UCU Activist List (aka the "Bigot's Playground")

Anyone following this bonkers boycott might well think the whole thing's over, finished, one for the history books (see under: racism in the British union movement).

Not judging by the UCU activist list - aka - the bigot's playground: we are already familiar with the sort of bigotry which comes courtesy of this List, since it's made its appearance on here before (the link is to that post's update and to the anon. comments it attracted, some of which have also appeared on Harry's Place).** Yes, that toxic forum which UCU offers, and here's the official line, to encourage its members to become more active in union business. This is classic UCU-speak which needs translating. In reality, it's the UCU encouraging its members to become victims of the boycotters' bullying, for this is how I've experienced the period since acquiring the 'privilege' of having my inbox polluted by the filth which passes for international solidarity work on there.

Just for confirmation that the boycott movement is as alive & kicking as ever within UCU politics, one recent thread on the list ends with the following war cry:

Let the mad people rant on... The boycott just will not go away! Why should it ...
(note the absence of a question mark!)

So that you can get the measure of the truly poisonous nature of this debating forum, this last message was written to end an unending conversation which had caused one academic, an expert in the field, to exclaim at an earlier stage in the debate:

I don't think I have ever seen such an archetype acrobatic of apologetics for contemporary antisemitism listed in so perfect a fashion. May I use it as a research document?

I am prevented from talking in too much detail about the List as it operates according to the most Stalinist of structures & rules, resulting in the eventual exclusion from the list of some of the best anti-boycotters posting on there. I say Stalinist because only anti-boycotters have been excluded in this way (never the boycotters); and only the most effective & trenchant among them, those posters putting arguments to which the boycotters could find no response other than this dirty trick of exclusion. I say Stalinist because you don't get excluded for posting antisemitism; you get excluded for quoting it outside the list! It's OK to post antisemitism to 700-odd people but it's not OK to give such antisemitism yet further publicity beyond this 'select' public! I say Stalinist because anti-boycotters have been prevented from posting messages from outside sources, even though many on the list do so without objection. Frequently! Only the anti-boycotters have been silenced in this way. [the link is to David Hirsh's comment on that thread]

Think of the ugliness which appears on an I/P thread on any day of any year on CiF. Think boycotting academics with apparently WAY too much time on their hands. And you've roughly got the picture!

The List is dominated by the boycott movement and arguments about the antisemitism which it symbolizes, together with other nefarious manifestations of the politics sustaining the movement. It is not about becoming more active in union business; it is about ensuring that everyone is so detained in this one issue that they have neither the time, nor the space, nor even the will to discuss anything else, let alone the bread & butter issues which a union should be deliberating, especially at a time such as the present, when British academia is facing such grave problems.

Perversely, for some UCU members, the picture I have painted gets perceived from their perspective as a debate forum which seems to offer a kind of diverting & entertaining sport. One recent poster explained how he was returning to the debate as a "nice break" from marking - "to see how the debate was going"!!

For the rest of us, however, as David Hirsh has put it, it's "puerile, toxic, boring, repetitive and dangerous." And damaging and distracting and debilitating... etc ETC ETC

My last post, on having A Room of One's Own, was motivated by witnessing the latest fight on the List, yet another in a long and shameful line, and particularly the efforts of one fine academic on there who was speaking for so many of us in taking on the hate-filled messages being dumped on there by our boycotting 'colleagues.' Quite apart from the toll such activity must take, both psychologically and in terms of an academic's ability to produce excellent scholarship (which is the phenomenon Woolf was describing in a different context), I wondered how this academic could manage to absorb such hate, contain it, and then proceed to reply with cool logic & reason when, to me, the only response which seems fitting is a loud

F OFF!!!!

Readers, you'll have realized by now that I'm not of a disposition & nature to have what it takes to respond in this vein. Instead, I just watch on in silence, paralyzed, like a rabbit trapped in the glare of headlights in the middle of a motorway.

Worse, instead of just closing down the window through which all this filth enters my life - to get on with that life, as best I can in the circumstances - I squander most of my productive time, detained in thinking how and by what means I might acquire the constitution to respond to this sort of venom. It seems to be beyond me - I am not, as an academic, used to dealing with argument waged in these uncivil and pugnacious terms; and I don't seem to have developed the skills required. All I can do is look on, in horror, at the messages being submitted by the boycotters - horror, I tell you; and in admiration, at the messages posted by those few valiant academics on there who manage, somehow, and at great cost, to take these disgraceful boycotters on.

I am amongst those silent on-lookers mentioned by Eve Garrard in an excellent blog post which makes me feel so ashamed about my (non)response to all this. Her post describes just one of a countless multitude of offensive, shameful postings and observes that

the most striking feature of the remark was not that it was made by a pro-boycotter, nor that it reeks of classic anti-Semitic thinking about the power of Jews... It wasn't even that none of the pro-boycotters disowned this remark or spoke out against its being made, though that was indeed the case. No, the most striking aspect of the whole event was that not one single person, from all of those relatively unengaged UCU activists who read the remark, found anything worth objecting to in it. None of them protested about it. Such things have indeed become normalized, unexceptionable, unworthy of remark - and this in an academic sub-culture which prides itself, as the UCU vociferously does, on its anti-racist commitment.

There is the shadow of a dying rat in the corner of the room, and people don't remark on it. It's not polite - in fact it's offensive, insulting - to mention the matter.

I wonder if Eve has underestimated a sub-category of silent UCU member on the List, one in which I count myself: those who are unable to object & fight back; those for whom the forum is so brutal & belligerent that they are cowered & shocked into silence but whose silence should not be taken to signify acceptance; quite, quite the contrary!

As I've said, the List is pretty much a single-issue platform, dominated and paralyzed by the boycott movement, to the detriment of its furtherance of core union aims. From time to time, however, the occasional message does get posted on there which addresses more standard union business (without eliciting great interest, I might add, everyone apparently too spent & disgusted by the 'solidarity work'). One such: bullying at work.

The definition given by the Andrea Adams Trust - which recently coordinated a Ban Bullying at Work Day, welcomed by UCU and trailed on the activist list - describes perfectly the bullying which passes for international solidarity work on the Activist List, as well as the likely effects this bullying has on those of us who have the misfortune to have to be subjected to it, just for being part of our union:

WHAT IS WORKPLACE BULLYING?

When we talk about bullying at work we are referring to an abuse of power or position. It is offensive discrimination through persistant [sic], vindictive, cruel or humiliating attempts to undermine, criticise, condemn, and to hurt or humiliate an individual or group of employees.

It can make employees lives a misery, affect their performance and damage their careers. It can also have a serious impact on organisations: indeed, statistics show that each year as many as 18.9 million working days are lost to bullying and up to a half of all stress-related illnesses are a direct result of bullying.

I couldn't help but notice the contradiction of our union showing concern for this issue at a time when bullying was being conducted on the List itself, courtesy of the boycotters (including those on my campus, a fact which serves to augment the pervasiveness of their bullying for I can't even conceptually contain them in that virtual madness which is the UCU Activist List!).

It always seemed odd to me that UCU should stand so staunchly against campus bullying, UCU HQ having apparently taken an active role in the initiative, on the one hand, and yet be the institutional facilitator of precisely that, through the bullying boycott, on the other. This includes the List moderators working at HQ who allow all sorts of antisemitic claims, and indeed in effect an antisemitic campaign to be waged, on the List itself. Who is UCU to preach when they don't practise?!

It is the bullying ways of the boycotters which serve to explain the group of silent UCU members of which I'm part: the horrified & terrorized on-looker, watching the List muzzled & mute. It's just this kind of bullying which has rendered me silent & voiceless in the bigot's playground. That is what bullying does.

~~~~~

** there's a fake BBA poster who occasionally posts on the HP site - fake, in the sense that it's not me (that is not BBA's e-mail, for starters!) but someone who has performed the necessary task of exposing, in this name, what passes for international solidarity work in our Stalinist union! There's another going by the name of UCU Whistleblower, a moniker which is equally apt. The BBA blog is meant to be a resource for other academics facing similar conditions to those I am experiencing and so it is only fitting that others should adopt the BBA moniker (as I've noted in another thread, this is fair enough): let it be one adopted by those for whom it captures the condition of being a Boycotted British Academic. This blog forum began as a way of finding a voice and I hope this process of articulating that voice on this blog can help all of us!