UCU Coventry members are currently voting on the below matter.

The Case:

1. Restructuring – CU Group has repeatedly sought to restructure staff into various subsidiaries, the common theme always being to reduce terms and conditions for those transferred.  This is simply to reduce costs. However, CU Group claims that this is necessary to facilitate growth and has provided us with financial strength and security. 

Subsidiaries have not provided financial strength and so this has failed.

2. Growth – The growth CU Group has experienced over the last 10 years has been significant requiring extensive investment in physical, digital and staff resources. Coventry UCU warned about the risks of growth and the need to focus on quality, the need to place sustainable, organic growth over an arbitrary target such as doubling within 5 years those studying CU accredited degrees. Sustainability would mean being better able to weather any shifts in student recruitment, especially overseas recruitment, where numbers are impacted greatly by wider issues. For example see the decrease in Nigerian student recruitment following the drop in global oil prices a few years ago. 

If VC’s & ULT’s fears about Brexit and a post-COVID world are true then real sustainable growth has not been achieved and so this has failed.

3. Academic Excellence – The ongoing consultations about the abolition of the Associate Professors role is just the culmination of a process of disassembly of academic expertise, reinforcing a problematic separation of teaching and research through the instatement of “teaching and scholarship” contracts. This process shows a deep disdain of academic expertise, and a view of teaching that is reduced to the marketing and transmission of pre-packaged “educational bundles”, often through dedicated subsidiaries with inferior contractual conditions.

Abolishing senior academic roles severs the link between teaching and academic expertise, diminishing the opportunities for students to directly engage with new and current knowledge, and most importantly with the processes of its production. 

The VC & ULT have demonstrated a complete disregard of what makes a healthy University, and of the environment and culture, grounded in academic freedom and recognition of professional autonomy in which research and teaching can thrive as one. The VC and ULT have therefore failed and are therefore unfit for purpose.

4. Opaque Governance – The CU Group has severed any effective involvement of the wider academic community in decision-making processes.  It is very selective with the information it shares with staff and students, undermining any form of democratic representation of the wider staff community from the University’s own governance structures. They focus only on the legal minimum standards and requirements and only on that which serves its own ends. There must be a detailed model, with explanations of how each loss in different income streams was calculated, otherwise it appears to have no basis in evidence. It was also revealed that the current redundancies being discussed have been in the planning pre-COVID.

The lack of transparency has resulted in distrust of the university. If the desire was to create an academic community then it has failed.

5. Financial Strength, Shifting Sands – The 4 points above highlight the issues with the current situation that the VC has led CU Group into. The restructuring and growth were supposedly to improve the financial strength of the university and make it better able to meet the unforeseen challenges ahead. Staff have been restructured with their pay, pension and other benefits reduced. For those not restructured pay was held down; only 4% of staff in the contribution zone got a pay rise through CORE/Clear Review and so in real terms have become poorer. 

Yet despite all the claims that this was to ‘future proof’ or keep us ready for the challenges ahead we now find out that we are not ‘future proof’ at all nor ready for the challenges ahead. In fact quite the opposite – the growth strategy has left CU Group exposed, and yet again, staff are expected to pay the price. VC & ULT claim that they cannot use/access more of the reserves (that amount to double the apparent shortfall) – which makes us wonder, do they really exist?

By CU Group’s own measures it has failed.

On its own terms CU Group has failed and it is seeking to make up for these mistakes by doing more of the same – more restructuring which has been shown not to work. The Vice Chancellor oversaw this entire situation, has ignored dissenting voices and seeks to cynically blame current circumstances for his failures. The decision to put forward this case was not an easy one, Coventry UCU has consistently attempted to work with CU Group leadership in good faith but at every turn CU Group acted without any notice or consideration for the impact their decisions would have on staff.

United In Solidarity 

UCU Committee