University College London

Response to the Provost

Dear UCLUCU Member,

Attached below is UCLUCU's response to the comments made by the Provost about our current ballot of members in his latest all-staff e-mail newsletter.

Please note that an important lunchtime meeting has been arranged TOMORROW 18 March in Roberts 508 (Roberts Building, Torrington Place) 1-2pm for all UCLUCU departmental reps to provide a briefing on branch strategy to get the vote out.

Please feel free to bring along UCLUCU colleagues who would be interested in helping with the ballot.

Best wishes

Rob Jones

RESPONSE TO THE PROVOST:

Dear Malcolm

We are responding to the comments you made in your "Provost's Newsletter" all-staff email of 15 March regarding the current UCU ballot of members.

UCU believes the most serious issue revealed by your message is an unfortunate absence of insight into why staff might have voted, on four separate General Meetings of UCU members since November, for a ballot for industrial action to defend jobs and stand up against the redundancy programme.

Academics across UCL have expressed their deep concern about the precedent that is being set in Life Sciences. Academic-related, professional and technical staff see themselves in a similar position to those facing redundancy in Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, the Registry and elsewhere. The entire University community is concerned about the kind of university UCL is becoming.

On 3 July 2009, when you announced the proposed cuts targets to the trades unions, we urged you to develop outline plans but then hold back from implementation. This would offer staff the opportunity to engage in a meaningful debate about the future of University College, so that staff across UCL could discuss the implication of proposals in other departments than their own and engage in what is popularly known as 'joined-up thinking', or indeed collegiality, while simultaneously placing Higher Education funding and the consequence of cuts, at the centre of an informed public debate. This has not happened.The consequence of this refusal is that Directors and Deans have been given the responsibility for developing and implementing change proposals at a local level where the global picture is easily and sadly lost. Moreover where specific proposals are presented they have offered little opportunity for manoeuvre by staff, managers fail to understand workload implications of changes, leading to fewer posts and a zero-sum competition between colleagues.

The present consultation over the Life Sciences criteria does not constitute a debate about future Life Science academic priorities and how best they may be achieved. Rather, we believe it resembles an academic cull premised on narrow, retrospective 'performance' criteria.

We have attempted for months to get Senior Management to consult meaningfully over the cuts programme. For the reasons outlined above the 'consultation' offered remains insufficient.

There remains an opportunity for you to repair this breach of faith with staff. You could:

• withdraw the academic redundancy committee and the threat to make compulsory academic redundancies in Life Sciences.
• engage in college-wide consultation, as we have proposed previously, to avoid compulsory redundancies among support staff.
• without precondition, support an open series of debates in the College community on the future of UCL.

You will be aware that Leeds University yesterday bowed to pressure from staff and signed an agreement with Leeds UCU yesterday, 16 March.

The main features of the agreement include a new sector-leading process for managing organisational change; this reinforces collegiality and the engagement of staff. This represents a ground-breaking package enshrining the principles of openness, fairness, transparency and good governance in detailed new policies and procedures to promote job security, avoid redundancy and manage change. The agreement also covers the position of the Faculty of Biological Sciences (FBS), where the post-restructuring review phase entitled "various steps aimed at avoiding compulsory redundancies" will be extended to the end of January 2011. New measures to facilitate redeployment and retraining and where appropriate the reinvigoration of research work are to be piloted in FBS.

We are simply asking that UCL agrees to consult with staff and trades unions in a like manner, and avoid a damaging dispute.

Most of all we believe that we should be working together to put pressure on political parties to support proper funding for UK Universities. We could be saying together, to Gordon Brown and David Cameron, that cutting the sector in a recession is perverse. Were our finances so dire that academic redundancies were demonstrably necessary (unlike at present), you could be explaining to the public at large the implications of government cuts for independent publicly-funded research and broad access to Higher Education.A YouTube statement of belief in HE, while welcome, is frankly insufficient.

The time for sound-bites is over.

You will be aware that there are a number of global examples where national governments are diverting large funds to their HE sectors precisely to counteract the effects of the economic downturn and ensure their universities are in a healthy state to benefit from the economic upturn.

In summary, we believe that you have chosen to misrepresent UCL UCU's position, partly out of expressing an understandable but unhelpful Managerial position, but also because you have misunderstood the extremely serious concern and anger of staff at your proposals.

We would welcome a public right of reply.

Yours sincerely

Elizabeth Clear
UCU President

Sean Wallis
UCU Secretary