Campaign Update 23

UCU fudges decision 

  •  UCU failed to make a decision on whether or not to implement the pro-boycott motion today.
  • The first meeting of the new National Executive Committee decided to refer the motion to a Union committee, which will examine new legal advice that UCU is seeking and decide which parts of the motion can be implemented.
  • UCU General-Secretary Sally Hunt had previously said "Implementation of the motion within the law will now fall to the National Executive Committee". However, the NEC has now deferred that responsibility.
  • Commenting on the lack of a decision Jeremy Newmark, joint-head of the Stop the Boycott Campaign, said

"UCU's NEC has failed to seize a key opportunity to take decisive action and show leadership on the boycott issue. Instead, it produced a bureaucratic fudge resulting in a discriminatory motion remaining on the Union's policy books for months.

This is now a question of leadership. How long does Sally Hunt expect people to wait for the UCU to decide whether or not it will break the law in order to punish Israeli academics? Organisations and with a commitment to anti-Racism may choose to review their own relationships to a Union with an official policy that promotes discrimination."

 

  • Lorna Fitzsimons, joint-head of the Stop the Boycott Campaign, commented:
"If this was legal, the Union would not have hesitated in implementing it. It is clearly playing for time. Its actions show that the Union knows what we have known for the past 4 years; that a boycott is illegal and will be challenged in the courts.

What is perplexing in the extreme is the UCU's decision to continue to pursue this when it knows that it will end the same sticky way as last year."

 

 

Brown opposes boycotts

  • At his monthly press conference yesterday, Gordon Brown answered a question on his views on the UCU boyott proposals:

"Well, we have very good relations ourselves, with Israel. I have worked very closely with Prime Minister Olmert on issues affecting both our joint relationship and the region. And none of us want to see boycotts of Israel. That is very unfortunate."

 

Professors attack UCU policy 

  •  Two eminent Oxford professors have written an article in the Oxford Magazine opposing the UCU policy.
  • Profs. Denis Noble and Michael Yudkin wrote:
"We have noted before how, in their obsessive campaign against Israeli academics, some members of UCU are prepared to disregard the views of the majority of the membership, jettison the universally accepted principles of non-discriminatory interchange among scholars, and divert the Union's resources away from its core functions of protecting members' salaries and conditions of employment ... We now see that the boycotters are even willing to act in defiance both of the law and of the Union's own rules."
  • The full article is reproduced on Engage's website, here.

 

 

Israeli ambassador comments

"The concept of an academic boycott is a ludicrous oxymoron, undermining the democratic principles of free speech and free debate. Academics, who are supposedly society's guardians of knowledge, objectivity and informed debate, have seen their union held hostage by radical factions, armed with political agendas and personal interests.

 

  • Responding to the article, Higher Education minister Bill Rammell said:

"I do not believe calls for academic boycotts of Israel have anything more than small minority support amongst academics [...]

The Government is completely opposed to any form of academic boycott of Israel, which will harm rather than help moves towards peace and reconciliation in the middle-east."

 

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07/01/2009