Published: 15th January, 2019
Voting is now open to decide whether UCU members will take strike action (and action short of strike) in support of our claim (vis-a-vis our employers) regarding pay, equality, workloads and precarious contracts. The ballot closes on 22 February – so you must send off your ballot paper by 20 February to make sure your…
Published: 12th November, 2018
On Thursday 1 November, students and staff from across the University of Leicester came together to discuss how to decolonise the curriculum and create a more inclusive university. The event was jointly organised by the Students’ Union and the university’s Inclusive Curriculum team made up of academic and professional services staff, and coordinated by Azza…
Published: 26th October, 2018
Ruth Luthi-Carter is a professor in the University of Leicester’s Department of Neuroscience, Psychology & Behaviour. Now the dust has settled a little on the University Leadership Team’s withdrawal of the remaining ‘business cases’ for compulsory redundancies it presented last summer, she reflects on the prospective value of an alternative approach to managing change. The…
Published: 23rd October, 2018
Our union’s Congress Business Committee (CBC) has a seemingly thankless, but nevertheless essential, job. Its task is to sort the dozens of motions submitted each year to annual congress, filter out those that are ineligible for some reasons (submitted too late and don’t satisify criteria to qualify as ’emergency’, for instance), coordinated the ‘compositing’ of…
Published: 4th June, 2018
The following collective text was agreed by somewhere between 100 and 150 delegates (and a few observers) who remained after the attempt by the chair to close down UCU Congress. It is worth stressing that this was a diverse collection of union colleagues without any shared factional affiliation. The two Leicester UCU delegates’ report is…
Published: 1st June, 2018
There was nothing new from President Boyle at Wednesday’s Missive to the Masses. We’ve heard it all before…challenging times ahead, too much expenditure on staff, don’t recover enough research spend, pensions cost too much (ha!) and, as had been revealed the previous day, the University’s league table positions leave something to be desired (having plummeted…
Published: 29th May, 2018
Last week, we reported on University of Leicester’s performance in the Complete University Guide. Published this morning, The Guardian’s Good University Guide. Below we plot our institution’s trajectory over the past decade. Will it end in a sudden stop?
Published: 17th May, 2018
This afternoon, Professor Paul Boyle emailed all University of Leicester employees with a ‘University financial planning update’. The content and language was all too familiar. The president and vice-chancellor informed us that ‘we continue to face a number of financial issues, both local and national’. He also wrote Whilst other universities have reduced their staff…
Published: 11th May, 2018
On May 9, the House of Lords debated the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. Viscount Hanworth, aka Stephen Pollock, is emeritus professor in the University of Leicester’s economics department (now subsumed into the School of Business) and remains a member of Leicester UCU. Below, we reproduce his contribution to the debate. My Lords, the…
Published: 2nd May, 2018
The scandal about the Home Office’s mistreatment of the Windrush generation has dominated the news in the past week. Students at UK universities have also been victims of the ‘hostile environment’ as this story in the Financial Times makes clear, and British universities have themselves become ‘enforcers‘. The University of Leicester is complicit. At the…
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