Dear Colleagues

It might be helpful to have some comments from a veteran of the struggle against the antics of the UCU.

The union has been for some years the victim of a campaign by an extreme left-wing group, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who seek to use it for their own purposes. The SWP has no particular interest in academic matters, but it has seen the union as a soft target for promoting its own political agenda. The majority of members of the union are concerned with their job security, their pensions and their conditions of service. They are relatively indifferent to many issues that are of importance to the SWP, whose ideology is based on a hatred of capitalism, of the USA, and of Israel as a ‘client’ of the USA, and on sympathy for groups that are perceived as being exploited by the capitalist and colonialist West. The SWP has succeeded in capturing the union through the time-honoured tactics that are characteristic of such groups – strategic placement of their members in office-holding positions in local branches, persistent hard work at branch level, packing of local meetings, manipulation of the constitution and so on. By taking over the UCU, the SWP can advance its own agenda and can then claim to have the backing of an important and influential union. (It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that the UCU is not composed solely, or even largely, of university academics. Many of its branches are in colleges where no research is carried out; and within research-active universities the union’s members include many in academic-related rather than academic posts. Moreover, in some universities fewer than half the academic staff belongs to UCU: in Oxford the number of members of Congregation (the senior staff of the University), is in excess of 4,400 but there are only about 900 members of UCU).

Motions calling for boycotts of Israeli universities have been a feature of UCU annual congresses (and of the annual meetings of the union’s predecessors, the Association of University Teachers and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education) for years. On 30 May 2007, during its inaugural Congress, UCU passed by 158 votes to 99 a motion which, amongst other things, “encouraged members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions” in the context of an allegation that “Israeli academia [was] complicit[ous] in the occupation”. In September of the same year the union announced on its web site that it had received legal advice which made “it clear that making a call to boycott Israeli institutions would run a serious risk of infringing discrimination legislation. The call to boycott is also considered to be outside the aims and objects of the UCU.” Notwithstanding this advice, a very similar motion was passed at the next annual Congress of the UCU on 28 May 2008. In response, a group of 12 members of UCU (including myself), with the invaluable help of the well-known solicitor Anthony Julius, managed to get the union to drop the proposed boycott call through a threat of legal action. Roughly similar motions were passed (but again not implemented) by the union in 2009 and 2010.

This year’s boycott motion is thus in a tradition that was established several years ago. However, there are three new features of the situation this year that could be game-changing.

1. The UCU’s decision to reject the EUMC Working Definition of anti-Semitism.

2. The Equality Act 2010, which appears to strengthen legal provisions against discrimination. We must bear in mind that, as I understand it, there have as yet been no cases brought under the Act, and so it is not clear how the courts will interpret it. However, in the view of Lesley Klaff, a Senior Lecturer in Law at Sheffield Hallam University, the Act may be very helpful in challenging anti-Semitism on University campuses – see the interesting article by Dr Klaff entitled ‘Antisemitism on Campus: A New Look at Legal Interventions’, in The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, vol. 2 issue 2 (2011), pages 303-322. (I can supply a copy in case you can’t get hold of this article).

3. The involvement of Trevor Phillips, the Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, whose letter in response to an enquiry from the Jewish Leadership Council states that “[n]othing should prevent Jewish students… from being able to complain of harassment, racism, or anti-semitism. Such complaints should be taken extremely seriously by every institution[.]” (see http://engageonline.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/trevorphillips.pdf ). Mr Phillips’s letter refers to the Equality Act 2010, which perhaps gives the Act some additional credibility in this regard.

All of these matters require a considered, a sympathetic, and above all an actively involved response from Jewish communal organisations. Statements by eminent scientists and others have no effect on the SWP-led National Executive of the UCU. The boycott motion passed by the UCU in 2007 was condemned by HM Government, the International Council of Science, the British Academy, the Royal Society, Universities UK, The Russell Group of research-intensive universities, several individual British universities, and a large group of presidents of major American universities; the immediate Past President of the Royal Society wrote of it “Once again, a handful of UK academics are giving us all a bad name.” But none of that prevented the UCU from passing a similar motion the following year. The only thing that stopped the union in its tracks was the threat of legal action in 2008, which was made possible through the help of UK communal groups. I very much hope that the same, or other, communal groups will become involved in the present context.

With best wishes

Michael Yudkin