UCU: Academic freedom and the managerial use of institutional technologies

Motion

Motion title: Academic freedom and the managerial use of institutional technologies

Motion text: Conference notes:
1. Technologies can be helpful and even liberatory in educational contexts.
However, institutions often implement technologies without union
consultation.
2. Increasingly, institutions use technologies to control staff and gather metrics
in ways that can lack transparency, obstruct academic freedom and alter
power relations towards management, and away from workers.
3. UCU research shows that academic freedom is negatively affected by
managerial use of organisational technology.
Conference believes:
a. Technologies should not be seen as neutral. Their use for managerial
purposes is an academic freedom and industrial relations issue that the UCU
needs to better anticipate and respond to.
Conference resolves:
i. Based on the research recommendations see ‘Principles for Protecting
Academic Freedom in the Digital University’ and ‘Recommendations for
Unions’), to develop CPD materials to upskill UCU branches on how to
mitigate employers’ use of organisational systems as technologies of power
with which to undermine academic freedom.