Defend Academic Freedom at Warwick

This is the script of what I hoped to deliver today (10^th May) to a UCU meeting called to oppose the University of Warwick management’s proposal to reform Statute 24, and specifically the University’s procedures for Disciplinary, Grievance, Redundancy and Removal for Incapacity on Medical Grounds for Academic Staff. I was asked on Tuesday May 2^nd to address the meeting. Sadly, due to Warwick’s policy under the government’s Prevent agenda, there is a requirement to give three weeks’ notice for approval of a visiting speaker. The  organisers were evidently aware of this regulation and realised they had not left enough time to apply:

“The principal organiser must ensure sufficient time for the HoD or nominee to give consideration to any concerns, and for the University to review the request should the HoD or nominee deem this necessary. If so, and where possible, the University should be notified of the speaker request in question at least three weeks prior to the event, to enable a full risk assessment to be conducted and any mitigating arrangements to be put in place. If it is not possible to provide three weeks’ notice, the department should inform the University as soon as practicable.”

So I was not able to address an emergency meeting on important union business.  But at least I can blog.

If the amended Statute 24 and ordinances pass, Warwick UCU feel that academic freedom at the university would be weakened. I agree with them, and my belief is underpinned by personal experience.

If you care about the attempted roll-back of academic freedom in UK universities, please sign this petition for Warwick UCU.

I was a student back in 1981 when Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph launched the first governmental assault on public universities. The outcome was the rescinding of tenure for academics. I remember at the time there was a competition in the university staff bulletin. These were often jokey things, like write a reference for the person you’d most like to get rid of from your department. But this one was genuinely thought-provoking: ‘write a speech defending tenure to a steelworker from Consett’. That was a ‘check your privilege’ moment. If it was a hard sell in 1981, it is seems more defensible now. We know what abolition of tenure looks like 36 years on. We have seen the steady erosion of academic freedom and job security. We have seen the undermining of shared governance in universities, and how swiftly the space emptied of democracy has been exploited by authoritarian management structures.

Universities used to be based on collegiality and shared governance. The Union has a role in negotiation, but the starting point in universities should be staff participation in decisions on how the university is run. If our role is to defend democratic values in the public sphere, we should be able to model that within our own walls. It is clear that we have rather neglectfully buried our heads, while shared values, traditions and assumptions have been overridden in the corporate university. Our colleagues in the US are appalled at our lack of tenure and academic freedom. They are busy protesting rescinding of tenure in Wisconsin, and threats in Iowa. Meanwhile, in Hungary, thousands took to the streets when the government threatened to close an entire university.

Now that we can see the danger, why aren’t we in the UK protesting more widely?

We can’t wind the clock back, but for heaven’s sake, at least we deserve protection from summary dismissal and attacks on academic freedom. Let’s start there. Take a look at what is being proposed at Leeds University – dismissal for ‘some other substantial reason’:

“The university wants to add a new reason for dismissal ‘some other substantial reason’ to our Statutes, which would make it easier to dismiss people for any reason. For example, a conflict of interest or personality clash, third party pressure, raising insufficient funding, not publishing enough, not having a PhD, or criticising management.” Leeds UCU

As CARA – Council for At-Risk Academics  – says, ‘you only need to kill one academic to silence a hundreds’ so our academic freedom is worth protecting.

So, we need to educate UCU members and academic staff members about their clear rights to academic freedom. Here is section 27 of the UNESCO Constitution:

27. The maintaining of the above international standards should be upheld in the interest of higher education internationally and within the country. To do so, the principle of academic freedom should be scrupulously observed. Higher-education teaching personnel are entitled to the maintaining of academic freedom, that is to say, the right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom in carrying out research and disseminating and publishing the results thereof, freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work, freedom from institutional censorship and freedom to participate in professional or representative academic bodies.

[http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13144&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html]

And the UCU Statement on Academic Freedom:

• Freedom in teaching and discussion

• Freedom in carrying out research without commercial or political interference

• Freedom to disseminate and publish one’s research findings

• Freedom from institutional censorship, including the right to express one’s opinion publicly about the institution or the education system in which one works

• Freedom to participate in professional and representative academic bodies, including trade unions

[https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/5128/Academic-freedom–a-guide-for-early-careers-staff/pdf/Academic_freedom_leaflet.pdf ]

All of these are reflected in the 1988 Education Reform Act and this is the basis for current statutes and articles of government in UK universities. However, they are not always well supported by the nation’s vice chancellors. I’d suggest Sir Keith Burnett at Sheffield is a lone beacon among them for academic freedom, saying: “Great teaching is not inconsistent with academic freedom, it depends upon it.”

Certainly Warwick’s proposed amendment to Statute 24 says nothing about freedom to criticise the institution or system in which one works. In fact, the paragraph d) of the amendment to the statement on academic freedom reads: “To avoid unlawful discrimination and promote equality of opportunity, dignity at work and good relations with the University.” Are employees obliged to be on good terms with ‘the university’ at all times, even if its management does things they don’t agree with? Some of us know from experience that that any form of controversy or critique can be regarded by management as causing reputational damage. That might lead to a charge of gross misconduct, and as far as I can see, the most likely outcome for that is instant dismissal. But universities are not above the law, and they should not try to amend their statutes to circumvent it.

If you think we have no need to fear for our freedoms, just remember that several colleagues have reported on Twitter that they have been forbidden from speaking beyond their area of designated expertise, or even from speaking about their research during the election campaign.

Warwick is also seeking to amend its disciplinary code. The right to legal representation will no longer be part of the procedure. From the FAQ:

“The use of legal representation in any internal proceedings creates an overly adversarial environment, not least for the individual member of staff involved. Often the use of legal representatives results in an overly legalistic approach to the issues to be determined and this does not necessarily assist any party, nor is it in line with general good employment practice or the ACAS Code of Practice”.

Really? Do they think you just sailed up the river? Let’s imagine what might have happened to a rather well known professor at Warwick if he had not had legal representation.

Would absence of a lawyer make the disciplinary process less confrontational ? Add clarity ?  In short, no, of course not. But there are two points to raise here.

If the experience of colleagues at a couple of other universities in the Midlands are any guide, there will be many more disciplinaries for what most reasonable people would regard as minor infractions. These take up enormous time and energy and are stressful, not to mention the expense of these, and the drain on the university’s main source of income – student fees.

Second point – Regardless of whether the wording in the statute on academic freedom remains unchanged, disciplinaries will be used to curtail academic freedom, as they were in my case. I wrote a blog piece about the causes of the epidemic of work-related stress in academia – and chose to talk to students about this. The piece was re-published on the Times Higher website where it trended for 4 days. That eventually attracted the attention of management and I found myself facing a 12-week disciplinary process. Previously, I had served 30 years without so much as a late library book. There was no doubt in my mind about the intention to silence me as a critical voice. Incidentally, I had not mentioned the university that employed me, because the piece wasn’t about them. It was about a system that has become an ‘anxiety machine’ as Richard Hall calls it.

I notice that Warwick’s proposed disciplinary policy allows appeal on the grounds of academic freedom. But from the management perspective, it is never about academic freedom. There are always other justifications for alleging gross misconduct. As long as the charges are in place, the actual behaviours pinned on them tend to be rather fungible. But management are pretending that this is a strengthening of academic freedom. It is anything but.

I resigned because for me the capacity to do the job rests entirely on academic freedom. Without that, there seemed no point in turning up. So take note of the mushrooming of these procedures being taken against staff for fairly minor infractions and expect summary dismissals or written warnings that inhibit further risk-taking with independent thought. Be warned. This is the direction of travel in universities.

Another bullying tactic is the use of Capacity Procedures in accordance with performance management and quite unrealistic targets, for example, for grant capture.  In several universities, professors have faced redundancy, performance management, or even in one case, being told that the criteria have shifted and they can be judged to no longer ‘map over’ to the new role descriptor. This is inhumane. In several universities, I have seen the result of this to be incapacitating stress, professional and personal breakdown. It is the academic equivalent of being dragged off the plane. In the words of the late Stefan Grimm, ‘they treat professors like shit’.

Democratic structures must be built from the ground up. They will not materialize through authoritarian diktat. It is now clear that highly qualified and able people work much better in a high-trust environment. It is really important to remember that management are not the university. The university is made up of an entire community. Nobody ever came to a university because of the Human Resources department or its disciplinary policy. And as Rob Cuthbert has written

“It behoves managers to remember that as managers they make no direct contribution to the real work of the university – teaching and research. They are an overhead and, like all overheads, they need to justify their existence.” [What’s wrong with management in higher education? April 28, 2017 by SRHE News Blog

Managers are overheads. Let’s all remember that.

Steps to resistance – what works. A case study of RTB from Newcastle University.

The details of The Newcastle University Raising the Bar initiative were well-reported in the Times Higher in 2015 . There was an attempt to formalize outcomes-based performance management, whereby academics would be judged by metrics on financialized targets for grant capture, REF ‘outputs’ at grade 3 or 4; PhD student throughput etc. I have blogged about this here.

After academic staff protested, organised and negotiated further, the proposal was withdrawn last summer. I like to think of it as a successful culture hack towards more democracy and civility within the university. I have been collaborating with a collective from Newcastle known as the Analogue University. We have written a chapter (unpublished but forthcoming) on the context of management by metrics, and the Analogue University collective has reported on their extensive research project which documented the resistance to Raising the Bar (RTB). The following were the main strategies that were used successfully in countering the management’s narrative. The summary and quotations are used with kind permission of the Analogue University collective.

Organise and mobilise support

Use whatever democratic structures are available to you within the university. A massive turnout at school, department and union meetings is important in voicing concerns and planning strategies for opposition. Try and get student support and press coverage. Both will make an impact. Get an online petition together, and ask prominent professors to write a letter to management. Within three days over 3,500 people worldwide had signed the petition against RTB at Newcastle.

Deconstruct management-speak

Start with the pronouns “we” (Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017, forthcoming; Machin and Per, 2016). Often in these documents there is a deceptive ambiguity about ‘we’. It is a quirk of the English language that ‘we’ can be both inclusive and exclusive. These documents which claim to be ‘modernising’ and bringing procedures up to date with recent legislation usually exploit that. So ‘we’ retains both its managerial prerogative and its pretence at inclusivity. However, the Warwick communications from Provost Christine Ennew are unusual in their use of the exclusive ‘we’, demonstrating that the innovation is led and imposed by management:

We began consultation with the Trade Unions in December 2016.

We have published the revised statutes, ordinances and policies in draft so that you can see the proposed changes.

We have discussed the proposals with the University Council, Heads of Department and our Trade Unions.

We are proposing.

We would like to hear views from all of our staff community.

And if there is any doubt about the managerial exclusivity:

If you are a member of a Trade Union, you will have the opportunity to contribute to this process through your Unions.

Publicize the story – especially social media

There is now a lot of evidence that shows when you get an intransigent management, using social media can bring about results. “Since the RTB was primarily driven by a desire to raise Newcastle University’s reputation as a premier research institution, the activists felt that the management would be more receptive to their demands if they saw the university in the news for the wrong reasons. The news and social media platforms such as Times Higher Education (THE) and Facebook were used to publicize the growing dissatisfaction and opposition to RTB”. [Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017, forthcoming]. Notice this would violate the new statute which requires “good relations with the University”.

“The research project succeeded in getting public intellectuals who have written on the threat of neoliberalism to the humanities, such as Martha Nussbaum, Marilyn Strathern, Stefan Colini, and Rowan Williams to join its advisory board. Their very presence drew attention to the dispute and helped ensure it was more widely publicised. As one key goal of RTB was raising the reputation of the university internationally, such attention risked undermining RTB by negatively damaging the reputation”. [Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017 forthcoming]. Again, would this invite disciplinary action under the proposed amendments?

Industrial action

“In the summer of 2016, after all the attempts at getting the university management to withdraw it failed, the UCU moved towards industrial action in the form of Action Short of a Strike (ASOS), principally a marking boycott. This precipitated a swift climbdown on the part of management and a successful resolution of the dispute in favour of the Union and its members”. [Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017, forthcoming]

Articulate an alternative vision and vocabulary of excellence in academia

The activists felt that they ‘fought hard but without bitterness’. It was important for them to not personalise the campaign as being against the VC and senior management. An alternative to RTB was drafted under the title ‘Improving Research Together’ (IRT).This recognised the need to be seen to perform well in key audit exercises, and asked management to withdraw RiPE and engage in the proposed IRT alternative as, “an inclusive, collegial, evidence-based, bottom-up process to devise a non-coercive framework in which to foster a higher-performing research community”(Academic Frameworks for Research Improvement, Newcastle University / University and College Union, June 6, 2016). [Morrish & The Analogue University, 2017, forthcoming]

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Dragged from the plane in academia…time for a culture hack

I’m sure this incident recorded by a passenger on United Airlines will be remembered long after 10^th April 2017.

Watching this poor man being violated and treated so inhumanely disturbed me in a very profound way. It stayed with me as a reminder of what seems like an increasingly uncivil, uncaring and ruthless society. There is a massive amount wrong with being dragged off the plane when you have paid for a seat, and settled in for take-off. Sitting with your family and looking forward to getting home. And then two men charge at you and break your face and humiliate you as if nothing about you was valuable, and as if you didn’t matter to anyone, least of all the company. As if you were a criminal.

We all know that the CEO’s first instinct was to defend the actions of the Chicago ground crew and security. He was forced to backtrack within days in the face of viral bad publicity on social and news media. Then on 28^th April 2017 there arrived in my inbox an email from United CEO Oscar Munoz which fulfilled all the criteria for a sincere and abject apology. Most significant was this section:

“It happened because our corporate policies were placed ahead of our shared values. Our procedures got in the way of our employees doing what they know is right”.

Right there, that sounds like a major change of corporate direction. A kinder, humbler more intelligent United Airlines which places trust in the wisdom and experience of its employees. Things may be looking up for United. My rage and fear softened. I dared to think I could bestow the trust they are so anxious to earn. I hope I’m right. They had clearly taken a leaf out of Amtrak’s book when the company emailed customers immediately after the last derailment in Pennsylvania. In that letter, the Amtrak CEO expressed sympathy with bereaved families, and unequivocally took responsibility.

Kate Bowles evidently received the same email from Oscar Munoz as I did. In her recent blog piece, she made the connection between the brutality and carelessness the passenger faced, and some of the behaviour we and our colleagues have been witnessing in universities. At one extreme, we remember the professor slammed to the ground by police for allegedly jaywalking on the campus of Arizona State University. More typically in universities the harm is psychological and involves demoralizing or victimizing colleagues. Kate has now activated ‘dragged off the plane’ as a metaphor for those violations. I found it staggeringly powerful when she placed it in an academic context because this is, after all, what drove me out – watching one after another of my colleagues being dragged off the plane. And Kate points out, it is no easier for those in positions of leadership.

“Workplace leaders, on the other hand, have more on the line; they’re watching the rising tides of redundancy and job casualisation around them, and hoping that by clambering to higher ground they can stay one step ahead of what’s coming. On top of this, they’re increasingly seeing colleagues being dragged from the plane, and responding with helplessness and loss. And this is the climate in which they have to lead”.

It certainly is a tough climate for university leaders, especially middle managers. Many feel pressured by those above them in then hierarchy, and distrusted by those they manage. I often read appeals on Twitter from this constituency – why don’t more academics come forward for leadership roles?

In post-92 UK universities particularly, positions such as Head of Department or Dean are not rotating, they are substantive. This means that if you decide the job isn’t for you, there is no faculty position to step down to. Consequently, the middle manager must learn to align their displays of loyalty towards their masters in the university senior management team, rather than their former academic colleagues. This puts in place structures which exact obedience. An example: a new vice-chancellor arrives and demands a restructuring of faculties and departments. Four departments are collapsed into three, which means somebody loses their Head of Department position. Or another scenario is when the job is redesigned with new criteria and the incumbent has to apply for their own job, or endure a demeaning ‘mapping exercise’ which has less to do with competence than with compliance. As one PVC put it to me, ‘you keep getting shafted’. Dragged from the plane, bruised, humiliated. Your loyalty and willingness to accept leadership and responsibility can swiftly become your downfall. This can lead individuals to shelve those widely-held values of democracy, shared decision making and collegiality that have usually held sway in universities. I have previously blogged about the disgraceful treatment of professors and other senior scholars in universities here and here.

In another blog, Jana Bacevic wonders why, when there are so many critiques of the neoliberal, managerial university, is there so little resistance? I think there may not be so much mystery in this. All academics have been made to feel precarious and unworthy and it has led to a focus on meeting the metrics and staying ahead of the escalating demands of the university’s performance expectations. Raising a voice or organising with colleagues to change these absurd conditions seems too much like a risk when there is a mortgage to pay and children to feed. Managers know this, which is why they build structures to feed on academic insecurities – ‘imposter syndrome’- and incorporate employees into an anxiety machine (Hall and Bowles, 2016). So it is as much as academics dare, to reflect and write about their experiences in a rather dispassionate analytic way. Even this leads to a Catch 22 situation whereby academics find themselves required to publish, but publish to satisfy an urge to rebel by tilting at the REF windmill with their (published and peer-reviewed) critique.

Somehow, over the years, like United Airlines, the scale of perversity has driven a stake through any pretence of shared values within universities. We have forgotten how to use any initiative outside of the policies, procedures and line management which directs our work. And like United, there have been instances of brutality and inhumane treatment, just nobody has yet caught it on video. We know that systems and institutions which place rigid and impersonal procedures ahead of ethics and humanity will fail, and fail publically. They will experience the humiliation they have meted out to their employees and other ‘partners’.

So for me, the question is not why there is so little resistance – clearly bullying and repression account for that, but how can resistance take shape? Kate Bowles offers a way forward.  In order to reclaim our shared values – the values of all those who work within universities – not just those who claim the highest salaries – we must tell our stories and make space to listen to others. This is known as values-centered narrative practice, and university managers would do well to ditch the mindfulness seminars and the aromatherapy rooms and get training on this. In this way, we would enable the co-creation of values narratives which could inform the institution from the ground upwards. It would certainly win more support than the banalities of the strategic plan. We need to do this because the repressive, authoritarian atmosphere of many universities just isn’t us. Hardly a week has gone by since the Times Higher printed my piece on quitting academia that someone hasn’t posted it on Twitter with the news that they too are leaving. A few days ago, I received this email:

“You articulate so well the problems of contemporary academia.  It is important that this issue is public and I thank you for being a voice of reason amongst the madness. Yes, I have made this difficult decision as every day was becoming more and more a battle with my values. I could no longer be proud of what I do, which now feels like exploitation of staff and students for profit to oil the corporate machine.  Dedicated colleagues are so ground down and demoralised that it makes the workplace a grim environment”.  (quoted with permission)

I have had many emails like this and my Twitter timeline is testament to the many voices who feel it is time for academia to do better than this. Whether management or employee, we are well equipped with skills of articulating problems and listening to alternative answers. As Oscar Munoz put it, meaningful actions speak louder than words. It is time for a culture hack. My next post will offer some suggestions for those actions.