Are you on the Academic Board? Please read & sign!
We are asking all our members who are on AB to please sign this open letter calling for a Special Meeting of Academic Board to discuss Management’s proposals to ‘reform’ (read: weaken) Statute 18:
To sign this letter you should be a member of Academic Board. Academic Board membership is automatic for all UCL Professors (Clinical and Non-Clinical), and other staff are members by virtue of election.
As you may be aware, UCL management has been trying to ‘reform’ UCL’s Statute 18 (the UCL statute that gives procedural job security to UCL academic staff) with a view to reducing its protections.
Currently Statute 18 (which is part of UCL’s ‘constitution’) gives robust due process rights to academic staff accused of conduct that could lead to dismissal.
These protections include
- a right to a tribunal hearing with a senior chair, a representative from the Academic Board, and a member of Council on it,
- a right to be accompanied by a qualified lawyer to the tribunal,
- an appeal process chaired by a senior, independent, legal professional.
UCU have found these due process safeguards crucial to upholding fairness and justice in UCL’s disciplinary proceedings.
Now UCL senior management want to take proposals to Council that will restrict access to these safeguards only to cases that a panel organised by HR deem in advance to contain ‘academic freedom issues,’ on a basis that has no clear criteria.
For more information see these summaries:
- 10 Frequently Asked Questions on Statute 18 (and proposed “reforms”)
- Management’s proposed “reforms” of Statute 18
The proposal to restrict access to the Statute 18 process is one of the main recommendations contained in a report produced by a ‘Task and Finish Working Group’ established by management.
Over 370 members of the Academic Board have already signed a letter calling for a Special Meeting of AB to discuss and vote on this very serious matter.
UCL UCU encourages all of our members who are also members of Academic Board to support the requisition letter (and, in due course, to vote in favour of the two motions contained therein).
We hope that by passing these motions, the Academic Board will persuade UCL Management and Council to desist from any attempt to reduce or limit the protections contained in Statute 18. Statute 18 should be reformed by ensuring that its protections apply to all academic staff, not by limiting it further to some spurious notion of a pure ‘academic freedom’ case. Colleagues may remember that in 2012, UCL accepted that Council could not seek to ‘reform’ Statute 18 in the teeth of opposition from the Academic Board as well as UCU.
Should UCL Management decide to proceed with its plans regardless of AB’s formal advice, UCL UCU reserves its right to resist any attempt to water down Statute 18, which forms part of our members’ terms and conditions of employment.
