Updated May 2022
This branch notes:
- Goldsmiths UCU successfully re-balloted their members for further industrial action in opposition to management’s decision to send out 16 redundancy letters to staff in English & Creative Writing, History and Professional Services in April.
- These redundancies include GUCU’s co-president, co-treasurer and both reps in one affected department.
- Goldsmiths’ management has consistently failed to engage in meaningful consultation, carry out sufficient Equalities Impact Assessments (EIAs) or provide fair and reasonable selection criteria for the redundancy process.
- Following 37 days of strike action & UCU’s greylisting of Goldsmiths, GUCU are now pursuing a marking and assessment boycott and other forms of action short of a strike (ASOS).
This branch believes:
- The targeting of trade union officers, reps and activists is a punitive act from senior management aimed at UCU members who have prevented them from pushing through their original plan of mass redundancies.
- Staff selected for redundancy include those teaching on Foundation Year courses which will reduce access to Higher Education for those already marginalised & excluded by the education system.
- Despite Goldsmiths’ Warden’s professed commitment to ‘liberating the curriculum’, the redundancies target academics whose research and teaching focuses on Islamic history, the Middle East, Arab migrant literature and African migrant literature.
- The aim of these cuts is clear – to turn Goldsmiths into an institution that embodies the Tory government’s vision of higher education.
This branch resolves:
- To publicly support and promote Goldsmiths UCU’s campaign to stop job cuts.
- To donate funds to their local strike fund to support their on-going industrial action and legal challenge.
- To observe the parameters of the academic boycott as laid down in this outline.
- To call on all UCU members in your branch working as external examiners at Goldsmiths to resign with immediate effect.
- To invite a member of Goldsmiths UCU to a forthcoming branch meeting.
You can read GUCU’s latest statement on the dispute and what is at stake here: https://goldsmithsucu.org/2022/04/29/gucu-statement-on-redundancies/