore at home, because he was too ill to attend the medical practice. Just before leaving, he contemplated writing to the university to see if he could help but said that they should really contact him first. I sent confirmation that Salvatore was still unwell to the University by fax the same day and sent the sick note by post afterwards.

On 18 April 2007, a special delivery card was left by the Royal Mail whilst I was out and Salvatore was sleeping. I did not know what this related to or who it was from but only that it was for Salvatore and that he felt too ill to either collect the item or deal with any correspondence.

On 24 April 2007, I came into the house to find that another Special delivery card had been delivered. Salvatore was very agitated and disoriented and had been sleeping on the sofa. He explained that someone had been banging loudly on the window and had woken him. He said he hadn’t realised it was the Royal Mail but had indicated that he was not able to come to the door. Salvatore was upset. At that time, he was not well enough to collect the item or deal with any correspondence.

On 03 May 2007, I was shocked when Salvatore received a letter, wrongly dated 01 April 2007, enclosing notes apparently taken at a “Stage 4 (Dismissal) hearing”. I understood from reading the notes that the respondent had dismissed Salvatore in his absence and that the 5 days allowed for appeal had already elapsed. I was surprised that the hearing had been so short and could not understand from the notes what evidence or individuals were being referred to.

I did not know at the time that the hearing was taking place. The University had made no attempt to contact Salvatore by ‘phone, email or regular post, despite having done so before the previous disciplinary hearing.

Because I had forwarded medical evidence to the University, they were aware that Salvatore was not fit to attend a hearing. They were also aware that he did not know about the hearing and he did not have chance to appeal.

Melody Boyce

The court of Mangiafuoco and troubles matter

2009-05-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

Salvatore Fiore’s witness statement of what he had to undergo whilst employed at the University of Wolverhampton.

The following document was written on 23/11/2007

I am currently studying for an MBA in Education at Keele University. I have a MPhil Computation Human-Computer Interaction, UMIST (University of Manchester), a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning & Teaching in HE, University of Wolverhampton, a BSc (Hons) Business Information Technology, Open University and an HND Business Information Technology, Brunel University. I also have Professional qualifications as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Chartered Scientist of the British Computer Society / The Science Council, Chartered Member of the British Computer Society and a Chartered IT professional of the British Computer Society. I have worked hard to achieve my qualifications and was keen to get the position as a senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton.

I started working as a Senior Lecturer in Computing at the School of Computing and IT on 1 September 2004. My terms of employment were set out in a letter of offer of employment dated 21 July 2004. At the section headed Duties and Hours of Work it specifically stated that my duties included “teaching and tutorial guidance, research and other forms of scholarly activity, examining, curriculum development, administration and related activities”. I was keen to be given the opportunity to carry out the full range of these duties.

My optimism about my new role was fairly short-lived, as within about one month of starting the job there was news of redundancies at the University. I knew from an early stage that I did not like the management style of Robert Moreton, the Dean of the school. I recall a meeting with him when I first started working at the University whereby he told me that he was proud at how well he looked on a photograph on his wall when other members of staff looked old and worn out. As he was my manager I was not impressed by this attitude.

On 20 September 2004, I attended a ‘Dean’s Address’. Nearly all members of staff of the School of Computing and IT (“SCIT”) as well as some external members including members of the Executive Board were in attendance. I and other new members of staff were asked to stand and present ourselves. I felt uncomfortable about being told to stand up. At my turn, Robert Moreton asked me to stand with a gesture, which I did. Robert Moreton then continued presenting and in a rapid succession of words, said the phrase "bloody Italians". Nobody in the room offered even a glance of disapproval for this remark and whilst leaving the room afterwards, I said to a colleague how shocked I was after this remark, but he didn't respond.

I deny that I exhibited relationship difficulties with my colleagues. This suggests that I was the sole cause of these problems. I in fact felt that I experienced some bullying during the first few months of my employment, firstly involving colleagues Alison Bunce and Tony Mansfield and reported this first to my line manager Peter Musgrove at two meetings in October or November 2004. Peter Musgrove told me he would investigate but came back at the second meeting dismissing my complaint by saying that Alison Bunce had problems, in a way that made me understand she had some sort of mental problems or similar, and I should just forget about the incident.

During these meetings, we also discussed some conferences I wished to attend as part of my research activity and staff development. Peter Musgrove told me that there would be only £2000 available each year for staff development. I told him that I was paying my own PhD fees.

In December 2004, I was approached by Helen Ashdown to tell me that I needed to participate in probation meetings. She had been assigned to supervise my 12 month standard probation period. When I received the forms then for the first time, I saw that these meetings should have taken place from September 2004. We had various probation meetings between December 2004 and July 2005, during which I raised various complaints about the bullying and unprofessional conduct by some colleagues. Helen Ashdown told me that she hated filling out the forms and was very reluctant to do so. The meetings were very unpleasant as Helen Ashdown would always refuse to address my complaints, instead dismissing them by telling me I should adapt to the culture of the School and commenting that nobody liked to work with me.

We discussed many of my ideas for curriculum development but Helen Ashdown repeatedly told me I could not participate in curriculum development at that time, though I could not understand why as it was part of my contract and job description. She suggested that there would not be enough hours to give me a full timetable. This made me fearful of redundancy. During this time, none of my grievances were addressed and Helen Ashdown twisted the facts and blamed me for the majority of the complaints that I raised.

As part of the requirement for my job I had to complete a Postgraduate Certificate in Education. I was given a mentor, Ruth Fairclough and had a nice stable relationship with her. Unfortunately the University changed my mentor without giving me any explanation or reason. This change of mentor was unprecedented and I felt a level of mistrust as a result of this unexplained change. Whilst the University allege that I had instances of relationship problems in the first months of working at the University, I do not agree with this. I had some disputes, which I tried to resolve. One issue was that the other staff failed to provide me with the slides and teaching materials that I needed to do my job properly. When I told Robert Moreton he agreed with me that it was unprofessional conduct by the other members of staff.

Only one grievance was investigated at this time despite the fact that I, accompanied by my partner, Melody Boyce, also met with Neil Gordon, Personnel Services Manager for the University about them. At the meeting on or around 20th April 2005, I told him of my grievance against Jenny Davies, as well as the irregularities in the conduct of my probation and problems with health and safety. I also complained to him about Peter Musgrove because he had refused to replace the broken and unusable chair I had been assigned in my office since my first day of employment and had said it was ‘good enough’ for me. Neil Gordon did not take note of these grievances and told me he could not advise me, except to tell me which procedure to follow.

In April 2005, I met with Robert Moreton to enter the grievance against Jenny Davies formally. During the meeting we discussed the other outstanding grievances and the misconduct of the probation process by Helen Ashdown. Because Robert Moreton promised a full investigation into my complaints, I agreed to document them on the ‘mid-term’ probation forms, despite the fact that the procedures for completing these had been breached by Helen Ashdown. Robert Moreton was clear that he regarded the conduct of the colleagues I was complaining about to be “unprofessional” and he later confirmed this by email attachment to me.

A few days later I had an informal conversation with John Roche, a colleague and NATFHE Union Representative in SCIT. He tried to persuade me to withdraw my grievance against Jenny Davies, because I was still a probationer and suggested it could cause me to fail my probation. I felt intimidated by this and made him aware that such comments were unwelcome. At some time after September 2005, during another conversation with John Roche, he confessed to me that Robert Moreton had sent him to persuade me to withdraw the grievance against Jenny Davies.

The grievance was investigated by Alison Halstead and appeared to be conducted fairly. She took my statements but the statements of Jenny Davies were more of her interpretation of events rather than factual. After I received her report, Robert Moreton interpreted it as though there was no fault with the School whatsoever, although the report clearly indicated serious problems of communication towards me and that he had taken an unprecedented step to remove my mentor without consulting me or my mentor. As a result of the grievance, a new mentor was promised to me in order for me to continue my studies towards a Postgraduate Certificate in Education, without further disruption, although this was never done.

On 15th July 2005 I met Robert Moreton in his office. During the meeting we had a general discussion about management and the unprofessional conduct of some colleagues I had already raised, such as Alison Bunce and Tony Mansfield. I told him that there was a cultural problem in SCIT and raised again my serious concerns, as a verbal grievance against Tony Mansfield. I made him aware that Tony Mansfield did not give to me materials necessary for me to teach students during a workshop and that I had heard Tony Mansfield telling a student to ignore me. He told me he would investigate and asked me to provide the email exchanges between myself and Tony Mansfield (which I promptly forwarded to him after the meeting). He adjourned the meeting, promising to resume when he had investigated this complaint. This never happened and the grievance was never resolved. I was never offered any report or feedback of meetings about this or other grievances, despite repeated promises to do so from the University.

On 12th September 2005, I went, accompanied by my partner, Melody Boyce, to see the Head of Personnel, Roger Williams to complain about the mismanagement of my probation due to the fact that I was not presented with relevant information and forms by management of SCIT and the personnel department in time. Moreover, I complained that due to the fact that the probation meetings and paperwork relating to its procedure had been mismanaged by Helen Ashdown, my probation supervisor. As such I claimed the breach of contract. Subsequently, a meeting was held with Robert Moreton and Neil Gordon, at which my partner was also present, at which it was confirmed that the probation had been passed successfully.

In September 2005, I met Peter Musgrove in the ‘common area’ of the office neighbouring mine. We were speaking about the relocation to the new offices and he made me aware that there was an agenda already established with regard to research and careers in the department. He told me that a new member of staff, Rupert Simpson would be located in my office and that he would ‘go higher’, making me understand that he would make a very rapid career progression. I was puzzled about how he could be so certain about this. He continued telling me that there were arrangements with regard to research in the department and that some would do research like Quasim Mehdi and his research group and that these individuals too would go higher up. He then said that I ‘would be involved in research too’, but as he said so, he made a gesture downwards with his hand and a disparaging expression with his face, that made me feel he was certain that I would not do well in the department. I was further perplexed as I understood that career progression in the university was regulated by appraisal, by contract and not by sponsorship.

On 11th October 2005 or thereabouts, I met Peter Musgrove in the annexe of the Costa Coffee bar on the University main campus for an informal chat without a fixed agenda. The chat was mostly referring to some of the suggestions he had to give me with regard to how to approach members of staff. He made me some propositions that I should ignore mismanagement of procedures by others in the department, without looking at the root cause of them. I also told him that I was attending a Masters in education at the University of Wolverhampton and talked about my doctoral studies at the University of York. We discussed the procedure on how to deal with student complaints. We did not converse at all about issues arising with regard to staff relations, students or performance. We did not fix any performance targets in what was a very informal meeting. Since this meeting, I never again met Peter Musgrove to discuss issues of performance or set targets for the purpose of appraisal.

In November 2005 I raised a formal grievance about my line manager, Peter Musgrove, which was not investigated. I raised the grievance because I felt bullied and harassed by him. This failure to deal with what I viewed as important employment difficulties was not taken seriously by the University and I became ill. This, compounded by the previous events and unresolved grievances, resulted in extended leave for work-related stress in November-December 2005.

In November 2005, I sent an email to Peter Musgrove requesting an appraisal. I did not know about the procedures for appraisal but was aware that it should be done every year. I was concerned that I did not have any targets or recognition of my progress set at the conclusion of my probation. He said appraisal had not been started for the year, which I could not understand as it was already November 2005 and the year had begun in September 2005. I was denied opportunity to participate in appraisal throughout the 2005/6 academic year, despite my repeated requests to Personnel and my line manager Peter Musgrove.

Sometime around November 2005 or thereabouts, I went, accompanied by my partner, Melody Boyce, to the Personnel department to let them know that I was concerned about the lack of appraisals in the department. I spoke to a slim, young, black woman, I believe to be named Sam Patterson. After briefly explaining to her the information I had gathered, she said that appraisal should be done at all levels in all Schools, but that she could not do much about it. I was handed information relating to the appraisal process but she did not take note of the event although I was explicit that this was, albeit verbal, a grievance towards the management of SCIT. I was never invited to discuss this with Personnel or others.

As a module leader on teaching module CP1045 I issued assignments to students. One particular assignment had to be handed in on 10 November 2005. The day before the hand in date for this assignment I held an additional tutorial to make sure that the students were okay with the assignment. No problems were raised and only one student asked for an extension. As she would not give me a reason for requesting an extension I refused and told her that there were proper procedures to be followed to obtain an extension. On the 10 November 2005 the day that the assignments were to be submitted I was off work due to sickness. In my absence Peter Musgrove gave a mass extension to the students without even attempting to consult me about this. I felt that this was in breach of University policy and undermined my authority and credibility.

On about 11 November 2005, I met with Peter Musgrove in his office, in order to ask him about the mass extension he had given on 10th November 2005 to students of the module CP1045. I went to see him in order to find out his motivation and ask for evidence of the need to do so. I began the meeting by telling him that I was off sick for just one day on 10th November and that on the 9th November I had been with the students, giving them extra timetabled tutorials to address last minute questions. At that time, nobody had presented their tutor with an extension request and I did not receive any extension requests from any tutor. I told him that I had reminded the students, as I normally would, that extensions would be allowed only for the circumstances contemplated in the module guide as determined by university procedure. They had to inform their tutor first, who, in turn, in agreement with myself, would have allowed an extension if a reason was valid. I also said that students who need an extension should approach their tutor at least a week before the deadline.

Peter Musgrove told me that on the day he had been approached by Jas Singh and Stuart Slater and that by “error of judgment”, he allowed an extension to the students. On this basis, I asked him to withdraw the extension because it unfairly discriminated against some students who had already submitted their work on time. He told me that he did not want to do so because the extension was already issued, so I told him that I would be willing for the students to present their assignments as a resubmission at a later date. He refused this offer from me. I told him that with his extension he was implying that there was fault with my teaching and that he was breaching university procedure. I said that he was bullying me with his behaviour. He was very quick to dismiss me, saying that he didn’t care about staff but was interested in making the students happy. I was dismayed and asked him again if he really was not interested in the wellbeing of his staff, which he confirmed. I then said “I’m sorry, but you are forcing me to put a grievance” and he responded confidently, “yes, put it”. That same day I gave him a written grievance. I also lodged a grievance with Kamal Bechkoum, Anne Latham and Robert Moreton for this matter. I felt that I had to do this to protect my dignity.

On 14 November 2005, I met with Kamal Bechkoum in his office to discuss the grievance I had put against Peter Musgrove after he allowed the extension. The conversation began with Kamal Bechkoum illustrating to me some documents for internal moderation in which Jas Singh highlighted some areas for improvement. I pointed out that the assignment was issued after making the suggested adjustments and that no other suggestions had been made by the internal moderator or the teaching team for the module CP1045 (Myself as Module Leader, John Roche and Stuart Slater as Lecturers). Kamal Bechkoum continued telling me about the motivation behind Peter Musgrove granting the extension and admitted that this was due to an “error of judgment” by Peter Musgrove. In a previous meeting with Peter Musgrove, he had also admitted to me that his actions were the result of an “error of judgment”.

There was, from Kamal Bechkoum, an admission of this mismanagement and I asked for there to be a clarification between Peter Musgrove and me regarding how to take the module forward, considering my insistence that Peter Musgrove should acknowledge his error to the students. The meeting terminated with an agreement between Kamal Bechkoum and me that these things would be discussed further in the presence of Peter Musgrove and we fixed a meeting for the following day.

Due to ill health, I could not attend this meeting. However, after my return to work, I mentioned on various occasions to Vicky Ubhi, Martin-Hedley Smith, Kamal Bechkoum, Robert Moreton and Maggie Burton that the grievance was still unresolved and an investigation was needed. Even Peter Musgrove referred to the fact that this grievance was unresolved in an email.

No concerns at all were raised subsequently by the external examiner or any others, regarding the module or its assessment and neither were there any criticisms directed towards my teaching or module leadership. If there were concerns with the assessment regime for CP1045, these would have been highlighted at the exam board and reported to me as module leader as a breach of the quality assurance process.

It was in late 2005 after all these events that I started to feel depressed. I would wake up in the morning and feel unable to concentrate or find motivation to do the most elementary things. I would get confused and suffered headaches and other symptoms. I am a very proactive and pragmatic person by nature but I started to feel that all I wanted to do was to sleep all day and I was not up to doing anything. I went off sick after these events due to stress and went back to work on 12 December 2005.

On about 12 December 2005 on my return to work, I went to see Steve Garner, a lecturer in SCIT, to discuss the delivery of classes and if there were any issues with the module ‘System development and HCI’ of which I was part of the teaching team. He was aware that I had been off sick for some time due to ill health and so we had a brief chat about the latest developments on the module. He made me aware that there were no major issues and that during my absence other lecturers had covered for me whilst he also prepared the exam paper to be issued to students for the end of semester examination. I was a bit irritated by this considering that I expected to be involved in the design of the exam questions, being part of the teaching team. I asked him why he decided not to involve me and he seemed uncomfortable to respond and avoided answering. He told me that the exam paper should be issued to the students and I made him aware that I was not prepared to do it considering that almost none of the exam questions were related to the part of the subject with which I was familiar and would have taught. I made him aware that I was not going to deliver a paper as the students would inevitably ask questions and they had the right to do so. I suggested it would be in all respects unprofessional for me to do so. He seemed to accept my decision.

I also asked him why, unlike previous years, there were hardly any questions in relation to the part I taught, and suggested to him that this was intentional by him because the paper should have been finalised for internal moderation some considerable time before I went on sick leave in November. When I reminded him about this and told him I felt isolated on the module and that what he had done was not a fair practice for the students and that he was breaching the external quality assurance processes of the quality assurance agency, he quickly dismissed me, saying that Peter Musgrove told him to ignore the HCI questions purposefully because I went off sick. At that point, I made him aware of the very low esteem I had for him and left his office.

Steve Garner subsequently sent me an email asking if I was able to deliver the exam paper, to which I responded again, that I was not.

On 13 December 2005 I sent an email to SCIT staff. I believe that I was making valid comment about the situation that I had been put in by the University. I did not trust peer observations after I had experienced first hand how the system could be abused, when my mentor Jenny Davies had previously compiled blatantly contradictory reports for quality assurance and staff development purposes.

In January 2006, I had initiated contact with Vicky Ubhi, the university Occupational Health Advisor and their Occupational Health Physician. The physician had reported that my grievances should be addressed and I was expecting a support for return to work in accordance with the university procedures. I was offered counselling but I asked for a couple of weeks to reflect on whether I wanted counselling. The offer of counselling suggested that I had a problem, which I had caused.

In January 2006 I returned to work but felt that I received no support and immediately upon my return to work I had an argument with my line manager, Peter Musgrove, against whom there was already an unresolved grievance. I was still very stressed at the time. He did not ask for my reasons why I did not want to deliver the exam paper. This was too much for me to take. I felt as if he had intended to make me break down. I did not make any physical threats and had no intention to offend Peter Musgrove.

Disciplinary action was taken against me as a result of this argument leading to a 12 month Level 2 warning on my file. In December 2006 I learned from my Occupational Health file that, following a meeting between the Dean, the Association Dean and Occupational Health Adviser in December 2005, it had been agreed that I should not have to have contact with Peter Musgrove whilst the grievance remained unresolved. This relevant fact was withheld from the disciplinary proceedings. If this decision had been implemented, the argument and subsequent disciplinary action would never have taken place, and if the information had been present at the proceedings, it may have altered the outcome. Not only did this affect this particular disciplinary sanction against me, as my dismissal was based on a breach of the warning arising out of this incident, the implications of this failure by the University to take into account the recommendation by the Occupational Health Adviser and what had been agreed at that meeting has had very serious consequences for me.

I was annoyed with Peter Musgrove and was showing my anger. I did not make any offensive comment to him, and I understand that the problem was the level of my voice. Despite this on 11th February 2006 I was disciplined by being given a Stage 2 written warning, which was to be kept on my file for a period of 12 months. I appealed but it was unsuccessful.

At the disciplinary hearing I presented my defence to the chair, Geoff Hurd. Robert Moreton had collected evidence in the form of statements from members of staff and Geoff Hurd accepted them as valid evidence for the hearing. I noted that an email sent by Robert Moreton to request evidence from members of staff, had precisely the same date and time as those of response containing witness statements. I felt that the evidence presented by Robert Moreton was flawed and that the Chair did not appropriately weight this. I asserted this at the appeal hearing on 3 April 2007. During the hearing, I discovered that nobody of the panel had made the Chair aware that I had immediately prior to the incident, been off sick with stress and that there was no record of my illness in my personnel file. The chair also failed to take the reason for my behaviour into account.

At the conclusion of the subsequent appeal, the chair for the University Gerald Bennett, stated that the outstanding grievances I had entered previously should all be progressed and a brokered attempt at resolution be made. This never occurred despite my persistent requests.

On 16 January 2006, I notified the Vice Chancellor, Caroline Gipps, in writing that I felt that I had been subjected to bullying and harassment and that the disciplinary action was not being conducted fairly by the Dean. She declined to investigate or meet with me.

On 13th February 2006 or thereabouts, Robert Moreton appeared unexpectedly in my office. He asked to meet with me, but I told him I was busy at the time. First he offered me a choice of when to meet but when I said I was in the middle of some work and would fix a time with his secretary, he changed his mind and said he wanted the meeting there and then. He closed the door and then behaved in a domineering way, forcibly and repeatedly (more than three times) asking me to send an email to all SCIT staff apologising to Peter Musgrove. I told him that considering the circumstances I didn’t feel an apology was needed and considering that I had already been given a penalty, such an apology would serve neither one of us. He eventually stopped his insistence and before leaving, told me that Kamal Bechkoum would be my line manager for a while. I felt uncomfortable with this as it meant reporting directly to an Associate Dean and higher level of authority than required by contract and this felt like yet another disciplinary sanction and breach of contract and effort to control from which I would not benefit in any way.

On 15th February 2006, I met with Kamal Bechkoum in order to agree a return to work plan and address the issues, which were causes of my stress illness to date. During the meeting, we spoke of some incidents of bullying which I had experienced and about the behaviour of some colleagues. Kamal Bechkoum tried to minimise things, always referring to me with paternalistic examples of conflict resolution drawn from literature, which were not at all related to the circumstances, I was describing to him. I felt that he was not taking the situation seriously. At this point I felt more and more isolated from the other staff. I started to feel that the University were ignoring me in the hope that I would resign.

During this meeting or soon afterwards I mentioned to him that I was carrying out some research work with a part-time student and that it was my intention to submit the research work to the EAERCD and IADIS conferences, with a further possibility to submit to a journal for publication. He told me that I could also focus more on the discipline in which I specialise, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and I made him notice that the work was indeed relevant to this field.

He also promised during the meeting that I would take a very important role for curriculum development during the revalidation process. In particular, he said that I would take a lead role in HCI. He said this after I told him that I had requested to Helen Ashdown during my probation, for opportunities to develop new modules. I also made him aware that Peter Musgrove had promised me active involvement in curriculum development meetings.

He asked me about the tasks which I had fallen behind on due to my absence and was keen to discuss this to some extent. The day afterwards, we met again and discussed in detail the backlog and the tasks I had to carry out soon. I also explained that this was my return to work after long term stress‑related absence and prompted him to seek a resolution of the events and the causes of my stress with the intention to solve them. I wanted, as also requested by Robert Moreton, to follow the procedure for return to work in accordance with the stress policy, but this was disregarded, ignoring the University’s stress policy. The only record Kamal Bechkoum provided to me was a list of tasks I was required to complete to rid my backlog. There was no mention at all, even subsequently, of how my stress would be addressed and no plan was proposed to address such issues for the future, although I requested it as this was an ongoing situation, raised also previously with Peter Musgrove.

On 8 May 2006 I was bullied on two separate occasions by John Roche. First, he had, without any provocation, slammed the door of the office we shared whilst I was standing in front of it, talking to Ros Hampton. Later the same day he had constantly interfered with and overruled me whilst I was speaking with the students and examining student presentations, causing the session to be aborted.

A few days after this event, I was stopped in the corridor by Kamal Bechkoum. He told me he had spoken to Robert Moreton about my previous request to remove John Roche from the reiteration of the presentations he had disrupted on 8 May 2007 and that Robert Moreton had said they could not do so because he was a union representative. He was not concerned at all about the stress this was causing me.

Following a further absence for stress in May 2006, I was concerned that neither SCIT, Personnel nor the Department of Risk, Safety and Health, were encouraging the application of the University’s stress policy. In particular, I was not given opportunity to discuss my illness and the causes of my stress beyond confidential sessions with the Occupational Health Adviser. No action was undertaken by the University to address the situation. For example, no plan had ever been instigated, either involving me or of which I was aware, to investigate, monitor or address the situations causing me stress. As a consequence, I took the step of expressly requesting to Vicky Ubhi, in the presence of my partner on 19 May 2006 or thereabouts, that the University should follow the stress procedure to guarantee my health and wellbeing. A meeting took place on 30 May 2007 with me, Vicky Ubhi, Neil Gordon and Kamal Bechkoum present. At the meeting I felt that Neil Gordon was orchestrating who should say what. For example, as I turned towards him at one point, I noticed him making signs to Vicky Ubhi and Kamal Bechkoum behind my back. At this point I felt that he was not interested in helping me address the problems but only in controlling what was said to me and who should speak.

I requested that an investigation into the causes of my stress be carried out. I was very clear that I did not intend to pursue a punitive approach via a grievance, as I was interested to address the causes of my stress and the bullying I had experienced in SCIT.

As a result a “Stress Review” was carried out at my instigation to investigate the causes of stress in the workplace. During this investigation, no witnesses were spoken to and no evidence was looked at. No attempt was made to establish what had happened to me. The Investigator refused to look into allegations of bullying, lack of appraisal, racial harassment and breaches of contract. The sole recommendation was that I should be provided with a suitable office; ironically this was never implemented and I was without an office from May 2006 until my dismissal.

On 03 July 2006, I met with Andy Bridges for investigation into the causes of my stress. I met him in his office in the University’s School of Applied Sciences, to discuss and for him to take my witness statement with regard to the causes of my stress in SCIT. At the beginning of the meeting, he told me that he would also gather views from John Roche and that he did not have any knowledge of what he was doing. He asked me to explain to him the causes of my stress and I made clear that I was there to discuss the case of myself feeling bullied by John Roche in SCIT. I made him aware that I wasn’t there to revisit all the previous grievances, although I was very clear that for him to get a grasp of the stressful situation I been through during my employment, he could revisit my Personnel file and look at the grievances I had already put through during my employment with the University. He took note of this. I proceeded however, by making him aware of some of the events occurring during my employment, which created stressful situations for me. He agreed to look at these separately through my personnel file or files held by the University about me.

By the end of the meeting, he made me understand that he could contact me if he needed further clarification and that he was happy with all the information and he would proceed with the investigation.

In July 2006, I made the Dean, Robert Moreton aware that my contract was not being implemented fully and that I was not being treated fairly. The Deputy Vice Chancellor was also notified that promises made during the prior disciplinary proceedings to investigate and address the circumstances causing my stress had not resulted in any actual improvement.

On 27 July 2006, I sent an email to my colleagues in SCIT in reply to an email from Michele Palmer about a new marketing policy. I was concerned about how the policy would avoid discrimination to members of staff and students. She initially misinterpreted my email as criticism of her and so I clarified to her and offered to do so to the other recipients that I was only talking about the policy. I also apologised for any misunderstanding to her. Robert Moreton took the opportunity to discipline me by email without giving me a chance to explain. I felt annoyed that he was attempting to limit my academic freedom and expression, as my critique in relation to the policy was academically founded and intended to be constructive, within the normal scope of academic debate.

Later, in collating this exchange of emails as part of the evidence against me for disciplinary action, Robert Moreton excluded from the evidence my emails, which clearly outlined the academic basis for my comments.

In July I put in a claim for my expenses for visiting two students in London and New Milton in relation to their work placements. The combined claim was for £292. I forgot to put the expense claim through immediately following the visits and I only made the claim after 3 or 4 months at the start of the holiday period. Kamal Bechkoum asked to see me about the expense claim. He refused to deal with the claim by email. I felt that this was odd as the expense claim did not need to be authorised by management. On about 31 July 2006 I met with Kamal Bechkoum and asked what the problem was with my expense claim as it had been authorised by the placement office. He told me to listen to him or leave. I felt that I was being accused of stealing the money and got up and left. After about 15 minutes I returned and said that if they did not pay me within 7 days I would take legal action to recover the expenses. There was no reason not to pay my expense claim and I was given no reason for withholding the money. Kamal Bechkoum referred the matter to Robert Moreton and he authorised payment of my expense claim within 7 days. As a result of this the University took further disciplinary proceedings against me.

On 07 September 2006, Robert Moreton sent me an email clearly offering me the option of being assigned to a University Quality Standing Panel. I replied that I did not wish to undertake the role, as I did not have the right training and was anticipating other duties, including the curriculum development role, previously discussed with Kamal Bechkoum. Robert Moreton ignored my decision and ordered me to be on the Panel regardless. This upset me because I had been excluded from appraisal for the past year and should have had an opportunity to agree my duties in consultation with line management with respect to my skills, experience and aspirations, as stated in my contract.

On 20 September 2006 I wrote an email to the Standing Panel to explain that I had been forced into the role and neither wanted to do it nor had the necessary training. Belinda Cross replied to me on the same day, apologising and saying that SCIT had led her to believe that I agreed to the role.

On 12 September 2006, I met with Neil Gordon and Kamal Bechkoum in the meeting room of the SCIT ‘Deanery’ to discuss the outcome of the stress review investigation carried out by Andy Bridges.

At the meeting, Kamal Bechkoum was very happy with the outcome. Whilst reading the outcome both he and Neil Gordon were smiling. When he concluded, he mentioned that I would be relocated very soon to another office. I told him that I welcomed this decision but that I rejected the overall findings of the investigation because it was flawed and not carried out in a fair and professional manner. I later sent him an email reiterating this.

On 13 September 2006 I met with Kamal Bechkoum in his office for an appraisal meeting. He had not followed the procedures because he had already decided on the targets without giving me an opportunity to think about it. During the meeting, he did not suggest that there were any issues relating to my conduct or any problems, which needed to be discussed. I later discovered that he had at the time been, along with Robert Moreton, gathering evidence against me with a view to dismissing me.

On 14 September 2006, I met with Kevan Buckley and Robert Moreton in the office of Robert Moreton. I had requested the meeting to clarify some events involving myself and Kevan Buckley and because I wished to complain about events involving Kevan Buckley arising from his insinuation that I should resign from the Learning and Teaching Committee.

At the meeting, Robert Moreton started by refusing some written notes, which outlined the reason I had requested the meeting and summarised my complaint. He refused the document, although I told him that this was an informal complaint. He made very clear that he didn’t want any records of the meeting or the complaint itself. However, whilst speaking, he wrote on the document “This an informal complaint”. During the meeting, I had very quickly the impression that both Robert Moreton and Kevan Buckley were not taking the matter seriously and that they were making allegations, which I contested. During the meeting I asked Robert Moreton who told him that I had ‘stormed out’ of a recent meeting of the Learning and Teaching Committee. He refused to reveal a name. I explained again that I had complained politely against the chair, Kevan Buckley, about his insinuation for me to resign but had left the meeting quietly several minutes later. Kevan Buckley told Robert Moreton that I sent him an email of resignation. When I challenged him to present such an email, he first refused and then told me that he would send it to me after the meeting. I was still astonished by this, knowing that I had never sent such an email and said that this was unwelcome and that I felt offended by such false statements and events. Robert Moreton took the occasion to tell me that “people don’t like you/your perceptions”. I was very offended by this and it was unrelated to the matter at hand. During the meeting he never asked Kevan Buckley to present further evidence or clarification of events and was instead defending Kevan Buckley and openly in his favour.

The meeting concluded without any resolution or any clarifications being brought about. Indeed, I again asked Kevan Buckley to send the email he had referred to during the meeting and Robert Moreton did not want to receive the email or leave any trace of the discussion.

On 27th September 2006, I sought approval to attend a conference and this was granted by Kamal Bechkoum. The following day, I received an email stating that the review and revalidation process I had previously discussed my involvement in with Kamal Bechkoum, would be conducted during my absence via two meetings. This would be my main opportunity to put forward my ideas for the new curriculum. Although I delayed leaving for the conference by several hours to be able to attend the first meeting, when I requested that the second be moved by two days to enable my participation, both Peter Musgrove and Kamal Bechkoum refused, stating it was because the process had a tight deadline. However, the process continued for several months after this. I was very stressed by their decision and felt purposefully excluded.

I believe that Robert Moreton had been collating evidence against me for some time, in order to construct a disciplinary case to dismiss me. On about 11 and 12 October 2006 I became unable to work due to severe stress. By a letter dated 03 October 2006 I was asked to attend a Stage 3 disciplinary meeting for an alleged breach of the Stage 2 final warning. A Stage 3 disciplinary hearing was scheduled for 18 October 2006 but was postponed because of my health.

On 10 November 2006 I met with the University’s Occupational Health Advisor, Maggie Burton. My partner Melody Boyce also attended. The only reason that this meeting was arranged was because I phoned Occupational Health to ask why they had not contacted me. During the meeting she assured me that I would receive full support to return to work and that I should not return at that time as I was not well enough to do so. However, immediately following that meeting, she sent an email to the Personnel Services Manager, Neil Gordon. This email did not state that the main cause of my stress was bullying as discussed with me at the meeting, but said that it was because I had been passed over for promotion, which is something I never said. Neil Gordon had on 31 October 2006 communicated to Maggie Burton in an email that he needed to conduct the disciplinary hearing as soon as possible and that in his opinion, I was able to attend the hearing. I believe that this may have influenced the outcome of the meeting with Maggie Burton.

Whilst I was off ill and getting more stressed by the situation and was depressed, I sent two emails on 13 October 2007. These again made criticisms that I felt were justified. This resulted in the disciplinary action against me being raised from Level 3 to Level 4 (gross misconduct) and a new hearing was scheduled for 01 December 2006. On 24 November 2006 the Occupational Health Advisor, Maggie Burton, advised the Personnel Manager, Neil Gordon that I was unfit to attend the disciplinary meeting and on 27 November 2006 the hearing was postponed due to my ill health.

On 16 January 2007 my GP, wrote to the University confirming my ill health, its causes within harassment at work and my lack of fitness to participate in a disciplinary hearing. On 16 December 2006 and 13 and 27 February 2007 I cancelled my appointments with the University Occupational Health Physician because of my ill health. A further appointment was scheduled for 18 March 2007, but as this was a Sunday the appointment did not exist.

In February 2007 my IT account was suspended, along with all my employee services, such as library services and email, without any prior notification. This makes me believe that the University had already decided to dismiss me.

On 18 April 2007, I was very ill at home with depression. During the day, whilst I was sleeping, a Royal Mail Special Delivery card was delivered. I didn’t know who had sent it but felt too ill to go and collect the item or cope with any correspondence at the time.

On 24 April 2007 I was still very ill at home with depression. I awoke that day and was able to go downstairs to stay on the sofa in the lounge. I slept on and off most of the day and was awakened by a loud banging on the window. I ignored this at first out of disorientation upon waking, but as it continued and got louder I said to a man outside the window that I couldn’t get to the door. The banging stopped and I assumed the man had left. Some time later, my partner came in and told me that another card had been left by the Royal Mail. Again I had no idea who had sent it. I told her I wasn’t able to deal with it at that time, as I was feeling too ill. I believe that during April 2007 I was so ill that I could not visit my GP and he had to come out to my home to see me.

On 03 May 2007 I received a letter from the University incorrectly dated 01 April 2007, which enclosed notes of a disciplinary hearing, which had taken place on 23 April 2007 in my absence. The note indicated that I had been dismissed for Gross Misconduct because the University no longer had trust and confidence in me as an employee. I did not receive any reasons for my dismissal and was not given the opportunity to appeal. I believe that my dismissal was planned. The notes do not show that any evidence is considered or discussed in a balanced way in reaching the decision to dismiss me.

The University were fully aware that I had not received notification of the hearing and that I did not know that the disciplinary hearing was taking place. There was no attempt to contact me by phone or email prior to the hearing, although this has happened at the previous proceedings. In addition, the University were fully aware that I was not fit to attend a disciplinary hearing. Evidence of my ill health was provided throughout the time. No mention is made in the hearing notes of the fact that I was ill at the time. There appears to be no investigation into the allegations and the Dean, who presented the case for dismissal, was directly involved in the matters concerning the disciplinary allegation against me. It seems that no witnesses were called and a lot of very significant evidence is withheld from the proceedings including various emails. None of the evidence presented is cross-referred or questioned.

If I had been given an opportunity to defend myself against the allegations I believe that I would not have been dismissed. The University did not take the background to my dismissal or any surrounding events into account when deciding to dismiss me. They also failed to take into account any mitigating factors. There are a number of false statements made at the disciplinary hearing. For example, I have never been or been proposed to be a line manager and I believe that this would be impossible under my Terms of Contract. Secondly, there have never been any issues surrounding expenses for “home visits” as I did not carry out home visits. Thirdly, it is not true that I made weekly allegations of bullying. Fourthly, I did present information and evidence to the Stress Review but the investigator refused to investigate the allegations beyond one event.

The “Talking is not working” document is not a web-log, but a message posted for private on-line discussion forum which requires registration to view and post about bullying in academia. It is not clear how this document was obtained by the Dean. I was at the time studying for an MBA in Education at Keele University and doing research into bullying and harassment in post-92 Higher Education Institutions. When interested in the problem because of carrying out research, it is important to validate research by evidence. I was also outraged by the behaviour of the Management at the University.

All my actions were to protect my rights or the rights of other employees or my students. I tried to do the best for my colleagues and my students. I always acted to preserve my job and position. I believe that the University targeted me because I could not tolerate continuous mismanagement and lack of care towards me as an employee. I was always persuaded not to make my grievances formal and when I complained the facts were twisted so that I was blamed for the incident.

I strongly believe that I have a right to criticise the University, my employer at an academic level, but have lost my job for doing this. I am proud about being critical and carry out critical studies as major aspect of my research. I never meant to be offensive, personal or attack anyone in a personal sphere. I always made criticisms in an academic way. I believe that it is normal for academics to be critical to preserve academics freedom as enshrined in the Education Reform Act (1988).

I also believe the Dean, Robert Moreton, took a disliking to me and was instrumental in my dismissal. I was pushed into sending the emails because of the situation I had been placed in by the University. My actions were reasonable if put into the context of what had been going on. However the University were not interested in my defence and mitigation to the allegations against me as they wanted to dismiss me. I was frustrated by what I saw as serious mismanagement and told them so. I was frozen out of the department by a failure to allow me to develop my role and to participate in curriculum development and finally dismissed for no valid reason.

Salvatore Fiore

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PS: Somebody wrote: "Those who can do, those who can't, bully".

The Bologna Declaration : critical notes - Part 3

2008-12-11T10:44:00.000-08:00

Mobility of students

Employability, as the main outcome sought from HE in Europe under the Bologna Declaration, also drives its two objectives to create a standard system based on a set number of undergraduate and postgraduate cycles and of a prescribed minimum length and to incorporate a system of credits. It is suggested that the purpose of such objectives is to promote student mobility, making it easier for students graduating in one country to have their achievements recognised equally elsewhere in Europe.

While there is some benefit evident in helping graduates move easily throughout Europe on an equal basis, the reality is that the Declaration does not attempt to create a truly equal basis. For example, as the requirement is for degrees lasting a minimum of three years, students studying within national systems which adopt the shortest timescale for degree completion, are automatically put at an advantage as their qualifications are given equal relevance for employment as the longer courses. At the same time the universities in such countries benefit disproportionately in being able to attract more overseas students, not because they provide better education, but because they require less of a time commitment from students. Meanwhile the competition doctrine puts pressures on countries with a traditionally longer degree structure to adapt to the 3-year model to attract students, forcing an hegemony that reduces both student choice and university autonomy to determine the structure of learning. At the same time there is no restriction on universities charging ever increasing fees to students as is the case in Britain. This effectively can mean universities are free to charge a premium for ‘express’ courses to those who can afford to pay.

The mechanism of credits pushed by the Bologna Declaration to quantify study, including that not leading to degrees and time spent in the workplace, also erodes the value of certain qualifications. It basically ensures that students are able collate periods of study on a modular basis. This might work well in practical terms for many students, but is more suited to vocationally-oriented learning than social disciplines, as acquired knowledge is awarded on a fragmented and discontinuous basis with a strategic underlying motivation. This is particularly so in the case of credit earned for vocational training where the learning priorities rewarded are essentially those of employers not workers. Credits shift the emphasis onto the quantification of educational achievement as opposed to personal development and appreciation of a field of knowledge.

The detriment of such schemes is felt by those students who spend the longest time devoted to study and study the least economically-oriented disciplines as well as the universities which host them. Furthermore, instead of encouraging and enabling citizens to devote part of their lives to learning as an open, critical and unfinalised endeavour, under a credit system study becomes accessible for many through or between employment only.

The problem lies, for the large part, in the fact that the declaration is purposefully set out to make it easier for qualifications to be standardized as goods of consumption on a minimum basis, instead of making it easier for the working class to take time out from the labour and manage their lives more independently from the needs of the market. This time out would be devoted to learning for the sake of learning; learning for the sake of knowledge, as an intrinsic activity.

The declaration is certainly not, for instance, counterbalanced by an undertaking to ensure free access to HE for all, without economic barriers or imposed hegemonies. In this sense, the mobility promised is effectively on the condition of embracing the ideology of the free market, in a way that students see themselves as units of consumption, or as precarious unit of labour. Only those who can afford to stay out of employment for several years can hope to spend time learning for social and cultural reasons primarily – not ordinary workers.

The objectives of the Declaration overall seem to falsely represent a sort of safety net promising universal access to education, which will afford graduates social and economic mobility as a result. In reality access to education is becoming more and more expensive and the truth is that the declaration’s objectives aimed at mobility and employability also act as drivers to mask the erosion of the number of opportunities for diverse modes and foci of study. The point of such objectives is not really to increase opportunity to study, but to shift the emphasis in HE towards learning how to be effective in employment and adapting the self to priorities established in the free market, by profiteers of human labour.

It works out this way mainly because it is very difficult to trace and maintain a system of quality control in such a marketised system of HE. And if such systems of quality control are in place, surely they control people and not the standard of work; in fact quality, like education itself, is always undefined and as such, not possible to control except if the student is conceptualised in a particular manner. Neoliberalism has found it easy to conceptualised the student in a manner that those employable are the ones who have absorbed the doctrine of meritocracy, competition, performativity, productivity and the will of the free market to determine the human race.

The signatories of the Bologna Declaration seem to think that increased mobility of European citizens has to necessarily coincide with less diversity of the opportunities open to them. Instead of identifying and protecting the diversity of European systems to promote knowledge exchange, they aim for standardization. They combine the wilderness of the free market structure with quality control mechanisms. This means universities strategically setting the lowest available standards and functioning as a training service for industry, may be perversely perceived as ‘better’ or ‘more successful’ universities simply because of their skill as capitalist opportunists in exploiting and profiting from the possibilities of a postmodern market system of HE. Similarly, the students who pass through these ‘better’ universities, have their studies valorised above other graduates on no grounds more substantial than it is what the market allows.

The Bologna Declaration : critical notes - Part 2

2008-12-04T10:12:00.001-08:00

Employability

The Bologna Declaration sustains rhetoric of employability that is central to the redefinition of HE as an economic system. It promotes tools like the Diploma Supplement (a document giving more information about the contents of a qualification earned) aimed at increasing the depth and comparability of degrees across Europe. This is supposed to make the European HE system more internationally competitive.

The rhetoric sounds promising, implying that students in Europe will have a better chance of employment and it is underlined by another positive-sounding vocabulary: meritocracy.

The reality is not so promising because the mechanisms of the free market are left to determine the structure of the economy, the nature and typology of employment and what constitutes merit-worthy achievement.

The result is a technocratic and instrumental conceptualisation of knowledge that is separate from any epistemological basis.

As employability takes precedence, degrees are literally manufactured in accordance with sets of product specifications. Both student and employer expectations and responsibilities in relation to such qualifications reinforce an approach to learning as a competitive individualistic activity whereby student peers are potential opponents in the job market.

This can both obstruct the disinterested exchange of knowledge and result in a struggle for academics to disseminate ideas which either bear a weak connection to the market or which contradicts its ideology.

The situation is complicated further when the HE system allows the market to reward universities which turn out the most employable graduates. In this way, universities gain reputation and market share in much the same way as sausage machines.

The neoliberals justify turning education into a knowable ad exchangeable commodity why pretending that it will ensure greater meritocracy. In other words, employability is supposed to be open to everyone, ‘elitist’ practices of restricting admission are abolished and private sector structures, values and processes are put in place, enabling competition to determine educational quality and individual success. There is little role for the interpretation of meritocracy we are usually sold; of having our hard work and integrity recognised and respected.

This is because the economic priorities of neoliberal ideology set the meaning of meritocracy so that what really matters in being an employable graduate is how readily and absolutely you have embraced that ideology, not how hard you have studied or what good you have contributed to humanity.

In Britain the effects of this are clear as the number of British graduates moving into postgraduate research study . In Britain there is a precarious dependency on overseas students (especially from China) in the postgraduate sector in particular, as home students prefer to move into employment.

As tools aimed at forcing a competitive mentality in HE such as league tables, work to place universities in a scale based on criteria that are often alien to the interests of local populations, student graduation and mobility becomes centred on aspects like prestige and ranking rather than qualitative dimensions of knowledge-based institutional communities.

Those who graduate from the most prestigious universities will gain access to work more easily than those who attend a ‘local’ university. Universities from the local to the internationally prized will promote themselves competitively to attract students from abroad, draining historically disadvantaged regions of capable citizens. Instead of fostering knowledge and capability in a localised context, so that knowledge becomes more evenly distributed across populations and geographies, students are drawn towards the elite and encouraged to learn for profit.

Employability in a mass global education context is about tuning skills and competencies to the demands of a volatile job market. The result is the transformation of many universities into degree mills. They are rewarded financially for supplying usefully qualified graduates and enhancing government statistics on access to education and employability. But the market and employers reap the best benefits, while students (and their parents/families) and expected to foot the bill.

The Bologna Declaration : critical notes - Part 1

2008-11-29T15:40:00.001-08:00

An Introduction

After nearly ten yeas, the effects of the Bologna Declaration in shaping European Higher Education (HE) along neo-liberal lines are becoming evident.

In so far as the Declaration affects the immeasurable tenets underpinning education at all levels “of knowledge” and personal growth, academic freedom social equality and cultural heritage and development, its effects are essentially disfiguring rather than reformatory or revolutionary in any popularly beneficial way. It uses rhetoric to blur its real focus on economic and neo-liberal ideological foundations of knowledge as opposed to the social and cultural. Most alarmingly the declaration is an attempt at the appropriation and redefinition of education as a marketable and exchangeable commodity and a tool of capitalists.

The hidden agenda of the declaration is to create an Higher Education System which enforces hegemony to an Anglo-American style European system of HE based on scientific supremacy and technology. The constituent cultures are implicated in a process of adaptation to the ruling dogma to ensure that they ‘appeal to other nations’ and thus ensure their ‘vitality’ and ‘efficiency’ are sufficiently rated according to criteria imposed by a neoliberal elite caste. It represents a truly colonial mentality towards all aspects of education; a mentality which renders education at the service of the capital colonialists who rely on the same education system to indoctrinate the masses of slaves and ensure their compliance in their own oppression.

The Declaration talks of an education system that must be reconfigured to acquire an international attraction equal to that of European and Scientific traditions. In doing so, the role of education at the root of such traditions is displaced. It is effectively reclaimed by the signatories entrusted with its control, as a system to be molded around economic needs and used to reinforce a neo-liberal cultural, economic and political hegemony across Europe.

The lot of witnesses that "La Repubblica" is missing

2008-11-19T09:06:00.000-08:00

There are many people who have been forced out of their jobs and academic careers, from postgraduate researchers to professors, because of bullying in universities in Britain.

We know that these same problems exist elsewhere around the world and seems to worsen the more neoliberal policies and ideologies are forced upon Higher Education systems. Sometime the problem of bullying and mobbing in the universities around the world is obscured and difficult to translate as behaviours and legislation changes from country to country but there are common patterns. In fact modern communication technologies have allowed for an exchange of ideas between countries analysing case studies and common patterns have emerged.

Those of us who have personally experienced the destructive oppression of bullying and mobbing in universities, have favoured diverse ways to oppose it and have identified various channels by which it is manifest; not just in the institutions themselves, but also through the media and public systems (e.g. welfare benefits, the legal system, governmental executive offices, etc.)

Strangely enough, there has been virtually no international dialogue among the base, to share the problems and battles or warn of the strategies employed by powerful groups to suppress voices of discontent and oppression of academics. Too much has been localised and focussed on reinterpretation of the problems under the weight of a sort of defeatism towards the structures of power that create the conditions for bully managers in particular to thrive in universities.

This has exposed us all to the tyranny of media monopolies to communicate news that furthers their interests and political alliances, while suppressing that which does not.

An example is the huge revolution that has been taking place across the Italian education sectors recently, including protests by millions of students, parents and academics, the occupation of universities by students and lectures in the streets. This is all in opposition to proposed major cuts across education which takes it more towards privatisation and the Anglo-American hegemonic model of education as an economic, rather than social phenomenon. Just a few words of this have been reported in the British press.

Not even the THES has seen fit to devote two lines to at least comment on the uprising against Berlusconi’s law 133 cuts. But this is no innocent oversight by the newspaper which publishes annual league tables and is able to influence the future of universities by hosting exclusive conferences between vice-chancellor, corporate financiers and management consultants.

Meanwhile the Italian newspaper Repubblica, which could not really pretend to have missed what was going on, introduced a new tactic.

It has collated, via one of its blogs, several-hundred testimonies from academics who have left Italy to go abroad for study or work in universities. The aim was to not merely show up problems these people perceived with Italian HE, but to show that other systems, particularly those in America and Britain, could offer a perfect solution and be of example for proposed reforms.

The technique behind this stunt was to create a binary opposition; a one and only alternative in the reform of universities. The accounts present a sort of marketing brochure for the anglo-american model which show only positive aspects without highlighting the problems. To use the example of the British case as the one I am familiar with, whether or not the Italians who contribute to the blog have experienced bullying, nepotism, discrimination, research censorship, or any of the other serious defects characterising British HE, is besides the point. These problems exist, the plague of bullying destroys lives, and hiding them from Italians, just like the British press hides news of the revolt against Berlusconi’s reforms from the British, is more than irresponsible. More precisely it demonstrates a violent abuse of the trust people give to the press to report the facts. Moreover, it shows up a desire to push a particular political agenda.

For the THE this means the agenda of the blairote/Brownite neoliberal New Labour. Sally Hunt, head of the University and College Union (a ‘yellow’ or pseudo union and only recognised union for HE in Britain) regularly espouses propaganda in the THE’s pages and her union contributes to directly funding the labour party.

For Reepubblica, the allegiance is with the centre-left Partito Democratico who would prefer to introduce neoliberal style reforms to align the Italian system with the hegemonic model set down in the Bologna Declaration at the shadow of social-democracy missed policies never truly implemented by Tony Blair.

Such power in the hands of the media to influence public opinion, not through a clear confrontation of the facts, but through a campaign of marketing and propaganda, is dangerous. What is more, it is exactly what pleases the political centre and centre-right, preventing the forming of a solidarity among workers and the political left, who will never benefit from a system like that in Britain or America. It is a sell-out, not information and it is Berlusconism.

People need to be informed of the tragedies created from people’s lives by bullying and other problems in British HE, so that the same problems are not recreated in Italy and ultimately, globally. Stunts that this one by Repubblica reinforce the mistaken idea that there is only one alternative system of reform for HE, masking the reality that the systems in Britain, America and many other nations, are just as bad if not worse in many respects than that it Italy.

Neoliberal reforms of HE in Britain have not solved existing problems. The same patriarchy, bullying, poverty, precariousness and lack of equal opportunities remain in Britain as they do in Italy.

In the current financial crisis this is only getting worse as lecturers and researchers struggle to meet living costs and are forced to submit to unfair demands on their labour and students face impossible levels of debt to complete their studies.
What is more, the years of reforms in Britain have seen a reduction not an increase in academic freedom.

What has increased is the extent of accountability and the demands for efficiency on the academic workforce, who are simultaneously subjected to market and governmental forces.

What is true is that these problems are more than ever hidden by political rhetoric and the willing servitude of a compromised press, who use their influence to pervert public expectations of and values towards HE.

There are some very powerful people who are intent on bringing Italy into line so that its HE system, can be turned to the advantage of the economy, not the advantage of ordinary citizens.

La Repubblica is certainly not helping in bringing democracy to the fore.

An education system not to trust

2008-10-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

The THE has published a survey in which 77% of lecturers denounce that they are pressurised to award higher grades to students than deserved. There are some important perversions of interest underlying the publication of such data by the THE.

If the THE, the universities, the QAA, the government, the pseudo-unions, or anyone else in the elite caste architecting the direction of British HE, wanted to really ensure meritocracy and student-centred learning in academia, they would first examine why lecturers feel pressured to inflate grades in the first place.

They do not want to answer this question because to do so would reveal the true hypocrisy of the QAA et al and the ways in which universities and their commercial and political collaborators, are appropriating knowledge for profit, destroying the quality of European HE and making postmodern slaves out of academics and students:

- In June 2008 the QAA put out a statement that degree classifications are ‘arbitrary and unreliable’.

- In October 2008, the THE published its annual league tables.

- A week or two later, the THE publish news suggesting that degree results (which impact on the league tables along with various other QA-style factors) are falsely inflated.

- At the same time, a number of universities announce their intention to abandon traditional degree classifications.

While the government bounces off the league tables and clings to its standard rhetoric that British HE ‘has an international reputation for excellence’, they side-step the reality that such reputation is constructed by the same league tables and QAA outcomes that ignore falsely inflated grades; in other words grades that have been awarded out of financial incentive rather than merit.

This is most damaging for the honest hard-working students whose merits are not fairly recognised alongside others and for the lecturers whose academic judgment is rendered, at best meaningless and at worst, an obstacle to meeting institutional targets, which may lead to them losing their job.

But the QAA and institutional classification systems are not just misleading in ignoring the inflation of grades; they lead to the situation in which universities are forced to compete with one another for funds. As managers pass responsibility for achieving QAA targets and attracting funding and students down the institutional hierarchy, lecturers find themselves pressurised to make sure that enough students pass their courses and continue their studies to completion and that the academic standards are seen to rise.

In this respect there is no inherent problem with degree classifications themselves as the QAA claims, but rather with the oppressive culture of British HE, which renders the academic judgment of lecturers valueless if it is not simultaneously profitable in the minds of the new HE management class. Thanks to the QAA regime, universities aim to have a lot of students completing their degrees and getting good grades because it means they will get more money from both the QAA and private sector investors, inevitably attracting more students in the process. No matter if the grades awarded are not earned.

While there may be issues to do with admissions standards, effective learning and teaching and assessment methods, the real problem lies with the so-called ‘quality’ regime of rewarding superficial attainment data, allowing universities to prioritise profit and income and conceptualising lecturers as resources at the service and disposal of the university corporation. The attainment targets are clearly unrealistic with regard to the resources – intellectual or actual – available to reach them.

Such a competitive HE marketplace is against the interests of students, lecturers and the general public alike. Changing the way degrees are classified will not change what students are learning or how sincere hard work and the development of knowledge are rewarded in society.
But neither the THE, the QAA, the government nor the UCU can be trusted to address such oppression and unfairness in British HE, given their roles in causing it.

No to the sell-out of education

2008-10-21T13:51:00.001-07:00

Cobas UK is actively protesting against the proposed reforms of the Berlusconi government in Italy aimed at privatising and cutting public funds to all levels of education, as well as research.

The neoliberal agenda to control knowledge for the ultimate benefit of capital which drives such reforms is also reflected in moves by UK institutions and elitist collectives such as the Russel Group.

Increased privatisation of universities and research means that fees will likely rise as universities sell education as a product with a quantifiable market value.

In an unstable and unjust capitalist economy, students are not guaranteed employment. In reality only a few will avoid the oppression of a lifelong struggle to meet the basic costs of living; even those who graduate from the most elite institutions.

As league tables and ‘Quality’ regimes architected to contrive an auto-referential system of accountability and competitiveness, manipulate ideas of what learning should be about, elite groups of university executives reap the rewards of a privatised HE sector. Not students. Not lecturers or professors. Not researchers.

They sell courses as products for profit, increasingly to overseas students, at huge fees. They compete for income from businesses and government. Such competition from privatisation forces universities into practices which go against public and academics’ interests. Only research and courses which can bring financial income are supported.

Private organisations should not interfere with the work or lecturers, students, departments and universities in general, whose endeavours to build knowledge for the public and social good, and right to pursue learning for its own sake, must be supported.

In a time of financial crisis, it is time to block the advancement of capital within learning institutions and safeguard against the commodification of knowledge. Privatisation and competition can bring only inequality and extortion to Higher Education.

Unite lecturers, students, parents, graduates to say no to privatisation. No to the sell-out of education.

For the boycott of employment tribunals

2008-10-17T04:35:00.000-07:00

In cases of unfair dismissal in particular, employment tribunals in England are merely a cushion to suppress what would otherwise be an army of unjustly ousted university (and other) workers.

Just like the groups which bring people together to complain about bullying but actually function to soften the shock of psychological torture in the workplace.

Just like the pseudo-unions including UCU which serve the needs of the employers in selling-out workers’ rights amid spin and collusion.

Just like the masonry of ‘professional organisations’ and ‘research clusters’ who conspire to appropriate public and private funding and steer research and teaching towards commercial and neoliberal political outputs. In so doing they knowingly cut out those lecturers and researchers who threaten to expose and contradict the viciously anti-social and egotistical objectives of the elite caste.

Just like the servant journalists who promote the oppressive neoliberal interests of the university employers through fantastical nationalistic league tables and sensationalistic, opportunistic and speculative news-making.

Just like all of these, the employment tribunals operate to reinforce the oppressive rule of universities over workers.

The reality of the employment tribunal process is that if you are brave enough to confront your employer over abuses and are dismissed as a result, you – and your true loved ones who suffer with and for you – will experience betrayal and desertion from the most perversely unexpected places.

Firstly, your union, if not a part of the original problem, will most likely lead you on and then abandon you to fight your own case, implicitly or openly giving reason to your former employer.

If your next option is legal insurance, expect that the lengths the insurers will go to in order to avoid paying your claim and funding representation will make the employer’s tactics seem to pale in comparison.

If you are too ill to represent your case, you will likely be further sickened by solicitors open to corruption and too keen to play the devil’s advocate.

Supposedly though, the employment tribunal enables self-representation.

While this may seem superficially to render the process more accessible to those without money to fund reliable legal representation, in reality it favours large employers like the universities.

Most universities will not hesitate to expend a vast budget allocation (more than they allow for new books or other essential resources in many cases) on obtaining the most prestigious and connected legal representation available. They will spend hundreds-of-thousands of pounds to defend a claim for a few thousand or even a few hundred pounds so as to prevent precedent passing to law.

The employee almost never has access to such representation and legal aid does not cover representation at employment tribunals.

So, while both sides are theoretically ‘free’ to avoid the costs of representation, the intimidation to workers from the bulky legal muscle fighting for the former employer and the risk of a potential expenses ruling in their favour, is overwhelming.

The worker is necessarily forced to question; not, ‘am I right?’ but, ‘is it worth it?’.

Aside from the disgustingly low capped rate of potential compensation, the unwillingness of tribunals to reinstate employees is a further spit-in-the-face of worker justice.

The false rationality of any argument that reinstatement would be ‘impracticable’ is revealed in the light of a Masonic-style system of employing academics based more on references than merit or their record of honest academic endeavour.

Once, as an academic in Britain, you have reached the stage of employment tribunal, the system has effectively sacrificed you to its underlying values of patriarchy and the internal authority and self-referential definition of justice of the same employer that abused you.

Why? Because by the time you get to the tribunal you have already been ‘tried’ and judged by the university’s internal hearing (even if you did not participate in it), as executed by the same managers who abused you. What is more, this whole banana court has been condoned and its procedures structured by the tribunal system you are now asking to question it.

The closed masonry of the university elite with their secret rituals masked by flatulent rhetoric, will not truly look at your CV for future lecturing or research jobs if you have rejected the fellowship of the patrons and exposed their brutal interests to the public domain (this of course has nothing to do with your academic ability or achievements).

Crucially then, even if your claim is upheld by the tribunal, the low compensation and impossibility of reinstatement are a secret way to condone the employer’s act of dismissing you.

Neither the union nor the press will take a serious interest in the merits of your case or battle to make a difference.

Ultimately then, such a system of auto-referential justice does more to reinforce the employers’ power over the employment relationship than reinstate your right to work after all those years of study.

Without reinstatement, the employer’s actions are effectively condoned as though they cannot be questioned: an employee who has questioned their employer via the employment tribunal cannot be accepted back into the workplace. Only the members of the elite caste (the previously imprisoned or publicly shamed politicians, the health and safety managers who let people die in their universities, the professors who plagiarised their students’ work and put their sticky fingers in the funding pot) can start with a new slate in Britain 2008, usually in a position of promotion rather than demerit.

For these reasons, Cobas UK calls on workers to demand an automatic right to reinstatement or otherwise boycott employment tribunals.

Simultaneously, workers must unite to force the eradication of internal disciplinary ‘trials’, demand free worker representation and redress the unequal power relation in the representation of worker versus employer rights in employment tribunals.

Boycott the employment tribunal for:

1 - An end to internal disciplinary trials

2 - Free worker representation of his/her choice

3 - Financial limit or ban on employer legal representation

4 - Automatic reinstatement rights in the event of the employee’s claim being upheld

5 - Automatic referral for some form of management training, monitoring or removal of managers as appropriate to enable the employee a normal return to work.

At present, it is the employee who is left jobless while the managers who orchestrated their dismissal, even when that dismissal is found to be unfair, remain in their posts and are very often even promoted.

The government, employers and pseudo-unions in Britain rely on the employment tribunal to divert away and cushion revolts against the oppression of the workforce with the rhetoric of an efficient and accessible legal system.

A day of demonstration ........to start with

2008-10-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

Today, we have manifested against Berlusconi government for legislation which would like to privatise universities in Italy and restrict access to research only to elite organisations.

We have distributed some leaflets in front of the Italian consulate in Birmingham to support also the manifestations organized by Rifondazione Comunista that were contemporaneously taking place in London and Rome.

We will continue with other days demonstrations around the country in front of Italian consulates and British universities to demonstrate our disapproval for the global policies of universities and research privatisation hidden behind rethoric of "quality", "professionalism", "leadership", "efficiency and profitability" and all the neoliberism parafernalia.

Join us in this struggle by spreading the message and talking to students, parents, politician and all people known to you to say that university schools and research privatisation must be stopped. If not it will centre power in the hands of a few who will inevitably ask for the payment of very high fees and will not give access to research which does not support their speculative interests.

(leafleting outside the Italian Consulate in Birmingham)

No to elite research!

2008-10-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

NO TO ELITE RESEARCH

COBAS UK support the initive of Rifondazione Comunista to say NO to elite research.

Tomorrow 11 October COBAS UK will protest in front of the Italian consulate in Birmingham - UK. There will be a distribution of leaflets to alert the British and Italian public of the drift of the public university research under Berlusconi authoritarian government.

For the emancipation of the subordinate class!

Tomorrow 11am - Calthorpe Road Birmingham - West Midlands - B15 1T - UK

COBAS UK

Rank and file - Part 3

2008-07-17T00:58:00.001-07:00

The institution of tighter job regulation for workers accompanied by greater discretion for managers in universities to make decisions over employment issues, represent an irrational postmodern transformation of universities into capitalist corporations, while the ideological neoliberal project driving such developments, functions to alienate academics and other university workers.

Academics find themselves working involuntarily in the interests of the capital imperative; for institutions primed to strategically manufacture employable and instrumentally‑qualified graduates to join the labour force.

In such a context, alienation of workers is an unavoidable consequence of managerial discretion, not only because it dissolves worker autonomy and control over their own working lives, but also because it forces them to work against their own interests, teaching for commercial gratification of the employer and with an ever-diminishing voice in shaping education for social and cultural, as opposed to purely economic ends.

HE manager discretion over employment issues is legitimised and reinforced by legislative changes regarding statutory disciplinary and grievance procedures, which do little to protect employees or increase their rights during internal disciplinary processes.

Without a strong presence of rank-and-file worker activity, unions existing to represent academic employees open to disciplinary and other discretionary actions from managers, adopt a passive role which does little more than support employers in containing conflict and reducing disruption.

With the prevailing focus in British Industrial Relations on economism and avoidance of conflict, academic employees are collectively failing to oppose the encroachment of capitalist managerial controls over the social relations of production and represent their antagonistic interests in the struggle for control over their own labour. In a technically-rationalised and marketised system of HE, workers and students both become commodities to be traded and exploited by employers on both sides of the graduation line.

The manifestation of university and particularly academic worker interests, is presently oppressed by academic managers who are encouraged to exercise discretion in the name of their employers and therefore in conflict with the interests of academic employees, serving only to alienate them. As in the case of disciplinary processes, such discretion is a mechanism aimed at internalising control and authority over the worker condition and the discourse of power, while reinforcing the ‘right to manage’.

In doing so, managers determine a postmodern perversion of ‘natural’ justice as being at the disposal of and beneficial to, the smooth and unquestionable operation of the capitalist university.

Unionised rank and file indipendent base committees are an alternative to the passivity of mainstream unions for Universitites and Colleges.

Continued...

Blonde ambitions

2008-06-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

The recent league tables hitch of Kingston University has made the round of the national news. I cannot understand why. Just practical things, a VC would say. From a point of view of a marketing manager in the Universities UK PLC, it would be ridiculous to provide evidence of such collusions between students, lecturers, senior management of the university up to the government. It is something that is intended to be there already: an intricate network of interests bum-to-bum as nobody knew anything about it. By the way: do we still have British prime ministers eating beans for breakfast?

The problem is just an hitch, from the business point-of-view of senior management. The VC of Kingston has made it clear: Sir Peter Scott has said that it was just an isolated incident. And what else should we expect, if not such answers from senior management. The thing is however, more peculiar to the university system itself. And it looks as if this is not confined to Kingston University, but it is a more widespread practice that has surfaced unexpectedly like organic matter in the sea whilst bathing. Do you get the point? A good signal against all the ideas that students can be rewarded with good jobs.

What? Just for a twist of arm to some students? In reality it is more than a simple twist. I may even sound sarcastic but the tape of such evidence recorded by some students did not attract me. I am just intrigued by how much the system is really corrupted to the point that my fantasy realises just that: an hidden world surfacing to what seems to us to be only fantasy. Such things are not isolated to Kingston University. And it would be childish to believe that such things happen only in Kingston University. It would reduce itself to only a media frenzy. The thing is much more widespread because it is real and it really exists.

Having myself been through the process, I know how degrading and frustrating it can be to blackmail students on their views of their courses. I really simply refused to bombard them with questionnaires * which could be used against them or traded for a better position *. A dose of animal instinct or a big nose is needed for business like that.

Kingston is well known for its too simplistic approach to students and staff well-being. The government knows that very well, but it looks as though the interests now are over other things. Kingston senior management is perhaps now more aware that they are running a University. They must have forgotten in the meantime that they were called to enact such role amongst other things and within all the business that the government and various leadership associations must have asked them to perform throughout the time.

And with Kingston also the elite caste of the media and all the associations which take people to be mad or irrational when such admissions are made in public with names and surnames.

Who knows why some become our enemies after such admissions?. Others prefer to stay away, silent and possibly messing about in class hoping that the students will sooner or later fill out a questionnaire which can discredit the victims. Others must struggle and put all the evidence together to be readmitted within the reign of the rational and to be in peace with themselves once again.

I am not new to this. Having seen it and experienced it, all I can say is that, such things are not different in other institutions.

The events linked to the exploitation of league tables are certainly very far from mainstream union activities and interests which nobody has up to know cited and highlighted. The National Student Survey has been up to now a tool of control and we knew it as such. UCU (University and college Union) as well as various associations for Academic Freedom have not paid attention to the fact that such time bombs where going to hit them back: the students cannot give credit to their own unions or have lecturers supporting them in not being pressurized, let alone the intervention or just an admission of this sort of associations for the freedom of academics which are nothing more than ridiculous spawns of UCU (University and college Unions).

I wrote a piece "Tradesman show" criticising such use and abuse of league tables at national and international level and clearly calling for a total abolition.

The British university system has got its own way to manage discrepancies which surface every single time a new article hits the pages of the Times Higher Education and spreads then virulently on the net and other newsfeeds.

The matter of control of students and lecturers from the elite caste of the media and senior management in the universities, becomes much more comprehensive if we start debating the discrepancies arising from universities' open days events. During such events students are alienated and courses sold to them by lecturers who are ‘invited’ by their heads of department to ‘present their courses’, otherwise they will not survive, either in the department as member of staff, or within the subject area they teach. In all this big show, students are literally manipulated and told false information with regard to the possibilities that such courses at that particular institution can give them: such information varies from inflated employment rates to possibilities and unrealistic figures of accreditations and credit transfer. All is targeted at creating an ideal environment: from the hospitality to the preparation of physical environments where students must be exercised to get a feeling of what the University is.

Once at Wolverhampton University I suggested to wear (myself) a blonde wig to the marketing artistic director Michelle Palmer in the School of Computing. I was hoping to be more attractive to the students. I had fear of not being a really credible liar.

The "famous cheese press" errata corrige

2008-06-19T02:39:00.000-07:00

In error of going to print for the latest edition, the THE typographer "famous cheese Press" has admitted an error of print on the "know thy student" vignette.

Click here for the errata version

It has been print erroneously upside-down due to the intervention of a Poppletonian student who didn't want to reveal the secrets of educational journalism.

The correct version is the one you see here on your left.

Managerial discretion

2008-06-11T00:39:00.000-07:00

Although rarely examined explicitly within the literature on managing human resources, the fundamental problem at the heart of industrial relations practices is one of interests. Lack of comparative power is of issue for workers because their interests are formed through belonging to the working class who produce collectively far more capital than they own or control.

The exploitation of workers by a powerful minority who control the majority of capital and the processes of production, forces conflict to the centre of the employment relationship as employer and employee interests collide, rendering the employer-employee relations inherently conflictual.

In this sense, both unitarism and pluralism may be seen as variants on a managerial perspective. By contrast, Marxist industrial relations is concerned with the challenging and resisting of managerial control by workers and, in an educational setting, collective efforts to deflect "the educational process away from any simple reproduction of dominant bourgeois values".

The fight against oppressive managerial control is a fight against capitalism itself, as it is capitalism, not any natural force, that accords false 'rights' to management to direct production, while denying an equivalent right to the worker to exercise control over the organisation of
production, either individually or collectively.

Discretion is thus such an important issue for Industrial Relations because it is the modality by which senior managers, representing the power and authority of the employer, manifest his/her interests in the employment relationship. It is the whole system of industrial relations which accords varying degrees of rights and responsibilities to managers in determining employment issues.

An overemphasis on managerial discretion is harmful due to its tendency to alienate employees as labour commodities.

Industrial relations: what are they?

2008-05-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

The widely accepted definition of industrial relations as the study of job regulation emphasises an interpretation of work issues being primarily about solving a ‘problem of order’, thus concealing the centrality of power, conflict and instability in Industrial Relations processes and prioritising the aim of maintaining order with the rhetoric of avoiding conflict.

Two perspectives on industrial relations represent contrasting views on organisational interests and authority and preferred methods for containing it.

The conservative unitarist view privileges an account of managers as leaders who develop a unified organisational culture of shared meanings, values and assumptions, on the belief that shared values and loyalties are an automatic source of order, so that any conflict is self-correcting. Managing people along such Taylorist or Fordist lines suggests a system of standard goods produced for a mass market with a privileged few, by natural virtue, at the top of a hierarchy commanding many workers. The emphasis is exclusively on ensuring that the objectives of the organisation are met, whereby people are treated as resources at the ‘disposal’ of managers.

The second perspective, pluralism, by contrast, recognises that various conflicting interests exist within every work organisation. Idealistically, this means that the organisation represents a coalition of interests governed by managers who are supposed to serve the interest of the whole organisation in exercising the discretion allotted them. Realistically, procedural and substantive rules serve to institutionalise conflict, whereby the interests of trade unions and workers are accepted only if they fall within an employer definition of what constitute orderly and reasonable limits and unions do little more than serve a managerial function of compromise and negotiation of workers’ interests.

Consequently, criticised for being untenably relativistic, the pluralist approach exemplifies a postmodern, neoliberal understanding of industrial relations.

Clearly, defining the core of industrial relations as worker injustice is a very different endeavour to the one of negotiating order to ‘get the work done’, the latter ceding priority to the employer’s agenda of labour utilization and control. Reflecting the economic and political priorities of employers and the state, pluralism thus actually reinforces management control and discretion, by making industrial relations much more stable and predictable.

Although common law assumes an employment contract is made between equals, an employer is put by the state in a condition to be a much more powerful collective entity – an aggregate of capital – than an individual employee, who brings no bargaining power to the labour ‘market’.

The work relationship is thus one of power.

Workers are exploited as profit produced by their labour is appropriated as part of an unequal economic relationship, giving industrial conflict a necessarily class character.

Given the resultant importance of worker collective action as a necessary process of control over work relations, unions will fail to protect workers if they make injudicious use of their power, limiting actions to a battle against the effects of the existing system instead of using collective forces to change it. In doing so, they effectively turn the authority of the union against workers and their attempts to resist the attacks of capital or may even become the "lieutenants of capital in the intensified exploitation of workers". In other words, worker collectivism should function as "an effective and situationally specific response to injustice, not an irrelevant anachronism".

In contrast, the prevailing neoliberal pluralist role of the British unions is to develop cooperative social partnerships with employers to whom they must continually justify their existence by demonstrating that they can "‘add value’ to the corporation", while managers are left free to exercise discretion over employment issues without contestation.

Moreover, the prevailing pluralist model of industrial relations does not negate the likelihood that managers in organisations will maintain more conservative views. Indeed, in an effort to gain tighter control over the workforce, employers may examine ways to internalise employee relations and return to unitarist industrial practices, as recent reports indicate is occurring in the HE sector.

Alienated at work? Don't sell yourself.

2008-05-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

Legislation since the 1990s has introduced a focus on mass education , performativity and marketisation in British Higher Education, whereby reduced public funds are allocated against student numbers and performance indicators, forcing reliance on market mechanisms to differentiate institutions based on the quality of education, which is essentially treated as a commodity.

A technocratic and instrumental view of knowledge is adopted, leading to demand on academics to constantly reinvent themselves and cultural capital as marketable commodities. In this, traditional dialogues about academic values and relevance are replaced by externally determined criteria coupled with the products of market forces.

This false belief in the power of positive external market forces to drive quality improvements in HE at a lower cost to the public purse, has created a new language of performativity for HE, the logic being that demonstrating efficiency and excellence means more students, more funding and easier expansion. However, while the decentralisation of public sector employment relations brought about increased responsibility and power for managers in HE, the degree of discretion and authority they have enjoyed is delimited by the requirement for public accountability, representing only a partial convergence of public and private sector employment relations.

The reforms nonetheless demonstrate a clear ideological commitment to neoliberal ideals and the principles of the free market and global capitalism, whereby the imperative of profit seeking market competition is allowed to dominate economic, social and political life. Accordingly, the close association of political economy and workplace relations results to be mediated by redefined managerial practices in universities.

In particular, the neoliberal value for money agenda affect how labour is controlled. Certainly, the outputs of such reforms - the rhetoric of performance management of a new HE managerial class, labour flexibility, value for money, quality assurance, productivity - have little in common with workers' interests and much more in common with notions of 'managerial capitalism'.
The impact of such tyranny on university life, and its agenda of measuring, monitoring and controlling, predictably then leads to resistance and a "daily build up of frustration and profound sense of dissatisfaction" among academics and other workers who feel the effects of macho management, increasing levels of stress and "confrontational and dictatorial management style".
In fact, one of the most significant themes to emerge in this respect, concerns the shift in power and discretion to managers in the transformation of universities from institutions of academic autonomy to management prerogative: work intensification has been accompanied by a loss of autonomy and transfer of control to managers whom many staff consider incompetent and have little respect for.

As managers assume discretion over both employment and academic issues, the commoditization of labour involves the suppression of worker values and beliefs which are assumed to be negotiable.

In an academic labour market, which treats labour as a commodity and a cost to be minimised, the worker surrenders control over his labour where both are virtually 'alienated'.
Surrendering control over one's labour then means to become alienated and to be subordinated in one's work. Academics are forced under such tyranny to surrender their capacity to work as though it is a commodity, but this means surrendering a part of themselves and their lives.
Indeed, losing control over their work, academics realise only what management want them to. Functioning as instruments or labour resources, they are alienated in several distinct ways:

From their own being, as they are treated as machines of production instead of as humans;
From other workers, as their labour is reduced to a commodity instead of a social relationship;
From education as the product of their labour, as it is appropriated and commoditized by the employers who control it;
From teaching and research as the acts of production, drained of meaning or intrinsic satisfaction.

Perhaps the most plausible explanation for why people sustain such a condition of submission to the interests of capital, is due to the problem of false consciousness;

"If there are alienating processes in the social system, they will affect the process of social production in such a way that the individual will learn "false" needs which in turn create a state of alienation. If this state of alienation is experienced sufficiently. it will be experienced as "normal". Therefore the individual will no longer experience his own alienated state. Instead he will acquire a "false consciousness" of himself and, in addition and in consequence of this, false beliefs about his social environment" (Israel, 1971).

It is in this manner, by creating and maintaining false needs, that capitalism effectively uses the rhetoric of the benefits of consumption, to control social and work relationships. This is on the basis of a perverse assumption that if people are alienated in their work, they can more easily be alienated as consumers and vice versa. In the 'modernised' neoliberal system of British HE, student indebtedness, the effort of study, long working hours and loss of academic autonomy are supposedly compensated by the promise of incentive and reward and inspired by the doctrine of individualism. Thus, accompanying the commoditization of labour is the consumerisation of university workers.

In transforming the labour of lecturers into a means-ends relationship and education into a commodity product, the HE reforms and the increased discretion they have accorded to managers to determine employment issues in line with neoliberal and capitalist ideals, can only lead to greater alienation of academic employees and a greater desire for control over what is treated increasingly by HE employers as a profitable and exploitable workforce.

Say no to league tables!

2008-05-04T12:39:00.001-07:00

Tradesman show

2008-04-10T08:33:00.000-07:00

The proposal by Joe Carter of having a new type of league table, reminds me of going shopping. I have learnt from such excursions how a tradesman details all the features of the object of desire, in an effort to sell it to the customer. He or she lists, one by one, all the features to let you know that the object of desire is in reality what you really wanted already.

I have spent many days just looking at and listening to tradesmen/showmen listing all the detailed features of objects of desire and have been very amused by the shows. Even without buying anything from them, I learnt how much I didn't know of my desires. With this I also reflected on the time the tradesmen wasted with their performances. I also, some days, reflected on how much the performances were in fact struggles directed and maneuvered by the alienating forces of capital.

The tradesman lists all the features of the object of one's desire. The buyer is left with just a few options; if he/she is able to resist such desires (some would justify them as a natural given) he/she would list all the items composing the object and negotiate singularly on each one. Then he/she would highlight how the object is in itself composed of many parts which are themselves produced at a very low cost and of very low quality so that the overall price may indeed appear to be an extortion. For this the buyer must be an expert on quality. Philosophical debates can at this point be triggered.

Desires or not, the roles can sometimes be reversed and the confident tradesman can indeed show you what he has got in his house. He will teach you how to recognize a quality item and show you that his profit is very low. The same trader can play these two roles with two customers.

The best tradesmen have not attended Master in Business Administrations courses or read too much. They are in a world of their own. They are very adept superficial communicators and know that although the product is of very low quality, the dialogue with the customer is however a very central part of the enactment of roles.

As such, any information about the object of desire can be turned into an element to prize in turn, year after year. Most importantly, the customer must be enticed into wonderland world ('wonderized') for brief stages of his/her life.

I can grasp the basics of business but it appears to me that the recent call of Joe Carter for better and bigger league tables is nothing other than a marketing exercise to 'wonderize' lecturers and students.

League tables have been introduced because the reformer had the three main priorities of "Education, Education, Education" for his government; this in order to instil private sector values among the workforce at the base in colleges and universities and augment the perceived quality of courses.

Servant journalists have, with time, filled the vacuum created in the dialogue proposing such tables, in order to avoid a perceived trade-off in quality so that Higher Education can appear to bring a return on investment to UK society. At the same time, the university/college union leadership has firstly approved, then shared such performative thinking because, due to its logistic organisation, it has continued to root its interests in careerism and protectionism of the interests of the elite caste, not concerned at all with workers' rights, which are generally witness to the labour movement.

Workers' rights bring history to current times.

In this, league tables are a tool for the elite caste to control the workforce with rhetoric of improvement and efficiency, whilst servant journalists preach about performativity. Students themselves become slaves of such thinking, whilst the elite caste of senior management of universities move from university to university even if their origin one was rated at the bottom of the league the year before their move in the upward scale towards the heaven of the VC network. I have been impressed to see how this self-fulfilling prophecy is rooted in racism and discrimination in order to instill values of social Darwinism. In fact, control is not needed in order to improve quality and learning because both are always unfinalised and open. It is not possible to determine the outcome of learning except if the student is conceptualized in a particular manner.

For this the very aggressive words of Joe Carter - "League Tables are very popular with the public, which is why newspapers love to publish them and why they are probably here to stay" - are very explicative: the elite caste still wants to retain the tools of control.

Like in the tradesman's show, the controller needs to sell more and more information; more and more features of such objects of desire to students and parents hoping that their debts can be a fruitful investment. On the other, the trader knows that by selling more information about the object of desire, such information becomes the tool of oppression on the factory's production line.

There is genuine need to ignore league tables and re-establish a cordial and disinterested dialogue among the base and the students.

There is a need to reconnect with all the realities which have been made invisible over time, by servants and actors in search of authors.

Round the crown

2008-04-02T02:35:00.000-07:00

The lastest opening of UCU to more 'extreme views' will not convince many people. UCU has suddenly become concerned with marketization of British education and is calling with a loud voice for an exchange of ideas. Indeed, it appears to be a well-directed drama in which many recognizeable voices have suddenly raised concerns on the marketization of British education and its deleterious end as a commodified field which will saturate and decline with the decline of the economy.

Such a move is from UCU unconvincing, because it lacks many of the principle characteristics of something being genuinely open. Indeed, how could it be different considering that British higher education is a good contributor to the British economy? It may be hazardous to think of this move as just another joke from the UCU leadership, but from the outset, such chameleon-like transformations do not convince.

To really move from a model of education based on the consumer paradigm to another, involves a general restructuring of the quality regime, the accountability of research teams, and the international qualification of such systems in respect of exchanges and bilateral agreements. There is nothing subversive. Actually there is nothing that can really be interesting in all this, because the real actors calling for a restructuring of ideas in higher education are the ones who must make the accounts balance for that elite caste who pay their salaries.

It is a move that, standing to British industrial relations, would look more like a countryside picnic than a real proper attempt to subvert the current elite caste affairs and doings. Actually it may seem to be exactly the opposite. But a question emerges: why all this alarmism about the marketisation of higher education and sudden passion for the disinterested and lightness of pure academia from UCU and the intellectual elite of British industrial relations?

There is nothing that the elite caste can be worried of because it is the elite caste who is speaking. As such, it is not something subversive but a sort of well directed drama in which the elite caste of union leaders reassesses the possibilities for a reinterpretation of a new role. It is a 'round the crown' exercise in which UCU calls for various strata of the intellectual elite to engage the already alienated substrate of lecturers and students of a decadent system, who cannot have the courage to talk as human beings. It is a 'round the crown' exercise to close the circle and obstruct the passage for likely infiltration of the system. It is a mask for the doings of such elite; an elite that is noticing how easy it is to dismantle and expose their servitude. I cannot see anything subversive in the curriculum of such individuals, neither anything really progressive or innovative in their leaders.

Could you imagine Sally Hunt in front of Downing Street shouting slogans against the marketisation of British education? This may not be possible, but an army of invisible flag carriers can make a simple walkway full of dispassionate individuals, look like a gigantic protest in the eyes of the believer. It was Sally Hunt who proposed time ago that the union should not be run like a University. Now she is rounding herself with professors and skilled deceivers of research to gather a consent for the loss of credibility that such Labour government and its elite caste has to face.

It is just simply a regurgitation of neo-liberal industrial relations.

Harassment, Trade Unions and the Law‏

2008-02-15T10:49:00.000-08:00

I have received the following and post it for the interest of the public.

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You may be interested in an industrial (employment) tribunal decision, which, according to Harvey’s Employment Law, is apparently still the precedent for cases involving complaints of racist or sexist harassment and discrimination.

The decision in the B Weaver v NATFHE case 1987, which dealt with issues at Bournville College, Birmingham , still allows trade unions to discriminate against victims of harassment, whether racist or sexist. The union was deemed entitled to discriminate because it had an obligation to protect the tenure of the accused and this obligation applied irrespective of the merit of the complainant's case. The union was also under an obligation not to offer advice and assistance to the complainant because to do so involved a conflict of interests.

The reports of the Industrial Tribunal and Employment Tribunal plus all the documentary evidence submitted to the tribunal by the applicant and the respondent are available for free on the internet at www.legalferret.net. This evidence is very illuminating on how union officials responded to the requests for assistance from the victim.

Penny Welch of Wolverhampton University was involved in this case although it seemed she refused to divulge to the complainant her involement; see sample letters section of the website, sample letter number 22 question 43. One thing was known that she was a close associarte in NATFHE of the person accused of harassment.

It is well worth a look.

Pete Crosby
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Self-Serving

2008-02-14T04:14:00.000-08:00

Each country has got its own Berlusconis, Blairs, Bushes or Popes. It is a kind of globalization thing and Blair may seem to have exaggerated recently in France whilst speaking about the current political situation. In reality he was just making another of his speeches on the "third-way" and that which he has really not been able to do; bring peace. Instead he has been able only to open discontent, the consequences of which he has sought to manage with repressive laws.

Has the Blair era been a soft-dictatorship?

This is what Britain has got into and from which it cannot get out. The debts, the moral blackmailing by employers, the obscure party financing, the run for capital to save banks from collapse and the monolith of unions-press-educational institutions. It is a jewel that Blair wanted in the British Empire. British education as evidence of his reformist thinking, to be pursued at any cost, and he was quite clear: "Ask me my three main priorities for government and I tell you education, education, and education.". This was the rallying cry of Tony Blair in bringing New Labour to power with his promises to transform public services.

But after a few years the reform implementations clearly indicated what was really happening: working classes had to embrace precarious jobs, debts and in general more risk, for the comfort and life predictability of a new elite class. His reforms were more difficult then predicted to implement.

The reformer changed his speech in declaration of all-out war on anybody who may have opposed the reforms. "Reformers versus wreckers” he declared in his rage for the blood of such opponents: “That is the battle for this parliament and it is one that we must win" Blair warned, sending a clear message. It was a New Labour of war, suicides, purges, debts, bullying news spin. In reality, it was an all-out war on trust, solidarity, transparency, and independent information. And it could not have been different, because to make his reforms he was aware of what he had to destroy first. So new Labour had to keep a distance from Europe, had to refuse to join the Euro and had to bury the conflict of interests, in order to bring such reforms alive.

Berlusconi was a real need for Blair in all this. He could really embody all that Blair wanted: double-facing, corruption and laws to avoid the illegality of his mis-doings. A man able to say and deny at the same time, a narcissus with big ideas about the Italian economy. In reality they used to echo each other on TV and in the papers. Blair went for the big ally then. He went for the man who may have given him possibilities that only ‘men of affairs’ can give: to enter into the business of a country through its major representative. As such, Blair, in real terms, attempted to export the third way to Italy, but paid a heavy price: he didn't account for the extra-parliamentary activism that Italy cultivates, in order to keep at bay corporativism and imperialism. He came to be confronted, along with Berlusconi - who in the meantime was pumping silicone into his face to make the miracle of science, the loss of age, come true - by the masses of workers.

Then the accounts had to be presented in matters of workers rights and job stability. Italy has been a test bench for Blair and his reforms and he has learned the experimental lesson along with his friend, the man of plastic: workers are of left and of right and there is no press that can convince them that 'anything goes'.

The unions in Italy have emerged from all these grand operations stronger then before. A progressive concern for manifesting class interests, conscious that there exist classes, there exist colours used by banks like blacks and reds to highlight balances, there exist words like credit and debt. They have different meanings and workers felt and feel them on their own skin and were and are ready to make this well known to Blair and his plastic friend.

Britain is a different country. Possibly it could have been the country in which Mr. Plastic would have found his liberty and full realization as a politician. He would have been comfortable with many journalists, union leaders, VCs and pro-VCs, and company presidents, but I don't know if he would have been comfortable with the justice. I can be sure that he would certainly be at home with some press, but more precisely, with that sort of press that cannot detect the border of decency; where a journalist is no different from a servant-journalist. But Mr. Plastic is only the little king of Italy. Not that sort of king that only Britain deserves.

Mr. Plastic would be more at home in Britain because he could truly realize his dream of no unions; only professional associations and universities which profess the good of the economy and of the free-market. He would be comfy within that elite caste, with those who listen, applaud, and execute. That elite caste that never questions or critiques and actually tailors laws to perfectly suit the needs of government, irrespective of the needs and opinions of the people they supposedly govern and of the voters in first place.

Mr. Plastic would be smiling on the streets emptied of university workers’ protests and would visit, from time to time, this or that TV programme to talk of his achievements. There he would be interviewed by journalists who would then invite union leaders to comment on the speech.

After this, invariably newspaper articles would be published in which the following unchangeable sentence would be found: “Sally Hunt said”. Mr Plastic would be free in the country where journalists define rank-and-file as Stray Cats and he would finally be at peace with the pseudo-Union of his dreams. He would be happy and in harmonious conjunction with what University and College Union leaders would say. He may even propose to join them in an honorary chairmanship.

Mr. Plastic would be at home within corporations of university VCs and Pro-VCs. He would not need to pass any specific legislation to get them on his side or to exercise control: he would govern, and they would execute. No matter the outcomes. Media would be under the control of a powerful and rich elite caste and always ready to make anything unnoticeable. The only thing to note would be legs and breasts if not genitalia on the cover of their newspapers: masculinity in any sense.

Mr Plastic would definitely favour diplomas issued by retailers, if this would help keep unemployment down and a stream of teenagers ready to be underpaid and indoctrinated by the temples of capitalism. He would also continue with his face-liftings and accurate make-ups like Blair and Brown at each loss of confidence in the British public. Or, like the elite caste of university union leaders at each re-branding of unions. Even higher education magazines and newspapers would lift their look and remix their editorial boards from time to time, to cover the wrinkles and the signs of age.

Many scars would be left on the British education system and on the lives of workers by the cold surgical removal of academics and others who evidence the disfigurement of such a system.

Such scars would be corrected with highly specialised plastic surgery journalism.

Elite castes are like-minded: The objectives are to make the rich always richer and the poor always poorer and ever-increasing in number.

With Mr Plastic in Britain, it would all be like it was for Tony: Education, Education, Education.

Voices of dissent

2008-02-12T12:29:00.000-08:00

Many voices of dissent within unions remain many times unheard. We have embarked in a journey to hear what people have to say on UCU (University and College Union) and the benefits of its membership, the agenda that the elite caste union leaders pursue and how members feel about their contract of work, academic standards etc. Here I present a very brief interview with a voice from the base, part of a series, which will then form part of a documentary.

Globalisation: n. 1 in the list of evils for contemporary education

2008-01-16T12:36:00.000-08:00

I continue with another piece to expose corporate control of academia in response to the article by Angela Jancius on "Battling the Neoliberalization of University Life" which I reported in a previous post. In this short article I highlight how globalisation attracts dangers associated with a lack of genuine educational values, quality control and regulation. I also expose some of the recent moves that new corporations have made in order to gain further control on Academia.

Long Post!

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It has been widely argued that globalisation is first and foremost an economic and technological phenomenon. However, while the detached rationality of economics does not appeal to social, cultural, political or humanitarian values for ratification or condonation, globalisation is not an amoral concept. It is more accurately understood as a utopian rhetoric and device for the reconversion of dependency. It functions to disguise serious social problems created by economic policies and drive the persistent machinery of capitalism sustained by structures of economic and political power and influence and by rational choice as a principle of legitimacy.

Accordingly, the roots of modern globalization within historic events of settlement, colonisation and cultural mimesis of western cultures over others, have been widely emphasised, with many critics referring to globalisation in education and other sectors as a form of neo-colonialism. It is accordingly associated with the creation of inequalities through continual flows of capital, people, information and culture.

Underpinned by neoliberalism, globalisation emphasises free enterprise and unfettered markets, whereby individuals are valued for their records of consumption and their success at dominating the less powerful and profit-seeking firms embrace the destruction of social welfare as a fundamental objective. However, as Fitzsimons suggests,

“the problem for liberalism is that rationality is its central tenet, and hence for relations of domination to be rationally defensible, they must be argued for”.

As such, globalisation, as an essentially market-induced, rather than policy-led phenomenon, driven by market expansion through processes spearheaded by the vested interests of multinational financial and industrial conglomerates, implies contradictory ideals and indefensible social consequences. It disguises sinister oppressive ramifications in a rhetorical postmodern language of freedom and economic liberalisation.

In pushing towards the world as a single economic space, the processes of globalisation rely on the internationalisation of trade, financial markets, network communications systems and a commodity culture, to bring about fundamental changes at social, political and cultural, as well as economic levels. Insipid homogenisation of societies and increased awareness of diversity are mutually irreconcilable consequences, as people become increasingly aware of receding geographical constraints on social and cultural arrangements.

Globalisation implies a doctrine of economic salvation, wherein the market is revered as a positive force and state intervention as a negative, upholding a bias towards the privatisation of public enterprises. While globalisation has not brought about the end of the state altogether, it has forced a reconstitution and restructuring in response to the growing complexity of processes of governance in a more interconnected world. This is particularly true for Higher Education sectors where no powerful interest groups exist to oppose state spending cuts, although the political influence of Vice-Chancellors, should surely not be underestimated.

It is primarily due to changes in the political economy in Britain since the 1980s, that a radical restructuring of Higher Education towards privatisation, contract government, output-based funding and marketisation has taken place, underpinned by economics as opposed to sociology. It has further been argued that all such contemporary pressures on HE from massification to the growth of the private sector are the result of globalisation. Certainly the recent trend towards the transformation of universities into centres for mass education has been accompanied by a rise in managerial organisational cultures which are themselves a by-product of underlying neo-liberal ideals.

Such centres for mass education exist not only to provide training in support of changing occupational needs, but also to produce epistemological research and contribute to cultural production. However, various researchers conceptualise contemporary, and therefore mass HE as a resource for competitive knowledge societies, implying the relevance of the economy in driving educational developments and painting a picture of a commoditised enterprise system of education in which apparently social ideals of widening participation are in truth linked to government targets and satisfying intense employer demand for useful labour. The latest example being the opening of McDonald indoctrination centres in the UK.

However, despite aligning ever more closely with the private sector, universities are still expected to provide both efficiency and quality in returning on society’s investment in them; arguably required to be all things to all people. This sets up a dichotomous relationship between the function of the university as a place to promote learning and encourage knowledge construction and its postmodern realisation, as a place to acquire transferable and valuable skills relevant to the prevailing economic and social culture. The superficially laudable goal of making higher education available to a larger section of the population must in this sense be viewed alongside the economic and political realities accompanying it; universities can no longer maintain competitiveness by relying on state funding alone and must now compete within both state-managed and private sector markets for funds.

In the UK, such significant changes towards a mass market for HE, largely followed the 1992 further and higher education act, which introduced a focus on quality audit and notions of a client-led system, wherein public funds are allocated against student numbers and performance measures. With the government publication of charters in 1993, students were already being encouraged to conceive of themselves as consumers and employers as stakeholders, reflecting the influence of market ideologies in HE. As a result, market mechanisms could already be seen to be emerging as a way of differentiating institutions based on quality, primarily through acceptance of the notion of education as private commodity. In doing so, academics contentiously obtained a new role as resources to be effectively and efficiently employed in pursuit of organisational aims; to tailor courses to meet the needs of ‘clientele’ as opposed to defining or guiding educational experiences.

The language of performativity thus crept into the discourse of mass HE by way of the introduction of a national system, based upon a belief in external market forces of both the state and private sectors, linked to an expansion of global HE markets and the discourse of global competition underpinned by commercial interests. With regard to the global market, though, the UK government had taken steps much earlier than this to exploit channels of income, allowing universities to charge full fees to non-EU overseas students from 1980 and thus opening up HE to a marketised approach to funding.

Subsequently, as a result of further legislation, including the relatively recent deregulation of ‘home’ student fees, various forms of competition have become evident within state managed (e.g. competition for funded student places and research funding through RAE) and private (e.g. fees from overseas students, commercial spin-offs and exploitation of facilities) markets of HE.

Resources are accordingly now, primarily in the form of funding to obtain and retain staff, services and physical goods. Outside of the state managed market, universities have freedom to obtain resources and compete for the most lucrative and stable stakeholders, treating state and non-state funding within a single forecasting and resource allocation process. The birth of the neo-liberal corporation for the control of research and access to funding, as in the example of the Russell Group in the UK, is a sign that universities and their elite caste of managers, have intentions and agendas other than freedom of thoughts and speech and freedom to research.

Despite the lucrative financial opportunities, such motivations within the market-driven fundamentals of globalisation, actually present more challenges than opportunities. In particular, quality control, information management, fitness for local services and costs and benefits, attract dangers associated with a lack of genuine educational values, quality control and regulation.

"La Sapienza" Rome - POPE free area

2008-01-16T05:22:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

Although nearly no space has been given to the following news I report it for you benefit:

"The POPE has been heavily contested with an occupation of the University Senate rooms by autonomous students at "La Sapienza" university in Rome. He will not go and give a speech at the university for the inaugural celebration of the Academic Year".

This of course is a great victory for academic freedom in Italy.

The right of reply has been given to the students and they took it and they made good use of it.

Not many newspapers have reported the news and some have devoted just a small space on their web-sites.

http://www.repubblica.it/2006/05/gallerie/esteri/papa-rassegna-stampa/1.html

Prof. Rodota' and other have been free to comment on state televisions and autonomous students have been given the right to protest in the university by the VC of "La Sapienza" and nobody of course has been sacked.

Academic freedom? What Academic freedom? What a joke! I leave in the UK.

Sal.

Research into bullying in post -92 UK universities

2008-01-14T04:37:00.000-08:00

I am finishing my MBA in Education and would like to ask for your support. As part of my studies I have chosen to carry out a piece of research on bullying in universities and management of policies to deal with bullying in the universities UK. If you have been affected by bullying or have instigated a policy/grievance to deal with it, I would like to hear from you. I would also be grateful to hear from anyone with information about tribunal or other cases related to bullying in post - 92 universities UK.

Please bear in mind that much literature has been written but I need the support and evidence from people who have actually been experiencing bullying in post-92 universities.

The findings of the study would then be published through research papers at conferences as widely as possible. The confidentaility of your contribution is assured in all parts.

As usual this piece of academic research is self-funded, independent and will not be used for profit and will only seek to enhance understanding of such issues.

contact@salvatorefiore.com

salvatorefiore@hotmail.com

(if you send me a line I can contact you by phone also)

Regards
Salvatore Fiore

Artistic approaches to anti-bullying activism

2008-01-08T04:27:00.000-08:00

Howard and Lori Fredrics are two artists, husband and wife, who are active in London and around. This couple have embarked on a series of mini projects to highlight the effect of bullying in the workplace. Having themselves experienced bullying in a university as workplace, the couple have brought an innovative and therapeutic approach to such issues in order to reflect on the devastating effects that bullying has on the lives of university workers and more in general on the lives of people. Using various performance techniques, Howard and Lori have already organized a series of outdoor mini events with the interest of the local audience. In November 2007, always on the theme of bullying, they dedicated an evening at the Ram Jam Club in Richmond to poetry, music and various arts. They have also produced some videos and music in which they perform autobiographical events of bullying.

I have spoken to them both about their reflections on such events and on how the evening at the Ram Jam Club went. Below is the interview in two parts (due to the length of the video).

Interview part 1

Interview part 2

Shadows of a gloomy future for the elite caste

2008-01-03T07:02:00.000-08:00

The Minister of State for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education, Bill Rammell, 27th November 2007 has given a speech on Academic Freedom and extremism in British Higher Education.

Since then he is looking for allies; for people who want to reinterpret freedoms "in the context of the new challenges and threats that face our society". In reality, with just this sentence he narrows down the scope for debate, framing it as a mere reinterpretation of the word freedom in the context of external threats and imagined dangers from an hypothetical external environment. And he has no fear to talk about it. In fact it sounds more like a declaration of war, instead of a relaxed speech about freedom and civil liberties.

Reflecting the uphill battle that the protection of civil liberties represents for neoliberal, New Labour Britain, Rammell is out to enlarge the corps of troops he hopes to lead into his war. It is here that the rhetoric of his speech comes into act. He calls for a reinterpretation of freedom by announcing the warnings and ideas of eminent individuals: most notably, the PM’s worries about the state of liberty in UK and the MI5 warning of a real and sustained threat from terrorism and bold statement that "Britain as a nation tends instinctively towards liberty, and historically has led the world in espousing its virtues".

But Rammell forgets that Britain has not yet been able to democratically elect a head of state; that Britain still refers to ex-colonies with contempt (economic and political); that Britain has waged war on countries for unjust causes ( Iraq); that Britain has traded in slaves; that Britain has the highest amount of people spying on each other like sexual perverts who have nothing better to do with their lives; that Britain has a series of secret agents paying neighbours to spy on each other (source: Guardian) whilst politicians are never intercepted in their corrupt dealings and collusions; that Britain has hit the bottom of league tables in Europe for privacy and academic freedom and that Britain will possibly overtake china with respect to abuse of human rights. Britain has espoused the neo-conservative Anglo-American ideals of masculinity and imperialism in universities. Not then to mention problems of bullying in schools, universities and the workplace more widely (to emphasise how widespread the plague has become, one needs only to notice that Britain now has to devote national days to ‘anti-bullying’). I would like to ask how many people silently suffer mental illness and are silently killed for this. Does it really matter that waging war on a country (Iraq) has become a shame worst than Rwanda?

These are the real problems that kill people. These are the places where postmodern urban terrorists hide behind the press, the headlines and the online forums to spy on and plot against the next victims.

Possibly our Minister Rammell is avoiding tackling the root of such problems, knowing that New Labour has been at the epicentre of their growth, following a narcissistic man thirsty for power and money. Likely our Minister knows that New Labour is still at the centre and must solve the problems. The impotency for doing so has already been demonstrated amply.

The words of rhetoric embody the thinking of neo-conservativism in Britain: that everything can be said and denied at the same time on the guarantee that the people will follow the politician to maintain a sense of safety, because otherwise they will be lost.

Rammell lays-out his true agenda without appeal to half terms. He intends to root-out extremism from the communities, in order to resist extremist influences and eradicate terrorism. Apparently this should be seen in light of a new freedom in universities, designed to refute violent extremist views on campus. His words are sharp and leave no space for interpretation or misunderstanding. The link is straightforward and the "proof" is provided by MI5.

But up to now I am not aware of any extremism published or any incitement to violence exercised through the academy, academic journals, classrooms and, importantly, conferences and speeches. I am not aware of students arrested whilst inciting violence or terrorism with extremist academic views.

I am instead aware of a plague spreading in British Universities; of research misconduct; of misrepresentation of research results; of setting international conferences and symposiums to access European or EPRSC funding; of professor suicides for research misconduct and apparent suicides for work-pressures by esteemed British university professors; and of illegal blacklisting of academics, to mention just a few of the symptoms of a sick system.

This is a fall-out for academic freedom, but surely not a comfortable subject of discussion by Rammell. The British University has learnt that she has to silence the free voices of uncomfortable academics in order for unions like UCU (ex Nathfe and AUT) to survive.

Ah well, Sally Hunt has already trained the dogs to salivate for the next statement on the educational press.

The elite caste has noticed that all this must also be made with the agreement of various politicians of the countries from which such academics come. It is a dirty battle for the survival of the Anglo-American corporate dominative-imperialistic thinking in Universities and from there to the rest of the population. Some have already noticed all this and find it impossible to believe that there is no agenda behind it: the Anglo-American deleterious capitalist evil of neo‑conservativism is trying to penetrate foreign markets and territories with a thinking that stifles local cultures and traditions.

Rammell plays with captivating words of rhetoric and sophism. The minister depicts the British university as a place where administrators, students and academics must keep an eye on each other, to mistrust and always put ideas under suspicion. At the same time, the vagueness of a term like extremism is not defined because Rammell cannot. Indeed, it is not possible to define such a term without coming down to observe the current world order, without speaking of masonry, of the secret services and of international politics. In reality, extremism is a term which can only be defined in a vocabulary that is in continuous redefinition. We must however observe that the dictionary is not universal and has not and will not be written by transnational agreements.

The British neo-liberal, even neo-conservative politics of New Labour, cannot be trusted for the simple reason that each action of this government has been part of a design for domination of values which alienate populations and cultures. They rely on values which trade freedom to the auto-determination of nations and tribes, promising vacuously, misleadingly, to bring stability and prosperity.

The same rhetoric is present in the speeches of union leaders and in the planning of union meetings, which makes me think that there is more than a simple coincidence to all this. The latest resolution to be adopted by UCU with regard to academic freedom comes, predictably, soon after Rammells’s speech. What can we expect from it? Surely, shamefully, we can expect that UCU will continue to recruit and indoctrinate to the effectiveness of the “third way” of agreements and peace and then purge the individuals who really care and work in a manner disinterested from government ambitions and grand master plans for world domination.

Many foreigners I have met in this country appear to have been transformed into 007s for the British establishment; post-modern subjects indoctrinated to deny their origins and accept the British superiority and the life-style with all the values that come with it. And it is for this reason that many institutions in the UK can not and will not ever be seen as institutions where cultures can be exchanged. Instead they will always be seen as institutions greedy for economic interests.

The likelihood that the UK will see a progressive decline of foreign students from Europe is tangible. A further progressive decline of support from the middle-east towards the British neo‑conservative elite caste is also probable, as the realisation of how the promised help to both factions could only be detrimental to the progressive developments of local populations, making the prospect of a common future ever more uncertain, as come.

It is interesting to note how UCU and increasing numbers of union activists are keen and ready to put their nose into foreign matters and foreign politics, when time and money should be spent on the interests of workers in Britain. The recent Israel boycott scandal is a disturbing example of the intensive interests that UCU has with regard to foreign politics. This perhaps gives some indication as to why there has always been a very strong resistance to opening up a dialogue for the reform of the unions in the UK, considering the ineptitude that such elite caste has created at the base.

We should at this point see the words of Rammell and the instructions by Sally Hunt as a sort of undivided region for the sharing of international affairs. And all this would not be nonsense considering that British universities suffer for the instability of some regions in the world, having taken foreign students as real and proper targets for the accumulation of foreign capital.

The neo-liberal British university system can only profit from frictionless and stable politics in foreign countries. As such, it should be within the intentions of such foreign governments to bring stability for coalitions which can disturb the normal flow of students towards the UK or can undermine the consolidation of ideas and doctrines exported through transnational agreements between universities in the UK and commercial partners representing them in foreign countries.

In this context, UCU seems to be perversely interested in highlighting the efficiencies of the British system, becoming an ambassador of an open mentality abroad: a role in which they are consistently supported by the workings of the Times Higher Educational Supplement, disguised as a newspaper, but in reality more like the official marketing brochure for the effectiveness of government actions in HE.

All this make me think that, although no grand plan is either written or accessible to the base, everybody knows what they must do in order to achieve it. In other words: ‘keep an eye on all the individuals from which the neo-conservative British system cannot profit’.

The so called extremism as such becomes a priority for the government. In concomitance to UCU and various academics who have professed that Britain was ready to embrace the role of peacekeeper in the middle-east, they have conceived the most opprobrious subject of post‑modern history: war-mongers can reinvent themselves as peace-keepers. It is not that Britain could not take a peacekeeping role in the world, but rather that it could be possible only after seeing Tony Blair on the bench of the Hague Tribunal. Tony has instead been left free to reinterpret his latest career move as a sort of crusade, by asking for absolution to the Pope before Christmas 2007.

The situation is evidently complex, and complexity is a feature of post-modernism. We should perhaps be wary of people who, for apparent no reason, like to introduce complexity; as a sort of discovery where ambiguity or complexity can really erase and redefine history, from which nothing can be learned.

Even UCU, who might be expected to seek a deconstruction, a delayering of such complexity, has instead embraced the idea that it is needed within this new system of contradictions and that new vocabularies, new ambassadors, new students and a new world order must be sought.

The news circular UCU/60, issued soon after Rammel’s speech, reports in the opening paragraphs these very objectives of Sally Hunt:

“At UCU Congress, and the Higher Education Sector Conference, two motions were passed on the issue of academic freedom and freedom of expression in the UK. The first one, from Leeds University, outlines the rights and responsibilities of academic and related staff in further and higher education, particularly in the context of the Frank Ellis case:

“UCU Congress resolves that all academic and academic related staff be free to criticise and publish without fear for their jobs; nevertheless with this freedom comes the responsibility to respect the democratic rights and freedoms of others.”

The second one from Queen’s University Belfast focuses on the freedom to conduct one’s own research, particularly as a result of pressures resulting from the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in higher education. This motion calls for “the executive to embark on a campaign to defend academic freedom by all appropriate means.”

These two motions highlight the complex, multi-layered nature of academic freedom and freedom of expression.1 The purpose of the following UCU discussion paper is to encourage a debate amongst members about these important issues.”

In my opinion, this kind of further debate can only take UCU further away. In fact it is the direction that the elite caste has determined for its members. Instead of embarking on a work of deconstruction in order to unveil the hidden workings of power up to now, the leadership has decided to add layers and layers of meanings. Such meanings full of ambiguity can only assist layers and layers of bureaucrats in making sure that such a right (Academic Freedom) justifies their actions, guaranteeing enforceable connotations to the transactions happening under the eyes of union reps in the universities.

It is unlikely that a new meaning for “Academic Freedom” in the vocabulary of freedoms can be understood by any but its writers. Aside from the rhetoric, UCU knows very well that impartiality must survive contradiction and complexity as features of the places in which such terms will be used.

“Academic Freedom” is a pleonasm which the UCU leadership knows very well. We would not need to discuss about freedoms for the work of academics if we would seek truth or knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

The ‘academic’ in Academic Freedom has, however, ceased to be representative of academic environments, while freedoms have simultaneously ceased to be guaranteed by the judicial system. The reinterpretation of the power relationships between the elite caste and the newcomers has taken over.

The call, through Rammell’s speech, is evidently for a new order of freedoms and seats in the unions, by the way of a simple but determinant subject: what should the research and teaching of the British neo-liberal system be, in order to gather further consent in foreign regions and territories? This is intentionally coupled to the open request to the various forces to search for allies who are ready to embrace the new anti-terrorist values backed by the government and the unions. This appears to be a real and proper utopia, although very useful and comfortable now for governmental initiatives.

The underlying objective is to launch an attack all over the world for the commodification of British education and exportation of such values through areas of political opposition. It is a vulgar double-meaning of “education” in the name of Anglo-American conservativism.

Fabio Mussi, the new Italian communist of the banana party

2007-12-30T11:24:00.002-08:00

Today the Italian newspaper "La Repubblica" has cited that the Decreto Milleproroghe reform proposed by Fabio Mussi, Minister of University and Research and leader of the Sinistra Democratica party in Italy is a sort of Copernican revolution. But what Copernican revolution? This is a carbon copy of what researchers and academics in Britain are trying to get rid of!

The following is an open letter to Fabio Mussi, the new Italian communist of the banana party.

30 December 2007

Egr. Ministro Mussi,

I have today read on Repubblica about the reform you proposed of Italian universities and research with the Decreto Milleproroghe. As an Italian, I am writing from the UK, with experience spanning ten years of study, research and university teaching here. I have worked in and researched the British Higher Education System and its prevailing quality processes and structures – a system from which you draw the design for your proposed reform.

The British Department for Education and Skills defines universities as a resource for a competitive knowledge society. This attributes power to the economy to drive developments in education and research, while politicians and university executives preach about efficiency and competitiveness. The goal then is to avoid a trade-off in quality so that Higher Education can appear to bring a return on investment to society.

What is actually meant by quality, however, in a mass, marketised Higher Education sector, is somewhat obscure. Repeated changes in the discourse on quality since Thatcher’s government have compelled universities towards a performativity culture. Both the established universities and the many new degree awarding institutions created as a result of legislation in 1992 have been made answerable to the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) as they are forced to demonstrate quality in terms of value for money in return for allocation of funds. The universities pursue an agenda of efficiency, with control devolved to agencies including the Quality Assurance Agency, to which universities are accountable via processes of audit and inspection. The pressure of such accountability is invariably felt most by the academics and knowledge workers rather than the self-styled presidents at the top of the institutional hierarchy.

On the other side are the students, now paying anything up to £7000 a year in tuition fees on the promise of better wages and employability upon graduation, only to discover, for the large part that their ‘innovative’ and ‘cutting edge’ qualifications tailored to the perpetually changing needs of a saturated service economy, make them less likely to find employment than if they had never studied at all.

Clearly agendas for educational quality and improvement should be built upon specification of educational purposes and standards and depend upon appreciation of the underlying context and how people learn, interact, sustain, develop or destroy a culture. Similarly, strategies and policies aimed at the enhancement of the quality of the provision of an academic institution should be read in concomitance to the overall organisation development aims and strategies.

In reality, the stakeholders meeting the shortfall and exploiting the competitiveness arising out of decreasing state funding, are primarily large corporations and multinationals, with a purely financial interest in research and teaching. Universities in Britain have moved to embrace lucrative partnerships with such capitalists as they are forced into increasing competitiveness with each other.

As such, while quality can be viewed either progressively in terms of educational improvement or performatively as meaninglessly quantifying aspects of the system, it is most worryingly and most prolifically under the British system, taken as a mechanism to increase power from above and institutionalise compliance and accountability, at the expense of areas of teaching and research that aren’t expected to bring short-term financial return.

The commensurable increase in quality required by auditing authorities with the power to give and take away funding from universities, is accordingly exemplified by permanent struggle, elusive goals and imperialism, such that quality then becomes effectively colonised by consumerism and short-term effectiveness. Quality, perversely, becomes a matter of numbers.

In Britain, the effect this has had on research has been particularly damaging. The Research Assessment Exercise, a process under perpetual review and soon to be replaced altogether, has attracted serious criticism for the way in which it causes barriers for less established, less mainstream and less commercially-interested researchers and departments, while rewarding established researchers and departments with much larger allocations of available funding. Those who need the most help – who are at the start of their careers or who are unable to attract corporate funding due to the nature of their research (however valuable to society) – are hindered and left to struggle, while others who are already ahead, are helped and supported to go further. As a supposed left-wing politician, you will surely recognize this as a fundamental ideological tenet of capitalism.

The Research Assessment Exercise, a process of allocating funding according to performance in research, according to specific criteria for what constitutes good performance, thus purposefully furthers some types of research, opposing equal academic representation and denying the free and fair distribution of resources.

There are many examples of researchers in Britain who have been excluded from research because they were not in a position (through ideology or practicality) to satisfy the prescribed quality criteria. These are, or were, capable and conscientious researchers. These researchers were not assisted by increasing competitiveness and society will not be able to benefit from their research because it was closed down before it could really develop.

Dear Ministro Mussi, the system you would like to implement is that described above. Does this really look left-wing? I think perhaps you need to turn 180° around, having confused left-wing with neo-liberalism, or even with ‘anglo-american neo-conservativism’. Alternatively, if you are unable to gyrate such a distance maybe you should leave your job to those who are still facing in the right direction.

This, however, is not the point, which in fact regards the allocation of resources and academic freedom.

Recent press reports suggest that the UK has hit the bottom of the league in academic freedom in Europe. The competitiveness of British Higher Education now means that the directions of universities, of research and of teaching are in the hands of unqualified and commercially interested consultants and managers. Researchers and lecturers are ‘troops’ being led into ‘battle’ by university ‘presidents’ who are advised strategically by multinational firms of management consultants.

In short, competitiveness is being embraced as a battle; one for capital, rather than knowledge or exchange of cultures, although of course neither Thatcher nor Blair would admit as much.
And it is a dirty battle. An increase in the amount of misconduct in research (e.g. faked research results, fixing outputs, copying work, etc.) perpetrated in order to access funding and boost profiles of departments or universities is another disturbing consequence of such systems identified here in the UK.

More fundamentally, research which has to fulfill financial outcomes is itself a flawed concept because most social research has got outcomes, the value of which are not measurable quantitatively or subject to the laws of finance or similar quality measures you would like to introduce.

Academic freedom allows that research must be disinterested and conducted for the wealth of humanity; not for the wealth of multinational corporations (We can certainly learn from the past about the bad financing of ghost projects).

The point, Ministro, is that academic freedom is not the product of any policy. It is the right of academics. If a person has achieved the right to be known as an academic and to publish his or her research, it is your obligation to guarantee this right, not to trade it in exchange for capital.

Dear Minstro Mussi, you are opening up universities for capital exploitation. Is this really left wing? Again, perhaps you should turn 180° if you are to call yourself left-wing, because up to now you are only proposing neo-liberal reforms which translate into submission to anglo american neo-conservative ways of thinking; the very same ways so much criticised by yourself and your colleagues during your protest marches.

If this is still not enough, I would also like to highlight to you that many universities in Southern Italy suffer as a result of low research income. How would you propose to lift such problems from Southern Italian universities? It is likely that your system will inevitably cut out some universities and, as a self-fulfilling prophecy, will create a two-tier system of universities: those in centre-north Italy with plenty of funding, brain-draining from Southern Italy and those in Southern Italy instead anchored to systems of paternalism and patriarchy, systems of protection over careers and access to research.

Your reform, which offers a carrot in supposedly creating thousands of jobs for new researchers, while giving a stick in the form of such a Quality Assurance system, is masking the real truth behind your project; that you are selling the university system of research and teaching to neo liberal ideologies of the free market.

To create thousands of new researchers is not an easy task and what you are proposing is to see instantaneously, a new army of research scientists. But with a past spent on what? You do not become a researcher from one day to another. You need to spend several years of hard dedication of your life to understand a field. Where will Italy draw such resources from? To be a researcher you need to be framed within the international field and can call yourself a research scientist nowadays only if you have international acknowledgement. It is up to the single individual and not to the good intentions of your government and its policies. You may well risk to raise expectations in a few individuals who will only profit from finances allocated to their universities, whilst drawing Italy further back in research.

If Italy is currently not in a state of advanced research, how do you pretend to form 10,000 new researchers in one year? You are selling the university/research as though it is wonderland, when in reality it has become a highly competitive international field.

Your neglect in not considering certain aspects of research and opening elusive futures to research students, their families and all Italians, is worrying.

Your supposed left-wing thinking is betrayed purposefully by your own words.
Instead of opening a phase of transition towards equal access and resource distribution to universities and researchers, you are instead opening up competition between themselves.
If all these grand operations with regard to universities have been brought about strategically and hidden purposefully behind the words of the President Napolitano, to make sure that Italian researchers do not abandon Italy, there is only one answer to this; you do not need to put universities in competition because doing so, you will automatically put researchers in competition also. This breaches the cornerstone on which research is based: academic freedom.

The state should be the guarantor of free circulation of ideas, independently from the financial situations in which a university finds itself. The state should be the guarantor that ideas are brought forward and developed without the need to compete and generate capital. Wealth generation it is not an antecedent of the free circulation of ideas in a democratic country. If not, it is only because there is a hidden agenda of which you should make all Italians aware.

By all means encourage Italian researchers to return to Italy. But don’t sell them out in the process. The finance for bringing Italian researchers back to Italy can be made available without the need for universities to enter into competition. Such strategies as that you have proposed are dignified only in a banana republic.

So, Ministro Mussi, like others in the centre-left coalition, can you please let us hear something that is left-wing?

P.S. Dear Ministro Mussi, I am writing in English because you say you would like to bring Italy to the heart of Europe. I therefore expect that by now you will write and speak English fluently.

Your Sincerely
Salvatore Fiore

University professor suicide - request for info

2007-12-29T10:22:00.001-08:00

We are looking for info regarding a professor who committed suicide whilst employed at Wolverhampton University. He committed suicide after a hearing for an alleged misconduct with his research.

We would like to hear from anyone who has news about the event or any important info. It has become impossible for us to find the news on the internet.

contact@salvatorefiore.com

Eradicate teaching evaluations

2007-12-27T10:57:00.000-08:00

Following the document by Angela Jancius on "Battling the Neoliberalization of University Life" which I reported in my previous post, I would like to highlight how the performative thinking, which pervades academia in UK, is rooted in corporativism.

Indicators of teaching performance stem ideas of performativity, breaking solidarities and local systems of trust. Such indicators may come to be used predominantly for image management and protection of interests at various levels in the organization by the elite caste, rather than for genuine and tangible student benefits. As such, they must be eradicated.

Audit systems do not empower students and lecturers in taking control of the curriculum, its meaning, content and the student-academia relationship, but instead serve only as control mechanisms for the elite caste.

It is a usurpation driven by the consumer paradigms emerging in HE, the marketisation and massification of HE underpinned by the free-market ideology embraced by the UK government.

Below is a critical review of the methodologies currently employed in the universities in the UK for assessment of teaching performance.

Long post!

***

From places for the intellectual elite to preserve their culture, universities have become centres for mass education. Much debate has ensued about whether the growth of flexible organisations has served to reinforce distinctions between elite and mass HE and their respective collegial and managerial cultures in the UK.

With primary functions as centres for cultural production, for producing epistemological research and for the provision of training to meet changing occupational needs, the societal role of HE institutions is reflected in the official DfES perspective, as a resource for competitive knowledge societies exemplifying an overarching commoditised, ‘enterprise system’ of education in which changes in economy drive developments in education. Indeed, following the alignment of Universities in the UK with the private sector the overriding demand is to improve efficiency while maintaining quality wherein HE must bring return on investment to society.

This leads to a chase for the best means of creating and measuring desired outcomes and a conceptualisation of roles whereby students become consumers and lecturers a resource for the institution.

Changes in the discourse on quality have also forced universities to become increasingly competitive and performance driven and respond to employer requirements. Post-’92 universities in particular must rely on HEFCE allocation of funds, enjoy less autonomy than older universities and strive constantly to demonstrate return on investment to stakeholders.

A changing government agenda has thus meant a redefinition of HE management and quality of education, its control, measurement and value, with the 2004 Higher Education Act citing further themes for improvement.

Quality Assurance and Improvement
A macro-level analysis reveals emphasis on accountability and efficiency within the agendas shaping strategies for HE management, with the emergence of a new language of audit aimed at instilling private sector values through the technology of accountancy.

Since the 1980s, the focus of educational effectiveness and QA has moved towards outcomes like excellence in learning and teaching, employability, widening participation and equal opportunity, while government initiatives have devolved control of the sector to agencies including the QAA, to which universities are accountable via processes of audit and inspection.

Attention is drawn towards to the interplay of external policy and institutional aims in setting agendas for educational quality and improvement. In particular, quality assurance and enhancement should be built upon specification of educational purposes, aims, objectives and standards and depend on appreciation of the underlying context and meaning of quality underpinning external methodology as well as of how people learn, interact, sustain, develop or destroy a culture.

Researchers have accordingly analysed various conceptions of quality which might inform QA policy with value-for-money and fitness-for-purpose most associated with the QAA’s key processes. While the former is seen in measures of accountability achieved through QAA assessment and audit processes, fitness-for-purpose is instead associated with processes such as the validation of courses and with the notion of ‘prospective QA’; in other words, improvement.

This more formative approach is concerned with reviewing how well the entire institution works in achieving its missions, as opposed to meaninglessly quantifying aspects of the system.

However, doubts are raised about prevailing processes for measuring performance against each institution’s stated objectives, in examining how mission statements have become marketing tools rather than statements of strategic purpose which can be realistically obtained.

Indeed, QAA audit and assessment are discussed elsewhere as the exercising of power from above revealing their values to be in contrast to those supporting educational development and their policing methods to be of threat to quality, or able only to institutionalise compliance and accountability.

Educational improvement is thus linked to commensurable increase exemplified by permanent struggle, elusive satisfactory goals and ambiguous measurement procedures. With this come themes of imperialism and domination towards HE, with quality effectively colonised by consumerism and short-term effectiveness. This raises lingering questions regarding what is actually to be improved, in what ways and for whose benefit and shifts focus towards instilling a quality regime and culture based on improvement, self‑regulation and meaningfulness for its participants.

Strategic Management and quality assurance
Strategic Management is an integrating mechanism in modern Universities. Activities of an organisation must be considered in light of the context in which it operates, plus all the mechanisms available in order to achieve aims and steer towards opportunities for improvement. In the case of a university, the main strategic aim of educational improvement should be analysed within the context created by the QAA policies and the increasingly competitive environment, leading university executives to adopt strategic management as in the private sector. Strategies and policies aimed at the enhancement of the quality of the provision of an academic institution should thus be read in concomitance to the overall organisation development aims and strategies.

Institutional change is thus linked to wider changes in society at a national and international level to the point that it becomes difficult to discern which shapes which. Indeed, suggestions that managers shape quality policy in universities are questionable under the spectre of QAA operations.

The academy is increasingly paralleled to an enterprise system, responsible for transforming a variety of inputs (e.g. students’ time, teachers’ time, consumables, equipment and buildings) into knowledge products, usually in the form of qualified people and intellectual property.

Good quality educational provision should as such transform students into well qualified individuals, although this correlation is not straightforward and the mechanisms of such transformations are often obscure. They are, however, ‘tuned’ by busy university executives who see the educational provisions of their institutions at the service of preset agendas, like employability.

This transformational model of HE (input-processes-output) in the UK amplifies the importance of measures of effectiveness and efficiency in the new neo-liberal enterprise systems of HE; accommodating the idea that processes targeted to the enhancement of educational provision can be subject to the law of reason and as such, efficiency and effectiveness can be measured by grade descriptors or indicators at different points in the transformation process. Enhancement of the processes is carried out after an evaluation phase and is characterised by various rationalisations of the system. This all assumes that input, processes and outcomes in educational organisations are well-defined and tightly coupled with one another, requiring a rational-technicist approach to the structuring of decision-making.

Power, control and performativity
Influenced by the performative thinking evident within external quality policies, the development of indicators of teaching performance and the language in which they are couched becomes institutionalised. Consequently, such indicators may come to be used predominantly for image management and protection of interests at various levels in the organization by the elite caste, rather than for genuine and tangible student benefits.

This finds resonance with criticisms of audit systems in HE as ‘political technologies’, which redefine social relationships in terms of power sharing and control between scrutinizers and observed. Processes of auditing, that is evaluating whether or not targets are met, evoke ideas of scrutiny, examination and inspection as a public event, which may not be concerned only with the quality of performance.

Instead, such processes may well be concerned only with the systems that are in place to govern quality, by displacing local structures of trust. Consequently, any form of local organization, where individuals can autonomously and professionally engage in a discourse on quality, is unthinkable.

Student Evaluation
Student evaluation of teaching is a method used throughout HE institutions to assess teaching quality, which should identify areas for improvement to the educational provision after evaluation. By identifying areas of curriculum, teaching or assessment which may need improving it is possible to have an impact on the overall perceived or actual quality of the educational provision. Such evaluations tend to focus upon systematically measuring satisfaction with teaching methods, materials and resources, often using questionnaires. Accordingly, their adoption has been most heavily informed by quality audits and teaching quality assessment exercises required by external agencies. The data gathered is often used as an indicator of educational quality, primarily through evaluating the performance of teaching staff.

At various universities, students participate in course evaluation by completing questionnaires at the end of a module or course. The feedback gathered is then scrutinised by School managers with summaries later provided to teaching staff and students. The evaluation of student satisfaction is also carried out at institutional level with a student end of year survey, which gathers evaluations on teaching and resources/facilities quality perceptions. In this way, macro policies can be translated into micro practices with performance criteria centrally-determined.

Such performance indicators provide grounds to managerial imperatives for the facilitation of a culture of commitment to them. Such a strategy of introducing arbitrary performance indicators internally, in contraposition to the externally determined is, a strategy of domination in the assessment of teaching quality, justified in terms of the open-endedness of continuous improvement.

Moreover, it should be noted that, although post-course evaluation questionnaires have attracted the nickname ‘happiness sheets’ because they tend to encourage students to provide the information students believe staff want to see, aware that their feedback can have no impact on improving their own studies, many universities continue to employ such methods within their strategies for educational improvement. To make matters worse, universities do not appear to have in place mechanisms to counteract the tendency of such evaluations to measure charisma and the inseparability of student feedback from individual learning conceptions or to put into context comments which may be either superficially optimistic or unfairly critical towards individual teachers.

There are indications that the data obtained from the questionnaires may be used to exercise subjugation and punitive oppression towards staff who do not fit the standard profile and expectations of the University’s management; who may be ‘maverick but effective performers’.

Certainly, inappropriate use of such evaluations to evaluate performance of teaching staff and identify poor teaching for remediation has led to suggestions that student evaluations, which, as a quality measure, are predominantly driven by bureaucracy and ideas about what quality represents rather than by educational concerns have lost their power to instigate educational improvement at all. Their value in bringing about worthwhile change to the curriculum, rather than merely identifying under-performers, is in this light questionable.

Further, student views should only be used as part of a dialogue aimed at reviewing the curriculum and under no circumstances should they be used to judge the personal performance of individual members of staff, it is difficult to see this in practice.

Other criticisms regarding the ability of lecturer behaviour or course characteristics to provide valid indicators about student learning in light of the nature of teaching as multidimensional and of learning as problematic, uncertain and relative, contribute to doubts that such procedures can capture the subjective aspects of quality and learning required to develop teaching practice.

Such summative approaches are of little value for teaching compared to alternative formative methods that could be adopted, aimed at informing individual teaching practice.

Battling the Neoliberalization of University Life: A List of Strategies

2007-12-18T15:05:00.000-08:00

I have received the following from a distribution list. It is a document by Angela Jancius [jancius@ohio.edu] .

It is a set of strategies to battle the Neoliberalization of University life. The document has been written in the USA so please bear in mind that it needs to be localised to your own context. I will in the next few days attempt to localise the strategy to the UK.

On Unions and Organizing:

* The No. 1 way is faculty unionization. Unionize tenure-track faculty, adjunct faculty and graduate students who teach. Your efforts will not be effective if adjunct and graduate teaching staff are not organized.

* Resist the destruction of solidarities (e.g. see David Harvey, The History of Neoliberalism).

* Support unity. As an adjunct instructor and a graduate student, I can tell you that management is WELL AWARE of the contempt that most full-time faculty has toward us part-timers. During contract negotiations, I've also heard GA's and adjuncts undercut the contracts of the full-timers.

Management disciplines full-timers with the knowledge that they can be replaced instantly by the army of the underemployed.

* Invite part-time and adjunct faculty, as well as support staff and research staff, to departmental meetings. Make the minutes available to the entire community.

* Join professional organizations that will lobby in opposition to the lobbyists for privatization: NEA higher education organizations, AAUP, AFT. Pay your dues or be prepared to be sold out.

* Participate in faculty governance and advocate strongly for resolutions and policies that promote an academic community built on shared values and scholarship instead of a corporatized institution built on entrepreneurship and external overhead.

* Form parallel autonomous institutions that meet people's needs in a collective, non-hierarchical fashion. At my old school, SUNY-Binghamton, the campus was served by an excellent bus system that was owned and run by a collective of the drivers, funded by student fees.

On Faculty Rank:

* Reject the implementation of "benchmarks" or any other form of "standards" for merit raises or promotions that are predicated on quantified output. Rather, draw upon such ideas as those of Ernest Boyer

(Scholarship Reconsidered) [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/02/wcu]

* Reject merit raises all together and rather spread the total raises due the entire faculty of a department evenly to all faculty.

* When 65% of the professoriate is part-time, why have tenured positions at all?

* Refuse to sell ourselves as "stars" to highest bidding institutions. This reproduces the neoliberal self-made "man," reinforcing gender and class hierarchies within the academy.

* Don't refer to enthusiastic younger members of faculty as "junior" scholars. It annoys them intensely and makes them feel small.

* Allow complete transparency, re: salaries paid to all faculty in all departments.

* Identify and monitor the behavior all 'frumps' (formerly radical upwardly mobile professors).

* Use the growing 'sustainability consensus' discourse to push for a democratization of academia - as sustainability centrally implies participation.

On Bureaucracy and Governance:

* Expose and oppose corporate control of academia.

* Resist the process of turning universities into institutions of management rather than places of "higher learning" by refusing to accept administrative positions that are newly created and not really necessary for "learning."

* The university can be run by the faculty, but the faculty must organize in constant vigilance. Professors could collectively attend administration meetings and repeat the demand, week after week, to stop the metastasized growth of bureaucratic bosses. Use the saved funds to create more professor positions, course offerings, and library books, and to establish student scholarships grants. The heart of the university is here, not in creating ever more layers of office managers to govern this and that for a bottom line value that is set by the new MBA bosses.

* Rip up parking lots. Implode student housing. Stop all construction projects not related to safety. Make students get gym memberships elsewhere.

* Demand accountability for the university practices in hiring faculty, labor, etc. in the construction of new campuses abroad (i.e. NYU's global expansion to Abu Dhabi).

* Resist the temptation to outsource to private companies, especially big non-local multinationals, tasks which the university could do by itself.

On Curriculum:

* Resist the neoliberal transformation of the curriculum (there is an excellent article--chapter 6--by Aihwa Ong in Neoliberalism as

Exception:
Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.)

* Restore a system whereby intellectual inquiry is valued for its own sake, and not just seen as a means toward increasing capitalist productivity. If the government's current proposal to fund all research on the basis of "relevance" were carried out, it would be the end of virtually all Humanities research as we know it.

* Resist the homogenization of university studies that is taking place all over Europe. Anthropology, in order to survive, is being asked to demonstrate demand from the job market. And its courses are oriented towards market demands.

* Avoid strict degree completion deadlines. Returning students bring valuable professional experience, but they also need the time to balance professional, work and personal responsibilities.

* Make research findings and publications freely and publicly accessible on the web.

On Teaching:

* Teach students about neoliberalization (its history, its impacts on individuals, etc.). They are the ones who can stop it.

* As teachers, we have a unique opportunity to relate the material we teach to the everyday lives of our students. Hold seminars on campus on the impact of neoliberalism on campus life and learning. Use critical pedagogy - encourage critical thinking.

* Create a course that studies the University as an anthropological project.

* Link with activists, community groups, etc., beyond the academy. Carry out critical (including participatory) research. Develop more experience based learning courses, including internships and community service learning programs.

* Make the world your classroom. Teach in parks, bars, restaurants, homes, online.

* Offer courses on weekends, evenings, and on-line, so that working students and students with child and eldercare responsibilities can take courses/make progress on degrees.

* Encourage team-teaching.

* Conduct and assess instructor evaluations in a manner that reflects that students are scholars, not consumers.

* Avoid grade inflation. In a context of grade inflation, instructors that seek to honestly assess performance find themselves at a disadvantage, especially if they are adjunct staff.

* Make classes last as long as they need to be. Stop with the micronization and fetishization of time. Some days I have a lot to say, some days not so much. Some days students need to practice and drill, and other times one profound sentence might do it.

* Quit giving standardized tests and grades. Pass/Fail. Get rid of students who don't want to be there. Tell them to come back when they know what they are there for. If we stop treating students like cash cows, maybe they will actually appreciate learning.

* Assign primary texts instead of textbooks.

* Make your students do the work - have them explain concepts to each other. Have them create materials they think are useful. Grade them for effort rather than results - they are there to learn.

* Spend less time preparing, and more time getting to know your students and their individual needs.

On Student Tuition, Fees and Support:

* Don't use standardized testing as a measure to determine student admissions or funding.

* Use course packets, blackboard pdfs and next-to-last edition textbooks in introductory courses to decrease student book costs.

* Fund all students who are admitted into your program equally. Since Thatcher (and Reagan), efforts to turn higher education into a vocational finishing school for industry have been much more systematic and blatant. Under this model, if you're funded you get money to live off, to pay fees, and to attend conferences etc. If you're not funded, you get nothing and you have to pay fees. So one person has masses of help, while another is hindered and must struggle. This is one of the central ideological maxims of capitalism.

* Do not permit university programs to let graduate student instructors teach without compensation, merely for the experience of it or for credit.

* Do not burden Ph.D. candidates and recent Ph.D.s with the heaviest teaching loads. The abusive practice of using younger scholars as workhorses keeps a new generation from reaching its potential, in scholarship and as practioners.

* Pay benefits and tuition fees for graduate students, if possible.

General Advice:

* Be a happy person. Stop with the bitterness.

Reclaim the public space

2007-12-05T02:43:00.000-08:00

The road is a place of discussion like the entrances to buildings, pub, bars and the rest that concerns the public. It is in the public space that a public debate can have space. It is a place where the public can confront our elite caste of politicians and union leaders, Vice Chancellors and comfortable servant-journalists. All places where the elite caste talk, control and package the news, are monopolized and not accessible by university workers.

They are safe behind barricades of secretaries and direct phone numbers accessible only by the elite caste.

Journalists block other independent freelance sources from accessing conferences where pies are baked for the deep throats that are never satisfied. This is what happened to me when I tried last week to take some pictures and ask some questions to participants at the inaugural THES conference for strategic thought in higher education management in the prestigious insular world of Mayfair in London.

The elite caste of union leaders are always busy, but nonetheless punctually answer questions posed to them by the elite journalists, phoning or emailing about the latest happenings. It is not a loss of style.

It is a total degrade.

Now we also have the "capital puppets" consultants joining the caste. Illiterate and ignorant of the real problems of the base, they consult the university managements on the latest wisdom.

The amount of money spent by Vice and Pro-Vice Chancellors on consultancy is rocketing whilst spending on essential services for students and workers in the universities is falling and has been dramatically cut since the advent of Thatcher-Blair reforms of universities.

It is a privatization of space and time. The base is not made aware of the happenings and those who need to represent their voices, instead congratulate themselves on newspapers whose journalists are not to speak any language other than the one imposed by the government. They are able to speak through their policies; not able to make real information independent from their salaries and friendships within the caste.

It is a fall-out of representation and a usurpation of the spaces for debate from university workers.

By reclaiming the space for debate where no agenda is fixed, items of discussion can always be put under discussion. It is in the public space that important items should be discussed.

Reclaim the public space!

Resist, Rebel and Revolt against the elite caste!

Academic Freedom

2007-12-02T14:31:00.000-08:00

The debate on freedom of speech once again sparks debate in and on education. Once more the word freedom is tossed wantonly around as controversial figures take to the podium at Oxford or wherever to voice their perspectives. It is the controversial individuals that attract the most attention and discussion; those whose opinions or reasonings will invariably incite the most opposition or have potential to cause the most harm to more people.

We talk much less about the speeches of those in the mainstream; those whose politely articulated violence nonetheless threatens to do the most harm to the academic freedom we value.

It looks as though more and more cases of free speech and academic freedom are destined to speak through the headlines, rather than making real progress on freedom of speech. But in this, something comes to light: Freedom of speech does not come free afterall. It is a continuous struggle for some, while for others it's a business.

Many sit confortably in their offices, writing books and papers or answering the questions of this or that journalist on what constitutes freedom of speech and making it a subject of research.

Freedom of speech and moreover Academic Freedom, are however incompatible with pre-fixed agendas, monarchies, dictatorships and capitalism. Such freedoms sit uncomfortably with an educational system that looks to the market of education as the next opportunity to exploit students. Not only here in England anymore, but also overseas.

But what sort of freedom of speech, what sort of freedom in exercising their academic judgments, can university workers such as lecturers and professors expect to have in a new globalised market for education?

UCU-uncensored has been asking this very question to some of the players in the market of education as they gathered to disseminate and further their agenda, quietly, insularly, in the heart of prestigious Mayfair. Making best use of the public space outside the conference "Surviving in an increasingly competitive Higher Eduation Marketplace" organised by the Times Higher Educational Supplement in London last week, we asked some questions to those who purport to know.

They emerged, seemingly inspired, as though having shared some protected wisdoms, they were now the holders of some new spiritual truth; able to exercise pressure over academia, worthy of their elite titles.

Take a look at the video to see what they had to say when we asked about academic freedom.

SOSR abolition petition interview with Howard Fredrics

2007-11-30T15:32:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I reported on the SOSR abolition petition published on the Downing Street website by Howard Fredrics.

We have hundreds, thousands of petitions on this or that subject. Some are put forward as political speculation or just for the sake of being uncomfortable for this or that party.

This is a very interesting petition because it is relevant for all parties all unions and all workers. A recent EAT decision in the case of Perkin v St. Georges NHS Trust, strengthens the right of employers to dismiss workers on the grounds of "Some Other Substantial Reason" (SOSR).

The petition aims to remove the vague and easily abused “SOSR” basis for dismissal while retaining the right to dismiss an employee on the grounds of gross misconduct.

I have interviewed Howard about the petition. In the interview he tells of interesting ways to take the petition forward with the arts.

Please provide your support signing the petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/sosrreform

UCU credit cards

2007-11-28T18:05:00.001-08:00

BNP talk @ Oxford Union sparks protests

2007-11-27T23:26:00.000-08:00

Was this really a general boot for a new wave of protest to reclaim freedom in the UK universities?

Shameless union

2007-11-27T05:49:00.000-08:00

The office looked authentic enough.

The shabby, dirty, poorly- lit room the Wolverhampton NATFHE branch had chosen as it’s headquarters looked like a place of hard struggle. Nothing wrong with that.

We had been told to meet union rep. Penny Welch on the street outside, immediately opposite the University’s central complex. When she arrived, she nervously unlocked the decrepit door, uttering something about being careful not to let the tramps in. I had walked past the building just about every day for more than a year and hardly noticed the tatty NATFHE poster in the filthy window.

It was alongside the prominent posters of other unions with which NATFHE apparently shared the ramshackle ‘offices’ (I use the term very loosely). Penny led us down a dark and dingy corridor to a room wherein were a table and some chairs. There was so little space that you could barely get to the other side of the room without clambering over the chairs or pressing against the wall and breathing in. No wonder the place was deserted; it was so stuffy my head began to thump after a few minutes inside.

Down to the matters at hand. We were there, supposedly, to plan a defence. A defence against the lunatic claims of a professor-without-doctorate-head-of-department-puppet and his attempts to purge one more worker from what could become a too-uncomfortable base. We sat down to what would turn out to be a surreal conversation. This conversation would reveal the rot penetrating throughout the Wolverhampton branch of NATFHE, and later UCU. Penny knew a little about the case we were there to discuss. She was keen to tell us that she had been on the phone to the regional office.

Ah! I thought, time to talk strategy. But Penny was a little more discursive and paternal, explaining that the regional rep had advised her that it had been a mistake to put a grievance to the professor -without-doctorate-head-of-department-puppet.

Ah! I thought, was she going to suggest more direct action? But Penny was more subtle and smooth, suggesting that such things should best be solved in other ways. In less confrontational ways. In ways that don’t rock the boat. She hinted of obscure networks and under-the-table compromises. This was the way things were done here. And she was not talking of democratic representation. She was trying to indoctrinate us to the power above.

We should learn of the quiet and non-disruptive ways of working things out (aka keeping things in) with a nod and a wink to the management.

Ah, I thought, maybe the union is feared so much by management. But Penny was more direct. ‘Grievances don’t succeed in this university’ she said, or words to that effect. Don’t put grievances. But there is evidence, she was told. Recordings – the truth on tape. And Penny seemed to change colour. First to a sort of greenish-white and then, perhaps in recognition of the faces awaiting some sign of strength and integrity from this union representative, a bright crimson.

She seemed overtaken by panic and quickly warned not to bring forward such incontrovertible evidence. What it might show!

Ah! I thought, maybe she has another tactic (though I was now getting impatient to know what the union would do to help). But penny was more ineffective. The evidence could not be heard. The management must not be questioned. At the conclusion of the meeting, I had no better idea how the union intended to help fight this case. What I did know was that the workings of this union were more obscure than I could have imagined. Penny Welch taught that this was union in which Associate Deans were welcomed alongside demonstrators and lecturers, in which Labour membership was favourable and in which activism and waving the union flag were now mere shadows. Mere dreams of nostalgia.

Here was a rep close to breakdown with no sense of action. Here was a rep unable to recognise the responsibility of the union. Able only to enact a role in a pointless drama.

Ah! I thought, this is a club not a union. And with that we left the offices of what I now understood to be a masonic organisation more than a union. As Penny Welch bolted the door behind us all and scurried off back to the panopticon, I reflected on new feelings about the union.

Ah, I thought, what a disgrace.

Super Woman

2007-11-26T04:27:00.000-08:00

It is something quite normal for candidates to the trade union general secretariat to promise you the earth, in order to get the job and the pot of money that comes with it.

Especially nowadays. They will make anything and everything good happen for you. They promise to be some sort of heroes with extraordinary powers. Energetic and enlightened, strong enough to defend you in the moments you believe things could never be worse.

When you really need the strong and sincere help of a friendly figure who can be down-to-earth but at the same time extraordinarily powerful. You can feel safe in the hands of such individuals, you can give yourself up in their bigs arms: they will always be there. And there is a nice warm feeling of comfort and passion in all this. We are not given the possibility to understand where the passion comes from but that does not matter.

The feelings of just being taken for another ride are not there anymore. Do you remember when you used to think: " Ah well, this is another lie from a politician who wants a seat"? They were too disingenuous to tell you the little story. The discourse now is totally different. The promises now are so big that even your imagination fails to realise such things!

Look at this new breed, this new genereation of elite caste of super-unionman/woman.

Don't go around the TV and don't waste your time in bookshops to look for another fiction to entertain you. The things that you really wanted to astonish you are there at the click of a button, on the Internet.

But if you are not really astonished yet, I'll tell you this. Read the following paragraph, it was written before the election to the highest position of a union. It was written on the blog for the election of its general secretary on her blog:

"In this union I have continued this work, campaigning to save jobs, lobbying ministers on academic freedom and workload, producing new guidance for fixed term staff and giving members who faced losing their jobs the opportunity to meet ministers face to face. "

To speak face to face with a minister before the sack?

If you want to meet your ministers for not getting sacked please email Sally Hunt, General Secretary of UCU shunt@ucu.org.uk

Why Diana?

2007-11-24T16:19:00.000-08:00

News for you

2007-11-22T05:59:00.000-08:00

Information is the basis of democracy. The correct information, independent and disinterested from any political influence and affair. This is surely one of the trademarks that distinguish the democratic information in democracies with parliamentary representations.

Unfortunately this cannot be seen in practice, though not due to a lack of laws to guarantee free information, free speech and circulation of ideas in democracies. Quite the contrary; such laws do exists and are in place. The problem is instead in the way information is accessed and broadcast by the news-makers.

News is increasingly becoming more and more packaged and proposed to the readership in timeframes. The politician does not need to be worried anymore about this and that error. There is no need anymore to cover up the lies and broken promises espoused during the election campaign. There are no problems for the union leaders who cannot take the lead for an action campaign against government policies. There are no worries that the press is waiting; ready and prepared to mask, cover and reinterpret on the basis that perception is all that matters.

The perception desired by this collective of power is that everything is done in the public interest and if something goes wrong - when the stink cannot be trapped in a jar - anything is moved and reinterpreted in order to learn the traditional lesson.

We, ignorant, stupid, are unable to see that information is so meticulously and strategically packaged and marketed to us that the information we know is really there, is in truth missing from the news broadcast and as such does not actually exist. But more perversely, it is as though it never existed and as such, was just invention of the mind. The thing becomes worrying when one, two, three.....hundreds of people discover that what they thought to be true, is, in actual fact, not a mere invention of mind, but the real truth.

It is exactly this process that makes the truth: the sharing of thoughts about a particular thing. But you need to be more than one. It is like I would declare myself a communist whilst I know that nobody else in the world knows the meaning of such a word. I could not even label myself a communist if I knew that I would be the only person in the world being a communist. I could use only my own name and surname.

Journalists no longer share such thoughts with readers. The truth is already written in the headline. The rest is only marginal and if your thoughts happen to be engaged, statements of eminent and illustrious union leaders are already lurking behind the next full stop. The elite caste of union leaders speaks through the events and the happenings. They are always there to tell you what to do, what to think, how to make the next step, what should be good for the whole world and the universe. Their voices echo from article to article.

The reading of the educational news has become somewhat of an experience in which everything is already framed within a particular timeline and within a particular line of discussion that is invariably comfortable for the elite caste of union leaders. If journalism is able to bring together union leaders and Vice Chancellors, it is more of a packaging skill than the real and proper skill of making information. If such journalism is unable to raise uncomfortable questions to the elite caste of union leaders than it is a journalism that is the servant of a system in which the elite caste speaks through the headlines. It is journalism at the service of the government and its representation in the educational institutions on one side. On the other side, are servants of union leaderships, who are always ready to release hundreds of statements about events without knowing the details of a case or its circumstances. It is a journalism of truth-making between the parts. It is in the sharing of ideas and possibilities between the parts that the educational press certifies the truth. Convenient truth for both parts.

When the real truth highlights such makings, that same truth is punctually discarded as nonsense. It is ignored as something irrelevant. The past cannot be revisited; the timeline is unidirectional. The lack of uncomfortable questions with regard to the collusion of unions with university and school management can evidence this. Such questions are never posed to the unions by the educational press. Such things are never investigated.

The worrying aspect of all this is that there exist web-sites where evidence of such collusion is provided. Online forums are replete with messages from dissatisfied union members. Isn’t academic freedom also about being able to criticize your own union and to take steps to defend your rights and the rights of other people who are in the same condition and share the same cause.

If, in the last attempt to still trust the union leadership, members cannot take steps and implement measures to publish such evidence, the truth is nonetheless already there written online. The problem is that such truth does not speak through the headlines. Instead, the educational press is asked to perform acrobatic displays to hide and to reinterpret, while the readership is complicit in the show; accepting every word with predictably orchestrated responses.

On a long term, the timeline of incompetence and the servitude become evident. The truth must be consistent and coherent over a certain span of time. Unfortunately, the news on the educational press has become real-time; the individuals who are constantly speaking through their headlines are virtualised and the events are reported looking always forwards. They are a convenient underbelly for government, UCU and Vice Chancellors. The rest is history.

It is for precisely this reason that we should learn not to trust UCU leadership and certain journalism from the educational press, anymore. We should denounce the collusion and highlight the incompetence of a union leadership caught within its own hypocritical actions and not able to speak freely because it is too entangled within the webs of its own skeleton.

The game of the silence

2007-11-19T13:03:00.000-08:00

The game of silence is the final supporting crutch of this pretend democracy. Sorry, constitutional monarchy. Anyway the citizens are suffering from hearing problems in relation to the truth. When they hear it they no longer notice it. In the "NeverEnding Story", reality was devoured by nothing, bit by bit. In England nothing has been superimposed on reality.

Facts disappear, lies remain. They are published without interruption to make them plausible. Information is no longer a tool of politicians. It is itself politics. The only one that exists, behind it there’s nothing. Sally Hunt, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Roger Kline are offspring of nothing. They do not exist. They are headlines on news broadcasts, on printed paper.

The few, very few journalists who write the truth are marginalized or sued. In England the truth hurts, but it hurts only those who tell it.

Silence is golden. It covers up kick backs, European funding used for university projects for creation of cronyism, ghost professorships and organisation of symposia to manufacture research output 'previously ordered'. It’s a new Iron Curtain between the citizens and the politicians. The media are no longer controlled, directed by the parties and by the economic powers. They are part of them. They are their press office.

In England anything can be under discussion, from the Iraq War, to the organization of the University and College Union, to the corruption of university management. Certainly sterile discussions, without consequences for power. Only one thing cannot even be discussed: information. No one talks about the ownership of the THES, the collusion of UCU with university management, the suicides of university professors or the lack of legal cases supported by UCU.

It’s not possible to open up the sewer of information. The politicians and our pretend capitalists know that well. If someone opens up the manhole cover of the sewer, then they are finished.

BTW: this is a very strict adaptation (nearly a carbon copy) of an article that appeared on the blog of Beppe Grillo in Italy discussing Italian corruption and information.You can read below the original article.

http://www.beppegrillo.it/eng/2007/11/the_game_of_silence.html

Prof. Winstanley suicide - request for info

2007-11-15T12:52:00.000-08:00

Hi, I am carrying out independent and self-funded research into the death of Prof. Diana Winstanley. She committed suicide whilst employed at Kingston University in 2006.

I would like to hear from anyone who has the smallest piece of info which can shed some light on this case.Total confidentiality assured.

contact@salvatorefiore.com

SOSR abolition petition

2007-11-13T14:58:00.001-08:00

The EAT decision in Perkin v St. Georges NHS Trust, strengthens the right of employers to dismiss workers on the grounds of "Some Other Substantial Reason" (SOSR). This decision encourages employers to violate the basic British principles of fairness embodied in British employment and human rights law by discriminating freely, and by intimidating potential "whistleblowers" into silence, whilst citing the competent employee's "difficult" personality. Employers have been able to claim that a "breakdown in working relationships, “caused by" the employee renders a dismissal substantially fair, even where the dismissal has been ruled by a court to have been procedurally unfair (e.g. where the employer is a public body and has violated the employee’s rights under Human Rights Act of 1998). We therefore call for legislation that would remove the vague and easily abused “SOSR” basis for dismissal while retaining the right to dismiss an employee on the grounds of gross misconduct.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/sosrreform/

Unconvincingly serious

2007-11-10T05:53:00.000-08:00

UCU leadership has become more critical of government initiatives. The elite caste of union leaders has suddenly become critical of the man who has given them the real reason for their own existence: a belief that all they do is in the interests of the British people because what really matters to them is for the good of the British people.

Brown has been recently quite convincingly telling us that Britain is at it's top but that this is not enough. New targets for quality education, housing and skilled labour force should be met. The unions, at least UCU, have nodded and welcomed such initiatives with limited reservations and few words of dissent which are anyway punctually forgotten or left to float free in the air or buried.

If Britain is at its top for education, the opposite should also hold true: cases of the worst examples of education in Britain should be found at the top end of the scale. That is, where unions are not present because they are not engaged with the government in the discourse for class domination and for the exercising of economic power. Such examples are to be searched for within recent scandalistic news, which has moved few hearts and only of those who are then classed as too sensitive to the problems of the oppressed.

Weekly education papers have recently been filled with cases of repression and expulsion of academics from the RAE system, because apparently their research does not fit the system. The so much revered catalogue of the cream-of-the-crop of British intellectualism and pragmatism, as if the RAE is now treated like an infrasructue of human knowledge with well determined borders and definitions. Such infrastructure, not transparent to everybody, should tell us more about how people and communities meet it.

Shouldn't we also able to identify the barriers for some? And shouldn't we be able to identify the systems which operate silently and invisibly behind the classification system of the RAE? This would definitely be a golden opportunity for UCU to highlight how some jobs are made and others are lost. And it is particularly for this last point that UCU should be worried, at least just for the sake of keeping face with its members.

Many laughs can be heard on the road in the uk. The British spirit is always alive. Grey skies on blue horizons. The economy is still at full speed according to the government. As such, the laughs are, yes, symbols of immortality and opulence. All is good and the servants are on the streets laughing loud for such a sense of immortality. It will take away the shadows of suicides by university professors, bullying in the departments, deans cheating with research papers and now even the purge of researchers from league tables of research.

Loud laughs can be heards in university corridors. They are the symbol of the immortality and opulence of the RAE system. If only UCU could reveal to the world its infrastructure of oppression and classification of university workers, its leadership could be relegated to the role of leading European unionism. As such a good laugh is enough to keep such ideas at bay because immortality is not European.

The impact of the RAE system will, however,be felt soon as the caste of VCs, PRO VCs and Deans will be challenged along with the elite caste of union leaders in addressing the issues. Or perhaps, in the last extreme attempt to save British education's reputation, UCU will rush to repair the ripping of relations amongst the intellectual elite, because these are critical times.
Sally Hunt, on lecturers' states of mind said "I think that what we are facing now is a period of time which is critical, not just to students and their immediate future, not just to academic and related staff or the support staff that work in the university system, but how this country views education as part of itself, as part of its soul. As such we have to take this very, very seriously". In this respect, the laugh is definitely a symbol of immortality of the Educational 'soul' of Britain.

Indeed, Brown has taken education very seriously, although recent announcements have upset the UCU leadership. It has not been the first time that the British government has called to monarchic powers and appealed to the pomp of monarchic events, in order to release unconfortable bills and policies.

The throne of a monarch and the magnificent displays, can become symbols to enforce authoritative connotations to government words and propositions. If a monarch refers to the current government in power as "his/her government", the unions of that country will be better seen as not "her/his unions" but as the unions of the people who are ostracised, controlled, drowned in debts and unable to cope with a government sucking blood like leeches from vulnerable people. For this, Hunt has very recently, well interpreted the role of the radical union leader, caring for everybody except for those who are in real need now.

In this case, a loud laugh is not a symbol of immortality, but one of challenge; the challenging of customs and traditions: ridendo castigat mores. The manifestations of all the defects of the current elite caste is sealed with a loud laugh. And it is precisely in this that the laugh can be effective in challenging the elite caste of government ministers, members of parliament and union servants.

However, even if only false consciousness will cause a person to search in the colours of a flag and in the notes of an anthem, for his or her freedom, many still look to a throne to search for certainty that tomorrow the sun will still rise. Don't laugh about it, you've got be serious.

Ghosts in the machine

2007-11-08T12:57:00.000-08:00

"If you know someone being bullied, then speak out. It's not a spectator sport" ended a letter to the THES today. But then came the irony, 'Name and address supplied'.

Those purged from 'UK Universities PLC' now have 'sanctuaries' to which they can retreat. Seemingly requesting grace and liberation from such a plague, self-confessed 'targets' of workplace bullying can seek solace and reassurance that they are not alone in forums devoted to bullying and even specifically to bullying in academia.

At first approach, such forums seem an oasis. Finally a place where others are waiting to listen and able to believe the many similar stories of bullying recounted by fellow members.

These forums are primarily self-managed, often the offspring of anti-bullying blogs or websites and seem to present no political agenda.

They are soft and reassuring. But for the university worker trying to reconcile the harsh reality of their working life with the fantasy of cyberspace, the extent of the help that such forums can really provide is illusory.

The first problem is obvious within the perversion of character assimilation that inevitably pervades such virtual communities, where anonymity is the norm. The motivation for victims of bullying to avoid revealing their identity is apparently underpinned primarily by fear of reprisal or the responsibilities accompanying legal proceeedings. But others may have different motivations.

In accepting such anonymity, members of such forums are required to trust that those hiding behind invented pseudonyms and personas are not the very managers they are there to confide about. Or, perhaps worse, that those to whom they entrust their stories of the most painful and undignified of realities, are only there to study them and gather data for their latest research into bullying, management or online social networks. Even the bullies may frequent the forums, risking to turn them into perverted tools of voyeurism.

You can never know. People play characters, often symbolic, in a sort of psychotic immersion.

Usually the plot of the story is distressingly the same. A new actor enters the scene claiming to have been bullied, seeking suggestions. They will invariably receive them; from emotional support to psychological counseling and even legal advice. But this comes from unknown characters who, after experiencing bullying for themselves, have self-trained at home whilst on suspension or in the wake of their dismissal and have subsequently become self-qualified consultants in law and finance and psychological counselors all in one package.

Countless references to other cases, to books, quotations, papers and blogs, create a cushion of information. Certainly many speak of how helpful this can be in coping with the first shock of being bullied, often out of one's hard-earned academic career, often never to return.

The reality though, is that the anonymous characters, regardless of the intentions (good or otherwise) of their creators, are unable to provide support which finds correspondence in real lives. In a compulsion to play the characters of the bullied and the counsel, there is no ability to recognise the mistakes made. It is nothng short of taboo to argue and doubt the intentions of those who claim to help. There is no need to demonstrate and prove fact, as we must do in the real world.

The twist lies then in the point at which the initial comfort created by anti-bullying forums, meets the real world. The legal battles. The poverty. The ill health. The strained relationships. The loss of direction and hope. Instead of empowering, the cushion of these forums too often dulls and relaxes.

At the moment when shock and anger sould be focused towards action, the temptation is instead to seek consolation and calm.

At the moment when the union should step in to battle for the worker's rights, there is a void, which forums etcetera aim to fill.

There is clearly a sinister argument that it is more convenient for bullied, purged academics and other workers, to adopt characters and escape behind their computer screens. Disparate, divided, hidden from each other, rather than making noise on the road, in front of parliament, at the gates of universities.

It is not just a question of not receiving the legal representation you expect from your union. It is the disturbing and sickening enactment of the union, colluding as silent accomplice to the bullying. No-one is out protesting on the road, everything continues as normal. Sociopathic managers breath sighs of relief as the 'uncomfortable' academic (a.k.a. bullying target) is successfully purged after a long campaign. Union reps and others settle back down to their alienating routines. A final email from the chief bully - often a dean and/or professor without doctorate - formally and authoritatively marks the end to the story and the cowardly former colleagues are only too happy to move on.

Unable to trust their union and often too deep in debt to hire legal help, many turn to the forums for help.

Sometimes, one can find new friends and those working tirelessly and admirably against bullying, but there is another character lurking online and off. That is the bullying entrepreneur; the individual willing to profit from this plague.

Sure enough, who ever said bullying can only be a loss for British business? We now have insurance services to protect businesses from the legal costs of their bullying. We have Occupational Health contractors ready to hand out convenient diagnoses to limit the liability to employers and convince workers they just weren't strong enough and need to learn to cope better. And we have 'management consultants' with multiple personalities able to guard corporations from the 'risks' and 'consequences' of bullying.

Then there are those profiting less directly from bullying; the sponsors of anti-bullying days (there are bullying days then?) who would let us all believe that they are bullying free organisations ready to battle against our pain - Ah! to be in Wonderland!

Yes, bullying Britain has become a business. And lastly in this, we have the unions. The ones who should take care of all this politically, at local level and beyond. Those whose job is to prevent, and take action when they fail to prevent.

What does a union gain from such impotency against bullying?

More importantly, what do academics (or other workers), bullied or not, self-organised, motivated, committed and above all responsible, have to gain from doing what a centralised neutralised union does not?

Surely, when the anonymous speak out online, it is but bits and soundbytes. Until workers can take pride and courage to unite and fight back their usurped rights with loud voice, they will remain the ghosts of the bullied, serving the machine of UK Universities PLC.

Rank and file - Part 2

2007-10-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

Self-organisation is at the heart of the rank and file movement. Many have observed how centralism of decisions for union actions has become ineffective in tackling issues which are localised and disconnected from the agenda set by major unionised action groups. Moreover, a capillary intervention on the territory has been at times ineffective due to the fact that union political coalitions at local level, do not find correspondence with the national agenda. This alienates such forces, which could be better employed to contain the capital offensive, albeit limited in scope.

It is easy for an inept leadership to alienate a local coalition and render such workers vulnerable to the attacks of senior management in universities. Collusion between the interests of the capital force represented by Vice-Chancellors and Pro-Vice-Chancellors, Deans and Associate Deans and the interests of the working class labour force at the base, can be hidden easily by centralised union leadership, backing the implementation of an agenda undersigned with the government in power in defence of the capital. Doing so, such leadership exercises economic power over the labour force alienating it from the basic rights guaranteed to university workers.

Collusion between the capital interests at the expense of academic freedom, work stability, mental health, natural justice, development and emancipation of the base of university workers should be eradicated at its start. Rank and file as self-organised group of action can effectively identify such collusion at local level and isolate individuals who undermine workers’ statutory rights, basic rights of freedom of speech, academic freedom and human rights, which are tenets of the university worker at the base.

Self-organised groups of action can counter-attack the violence manifest through the capital offensive at crucial moments in the lives of university workers. In such moments, the subjugation of free will of university workers – guaranteed by contract and the law – to capital interests, becomes evident. Such offensive can be contained locally because it is of a local nature, although some of its issues can have resonance at national level and similarities between workplaces.

It is at local level that the capital offensive can be contained. Localised actions can be called up urgently for all the issues which are not guaranteed at national level; mostly for protection of all the areas which are frequently infiltrated by deans/associate deans, reducing free will and agency of university workers. In some cases we can talk of methodical control of academic activity, in others of the reduction of freedom of speech. We have also assisted to activities of repression of dignified academics with further expulsion from the workplace. Many of these repressive actions should be correlated to the violent offensive in motion against free voices of academic expression.

Continued...

Unified union

2007-10-22T12:55:00.000-07:00

Surely one of the first strengths of a union is, well, union. Something smells when unity between members becomes something to be carefully controlled and orchestrated. Take the email below, for example. It was sent from a union rep to the union members in a department. I assume. In actual fact, the header shows it to have been sent from John Roche, to a distribution list called John Roche.

Of course the recipient knows they have received it, but who else? Who are the other union members in the department? How can we get together? What if I want to contact them? Answer; ask John. Go through the rep. You will never know if the Associate Deans and other Management figures are part of the same union (or receiving the email regardless). It’s a matter of blind faith, of one-directional trust.

Why go to such lengths to disguise the recipients of a message intended for all union members in a department who know each other already but may not know they are part of the same union?

Email text from UCU and former NATFHE union rep Mr John Roche, School of Computing and IT, University of Wolverhampton sent the 14/02/2007 with title "Vote, vote, vote"

Hi

A large envelope from UCU has probably arrived in your post box.

Please read it and use your votes. Note the plural, you are voting for a lot of people.

If you wish to receive some advice on who to vote for OR even who I am voting for then please ask.

The ones to vote for are the ones who (to quote another union member) will contribute most to

a

"unified union and who will move it forwards whilst avoiding unnecessary divisions. "

Note no Harvard refrence :)

I shall be voting for Sally Hunt

Regards
John

Ah! A UNIFIED union! What a revelation.

But are all these anonymous university workers being asked to make up their own minds? But seriously, who needs a Harvard reference, surely the whole universe, knows what Sally wants.

A good exercise in propaganda, sent with love on valentines day. But please, Mr Roche, a bit of dignity to let people make up their own minds. Try reminding them that next time they can strike a red mark to foul their ballot paper. Not that it will make any difference, as UCU elections are invariably counted in terms of ‘the % of those who voted’. Then, anything is possible.

Rank and file - Part 1

2007-10-18T14:31:00.000-07:00

The rank and file proposition for a more flexible and effective union action has been posed in the UK for some time now.

In some countries, rank and file unions take the form of groups which do not depend on the will of deliberations of committees who share agendas undersigned with the government currently in power, but which operate on a principle; that the members are united by the same conditions.

In other nations, rank and file operate from within the same union which is an amass of millions of people. In other instances they are the only group in existence to defend workers rights and interests. But let's see in much more detail how rank and file differs in perspectives and attempt to identify how the base of university workers in the UK can be unionized in order to contain alienation and augment a class battle against the offence of global capital in education.

Rank and file think of the day-today operations and address the unfolding situations with an active involvement of the members. Sometimes the most radical and ideological sectors of the mainstream unions become empty to give form to a new group of actions for extra-parliamentary debate.

Spontaneity is what characterizes rank and file unions and most of such groups of actions are bred out of discontent with current conduct of mainstream unions and do not want to share a political agenda with the current government in power.

Such are the motivations behind the most radical rank and file unionized groups. UCU is notimmune to pressures of rank and file. The themes have been discussed for some time now, out of the typical and official networks.

There has been criticism from the Socialist Workers Party, others have called for the birth of rank and file in UCU.

Are the rank and file so vital for the normal running of a union? The Socialist Workers Online seem to be convinced of this. For them, the union is an organization with internal contradiction due to the contended nature of the organization. They quite convincingly argue that unions are big containers to form broad coalitions gathered around agendas-of-the-moment. However, such coalitions are quite volatile and do not give stability; being constituted around political agendas which can be undermined by the opposition quite easily.

Lacking a coherent program to be supported, it becomes difficult to sustain a campaign effectively. This is not the case for isolated campaigns where objectives are clear and unequivocal under the domain of the public opinion, due to media coverage. The Socialist Workers online sustain that rank and file are useful for the so-called unofficial actions which are such an important part of the working class struggle; mostly to defend workplace conditions.

I am of the suggestion that such a view is reductive. Rank and file are not just members of this or that union who do not have a fixed role to play and as such they help with the running of the union at the base, whilst officials preen themselves in their rarefied world. Things at the base move, not in flux but engaging with what really matters to the rank and file. Events unfold rapidly, athough what is required of them is more of an operational nature.

Such events are perhaps linked to choices made in the first place at the higher ranks where
the air is so thin that they would surely suffocate.

Condition unites rank and file. Not just a temporary political agenda or the next electoral campaign, but something that feels like being a 'rank and file'. A condition shared within the base for the class battle and the struggle of the workers against the capital offensive. Such offensive is becoming day by day, always more and more aggressive and felt by University workers, who find now themselves vulnerable to the attacks of Labour government over the precious rights granted to them.

UCU is watching all this happening and passively introducing ludicrous policies which do not contain the capital offensive and augment the role of the government in submitting university workers to the needs of its agenda on globalization of education.

Most of these attacks are on academic freedom, health and safety, work stability, curriculum and intellectual ownership. The recent attacks on academic freedom in the UK have been extensively documented.

Many organizations, mainly being part of subgroups of work of the UCU are containing such offensive although a more vigorous and immediate response from the base is needed. Rank and file are at the base: they are where the breaches of contract by universities can be rejected and counterattacked by re-establishing the balance of power between the capital so much defended and promoted by VCs, PVCs and Deans and the labour by the Base. Such offensive can be contained through the dissemination of self-organized groups of action, working at the Base.

Continued...

Power talking

2007-10-13T13:18:00.000-07:00

UCU is becoming every day more and more ingrained within the discourse of Internationalisation/Globalisation of education.

Hunt is becoming also more fluent with the language used in such discourse. In UCU you can hear languages familiar to few people and which likely only eminent members of the public and the government can understand and not university workers. They are busy with slides and lessons; who is putting the form through the process of application for funding and who instead is getting the sack by this or that Dean who proudly exihibits his professorship while failing be part of the rank of the doctors. Eminent members of the public and the UK government instead understand easily what UCU is able to say with just a few words. Actually the speeches and written texts are becoming so succinct and short that minimalism would be an exaggeration as the movement under which they could be labelled.

Perhaps everybody is so busy that even the most needed words are superficial. Just two words are implicit in all this discourse; "money" and "economy". If Brown is giving the latest speech, Hunt is busy releasing the latest news for her support towards him on the UCU web-site. Others are busy, writing to the base or on university workers' blogs to put this or that action in place. One really struck me; Hunt has recently written on a blog encouraging the workers of a university to shout their anger whilst on strike. We can find sometimes small nuggets within the myriads of disasters made by a general secretary who was voted-in by such an impressively small percentage of union members.

Hunt is putting in place a soft approach of praise and complacency whilst talking to the government and members of the elite caste. To all others she maintains a hard-line appearance. She really doesn't want to lose the hard-line base she desperately needs in order to look more normal; more like a real general secretary of a union with more than 100,000 members. With the government instead, Hunt knows what to release. She speaks the elite caste language. She is fluent: a little bit messenger of a dissenting union base of workers by calming their tones and falsely interpreting their gestures from one side; a little bit entrepreneur of a company with a decent round of business from the other. A language to be condemned without reason. It is the language of the elite caste; of those who exercise economic power.

She is - within the discourse of internationalisation of education - exercising her ability to ensure that her ideas dominate, so that power is not merely political. Her desire for a compliant base is a desire for power in such a complex society. Her power is also in the ability to secure compliance with her purges - members should conform and be like all the other individuals with whom they are in association. UCU is coercing the base to comply with the governmental agenda. As such, she will be able to share the control of the state and its economic power over the base. That base, which is so distant from the dominant elite caste, is left without equal access and resource distribution.

Will Kline really stand for another election after leaving all this happening to his base?

What a lust for the new elite caste of union leaders.

An encroaching tsunami

2007-10-12T04:35:00.000-07:00

Just as Blair has left political and cultural chaos in his wake upon jumping (unrestrained) from the PM ship, so Brown leaves the economic footprint of a grotesque neo-liberal giant; a freakish preacher of the crude calculus of capitalism. In the characteristic style of rhetorical narrative, British press propaganda led the public for years to believe that the shoes of chancellor were never big enough for Brown. A story spun far too systematically. Alarming then that he has been able to step up to his new role unquestioned, for the reality is that British workers are not in the wake of but still under the shadow of a tidal wave of economic disaster.

University workers, like others in Britain, now find themselves drowning in debts before the wave has even crashed: submitted to the individualistic necessity of bringing home a wage. For decades they have been helping pay to construct a bland, featureless landscape; British education as a social, cultural, political relic.

An ongoing yet nowadays whispered obsession with colonising other places, finds contemporary resonance in a vacuous postmodern tangle of an education system masquerading as a crude capitalist market sector, colonising knowledge as a profitable commodity.

The potency of Vice-Chancellors – and others in the elite managerial class of HE – in bringing university workers in line with market forces, is evident. But as ever more local voids are disguised by international franchises and transnational arrangements, university workers face greater exposure to the perversions of consumeristic education and its lies of freedom, choice and equality.

Yet the profit motives of universities as market players are apparently unconstrained. The consequent sacrifice of respect for workers and their rights passes like water through the union’s fingers.

As the flood accumulates over the workers’ heads, Hunt & Co. sail comfortably above the waterline with the wind of rhetoric and empty promises in their sails.

Inevitably, when knowledge and education are unanimously and passively accepted as products, UCU will grasp the occasion to become even bigger and more omnipotent by merging with several other workers’ unions and (now here’s the jewel in the crown) the Committee of Vice-Chancellors.

So don’t get too comfortable with the UCU brand. Soon member fees will be called upon once again to finance yet another re-branding. ‘Your union needs you’ to pick up an oar and power the ship forward.

Sailing towards the British Ultra Gigantic Generic Employment Rights Syndicate. Also known as BUGGERS.

Representing indifference

2007-10-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the disinterest of union members to turn out to protest and vote at elections is equalled only by the impassivity of the reps.

In the sub-textual constitution of union activity, protecting the health and safety of workers is the first amendment. Accordingly, the mythical figure of the rep crouched like a tiger ready to leap on any infringements by management, lingers as a shadow somewhere deep in my subconscious. But this shadow finds its casting corpus only in other unions, in other places; far away from Wonderland.

And there’s another place yet further away from Wonderland. It’s a dark and dirty place.
One thought has been going over and over in my mind: How is it possible for a person to die in a swimming pool and yet for no heads to roll. Head of Risk, Safety and Health Mr Martin Hedley-Smith at the University of Wolverhampton remains in his role like a fat cat licking its whiskers waiting for its next small prey.

Of course, this doesn’t concern Sally Hunt and the UCU; the lifeguards on duty weren’t part of the union and neither is Mr Hedley-Smith.

No academics drowned so what’s the problem?

It does make me wonder though how the health and safety of others is put at risk in this, like many other universities, unchecked; what is the union doing to protect them?

In 2005, I visited the office of one Wolverhampton University lecturer in the School of Computing and IT and was chilled to my bones. Aside from the dense encrustation of dirt over everything (including the nearly blackened window), there were too many breaches of human dignity and workers’ health and safety to name; bicycles in the office, outdated electrical safety checks, poor light, ventilation and space; the list goes on. But what I had come to see was a chair, a simple chair. Too simple really because it was broken and unusable. Nonetheless, the academic it was assigned to had been ‘using’ it for a year or so, was refused a replacement by line management.

Management, health and safety and, here’s the crux, the union rep , Mr John Roche, knew all about it.

The academic, a union member at the time, fought hard alone to obtain a new £30 chair that could meet regulations. Meanwhile, Mr Roche, in a manner I later learnt to be typical of Wolverhampton union reps., responded collusively, otiosely and with an overwhelming sense of ineluctability, by doing absolutely zero. This was the first, but not the last encounter with a novel attitude towards unionism, which colloquially translates to “don’t rock the boat, you’re in your probation year.”.

Just why is a pay rise campaign more juicy material for Sally Hunt than broken chairs and shitty offices.

Is it okay to suffer the discomfort and indignity of a hostile unsafe working environment as long as the ‘take-home’ is good enough?

These issues may come with less bells and whistles to further political careers, but it is what matters to members most because, aside from the rhetoric, Wonderland can be a cold, dark place for a member with a broken trust.

The Third Way and all that jazz

2007-10-10T03:57:00.000-07:00

The "Third Way" is finally now giving out the fruits of the hard work of Tony Blair.

Gordon Brown is not preoccupied with the alarming raise of debts in which university workers find themselves, alongside a very uncertain future about their work and pensions. It is not difficult in UK to be hired in the HE sector, just as long as you keep your belief in a particular ideology to yourself and you don't ask too many questions. Or perhaps it would be better if you would show a keen interest in the student as a consumer.

The same applies for the dismissal. You can be fired very easily. The procedures for doing so allow it and the UCU has no intention to put their nose in such a bramble. Dismissal has become as such a word which apparently is used much more fluently within the working class and mastered by university senior management. Such a word which time ago triggered feelings of oppression.

More common causes for dismissal in HE are related to performance issues or disciplinary actions. However, many other words like discrimination, unfair, bullying, mobbing, harrassment are frequently joined to the dismissal itself, to the point that the amount of cases is adding to the variety. The possibilities for the employer to get rid of a university worker are becoming more of a choice of a legal technicality than a real need.

People get dismissed or, as some personnel departments prefer to say, "are terminated" (very sick word) for a reason that is perhaps less expensive and more defensible in court by the employer.

Deep throats and bad smells

2007-10-09T06:31:00.000-07:00

The moral issue for UCU can be opened with only a question: what is the salary of the UCU general secretary? I gathered some news with regard to the employment of regional reps and the salaries were quite interesting. They reflected those paid to middle management in private companies. I was a little bit disillusioned in looking at the advert for a regional rep in UCU to say what I felt. Disillusioned perhaps, because I was still anchored to my romantic idea of what a union rep should be and do. I was looking for some particular attributes within the words of the advert; adjectives I used to label such individuals as those always busy talking to people and sharing their cause; always worried if that man was going to get that job or if that woman was going to get the contribution paid for her pension. People for whom time to talk to people before the election promising this or that reform was never enough. People who would have the patience to help fill out the form for the pension of the old man with shaky hands during lunch break. Time well gone; different places, different nations. One thing really struck me: the advert resembled one written for hunting an individual with the characteristics of a middle manager.

UCU Plc is on the way, I thought.

Here was an up-and-coming corporation, out to impress, to attract the cream of the crop. If performativity had a smell, UCU would make it seep through computers using the latest ‘smellyvision’ technology. Perhaps then, somebody drunk from the intoxicating fumes of ambition, wide-eyed at the prospect of all the likely perks, would send off an application. He or she would perhaps include a question in the covering letter: 'would I also get a prestige car with the ‘company’ logo printed on the side?'.

Perhaps many would realize that they could never apply for such a position. They simply would not be qualified for such a corporativist role and would risk being purged as extremists; they would however save themselves from very bad smells.

This was a message from the UCU top brass, a call for people to coordinate and manage, to make the union bigger and stronger, to sell the benefits of union membership to ensure the stability of the structure and status quo.

Worrying in this, was the lack of call to representation of the workers. Sure enough, the term representation seemed to have taken on a new meaning in this union; one of sales and marketing reps able to recruit ‘customers’ and drum up ‘business’ for the organization.

The fundamental contradiction of the attributes being sought from salt-of-the-earth activists, was well hidden within the gloss of the advert. Ironic enough then, to remind ourselves that it is those activists; unpaid, committed, faithful to the solidarity of worker rights and socially responsible, who make the difference in a union. This is the base where you really need genuine and responsible people. In fact if you were to try to transform this day-to-day work into paid profession, you might find that the union wouldn’t be a union anymore. However it is those in this base who get the sack if complaints are raised with employers.

For UCU, activism is in giving out leaflets and receiving the regular newsletter, holding a uniform, preconceived banner along with a handful of others on the strike day that has taken months to deliberate over. They are not paid, but relied upon to keep the UCU message out there; from the top-(firmly)centre directorate to the email in-boxes of expectant workers.

In all honesty I began to get confused. Perhaps all these years of academic endeavor living under the umbrella of pseudo-democracy had begun to affect me. So I embarked on a small investigation on the web, TV (satellite from abroad actually) and foreign press.

I searched for shadows of this monstrous union elsewhere. Any signs of similarity with the normal and dignified faces of other European unions. My search was in vain. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was looking in the wrong direction and I asked myself: will UCU employ David Tidmarsh next to re-brand the new professional association. The new biggest provider of insurance, services and cutting edge courses paid for by Further and Higher Education workers. Is UCU becoming like a stock corporation wherein you can find the following cast of “Key People”:

Executives:

CEO – Sally Hunt
Director of operations – Roger Kline
Chief finance officer – Linda Newman

Regional operations:

Wolverhampton branch manager

I’ll leave you to complete your own list.

Of course, in this direction we must question who are the stakeholders who control the shares of Wonderland Plc?

Perhaps the next step will be to sell mortgages to university workers to enable them to meet the cost of attending courses. Would this too be of benefit in helping the ‘union’ to get bigger and better?

Maybe what we need is a dialogue and comparison with other unions in Europe. A comparison with others who make important choices based not on what the government says but on what their members want. On what matters to university workers. Leaders who have no fear to make the public aware that their salaries fall below those of the average British academic.

It Italy for example, moral questions with regard to the amount of money earned by politicians and their respective contributions to the democracy and ideologies, are being put under question. But avoid the usual suspect; this is a genuine debate. Such questions have been raised legitimately under discussion on the table of democracy because the postmodern movement is at its dead‑end. People cannot live anymore in the paradox of believing that politicians are or can be managers or that governing a nation means only administration and economy. In the same way, union management and the pay-offs of their leadership are continuously subject to scrutiny. They are not immune to criticism and do not represent a special elite caste of people.

It is not a question of are they worth all that money?, but of ‘should they really get all that money?’ Certainly, in Britain there is need for such open talking about the alienation of worker rights and their political representation, without fear of questioning all whose interests are implicated.

But up to now I have only been playing with words without bringing out anything to do with ideology, politics or private interests of this or that party. Is it noticeable?

An affair to remember

2007-10-07T13:08:00.001-07:00

The free liberal market ideology is being constantly pursued and sustained by the UK government and the University and College Union together. On one side, the government has recently issued news of increasing investments in education for teaching science and technology subjects. On the other UCU has not wasted time in approving such a move and actually has welcomed the "increased focus on the teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics ... for a new generation of students". The increased emphasis on the teaching of science subjects and mathematics is surely a product of globalisation. It has been possible due to the fact that high value is placed on information technology and other science-based industries, emphasising as such, science and mathematics education. Currently, many countries are keen to attract foreign high-tech investments and increase profits of domestic high-tech industries. These developments have, in some aspects, inflated expectations. In others, they have obfuscated ideas about how much real increase has taken place in science and math education and regarding the market value of such knowledge. For sure, the rhetoric surrounding such issues, has nonetheless greatly increased.
The internationalisation of education and knowledge and the role local government plays in the process, has been under scrutiny for some time. Comments on the role of university unions in all this have been at times dismissed as romantic diversions from the day-to-day running of the base. Although I think that it is precisely here at which a point of reflection is needed: decisions affecting university workers should at least raise some eyebrows and cannot pass down to the base without a serious, albeit limited in scope, discussion. What UCU is proposing is simply a belief. A belief in a policy which will bring prosperity and progress for future generations. But one important question is never raised: What the impact of the implemetation of this new policy will be on knowledge production, consumption, academic salaries, equality of access to knowledge and education. It is important to note how UCU is questioning the government less and less, whilst smoothing transition for the implementation of policies, irrespective of their effects on the lives of university workers, extending this also to Schools and Colleges. Education has been affected by globalisation in the UK and the goverment is seriously attempting to push forward agendas which facilitate the commodification and consumption of knowledge, as such making education more a product than a right. It is unlikely that the majority of lecturers will observe such changes at a first approach, although they will be later felt in the pay-off from the value attached to different types of knowledge.
Other effects of the implementations of globalisation of education can be seen in the fact that such reforms discourage an investment in lower-income students and facilitate an unequal distribution of income for the more 'valuable' knowledge. The UK government agenda with regard to investments on what has already been classed as 'valuable knowledge' for future generations of students, will definitely create unequal distribution of income among lecturers first and students of various disciplines later.

Globalisation/internationalisation of the curriculum and education also means a decrease in public investments in the long-term. Surely these initial investments by the UK government have been put in place in order to engage industry in such reform, leaving total control over the quality and improvement of education, in the hands of a few who guard the production of knowledge only as a profitable enterprise. The repurcussions of quality systems over academics have been extensively documented and most have depicted how oppression of university workers is possible if education and knowledge are transformed into marketable products.

"All these effects of globalisation on education are passed through the policy structures of nation states, so it is these states that ultimately decide how globalisation affects national education." (Martin Carnoy)

I am arguing and appeal for your attention to the fact that university unions have the power to negotiate with the state for equal access to education for students, along with the benefits of more equal income for lecturers, as well as improvement of education for the poor and production of knowledge with freedom by academics within a globalised economy. Although the UK has fully embraced the new ideological globalised thinking, it is still possible to resist such reforms and policies and in doing so, to overcome ineptitude within some parts of UCU.

Living in wonderland

2007-10-05T08:52:00.000-07:00

The Guardian reported on Sally Hunt on the occasion of her election, highlighting how the mission of the new general secretary is to make sure that the disagreements between the AUT and Nathfe should be put aside. "Now is a time for unity as we build a union to protect our members and increase public recognition of their important work. I am relishing the opportunity of working with everyone, whether they voted for me or not, to build a bigger, better, and stronger union."

How many nice words in just two sentences. She would surely win a prize for the most promising rhetorical general secretary. If this would be true, I could afford to comment on the last few months of her activity. Actually, I would like to the take the opportunity to step just a little back. A little enough to include the campaigning and her promises before election to general secretary.

Her words were then firm like her voice. The following is an extract from an email she sent out to all Natfhe members as part of her campaign. I received the message and politely answered her not to spam my email inbox with her lies. But let's see the contents of the message:

Dear colleague, help me build a better, stronger union. I know you are busy so I promise to be as brief as I can. My name is Sally Hunt. I am currently your joint general secretary having been first elected to that post in AUT in 2002. I helped negotiate the creation of UCU because I believe we can do better together........I am standing as general secretary of the new union because I believe UCU should be: focused on pay, pensions, workload, jobs, academic freedom and lobbying for funding, democratic not bureaucratic resources should be used to improve services for members not on union bureaucracy, arguing from the political mainstream not shouting slogans from the wings............ I believe that UCU should be a politically independent, industrially confident union and I am disappointed that political parties such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and others are seeking to influence this election. I think they should leave the decision to you - the members. My position is that I am committed to leading our union from the mainstream, not the extreme from where ministers and employers will find it easy to ignore us.

Certainly the tone is a little bit alarmist. It looks as though there are extremists, terrorists, spies or people within the base we should doubt or be afraid of. The suspicion is legitimate. You can have terrorists, extremists, or people packed with explosives in the union in the UK. I wonder who are the leaders they should die for? The list could be enlarged by including mafia men, corrupt bureaucrats and others, even if it is unlikely that such people would like to be associated with extremism, and they would not even be interested in being part of something where close scrutiny and transparency should be the norm. 'Something' being the union. She may not have been entitled to judge and label such people and elect herself as the median to which all should refer as the center. It is unlikely that such center may even have existed. She didn't carry out a political analysis of the situation and didn't illustrate to the moderate where the center was. Her words were the same for all the workers, because the words must be the same for workers in a union. Perhaps what she was referring to with the term 'extremes' were those individuals unsatisfied with the current leadership. Her alarmism was in fact to be read in conjuction with a speech given by Tony Blair, a few months earlier, in relation to the change of leadership in the labour party. He at least admitted that there were difficulties in the party and that the transition (in monarchic style) from him to the next leader would have happened without giving space to the extremes. Actually he called for an all out vigilance. After that she saw UCU as a continuation of the Labour party and herself as a sort of Blairite ill who cannot excape the virus and the inevitable contagion. The results of the UCU elections are evident and speak for themselves: the center does not exist and possibly the extremes, or read the 'unsatisfied' with the leadership of the union, are now more evident. Yes, because now we can possibly talk of extremes and center. Surely she is in the center, but as a by-product of the election itself and not as product of the election campaign. Her campaign has as such stigmatized the people she would really have needed in order to lead the union from the center. The boycott of Israeli academics, the lack of condemnation of anti-semitism and of the attacks of palestinians on Israelies, her lack of leadership in addressing the situation politically, the emergence of daily abuse and bullying in the universities, deep discontent for the breaches of academic contracts by the senior management; these things have cleared out, once and for all what it means to address the union from her center: political ineptitude. As a product of the Blair - Brown era she has lost sign of right, left and center for herself. She is a little bit Berlusconian in the sense that she likes to raise alarmism about extremes and link this to socialism or communism. An attempt to demonize and stigmatize some political parties which are legal and in some european countries are within democratic governments. Unfavorably, Berlusconi and Blair are both gone; the third way in Europe never really took off before crashing clamorously.

Independently from the type of political party a worker adeheres to, she conceptualises them as machines without ideologies or political orientation. The Socialist Workers Party had every reason to put forward ideas and slogans like any other party on the face of the earth. This is the role of a party in a democracy. It is also true that her words should have been the same either for the Socialists and the Right-wingers, that is, words indicating what sort of reforms or what sort of protection of the workers' interests and rights she would have implemented once elected. Conceptualising the worker as simply interested in salaries and working conditions and workloads and bla bla bla is another of her errors. Some words are part of the repertoire of any rhetorical union leader: salary, working conditions, workloads etc. etc. and workers know this already very well. We all know them all very well. But the error which is left to inexperienced new union leaders is in not understanding that workers would like to be more involved in the running of the unions and in the decisions to be taken at local level. Not in the governance of the institutions but giving space to a share of the ownerships of the methods of decision making. This would have demonstrated more openness with them and would have also erased any doubts for those who have always had in the back of their minds that she was just implementing an agenda written by Brown-Blair and shared under-the-table with the government. An event in which she clearly distances herself or in which she rejects a policy from government initiatives in order to protect workers' rights is missing.

Academic freedom, which is a cornerstone for university workers was cited in her campaign along with her plea to lobby for funding. The link between the two has been manifest for a long time. Yet still the sneezes of Blairitus can be heard. But academics are now calling for an academic world free of hidden agendas, and free from particular research which only supports goverment policies. Academics are now annoyed by such rhetoric: ideology and research can survive without necessarily doing so thanks to the funding of university departments or thanks to this or that council. Academic freedom which underpins research in the free democratic world of universities can also be found online, on the blogs, on newspapers and without investing massively in labs or waiting for the next round of editors of an illustrious journal. Academic freedom has been heavily penalised in the UK and all this has happened in the face of the union and their reps; academic altogether. Although this may not be a political struggle, we should have expected from UCU a quick response to the breaches of contract, where academics are ostracised, censured or obliged by their senior managment to conduct only some particular type of research. Breaches of contract are sacrosanct but not for UCU which has never to my knowledge openly condemned and boycotted an institution or engaged in an all-out strike until academic freedom is reinstated fully.

Words come cheaply and are for some, free without the need to pay anything even at a later date. The voices of workers are agitated as ever due to the battle of classes: where does she believe she is living; in wonderland?

Academic freedom and bullying: strong correlations with an inept union

2007-10-05T03:47:00.000-07:00

There are massive breaches of contract with regard to academic freedom but it looks as UCU is interested in different types of things at the moment. The breach of contract is the sacrosanct topic in the discussion amongst union members before undertaking action against the employer. I am clear here in saying that it has become a topic of discussion on paper more that being the central topic of union branch meetings.

The bullying starts when the union do not act vigorously on the institution retaliating against the free academic who wants to express his/her ideas democratically. Even academic freedom has become an academic speculative piece oftext. Plenty of research and articles. But...I say BUT are the breaches of contract on the increase or decrease for this? And the same for all the other breaches of academic contracts.

It is the breach of the contract that should trigger union actions. The bullying starts when it is too late. With the obvious disastrous consequences of the cases. Possibly, let me say that by acting early on the breaches of contract it may bring the potential bully in line with the contract. In this case we need the STRONG support of good, genuine people.

Forget all that jazz of labour, new labour and the third way. On this we can open a frank debate on how we want to proceed and politically set ourselves a line through which we can open a dialogue with the major political forces.

Leaders, followers and peace envoys

2007-10-04T13:16:00.001-07:00

The proposed boycott of Israeli academics has put the leadership of UCU under strain and has also tested the premise of the existence of the same union. Born as a dissent from the base, the boycott has involved all corners of the union but has altogether ignored all the voices and shut all the doors, with an exit strategy that can only be decorous for those who engineered it.
On the UCU web-site the follwing news has been released:

Members of the union's strategy and finance committee unanimously accepted a recommendation from UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, that the union should immediately inform branches and members that:

• A boycott call would be unlawful and cannot be implemented

• UCU members' opinions cannot be tested at local meetings

• The proposed regional tour cannot go ahead under current arrangements and is therefore suspended

Surely for the first point, nobody could stop anybody boycotting Israeli academics. They could decide not to invite Israeli key-note speakers at the conferences or reject papers from Israeli academics from illustrious journals. That would not have been anyway a UCU boycott but only from part of it. This would have opened a big fracture amongst members and could have been perhaps the beginning of a new political season. Considering the current lack of ideas on what the union must be in UK, Hunt has decided well for everybody.

The second is laudable for it's ingenuity. Either members do not have ideas, or perhaps they are not interested in such things. With the animosity demonstrated by the reps at the latest conference it may seem more probable that there is such interest in the base afterall.

The third point is that apparently, funds from the union cannot be used for debating on the boycott. The Internet, blogs, phones are a finger away. But as you may well understand, leadership is highly contested in such environments. Such spaces are open to noisy disturbances that would prove even the toughest leader in an open confrontation with the followers. UCU has suddenly become so austere in their decisions.

It has been a good exercise of leaderhip after-all which has left all the members wondering if they are suddenly anti-semitic or else, and has raised doubts on who are the anti-semitics in the union. With the new mission of Tony Blair as peace envoy in the Middle East, Sally has thought well that it would be in the best interests of British university workers to have peace in the Middle East and in the union too. A real political disaster in it's entirety from one side. On the other, the stupid mistake by leaders of being caught with fingers in the anti-semitic jam without openly condemning such a plague.

Academic freedom anybody?

2007-10-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

Uk lowest on the list for academic freedom. Ok, Already a very old article which has done it's time before I'm through reading the title. Then you try to read it to find something interesting and again and again. It feels like deja vu'. Then it comes to the point you get the anger. The Times Higher supplement has reported it this week like nothing really matters. Ah yes, it is a piece like any other and nothing matters more than the writing of it and making sure that we are aware that the UK is at the bottom of such list.

The UCU has not even been asked how all this has happened. Surely they would be asking for a vote between the branches and assembling to mount a polemic so that Hunt and Kline could be busy for another round of interviews on the BBC or Guardian web-site. It would afterall be an ideal afterdinner spirit to digest the recent aborted boycott against Israel.

But what is it that really matters in this story; breach of contract is something that is never even cited anymore. The entire article is plain and not a word of dissent is raised. Ehi!! the famous academic freedom in the UK is breached, sure and now what?

The unions have their fault: years and years of Thatcherite first and Blairite after must have made them seriously ill. Where were they when all this happened, all this daily eroding of the rights of dignified workers sitting behind their desks or inahaling chalk behind boards full of formula, graphs and diagrams for another day of abuse.

Surely neo-liberalism has been an excuse for forgetting all this and then going out happy, reciting that everything is nice and we were happy and that everything is so shiny. Ehi, academic freedom is gone. What next then?