THREAD. How to piss off thousands of dedicated university staff and strengthen a massive social movement against your own organisation, by @AlistairJarvis 1/
Working at Birmingham Uni a while back, hatch a plan, with Adam Tickell and David Eastwood, to deepen the privatization of HE via pensions, which you think are too complex and tedious for academics to understand so they won’t notice what you are up to 2/
Use your small but powerful white boys network to end up as CEO of Universities UK, despite having absolutely zero understanding of what academics actually do (who are not in senior management) 3/
Spend much of your time so far leading that organization to defend the disgustingly bloated salaries of your VC buddies using big phrases like "world class" and "world leading": telegraph.co.uk/education/2017… (headline doesn't reflect content) 4/
Carry out a pathetically unreliable survey of VCs across the country about the USS pension scheme, which leads to a dodgy valuation as a 42% minority of employers (of which a third = Oxbridge colleges) refused to accept the level of risk posed by USS’s employer consultation. 5/
Consistently fail to acknowledge 5/ despite a staggering bombardment of pleas that you MUST acknowledge it, coming from distinguished academics who dug into this mess with amazing rigour, and now want answers about why their pensions are being nicked 6/
Go into negotiations with UCU with your mate Tickell, and play a major role in releasing a shitty agreement that not only delays what only UUK and USS chiefs see as the inevitable, but demands that striking academics reschedule teaching 7/
Take out your frustration at the mess you created on an emerging social movement of university staff, by implying that they are being selfish by neglecting their students (whilst ignoring the student solidarity movements all over the UK) 8/
While doing so, completely ignore all the concerns about the gendered impact of pension reforms (and the equally catastrophic impact on early career academics) 9/
Instead of answer any questions put to you (esp Athene Donald’s letter with 3 brilliant questions), write a shitty piece in Murdoch press and say “The time I do not spend seeking a solution, I spend in reflection on what could have been done differently to avoid this dispute" 10/
Continue in your post, when your level of incompetence demonstrated is so gargantuan that any member of university staff who had demonstrated similar would be up before an HR disciplinary panel 11/
Try to rectify the ludicrous clown show of an organization that you lead by spending universities' money hiring Tory PR/advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi, but fail to send the Sunday Times a different photo of yourself with your article. END (I hope) 12/12 #jarvisout
