"Malignant shit funnels" and the sinister surveillance of university staff
Blog post by David Harvie
In May 2021 a tweet I had published eight months earlier resurfaced. On 11 September 2020, as the number of new coronavirus cases in the UK started spiking in what became the second wave, prompting a second national lockdown, I was party to a brief exchange on Twitter concerning many universities’ policies of ‘forcing us all back into the classroom’ – despite such shared-air teaching being unsafe. In response to a rhetorical question about the function of departmental heads – ‘What is the point of having a position of responsibility if all that they do is apply what they've been told without question? They think their job is literally just forwarding emails?’ – I posted simply ‘Malignant shit funnels’.
The tweet reappeared in the results of a so-called Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) that I submitted on 18 January 2021 to the Information Assurance Officer of the University of Leicester, then my employer. According to the Data Protection Act 2018 an individual has the right to ask any organisation for the information that organisation holds on them. The organisation must respond to the request ‘as soon as possible, and within one month at most’. (The alert reader will have noticed that far more than one month passed between the submission of my request and receipt of results – three and a half months, in fact.) January 18 was also the day that one hundred and forty-five University of Leicester employees, including me, received letters informing us that we were at risk of redundancy. In fact, three of us – all at risk of redundancy – submitted DSARs on the same day. All of us were prominent in our local branch of the University and College Union (UCU), as (highly effective) organisers, negotiators and caseworkers. We were not surprised to be targeted for redundancy. (In fact, of the sixteen colleagues placed at risk in January 2021, eight were either branch officers or departmental representatives.) Our DSARs all sought copies of our HR files and also exchanges (via email and other platforms) between various senior managers (including the university’s vice-chancellor, deputy vice-chancellor and the chair of University Council, its supreme governing body) and HR professionals in which our names were mentioned. We hoped to uncover evidence that our targeting for redundancy had been discussed by these senior figures, evidence that their attack was politically motivated.
No such evidence was revealed in the results of our DSARs. (Which is not to say no such evidence exists: besides results being returned to us many months after legislation stipulates, many pages were so aggressively redacted that literally the only legible words remaining were our names. Unfortunately, the UK’s Information Assurance Office, which is tasked with enforcing the law, was itself reluctant to act on our complaints regarding either the University of Leicester’s sluggish responses nor its overenthusiastic redactions.) What we did discover, however, from these first DSARs, submitted on January 18, was that middle managers – HR ‘business partners’ and operations managers, for instance – were monitoring the social-media activity of other university staff and reporting their findings to their superiors.
Who is Naddy Onions?
My ‘malignant shit funnels’ tweet was reported by a human relations business partner to the university’s head of human resources. It’s worth noting that the former has and did not have any identifiable presence on Twitter. It is unknown to me whether they chanced upon my tweet or were systematically, but surreptitiously, following me. According to the email they sent the head of HR they believed my tweet ‘over-step[ed] the mark’ because it could be interpreted as a personal attack on my own department’s manager. Their email contained three other lines of redacted text and, in the DSAR results as returned to me, was followed by a further four pages, redacted in their entirety. In other words, there is much I do not know. I do know however that no action was taken against me – unless one counts the fact that I was put at risk of redundancy four months later – and subsequently dismissed.
The results of my January 18 DSAR also revealed some other surprising exchanges. As well as that flippant ‘over-stepping’ tweet, I also challenged in more polite ways the University of Leicester’s policies vis-à-vis face-to-face teaching – and the way departmental heads, or mine at least, were unquestioningly applying these. On September 9, for instance, James Devlin, dean of the School of Business (my then-department) sent three emails to staff. In one he expressed surprise that ‘some staff are surprised by the fact that the School’s small group teaching is timetabled to take place in face-to-face classes’, before repeating the ‘institutional position … that … as much small group teaching as possible should take face-to-face, up to and including 100% of small group teaching if possible for those students studying on campus’. I replied (on the School’s all-staff email list) to Devlin’s email, taking issue with the ‘institutional position’ and his interpretation of it, and citing the most recent report from Independent SAGE and evidence from the United States. I also rebuked Devlin for his sign-off in one email, ‘Don’t panic’ – a far too close-to-the-bone reference to the inept and ill-prepared characters in the British 1960s–70s World War II sitcom Dad’s Army – characters who, themselves, never face any danger. This email of mine appeared several times in my DSAR results. The operations manager of the School of Business forwarded it to the operations manager of the College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities who, in turn, forwarded it to the head and deputy head of College and the HR business partner we’ve already encountered. The fact that in both cases the email was forwarded without comment suggests such monitoring of my communications to my managers and colleagues was routine.
These and other DSAR discoveries spurred me and other colleagues also threatened with redundancy to submit further requests to the university’s information assurances services. Now we were intentionally seeking information about the monitoring of our emails and social-media activity. In total we submitted perhaps a dozen or so such DSARs over the course of 2021, requests that were universally treated with disregard – the responses slow to arrive and implausibly redacted. But in one set of results, a new name appeared (i.e. not a university employee). Naddy Onions was a participant in a WhatsApp chat that also included Kerry Law, then the university’s Chief Marketing and Engagement Officer. A few minutes’ internet searching revealed that Naddy Onions was then employed at a Birmingham-based social media company WPR Agency – whose mission is to ‘to make good things happen for everyone in our world – the clients we serve, the people who make us, the community we love and the planet we share’. Assembling more of the pieces we figured out that for an unknown period starting in January 2021 – when the redundancy notices were issued – WPR Agency delivered to senior university mangers, including Law, reports titled ‘Crisis Monitoring: Redundancy Consultation Announcement’. These reports, which were quite possibly daily, including details of tweets and other social media activity of University of Leicester employees who were critical the university managers’ redundancy programme. It’s worth noting here that, in an online Q&A session with the university’s executive board in February 2021, Kerry Law insisted: ‘we don’t monitor staff social media accounts.’
Towards the Potemkin university
Our evidence is fragmentary, so there is much that we don’t know – and will likely never know – about the surveillance of staff at University of Leicester. But a few things are very clear. A number of middle-managers – we don’t know how many – systematically monitored the communications – social media and emails sent to lists – of other university staff and then reported their findings to superiors. The university’s management also hired an external company to monitor its employees’ social media activity – but lied about this. We do not know whether all of the surveillance was ordered, possibly by the then-Chief Marketing and Engagement Officer, or whether the individuals who carried it out were acting on their own initiative. But even our fragmentary evidence is sufficient for us to confidently conclude that this monitoring and reporting was sanctioned and even welcomed by the university’s most senior figures. The College operations manager whom we mentioned above was recognized for their work: in late 2021, a few months after the dismissal of me and many other colleagues, they became the recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Prize. The university’s Vice-Chancellor, Nishan Canagarajah, also rewarded his Chief Marketing and Engagement Officer: in May 2022 he elevated Kerry Law to the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor.
We also know that many colleagues – both those targeted with redundancy and other allies in the struggle against the restructuring – were threatened with disciplinary action on account of their social-media activity. Staff who invoked Orwell or Kafka or used words such as ‘putsch’ in their attempts to describe what was happening at the University of Leicester were typically sanctioned. In many cases senior management armed themselves with the university’s ‘Dignity and Respect’ policy, when taking ‘appropriate action against’ the, in their words, ‘small number of staff in breach of the policy in their social media communications’. We imagine that managers’ announcements regarding such ‘action’ had a silencing effect on other members of staff. In the context of a seven-month struggle against mass redundancies it is certainly the case that union organizers were required to divert precious time to defending colleagues – often ourselves – who had been threatened in this way.
We know that the University of Leicester is not alone in monitoring its staff and students. A recent examples include those of University of Sheffield which, in 2022, engaged the services of Intersol Global to investigate the activities of two student activists, and neighbouring Sheffield Hallam University, which has systematically surveilled at least one student activist. In fact, thirty-one universities have admitted students’ social media. Such surveillance is a further manifestation of the turn towards authoritarianism in British universities. As Vice Chancellors seek to control ever more rigidly what their employees (and students) say and do, and to erode any last vestiges of democratic governance (which must include the right to criticise the institution), the university is further hollowed out as a critical institution. The university becomes more and more a trompe-l’œil, a Potemkin village.
This blog post was originally written, in March, for the Council for the Defence of British Universities, which had commissioned it as part of its series on university governance. The CDBU accepted the piece in April and published it on July 26, under the title 'Surveillance and Information Control'. Just a week later, however, CDBU removed the article after a member of its executive committee 'expressed grave unease' – the reasons for this 'unease' were not shared with the author. UCU Commons has no such qualms and we are happy to step in and offer the article a home.
David Harvie used to be employed by University of Leicester, where he was also Leicester UCU’s communications officer and a negotiator. In August 2021 he was dismissed by reason of redundancy, a target of a restructuring programme called Shaping for Excellence, that resulted in approximately 200 staff leaving the institution. Some of those dismissed employees are writing a book about the struggle against those redundancies – Shaping for Mediocrity: Universities and the Cancellation of Critical Thinking – which will be published by Repeater later in 2023.