About us

UCU Commons takes its name from what we have in common; our values, our aims, our union, and our methods, and from our collective commitment to fight for the common good in education and in the production of knowledge.

What we all have in common, from knowledge production to teaching provision, from secure and dignified working conditions to our stake in education communities, is being eroded and enclosed by marketisation and managerialism. We organise not simply to resist these forces, but also to articulate our vision of education as accessible to all, and to defend and promote that vision by strengthening our University and College Union (UCU).

We are the commons, the third estate, and we want to pull down the hedges that enclose education.

Who are we?

Launched in January 2021, UCU Commons is a broad activist community working within and alongside the University and College Union (UCU). We share a particular set of values and we have intersecting aims. These include: improving the experience of staff and students engaged in post-16 education in the UK; challenging the governance structures of post-16 education institutions; and transforming universities and colleges such that they serve the communities that host them, and society more generally. Participants in UCU Commons share a dissatisfaction with much of the existing practice within UCU and a vision for how to remake it.

The founding members of UCU Commons have diverse backgrounds and experiences both in the union and beyond it. These include: involvement in the 2019 campaign to elect Jo Grady as general secretary, USSBriefs, the Rank and File movement, the International and Broke campaign, and the Indignant Academics network; contributions to the Branch Solidarity Network’s branch activists’ handbook The University is Ours; and a huge variety of activity at local and national levels (as members of branch executive committees, delegates to annual congress and conferences, and elected representatives on UCU's national executive committee and equalities committees).

We are politically on the left of the union. We recognise the connections between the personal and the structural, and we resist structural violence as expressed through patriarchy, racism, sexism and the destruction of our environment. We are also committed to a politics of care, practised by looking after each other, our students, and ourselves while recognising the power relations we are subjected to.

Based on our founding principles, we want to harness the power of our immense and extraordinary workforce for the public good. There are over a million staff working in post-16 education sectors in the UK, and 130,000 of them are members of UCU. We can amplify our power by seeking productive consensus, both in our union’s structures, and in wider education communities.

Why ‘UCU Commons’?

Commons can be understood as social systems in which resources are shared by a community of users/producers, who also define the modes of use, production, distribution, and circulation of these resources through democratic and horizontal forms of governance.

So for instance the production of scholarship—teaching and research—is a production in common. Knowledge—the common wealth that we collectively produce—must accordingly be shared. But instead our current academic structures ensure that it gets eroded, stolen, privatised, and monetised through, for instance, exorbitant student fees, digital technologies and platforms owned by large private companies, and journal fees. At the same time the ethic of production-in-common which underlies so much research and teaching is undermined by individualistic appraisals and workload allocation models which pit staff against each other and against students, by consumer-focused evaluation of teaching, by ever-expanding staff workloads, and through ever-tighter connections between financial security and work ‘performance’. By destroying the scholarly commons, public sector education managers and large companies are stifling creativity.

How do we work?

We are committed to working democratically, transparently, and by involving a broad base of UCU members and external allies. UCU Commons is organised into constellations, so it includes a multitude of activities and groups. One of our core priorities is to transform UCU structures and practices, but it is not our only area of activity. Any member can propose a new activity or group, provided it aligns with these values. Members can thus pursue and develop their own specific political interests within our union and the sector. If another member wishes to raise objections—believing that an activity is not in line with the spirit of UCU Commons, for instance—then they can do so and the matter will be discussed in a caucus.

How can I be kept informed?

Please hit the subscribe button to be kept informed of our activities. You do not have to be a member of UCU Commons to join this mailing list.