UCL Senior Management Team want to take new proposals for Statute 18 to the 28 November Council meeting for approval. The new proposals are detrimental to academic staff in that they:

i. Remove the right to legal representation for academic staff in UCL hearings that can potentially lead to redundancy, dismissal, or loss of academic privileges,

ii. Replace Council oversight over academic redundancies, dismissals and loss of privileges, with a Standing Committee on Academic Freedom (SCAF) that has only an advisory role, and one that can be ignored by panels dealing with these processes, or in the case of organisational restructuring redundancies, by Provost who can take proposals directly to Council,

iii. Include no provision for appeals against the SCAF decisions

Furthermore the proposals limit the operation of the SCAF to full academic staff, and do not extend academic freedom protections to research staff and teaching fellows, which was one of the reasons the SMT gave for introducing the reforms.

For the above reasons these proposals are inadequate and unacceptable to UCL academic staff. Effectively, academic oversight over redundancy, dismissal, capability, or loss of privileges is being lost.

We the undersigned members of staff at UCL demand that our existing rights under Statute 18 are not removed by management, and that Council rejects these new proposals. Instead, the employment law references in the existing statute may be updated, but the rest left unaltered, except where rights are to be expanded, or extended to other staff.

No staff rights should be removed from Statute 18!

(Note: you can sign this even if you are not a member of staff with Statute 18 protections, as the petition says that the only changes that are acceptable are positive: ones that increase rights or extend rights to new group)

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