Goldsmiths Professors’ Forum – Support for casualised staff at Goldsmiths
[Signatures are being collected until Friday 12 June, and you can add your name using the link sent]
Recently, the decision was taken by some of our Associate Lecturers to engage in a collective withholding of student marks. This action has been taken in protest against the decision by SMT to freeze the recruitment of ALs and its subsequent refusal to pursue the furlough scheme and/or to extend contracts in order to cushion the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on some of our most vulnerable members of staff.
We recognise the tremendous work performed by our AL colleagues across all areas of the College, not least in helping us to migrate to online delivery of teaching and support. Without the vital roles they play, many of our own jobs would be unmanageable. We offer our full support as they seek to defend their jobs and to resist the precarity that has become an unacceptable feature of higher education. Due to our own workloads, we would not be in a position to pick up any work that is necessary as a consequence of the action they have been forced to undertake.
We call on SMT to rescind its freeze on the recruitment of Associate Lecturers and to recognise the crucial role played by those on fixed-term and hourly-paid contracts. We recognise the very difficult financial constraints we are operating under but believe that all alternatives need to be explored before making casualised staff bear the brunt of these difficulties. We are not satisfied that this has so far been the case.
Signed by:
Des Freedman
Irit Rogoff
Atau Tanaka
Natalie Fenton
Sanjay Seth
Matthew Fuller
Bill Gaver
Jan Plamper
Pat Caplan
James Curran
Anna Furse
Evelyn Ruppert
Charlotte Scott
Dennis Atkinson
Angela Phillips
Clare Finburgh Delijani
Roger Redgate
Alan Pickering
Kristen Kreider
Tony Dowmunt
Carl Levy
Anna Traianou
Rosalyn George
Dejan Djokić
Richard Grayson
Mark Johnson
Marianne Franklin
Marsha Rosengarten
Windy Dryden
Michael Dutton
Les Back
Michael Newman
Kristen Kreider
Janice Kerbel
Joan Anim-Addo
Chris Baker
Dan Neyland
Osita Okagbue
Keith Potter
Tim Crawford
Caroline Knowles