Fabio Mussi, the new Italian communist of the banana party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BNP talk @ Oxford Union sparks protests

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

Shameless union

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

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?

News for you

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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.