The motion passed at the UCU conference on the war in Ukraine has provoked a lot of posts on Twitter recently. I’m not a member, and if I was, I would certainly be considering leaving. It led me to think of my association with HE unions over my career.
I joined the AUT (predecessor of the UCU) almost as soon as I became a postdoc, and remember standing on picket lines at Birkbeck in the mid 1980s. On moving to Keele, I kept up my membership and even joined the exec committee. I only became disillusioned with the union when they seemed more concerned about universities in the West Bank than trying to stop my university from closing my department. Sounds familiar? So when the UCU was formed in a merger with NATFE, I didn’t join.
Moving forward, I was Head of School when there was the last serious dispute centred on pensions (in 2018), and the current marking and assessment boycott is bringing back painful memories of very difficult times. If I was still a member, I would be concerned about the distracting effect of motions like the one recently passed on the real issues of concern. But thinking back to the latter years of the AUT, not much has changed.
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