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NTEU Sydney News - April 2013 Edition
The latest edition of NTEU News is out now. This edition includes excerpts from the fantastic open letters and information about the elections for Staff Elected Senate Fellows and a bargaining
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Open Letter to the Vice Chancellor and University - Sue Woolf
"... I looked up from my research and teaching, and realized that the educational institution I’d joined so joyfully had become a severely hierarchical corporation that I hadn’t a hope of approaching in a democratic way. The style of management of our university – management defined, it seems to me, solely as the managing of systems, structures, finances and building, never people - has robbed the colleagues I’ve been proud to be amongst, colleagues chosen for their brilliant scholarship and eagerness to share it, of any hope of democratic governance, even of the courage to speak out."
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Casualisation and the Academic Workforce
Here is Kurt Iveson talking about casualiation and why the NTEU's academic workforce claims in the current round of Enterprise Bargaining are so important. He talks about how those claims will address the explosion of precarious and casual teaching in the University and invest in the next generations of academics. High quality education relies on high quality working conditions for staff.
Casualisation and the Academic Workforce
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NTEU Members Meeting: Motions
University of Sydney NTEU members voted today to take further industrial action if management does not move on core Union claims.
The motions passed at today's NTEU Members' meeting are
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Staff Elected Fellows of Senate - Important Voting Information
The elections for Staff Fellows of Senate open today. The NTEU believes it is important to support staff elected Fellows of Senate who have a good understanding of the issues facing University staff and the direction of the University. We are urging staff to vote for the following active, prominent NTEU members.
It is critically important that we have advocates for staff, the University and higher education as our representatives on the Senate.
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Open Letter to the Vice Chancellor - Robert van Krieken
"For me a central question that we all at this university need to answer, in a way that is persuasive to a reasonable proportion of those working at the coal-face, is: what does it mean to be a university, and not a brewery? What kinds of relationships and lines of communication should we have, especially horizontally, but also vertically? What does it actually mean for managers to ‘respect’ the staff they manage, what rules should they be abiding by? There are many people in senior management positions at this University who are acutely aware of the importance of these questions, and have arrived at a considered approach to how they should be answered. In my view these are the ‘best practice’ managers at the University. This round of Enterprise Agreement negotiations, including the industrial action, will have achieved an enormously positive effect if it generates an impetus towards not only answering these questions, but developing the policies, practices and institutional forms that give those answers a firm shape in the real world of university
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Sydney University is international news.
The Enterprise Bargaining Campaign at Sydney University and the Industrial Action that members took in March has made the Times Higher Education Supplement this week.
Nick Reimer from the Branch Committee is quoted in the article talking about the campaign. "Describing the agreement as “an unapologetic charter for a new era of managerial radicalism”, [Reimer] said that the dispute was not principally about pay and conditions but rather “core intellectual and educational values”. It had “taken on the contours of an all-out ideological battle between different visions of the university and its relation to other parts of society, particularly the economy.”
Raewyn Connell's open letter is also
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Love, Fear, and Learning in the Market University - NTEU Public Lecture
Many of you will have read Professor Raewyn Connell's powerful letter to Dr Michael Spence the Vice Chancellor at the University of Sydney, or will have seen the video made by Sydney University Staff. Together these are an eloquent call for a more collegial approach to running our institutions of Higher Education and a reminder of the critical place these institutions have in Australian society and so the necessity to protect them.
Professor Connell will be presenting a lecture entitled "Love, Fear, and Learning in the Market University" on Wednesday April 24 at 6:30 in the Eastern Avenue Auditorium at the University of Sydney.
We encourage everyone to attend.
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Open Letter to the Provost - Laleen Jayamanne
"The history of reason speaks to its continual power to generate life that is creative rather than deadening, joyous rather than fearful, critical rather than obedient. It provides us with a keen understanding of how reason may be perverted in the name of an instrumentalised model of thought and action. For example: recently we were told by senior research and management staff that what was needed NOW was “quality” not “quantity”. This comes within months of all academic members of staff being threatened with redundancy if they did not meet an arbitraryand retrospective quantity of research, with little or no consideration of quality. This kind of double talk, unaccountable capricious rhetoric to which we are ceaselessly subjected, makes me feel that I am a minor player in a very badly scripted absurdist play, perhaps Ionesco. It also creates fear, not conducive to thought and good health."• -
Open Letter to the Vice Chancellor - Nour Dados
"I can tell you that our lives offer us no such flexibility – rent still has to be paid, bills still have to be paid, and food has to be put on the table. No-one I know has a casual life, nor do they have a casual attitude to their work. Giving those of my generation no choice other than to accept precarious work conditions in order to have work at all marginalises and devalues our contribution to the collective knowledge that all of us benefit from."
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