Motion passed at a quorate Brunel UCU Branch meeting 29th May 2024:

As scholars, we have watched with horror as Israel has systematically and deliberately decimated the higher education infrastructure in Gaza. Israel has destroyed or damaged all 12 Universities in Gaza , impacting 88,000 students. As documented by the Palestinian Ministry of Education and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, since the beginning of the war, the Israeli army has killed 4,327 students and injured 7,819 others, while 231 academics and administrators have been killed and 756 injured during the ongoing attacks. The Israeli army has also killed 94 university professors. The number of students and educational staff killed in such a short period is unprecedented in the region’s history[1].

On 11  October 2023, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the Islamic University in Gaza City – one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the besieged Strip. On 17 January 2024, the Israeli military used a controlled explosion to destroy Al-Isra University. The destruction by the air, sea and ground offensives amounts to a scholasticide. The term captures the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure. Scholasticide facilitates the physical and cultural erasure of the Palestinian people and is integral to rendering the Gaza Strip uninhabitable by Palestinians. Israeli colonial policy in Gaza has shifted from a focus on systematic destruction to total annihilation of education.

Denying access to education through the destruction of educational infrastructure, along with deliberate and indiscriminate killing of educators and students, are essential attributes of the collective punishment Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza, in violation of international humanitarian law. As an occupying power, Israel’s targeting of Palestinian educational institutions, staff and students violates the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 relating to the protection of civilians in times of war. International humanitarian law strictly prohibits attacks directed against civilian objects (including education facilities) and civilians (including teachers and students) and requires that states take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize harm to both civilians and civilian objects. Attacks intentionally directed against civilians or civilian objects, including educational infrastructure, can constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

As university workers, educators, researchers and students, we have a moral obligation to speak out against scholasticide. We raise our voices with Palestinian scholars and the people of Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Stop the war, stop the occupation and apartheid! Ceasefire Now!

We express our solidarity to all antiwar protestors in the USA, the UK and everywhere, and send our unwavering support to all students and faculty that have been arrested, suspended, threatened and harrassed. We will not be silenced.

We raise our voice with students, workers, and our own Union who has called for  Ceasefire Now and expressed its support for campus Palestine protests. Reaffirming Brunel UCU solidarity to Palestinian anti-colonial struggle as well as our right to academic freedom. In response to the horrific situation we find ourselves seven months into this war, We demand that the Brunel University management: 

• joins us in publicly condemning Israel’s attacks on Palestinian intellectual and educational life in Gaza. As an academic institution, Brunel University London has a duty to condemn scholasticide and to voice its solidarity with colleagues and students in Palestine, similar to the University’s declaration of solidarity with Ukraine and Ukrainian colleagues in February 2022;
• takes concrete steps to establish collaboration with one or more Palestinian universities, to support the rebuilding of education;
• provides scholarships for Palestinians from Gaza to study at Brunel University;

• calls for an immediate andpermanent ceasefire, including compliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2728 of 25 March 2024.

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza

Neil died peacefully on Saturday March 30th 2024 aged 82, surrounded by the love and care of his family.

Words cannot express our appreciation for the many crucial contributions Neil has made to the Brunel UCU Branch throughout the years. Whether it was as Health & Safety Officer, Secretary, Treasurer, or Caseworker (to name just a few of the many roles he’s filled), he has brought superb dedication, skill, forethought, support, and expertise to not only the Branch Committee, but also countless Branch members. For some of our lean years, Neil was the one who, for all intents and purposes, single-handedly held the Branch together, and our Branch wouldn’t be the great Branch it currently is without this.

The Branch will continue to be inspired by his selfless acts on our behalf, and we as a Branch Committee – and, more generally, we as a Branch – are indebted to his decades of service.

Solidarity to staff in Greek universities opposing the bill that permits the establishment of private universities.

Brunel UCU express our solidarity to colleagues and students in Greece who mobilise against the establishment of private universities in Greece.

Greek universities remain tuition-free to this date due to the decades-long, relentless action by student and labour unions. This bill will deliver a fatal blow to free public higher education, ultimately forcing public universities to impose tuition fees to compete against private providers.

In the UK, we know the consequences of the marketisation of Higher Education only too well; the only results this bill is guaranteed to achieve are worse working conditions for staff, barriers to Higher Education- especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds- and research and teaching dictated by the market and not by the needs of society.

[Unanimous vote as an informal resolution at an EGM 17.01.24]

Brunel University UCU expresses its sadness and devastation at the recent massacres in Israel and ongoing genocide in Gaza targeted at civilians, and affirms our solidarity with the Jewish people, and the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and decolonisation. We understand that many in our community will be affected by these events and we extend our support to all of them, especially to those students and colleagues who may have lost loved ones or whose loved ones are under direct threat of attack. We mourn the loss of life, defend our right to freedom of speech and protest, and condemn all forms of racism, including antisemitism, anti-Palestinianism, and Islamophobia.

This branch notes:

1. The bloodshed in the Middle East that has been going on and rising for days and has already resulted in thousands of innocent people losing their lives in Israel and Gaza and many more injured. Palestinians in Gaza live without food, water and electricity while an unprecedented siege and murderous attack is being carried out to flatten the Gaza Strip with rising numbers of Palestinian civilian victims, which threatens to ignite the entire Middle East region.
2. The 75-year occupation and illegal settlement of the occupied Palestinian territories by the Israeli state and the continuous, daily crimes, the apartheid regime, as well as the inhumane 17-year blockade of Gaza. These crimes against the people of Palestine have been committed for decades, under the tolerance and support from all the large imperialist powers, the USA, the UK and the European Union and the rest of their NATO allies.
3. The British government is complicit in colonial occupation and war crimes, from the Balfour Declaration and the suppression of the Arab Revolt right up to the current government’s political, economic and military backing for Israel’s far-right government in its collective punishment of Palestinian residents of Gaza. Israel is committing collective punishment against the people of Gaza with the full support of the British government.
4. The worrying rise of attacks on academic freedom across UK campuses, fuelled by the divisive and hypocritical position of the Home Secretary, and perpetuated through abusive reporting in news outlets and social media, which led already to anti-democratic actions such as the suspension of the UCL Marxist society from the UCUL SU. We highlight the dangers of the IHRA definition of antisemitism on free speech and academic freedom as articulated in the recent BRISMES/ELSC report.

This branch believes that:

1. The root cause of the conflict is the ongoing illegal military occupation and settlement expansion of Palestinian territories and the violation of the rights of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Israeli B’tselem have reported that these accumulate to the crime of Apartheid.
2. There can be no lasting or just peace under the ongoing conditions of the Israeli siege of Gaza, or of Israeli occupation, colonisation, and apartheid across Palestine. These are conditions which Palestinians have a right to resist.
3. The only way to secure and consolidate peace and security for the people in Palestine and Israel, but also in the wider Middle East, is to immediately end the Israeli occupation and settlement in the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories, as provided for in the UN resolutions, and to guarantee the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

Brunel UCU resolves to:

Raise our voices in solidarity at the face of genocide and erasure, standing with the Palestinian people, with our colleagues in Birzeit University, and in all Palestinian Universities, colleges schools, and Palestinian trade unions: we will not be silent, and that indeed now are all Palestinians. We call on members and colleagues to participate in solidarity protests.

Firmly oppose racism in all forms. We unequivocally declare that it is unacceptable to equate all Jewish people with the Israeli state; and that is unacceptable to equate all Palestinians and Arabs with Hamas. All members should be able to express their opinions, and everyone should be free to criticise governments across the world. This includes being free to criticise the Israeli government without accusations of antisemitism. This is indeed what some Jewish organisations already are doing. Following the recommendations of the ELSC/BRISMES, we call on Brunel University to rescind the adoption of the IHRA definition.

In addition to the actions that have already been taken by the national UCU on Israel/Gaza and on Academic Freedom, Call on UCU to:

1 Activate and promote the recent congress resolutions in support of Palestine and to stand against the government’s attempt to put under attack the academic free speech and to threaten critical academics and students for supporting the cause of the Palestinian people.

2 Coordinate actions with sister unions and demand from the UK government to:

a) Stop supporting the Israeli invasion in Gaza and to withdraw all UK military, navy and airforce from the area.

b) Promote the only just and peaceful resolution to the Palestinian cause, with the immediate recognition of the Palestinian state at the 1967 borders.

c) Guarantee free speech and democratic rights by withdrawing authoritarian policing measures and threats against protesters from the Home Secretary, and also, reaffirm the right of academics to discuss these in class and in their research – as enshrined in the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill  regulated by the Office for Students.

d)     Support BDS.

[Passed at a quorate branch meeting: 23.10.23]

This Branch notes:

• The attempts to intimidate and silence Palestinians around the world, including the murder of a child in Chicago and the cancellation by the Frankfurt Book Fair of a ceremony to honour the author Adania Shibli.
• Similar attempts in Britain, including: HMG’s demand that civil-society institutions side publicly and overtly with the Israeli state; the Home Secretary’s threatened restrictions on displaying the flag of Palestine; recent arrests of protestors for no other reason than that they wore the keffiyeh and/or held a Palestine flag; the police-enforced cancellation of the launch by the Jewish American journalist Nathan Thrall of his “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story.’
• The proliferation of McCarthyite attacks on academic freedom across UK campuses, whipped up by national newspapers, which have targeted academics and suspended students and student societies who have expressed support for the Palestinians’ anti-colonial struggle.
• The statement by BRISMES on “the Attack on Free Speech on UK Campuses”

 This Branch believes:

• Freedom of speech and association are the lifeblood of a functioning democracy.
• Governments should not use war as a pretext to clamp down on protest.
• Trade unionists should defend the right of students and academics to express solidarity with Palestinians, at this time when the freedom to do so is increasingly being curtailed by universities and the British government.
• Attempts by the Israeli government and its supporters to define antisemitism in ways that prohibit criticism of Israel signify the attempt to silence defenders of Palestinian rights, and, in practice, debase the struggle against antisemitism itself.

Brunel UCU resolves to:

• Call on Brunel University to reassure academic staff that the right to education, freedom of speech, and academic freedom will be protected.
• Give its full support to UCU’s national policy to protect students and staff who find themselves under attack for expressing support for the Palestinians’ anti-colonial struggle.

[Passed at a quorate branch meeting: 23.10.23]

UCU’s higher education committee (HEC) voted to begin a marking and assessment boycott (MAB) from Thursday 20 April 2023. This means that from Thursday 20 April 2023, we are asking all UCU members in universities which are part of the UCU Rising disputes to cease undertaking all summative marking and associated assessment activities/duties. The boycott also covers assessment-related work such as exam invigilation and the processing of marks.

UCU HQ MAB FAQs: UCU – Marking and assessment boycott FAQs

BUCU MAB Letter/Resource for Students: Info for students on the marking and assessment boycott [MAB] | Brunel UCU

Local BUCU MAB FAQ: BUCU MAB FAQs | Brunel UCU

MAB Poster – Student information: https://brunel.web.ucu.org.uk/files/2023/04/MAB_StudentPoster.pdf

MAB Poster – Staffroom advice: https://brunel.web.ucu.org.uk/files/2023/04/MAB_StaffPoster.pdf

UCU HQ Recorded MAB Training session, delivery notes and slides: UCU – Marking and assessment boycott 2023

HQ Weekly MAB Meetings:

UCU University of Liverpool MAB video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5yNG7Fwew8

UCU Goldsmiths University MAB notes https://notesfrombelow.org/article/notes-marking-and-assessment-boycott

Notes From Below MAB Road Map https://notesfrombelow.org/article/road-map-branch-activists-organising-successful-ma

UCU QMUL 2022 notes on strikes and MABs https://qmucu.org/2022/05/03/guidance-for-participating-in-the-strike-marking-boycott/

UCU QMUL 2022 MAB advice for students https://qmucu.org/2022/05/03/letter-to-students-on-strike-action-and-marking-assessment-boycott/

UCU University of Leeds FAQs on MABs for students https://www.leedsucu.org.uk/marking-and-assessment-boycott-guidelines/

No Sellout

This branch notes that

1. The employers’ “offers” on pay and conditions and USS are not strong enough to qualify for a pause of action: no improvement with respect to the 5-6% pay uplift, that union members have already rejected, has been offered; vague promises to discuss casualisation and workload frameworks do not constitute an offer; the restoration of our USS benefits and reduced member fees are conditional on the outcome of the valuation; and consulting UCEA members on abolishing “involuntary” zero-hours contracts adds insult to injury, by adding caveats to abolishing the most exploitative form of work contract, even as it claims to be a move of good will from the employers.
2. Neither branches, nor the Union’s democratic structures (HEC and negotiators) have been consulted in order to pause the action, which is a direct violation of our Union’s rules.

This branch believes that

1. Pausing the strike action now amounts to a sellout of our struggle. It weakens us in the dispute with the employers and is damaging the prospects of the ongoing negotiations to deliver an outcome to our favour.
2. We are in this action to win, and the current non-promises are far from winning anything of substance.
3. The current “offer” is also divisive, by overplaying promises to uplift the lowest paid only, which deliberately creates a rift between the various unions representing university workers.
4. Members’ control of the dispute is the only way for it to be effective, by uniting members, all campus unions, and students around our demands.
5. Maximum pressure has to be exerted to the employers now, in order for those negotiations to have any effect. If our leadership is not willing to do this, we are.
6. Not addressing members’ concerns regarding the pause at the live UCU event by the GS on the evening of 21 February can cause members to withdraw support at a time when unity is of outmost importance.

This branch resolves to

1. Call upon the UCU GS and HEC members to stop the pausing of strike action, call back the strikes, and contribute in the discussion to find ways to keep up the momentum of our struggle.
2. To call upon the HEC to give notice to the employers immediately for strike action on 9 and 10 March, including for the 15^th of March to be a strike day in order to coordinate with other striking unions on the date the government budget is unveiled.
3. Continue building our own branch’s organising and membership strength, by focusing on research and academic related/professional services staff and coordination with the Student Union and other student organisations, and other campus unions, including outsourced workers.
4. Call under Rule 16.11 for a Special Higher Education Sector Conference to debate and direct the future of our disputes. Notice for this SHESC should be issued as soon as the number of branches requesting it reaches twenty.