UCU Commons newsletter #19, 3 June 2026

Dear subscriber

Welcome to the UCU Commons newsletter, a curated set of links and information about what's happening in UCU Commons, our union, and our sectors more generally. As always, we welcome any feedback you may have on this or any other matter.

In today's issue:

What UCU Commons have been doing

Several Commoners attended UCU Congress and Higher Education Sector Conference (HESC) in Harrogate from 27–29 May, either in-person or virtually. We were especially pleased that our social at North Bar on Tuesday evening was so well attended (to the extent that the pizza place supplying our food ran out of dough, and we apologise profoundly to anyone left hungry!). 

We are delighted that the end of Congress marked the start of Mark Pendleton’s term as Vice President of the union. Mark will chair our Higher Education Committee (HEC) for three years, before becoming President and chairing the National Executive Committee (NEC) for a year in 2029–30. We are also pleased to report that Jo Edge was elected to the Conduct of Members Committee (CMC) unopposed, as the only casualised person to nominate. Jo will sit on CMC for a period of three years. Further positions elected at Congress are in the process of being counted and checked and will be announced soon.

Many of our members spoke in debates at Congress and HESC. Lisa Rüll, attending as a delegate for the University of Nottingham UCU, broke her Congress duck (third attendance, first time speaker) by speaking in support of motion HE18 regarding the significant lack of opportunities for Academic Related Professional Services (ARPS) promotions. Lisa says, “At Nottingham, ALL 3900+ ARPS staff received notice of risk of redundancy letters in April 2025, losing 350 people through voluntary redundancy. But with a wholesale push towards generic role profiles, staff are overloaded and struggling to access meaningful promotion. We've lost institutional memory and expertise, and in mid-May 2026, many remaining ARPS staff based in faculties were hit as part of the 2700 risk of redundancy letters targeting the restructure and reduction of academic subjects. We need to do better by our ARPS staff”. Lisa has also written a set of longer reflections on congress available on our website.

Michael Bartlett, attending as a delegate from the Open University UCU, has produced this useful blog post reflecting on his first UCU Congress and how its organisation and structure varies from that of the Quakers, which he attended a few weeks previously. We will share further reflections from Congress in the coming weeks.

We are very happy to announce a new data project, ‘JNCHES vs Inflation’. This dashboard presents historical spine point data against historic inflation measures (both CPI and RPI) to help get a clear view of the ongoing and serious erosion of HE pay over the last 20 years. The source is available freely and we welcome suggestions for additional features. Read the announcement blog post by Bijan Parsia.

News from UCU

After a unanimous vote by our HEC on 17 April to enable officers to act when necessary, UCU has issued a formal censure of Northumbria University on 28 May, in the fight over fair pay and pensions that the UCU branch is currently undertaking. If Northumbria management do not change course, a full international academic boycott will be considered. We very much hope to see improvements in management’s position over the coming days and weeks.

UCU is holding a hybrid meeting of post-92 branches on Tuesday 23 June at head office in Carlow Street, London. Each branch will be invited to send two delegates. Information will be sent to branch officers nearer the time, but we are pleased to see work around the specific struggles faced by post-92 providers, where many of us work, including Dave Hitchcock of Canterbury Christ Church. Dave says, “this meeting comes at a crucial moment for UK Universities and for the union. In many respects Post-92 universities have been the canaries in the collapsing coalmine of the HE sector. Post-92 branches have seen some of the very worst and most sustained job cuts and their members have endured years of managed decline and shrinking programmes. While this meeting might focus on the problems with the Teacher's Pension Scheme and universities hiring through subsidiary companies, it nevertheless represents an important moment for union and branch leadership to think strategically together about how we can push government and senior leadership to try to fix this mess".

In our sectors

Stefan Collini, Emeritus Professor at Cambridge, has written a scathing piece on the dire state of our universities in the London Review of Books. ‘Squadrons of Pigs: Bonfire of the Universities’ is a long read, which examines the root of the problem, and contains some valuable suggestions for action. This has clearly ruffled some feathers, given that Nick Hillman, former Conservative SpAd and current HEPI director felt the need to write a critical response suggesting that Collini is being ‘political’ in his criticism, and suggesting that the role of the Coalition Government’s HE ‘reforms’ in the current crisis are overblown. UK-elected NEC member, Sophia Woodman, said “In the London Review of Books 4 June issue, Prof. Stefan Collini undertakes a diagnosis of the dismal state of universities in the UK. His long list of morbid symptoms and their structural causes will be depressingly familiar to union reps across the sector, but laying them out so clearly for the political class is surely helpful. Collini argues that poor planning, dysfunctional competition and the fake ‘market’ created by the withdrawal of public funding has left ‘no room for strategic thinking’ in the sector around preservation of disciplines, quality of teaching and avoiding emerging ‘cold spots’ in provision of certain subjects. More could be done, but it would require a level of coordination among universities that is hard to achieve without some government steer. Within universities, aside from Oxbridge where faculty self-governance still exists, senior management teams concentrate on financial targets without accountability to the academic communities they theoretically serve. Collini thinks that revival of the power of university senates and election of VCs would certainly drive a more strategic and long-term approach, but says ‘we’ll see squadrons of pigs in the sky before that happens’. Pass on this piece to your MP”. 

In other news, UUK have soft-launched their Future Universities strategy and HEPI have released a piece on demographic decline and predatory recruitment as twin threats to English Higher Education.

We hope you have enjoyed this round up. Want to get involved? Join UCU Commons and work with us towards a more effective union for post-16 education here. 

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