Eric R Lybeck (University of Manchester)

Election address

I am a historical sociologist of universities, a Presidential Fellow at the University of Manchester's Institute of Education and have worked for some time at furthering the democratization of the way higher education institutions are governed. A committed member and activist within UCU, especially since the 2018 USS strikes, I have advocated for a particular idea of what our union could and should be moving forward. My work in the history of universities suggests we could supplement our relation to university management as a trade union - which is one of employee/employer in conflict - to also conceptualise our union as a professional association (in line with 2013 UCU report on Professionalism). From this angle, we are all equal members of our universities, colleges and institutions and we have delegated decision-making authority to management for certain (limited) coordination functions. This means university management should be working for us, our communities, our students - not the other way around! Having organised teach-outs and extramural public engagement during strikes and after, I can identify that many of our basic requirements necessary to pursue our professional work are the very things managers have recklessly stripped away. These include: TIME, SPACE and COFFEE - not metrics, surveillance and distrust.

Accordingly, I think UCU - working with other campus unions, including NUS, along with stakeholder groups from host communities - should invest resources and activities toward challenging and restoring self-governance and professional autonomy. If these traditions and  structures do not exist already - for example, in post-92 universities, FE colleges, and amongst professional service staff - we should lobby to create these structures moving forward. I see this agenda as aiming for a fully inclusive model of membership, including full incorporation and support for casualised staff. We are the Union and We are the University. These amount to the same thing.

To these ends, I am running for NEC on the new UCU Commons slate (www.ucucommons.org) to encourage a mass mobilization of all academics and staff on these terms initially, and then those co-created in future through pluralist and democratic deliberation. I have been arguing the case for governance reform since 2018 as a founding member of @USSbriefs. I am also an executive committee member on the Council for Defence of British Universities (CDBU) and I am an active member of Academic Senate at the University of Manchester. In response to the mismanagement of the university sector during the Covid19 crisis, I recently began a campaign to #ElectOurVCs and I will be working with the union and related organisations to lobby for this and related policy changes at both local institutional levels and nationally, with (and against) government, policy-wonks and media.