Vote of No Confidence
Motion passed at a quorate Emergency General Meeting, Wednesday 13 February 2019
We, members of the Reading University branch of UCU, declare no confidence in the current University Council, senior management (UEB) and the University’s governance structure.
We reject the senior management’s current attempts to make people take voluntary redundancy by threatening compulsory redundancies in the near future.
Senior management quotes as reasons for this a fall in student recruitment, pension costs and Brexit uncertainties. Rather, we assert that the true reasons are:
- Short-sighted governance – recruitment trends and demographic dips are foreseeable;
- Mismanagement – expenditure on PAS leading to lower NSS scores, investments making losses, unnecessarily excessive spending including vanity-project buildings, the idea that higher NSS scores can be achieved with fewer staff;
- Adversarial governance – management referral to increased pension costs when there is an as yet unresolved dispute with unknown outcome, threatening compulsory redundancies while stating that finances are under control;
- Opaque governance – no effective involvement of the wider academic community in in decision-making processes; operating as though managed top-down communication could replace democratic representation of the wider staff community in the University’s own governance structures.
We have no confidence in a University Council that oversaw mismanagement and poor investment and spending decisions in the past, and we have no confidence in a UEB that pursues short-sighted, adversarial and opaque governance and threatens its staff with compulsory redundancies.
We demand that the senior management rules out compulsory redundancies.
We demand that the senior management clarifies its financial position through an independent review and makes this publicly available.