THE University Workplace Survey 2016: results and analysis

...Half of academics are worried about redundancies related to metrics-based performance measures.

...The anonymised comments suggest to Gabriel that academics are exercised by three main issues: growing managerialism and associated “market-driven and rankings-driven policies, constant performance monitoring and target setting”; escalating bureaucracy and “standardisation that erodes professional discretion”; and “excessive preoccupation with image and hype: the bullshit factor, where everyone must be a star, world class, cutting-edge and the like”.

...“Unmanageable workloads, poor work-life balance and the associated stresses are unsurprisingly top of the complaints list for lecturers again this year,” comments Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union. “Survey after survey identifies increasing workloads and poor management as real problems for our universities, yet nothing is done to address the issues. Increasing workloads, higher rates of casualisation and diminishing support are not the way to deliver the world-class system that leaders and politicians say they want.”

...“University leadership are on record saying they want a high staff turnover and…[pursue] this perverse aim by setting unreasonable personal targets for all academic staff, enforcing them with a new draconian performance assessment system,” one academic at a Russell Group university writes.

...And a senior lecturer at a Russell Group university complains that “now it is all about metrics. Performance management is really a euphemism for: ‘If we don’t like you, we will get rid of you or bully you until you quit.’

...The failure of managers to listen to staff views is a major source of frustration for the sector’s workforce, our survey suggests. Some 39 per cent of respondents overall, and 54 per cent of academics, say that they can’t make their voices heard within their university. Only 25 per cent of professional and support staff feel the same way, but the comments suggest that the issue has a dispiriting effect on morale wherever it is felt. “Directives and decrees come down from [on high]…without any consultation or any consideration of the practicalities of implementing them,” states one IT technician at a large university in the North West.

 “We get crazy diktats – like they want to take all our printers away,” complains a senior lecturer in science at a Russell Group university. “Nobody bothered to ask us, or we would have told them that we need printers for our [scientific] instruments.”

 A senior lecturer at a post-92 university in the South of England claims that the views of academics are not heard by senior management: “Those on the ground, working with students, know what is going on and should be listened to, instead of middle managers who are merely yes-men.”

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/university-workplace-survey-2016-results-and-analysis

Bullying and Sexual Predators @ Academy Union (AU)

Last time we exposed long-standing bullying at Academy Union (AU). This time we focus on a specific case of what can happen when an innocent elected Union member falls foul of certain Academy Union staff “enforcers” of the union management.

So that our readers can understood how this injustice to a union member occurred, we have to emphasize that the real controllers of the Academy Union are the top management team who make all day-to-day decisions. Union Managers have a privileged salary, numerous job perks and subsidised life-style such as freedom to work from home. Academy Union staff enjoy working conditions which are much better than any equivalent university or college grade in the sector they represent.

Indeed the salaries and conditions of even lower-grade Academy Union officials are only matched by the professoriate salaries of union members in some of the older universities. In an academic sector which is increasingly casualized and a majority of academic staff in the UK are not in permanent jobs, Academy Union employees have some of the best working conditions of employees anywhere in the country. That may explain why only one of the top managers accepted the union’s generous voluntary severance scheme, and he (having allegedly received over £300k) renegotiated a new job leading the Academy Union Dictatorship Section.

When Academy Union faced financial crisis due to hitches in selling  two valuable property assets while buying and refitting a third, members took the hit in poor service. The union then spent over a £1 million to reduce its staff compliment by just ten people! Some of the pay-offs were spectacular- do the maths! Some of those “paid off” even immediately came back!

The highest beneficiares in the Academy Union’s generous staff trough are its top managers. Pay and perks @ Academy Union are so good for its staff that only the top 3% of its union members earn as much as the management team of their union. In short, only a tiny fraction of professors at elite universities earn as much as the General Secretary and union managers who are lavishly paid to represent them. That is even before we count the Academy Union’s Presidential Apartments, travel perks and even a bicycle purchase subsidy, pension scheme and union employee benefits. It certainly makes up for having to drink all that acidic “FairTrade” coffee which the union provides free for its staff.

The case we want to expose at Academy Union in this posting concerns an innocent union volunteer and an alleged sex predator among its officials. It also reveals the union’s failure to take action despite years of complaints about this union official, the inaction of his line manager, a cover-up disguised as a perfunctionary union investigation and the collusion of a union senior manager. The union volunteer was allegedly sexually assaulted by the Academy Union official at a union function witnessed by a dozen other union members including members of the union’s National Executive Committee. The volunteer was allegedly assaulted a second time, again during union work, the union official’s drunken behaviour having attracted the concern of premises security. Following the volunteer’s complaint his manager said she would talk to him and another senior union manager became involved as the official warned the volunteer that he would use this senior manager to silence him. Having served as a volunteer for close to a decade this elected member suddenly got a complaint from the senior manager about his expenses claims concerning such matters as his contact, his precise home address and his claim for carer’s allowance while he was on union business.

The senior manager claimed he did not have proof of the member’s address. The member produced his Council tax registration and a file of utility address confirmations for his home covering several decades. The manager claimed he wanted to know more about the caring relationship- something which is not even covered in union regulations. Nevertheless the volunteer happily provided full NHS certification for the caring arrangement. The manager said he did not believe the authorising doctor was curently practising and disproved the doctor’s reports as not being written with clincial rigor. The manager had actually mistaken the medical consultant for a different practice with a similar name. The British Medical Association then criticized the Academy Union for potentially slanderous allegations against one of its GPs. The manager claimed he previously knew nothing about the volunteer so could not be held to have acted disproportionately against him. The manager had in fact been named (for the first time at least a full three years previously) in the volunteer’s original sexual assault complaint as the Academy Union official had threatened him if he went ahead with the complaint he would use the senior manager to “bury him”. In addition, the senior manager had been involved in the complaint-review in which another manager had said she would “speak to” the official about his “inappropriate behaviour at a union function”. Moreover the same senior manager had negatively evaluated a case submitted by the volunteer for assistance from the union, some years earlier.

The extent of the union’s investigation of the sexual assault investigation was a two minute phone call to the volunteer made by another union senior manager asking how he would propose to evidence it. The outcome was that the union investigator, a colleague of the complaining senior manager, decided there was no provable case. The volunteer who was on a casual contract found his college’s human resources staff and his branch union officers were encouraged by the complaining senior manager to regard the volunteer as un-employed and stripped him from union membership.

To seal things the complaining senior manager set up a sting which undercut the volunteer when he relied on his branch to continue as a Committee representative. The volunteer had a long-standing branch approval to do committee work but within two minutes of his lodging his application for Committee nomination, the senior manager had undermined his support.

In short, this was a case of an Academy Union senior manager arguing with the human resources director of a college that a member could not have branch membership on the basis of his temporary but renewable contract offer. All this despite the union official policy to defend casual staff. The complaining manager at Academy Union then upped the anty against the volunteer by arguing he was foul of union rules requiring a contract to sit on union committees and thereby also calling into question the eligibility criterion for some of the volunteer’s past expenses. The volunteer made it clear he was blameless, had incurred all expenses in good faith and asked for an independent investigation. Academy Union refused, they ignored fresh evidence on the alleged sexual assault and concluded the volunteer had breached union rules with a view to expelling him.

The entirety of this process was overseen by the senior manager who was named in the volunteer’s complaint, but the union claimed that he could still morally do that while remaining at arms length of his own investigation. The shrewd result of this sanction is that it immediately deprived the member of branch affiliation and scuttled his request for an investigation of the sexual and collusion allegation. The volunteer was still owed more expenses by the union (if they accepted his eligibility) than he had ever claimed. The Union had suspended payment to him of meal, transport, carer’s and other expenses running into many thousands of pounds- a large sum compared with the expenses disputed by the Union.

The volunteer would like to use this forum to appeal for Academy Union to appoint a genuinely independent investigator into both the alleged sexual assault and membership issues. Such an investigation may compel Academy Union to produce previous complaints of sexual assault against Academy Union officials and allegations of alleged collusion between that official and the same named senior manager in regard to past compaints by the union’s volunteers. Such a process would also have to consider if Academy Union had permitted a culture of bullying at its London headquarters and that the Academy Union senior manager had also been subject to previous complaints of “union bullying”. The Academy Union has been criticized for allowing poor management practices e.g. an incestuous line management system complicated by marital and extra-marital relationships among its top employees, and a high level of complaints of staff bullying against the senior manager the volunter has complained of.

The Academy Union employee named in the complaint as an alleged sexual predator has a lengthy history of volunteer complaints. It is disturbing that the Academy Union which prides itself on equality services to members has such lack over-sight of alleged sexual bullying or that his line supervisor would regard it appropriate only to “have a word” with the staff member about his behaviour. This Academy Union senior staffer, again the subject of collusion allegations, has been referred to in previous disciplinary reports as the union’s “enforcer”, and as someone whose forcefulness had allowed his judgement to go unquestioned. We cannot necessarily look to our professional representation as a defense against bullying, and that Academy Union is not the membership-led organisation set out in its principles.

Many members now feel that Academy Union Congress, overtly its supreme body, is controlled by senior managers. However union membership is so weak and the Union Executive so “hands off” that genuine union democracy has long been sacrificed by its well paid Union employees. This web-site has exposed allegations of bullying across the college system, and where it exists, we are equally determined to stamp out bulling at Academy Union so that members can get the genuinely democratic representation their subscriptions deserve.

ADVISORY….This is a work of humorous parody and any similarities with persons or places real or imagined is purely a matter of coincidence. If you’ve been bullied at your union or in any F/HE institution don’t hesitate in complete confidence to E-MAIL:bullied.academics@yahoo.co.uk Victims may complain without penalty under their college procedures or consider making a complaint to their local police. Where the police are contacted bullying usually ceases immediately.

University of Ulster Victims Association

An association of former and current staff of Ulster University who have been subjected to systematic victimization and illegal treatment on Facebook:

https://goo.gl/27fntN

Bad PhD supervisors can ruin research. So why aren't they accountable?

PhD students’ relationships with their supervisors are pivotal; not only in terms of producing a good thesis, but ensuring academic and professional development. But while PhD candidates’ work is regularly checked by supervisors, it is far less common, to have formal checks made on the supervisors, with students assessing their performance.

The imbalance of power in these relationships needs to be acknowledged. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but only if supervisors use their position and privilege to empower students. When they say and do things that impede learning and advancement, it is an abuse of their authority.

One of the main duties of the role, for example, is to provide feedback on a student’s work. In my experience, this can range from general comments to close editing of sentence constructions and grammar. It can take the form of constructive feedback for improvement, or demoralising sarcasm. I have experienced the full range, and it has had a direct impact on my research. The most negatively couched feedback not only hampered my progress, but left me wondering if I should be doing a PhD at all.

Another vital aspect of supervision responsibility is to be, well, responsible. Unanswered emails only increase the anxiety of a student waiting for feedback on a discussion chapter. Unannounced departures for conferences, holidays and research projects are frustrating, particularly when they could have been discussed in advance.

A friend of mine had to deal with the sudden retirement of his supervisor, whose replacement then left after just six months in the role - he now has one who is on research leave with intermittent access to the internet (or is perhaps just intermittent with his responses).

The tensions and discomfort are more keenly felt by students, I suspect. We can’t simply turn away from an errant supervisor and go to another, but we can’t talk freely about how we feel – this is akin to bad-mouthing your boss.

I previously had to psych myself up for supervision meetings; the barrage of criticism I faced often left me feeling stupid. But this kind of thinking trapped me into becoming even more dependent on my supervisor for words of affirmation that came too little and too late. I constantly questioned whether I was good enough. After months of anxiety and stress, and with advice from others who suffered at the hands of the same supervisor, I made a decision to end the relationship.

Luckily I now have new supervisors who behave in more professional and responsible ways. I don’t believe that there is a perfect supervisor, but the ones I have are giving me the support that I need – being responsive, pre-empting future tasks, and most importantly, making me, a novice researcher, feel that I have a valuable contribution to make.

When students have horrible experiences with their supervisors, they tend to share them in private conversations with friends or in social media rants because there is often no formal channel to address them. My university seems shy about putting in place performance measures of PhD supervision, but is proactive about undergraduate students’ evaluations of papers and lecturers. Is there an assumption that PhD students and supervisors are mature enough to work out mutually satisfactory supervision arrangements?

As it stands, students are often left to manage tense relationships, find informal alternatives to make up for bad or non-existent supervision. Unless things become so strained that it is necessary to change supervisors (as it was in my case), students tend to put up with bad behaviour.

Maybe it’s because they think that’s the way a PhD is, or because they can’t see any face-saving way to remedy the situation. But it’s also because supervisors don’t appear to be accountable to anyone. When I have raised this with the academic staff who support doctoral students, I often get an evasive response – “It’s a tricky situation, isn’t it?” – or just an empathetic nod of the head.

There’s huge pressure on universities to produce research in order to prove their worth. If research is so important, then what about making a little more effort to nurture researchers-to-be?

Universities should not only implement performance evaluations of supervisors, but also cultivate safe spaces for doctoral students to share their issues, and have access to support staff who will be able to provide constructive advice and guide them towards workable strategies and solutions.

We need to get rid of the false notion of low-maintenance supervision relationships between consenting adults. These pairings are in fact high maintenance, and fragile. Ignoring the issues will not defuse a bomb that’s waiting to explode – one that could destroy promising careers.

From: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network

Witch hunt...

It is sad this is true in our academic institutions. I have been the focus of a "witch hunt" by a narcissistic bully Professor, Section Head. However, the professor worked with the Department Head and they both harassed, bullied, intimidated, coerced and threaten me as a student (Returning student after college then homeschooling 2 children and returning to school for the sake of learning). They have done these thing to me and forcibly made me withdraw. I have gone to the Dean, Provost and even the Senior VP of Academic Affairs. The whole academic side has ganged up and served me up to the disciplinary committee because the narcissistic bully and her "witch hunt" has me under the microscope. How do you fight the system? Where to go from here? Sad that freedom of opinion in the educational process is really not free.

Anonymous

What to do?

I'm at college in Glasgow just now and I'm being bullied by one of my lecturer but they're is nothing I can do about it because the lecturer is lovely to everyone else.

Anonymous

Bullying of staff in regional universities is a serious problem that needs addressing - Australia

A study of more than 22,000 university staff shows that academics in regional universities were more likely to experience bullying compared to those at other types of universities.

The survey, which looked at working life in 19 different universities across Australia, was set up to test whether the anecdotal complaints of colleagues at regional universities was anything more than the traditional complaints of academics about freedom, autonomy and managerialism.
  
What did the study show?

This was the first study of its kind to look at bullying across a range of Australian universities. Overall, 28 per cent of academics reported being bullied, with 12 per cent saying the bullying they experienced was serious enough to consider taking a formal case.

However, people were reluctant to take action as they felt pursing the matter would only make things worse.

The rate of bullying varied a lot across different types of universities. One third (36 per cent) of academic staff at the four regional universities reporting being bullied, 1.5 times more than in the five Group of Eight — the most prestigious — universities.

Disturbingly, 42 per cent of staff at one regional university said they had been bullied. Academics reported being publicly humiliated, excluded, intimidated and discriminated against.

Given the well-documented impact of bullying on physical and emotional well-being, these figures are shocking.

The institutional effects are also worrying. Workplace bullying damages productivity and reputation and can be seriously costly to universities.

Work-related harassment and/or workplace bullying has a direct cost of around $18,000 per claim, according to Safe Work Australia — and this is without considering the indirect costs to productivity and staff turnover.

Given the recent changes in legislation, which requires employers to demonstrate they have been proactive in addressing workplace health and safety issues, it's critical to understand what might be contributing to these toxic work places.

Toxic work environments

The research showed that Aboriginal Australians, people from ethnic minority groups, women, and those with family commitments were more likely to be bullied.

Evidence of nepotism was also evident, with individuals who were appointed by a competitive process reporting more harassment than those who weren't. And this was more common in regional universities.

Health and safety regulations require senior management to act to reduce workplace health hazards. But it's likely that at least some senior managers of these institutions are modelling and enabling the bullying and harassment reported in this survey, without senior level support, a culture of bullying would not thrive.

How to change this culture of bullying

Changing a culture that propagates bullying and harassment, even with a determined cross-organisation effort, is a long-term endeavour.

Using guidance from Safe Work Australia on how to prevent and manage bullying in the workplace, going forward, universities need to:

• Set the standard for appropriate behaviour — Senior management need to set and enforce clear standards of behaviour through a code of conduct or a workplace policy that outlines what is and is not appropriate behaviour. They also need to state what action will be taken to deal with unacceptable behaviour. Unfortunately, many university policies currently require the victim to make a complaint to the probable bully as a first step.
• Develop positive workplace relationships — Universities need to promote positive leadership styles by providing training for managers and supervisors on communicating effectively in difficult situations, including how to engage workers in decision-making "(which the survey showed has decreased over recent years in regional universities), and providing constructive feedback.
• Implement proper reporting procedures — A victim needs to know there is a reporting process that protects them and will be acted on. Unfortunately, fear of victimisation is the most common reason given for not reporting bullying in the study.
• Make sure reporting systems are confidential — Using systems to provide confidential anonymous information on workplace behaviour, such as university surveys, like this one in the US called The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education program, are easy to implement and safe for victims.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-19/bullying-in-regional-universities-is-a-serious-problem/6864972

UCU at Ulster declare a dispute with employer

Press release

The University and Colleges Union at Ulster University have this morning declared a dispute with the employer because of a failure to properly consult over collective redundancies.
In a redundancy situation, employers are required to consult meaningfully with the recognised trade unions with a view to reaching agreement on a set of proposals that are fair and equitable. The trade unions must be consulted on avoiding dismissals, reducing the number of dismissals and mitigating the consequences of dismissals.

Ulster University Management has presented its proposals, which include course closures and the loss of significant proportions of staff in targeted areas, as a fait accompli. Immediately after the proposals were announced, rather than enter a period of statutory consultation, courses were removed from the UCAS application system. An unagreed ‘voluntary’ severance scheme was opened to some but not all staff in targeted areas and was done so before the University published its business case to the trade union. UCU does not believe this constitutes meaningful consultation.

The closing date for applications to the voluntary severance scheme time is 30th October 2015. It has been offered to selected staff simultaneous to public announcements of course and departmental closures. Individuals have been placed in an invidious position of either applying for an enhanced package ahead of and parallel to consultation, or risk a compulsory redundancy on materially worse terms. The UCU believes the employer is bullying our members and is doing so with deliberate intention of undermining a meaningful consultation process.

Anthea Irwin, president of the local association of UCU at Ulster, said, ‘UCU are deeply saddened to have been forced into declaring a dispute with the University but we cannot stand by and allow our management to steamroller through a set of proposals that lack rationale, unfairly target colleagues in particular areas, and threaten the breadth of education we offer to our young people.

‘This should be a time of vibrancy and excitement at Ulster, as our students embark upon their new year of studies with talented and dedicated staff who inspire them, support them, and prepare them to make an impact on our society. But all of this is overshadowed by the fact that our management have demonstrated that they do not respect and value us, in the way our students and their future employers do. If they did, they would have worked with us to find a better way to deal with the Stormont budget cuts.

‘UCU have repeatedly asked management to consult meaningfully with us, they have not done so, and we have been forced to declare a dispute as a last resort. It is ironic that at the time the Minister for Employment and Learning is launching his ‘big conversation’ about higher education, Ulster University management refuse to have any meaningful conversation with their employees about how to best protect and nurture that education through difficult times.

‘UCU are ready and waiting to have that conversation, but we can only do so if our management halt their unacceptable process and start again in meaningful consultation with the trade unions.’

Contact: Anthea Irwin a.irwin@ulster.ac.uk 07742889802

University of Ulster Victims Association: https://www.facebook.com/University-of-Ulster-Victims-Association-1614149405477420/timeline/

Higher Education's Silent Killer

Sometimes the antagonist isn’t wielding a gun. In this kind of attack, there is no person or event that can be met head-on with a protest or a strike. There is no explosion, no great conflict, no epic battle. Such is the case with higher education’s silent killer: the slow, incremental creep of “audit culture.” Insidious “new public management” technologies first used by the Thatcher regime to weaken the public sector are restructuring post-secondary education today.

This enemy has no public face but instead makes its appearance in the banal metrics of a standardized bookkeeping program. The corporate transformation of universities has by now been well-documented in books like The Corporate Campus (2000), Universities for Sale (1999), and, more recently, Free Knowledge: Confronting the Commodification of Human Discovery (2015) and A Penny for Your Thoughts: How corporatization devalues teaching, research, and public service in Canada’s universities (2015). The capsule summary of such assessments is this: as a direct result of successive governments’ chronic underfunding of post-secondary education, the traditional university is being transformed away from an accessible institution dedicated to fostering critical, creative, and engaged citizens while generating public-interest research, to an entrepreneurial training centre churning out atomized workers and corporate-directed “R&D.”

...Audit culture is one of the more subtle aspects of the corporatization of universities. It contributes measurement and a new rise in managerialism to market in order to complete the “3M” trifecta of a fully neo liberalized academy. These forces operate in a variety of overlapping ways to affect what types of research are permissible; they determine which scholarship is legitimized and which is delegitimized. Such pressures on research have traditionally been exerted externally via corporations, foundations, and granting agencies, but the 3M trifecta has now moved with stealth to retool the everyday operations, policies, and practices of universities from the inside.The audit culture distorts scholars’ work by tabulating academic worth through the simplest algorithm: one that consid-ers, for the most part, only peer-reviewed publication, journal impact rankings, and the size of research grants. Whole realms of endeavour are devalued or left out of the equation altogether, including activities such as “slow” research, alternative forms of scholarship and dissemination, devotion to teaching, or actually acting on one’s research findings – all vital aspects of the academic enterprise...

Take participatory action research (PAR), a research methodology rooted in community engagement, collective inquiry, and on-the-ground experimentation. Under the strict publish-or-perish injunction of audit culture, I would be channelled away from projects like producing and distributing a city survival guide and map for the homeless – which I did in response to a community call as part of a PAR project – and I would be pushed instead to write a peer-reviewed paper on homelessness (to be read by few) rather than fulfilling a need that the community itself had identified. Research becomes a question of whose needs? To whose benefit? In this case, despite being in a position through my scholarship to contribute to the community in a tangible way, I’d be channelled away from community needs toward my own career demands and the requirements of an audit culture that rewards redundant scholarship...

From:  https://www.academia.edu/15061737/HIGHER_EDUCATION_S_SILENT_KILLER

Large Scottish public university rife with bullying, harassment, discrimination, and victimization

One of the largest public universities in Scotland turned out to be a nightmarish place to work. As a junior colleague I have been shouted at, threatened, made feel worthless, denied my rights, excluded as a co-author and pushed to violate grant conditions. Not only the Professor that I worked for is allowed to continue his abuse, but the Department Head sides with him. The formal investigation by HR found my ex-supervisor guilty of bullying and harassment, however the temporary arrangements are reneged upon and I am thrown into a lion’s den once again.

We are encouraged to use internal processes to resolve the matter, but with only 3 months to submit a legal complaint, they simply sit on the process and act compliant until enough time has passed and then they turn back to the same bullying tactics.

Does anyone have advice on repeated bullying, harassment, discrimination, and victimization? It is absolutely terrifying how even if the law is on my side, the only way is for me to lose my health, my career, my emotional wellbeing, damage my family relationships, lose productivity, all while the university and my supervisor feel invincible and just wait until they can demolish me completely. I can definitely tell you more about the details of my story, but I thought I would start with a short story first just to have my voice out there, to show how common abuse in academia is and how hard it is to get through, and how horrible the effect is. 

Anonymous