A recent BBC news article about Long Covid tells of the experience of 2 patients. A short thread.

Dr Deepak Ravindran 'said he believed there were many people unknowingly living with the illness who are yet to recognise the symptoms.'

1/🧵

Kent VC leaving just six weeks after announcing multiple course closures, with no succession plan in place, and acting like this is all normal. This is the leadership for which VCs are claiming hundreds of thousands of pounds in salary, is it? Shameful. kentonline.co.uk/canterbury/new…

Swansea becomes the 46th University to make redundancies - 200 staff to go. Much, much more of this to come in the near future. About 30% to 35%+ of all Arts and Hums jobs will disappear for instance.
walesonline.co.uk/news/news-opin…

We are very excited to announce our next big event on UBI and unions!

Panel:
John McDonnell MP
Vicky Blake/Vicky Blake UCU @vickyblake.bsky.social- Leeds Uni UCU
Jonathan Rhys Williams/Jonathan Rhys Williams- Lawyer GMB, Co-founder of UBI Lab Wales.
Plus others

Union member or not, please join! ubilabnetwork.org/events/ubi-lab…

UCU Post-92s often produce 4* research and excellent teaching for significant numbers of first generation students who haven’t been privately educated - so sick of the work we do being devalued or described as lower tier

There are 160+ #HigherEducation institutions in the UK.
Almost 40 (so far) are currently facing redundancies &/or closures - as per this updating Queen Mary UCU list - with another 14 having done so recently.
More are mentioned in the comments (inc. QMU, I see). qmucu.org/qmul-transform…

Fucking hell. A (mainstream, popular) photography company offered parents the chance to buy a school photo that didn’t include the disabled children. It really is a reminder just how much some of the public believe disabled people should be wiped from society.

Staff are more important than buildings

Sadly Cardiff Metropolitan University can be added to this growing list Queen Mary UCU. We have VS coming in and ‘flexible working’, details to follow next month. Solidarity with all branches facing cuts & job losses.

Current push back on antiracist & decolonial initiatives/movements within Higher Education (and society) is not new.

The below are just *some* of the responses we got from staff when asked what they really thought about decolonisation ⤵️

Read full report eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/191449/

'When genocidal intent is so conspicuous, so ostentatious, as it is in Gaza, we cannot avert our eyes. We must confront genocide, we must prevent it, and we must punish it'

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt presenting her report as UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory

In our open letter, students and staff University of Leeds call for the immediate release of Salma al-Shehab, a PhD student and woman’s rights activist, who was sentenced to 27 years imprisonment in Saudi Arabia on the basis of peaceful tweets: leedsucu.org.uk/open-letter-ca…

If it seems each day more disciplines under attack & job cuts announced in UK HE lately it’s because it’s true⬇️

We can’t afford a piecemeal response to decimation of our sector. To start we need a date for the UCU sector conference to coordinate our response HEC agreed in Feb.

Union busting is disgusting! How very USA of them. On the plus side, my dad (shop steward) always used to tell me if you’re not upsetting the bosses you’re not doing it right! Solidarity with all the workers at Amazon apart from the ones who came up with this idea

What a sad, narrow minded, shortsighted view of humanity, let alone university. Much solidarity to all at Uni of Kent UCU

My university wants to sack over a 100 academics. This is no way to run a university.

Big hugs for anyone finding the generally extremely poor commentary around the RF/KM announcement about cancer difficult. TV’s been on 2 mins, already heard utter bilge about how “unusual” cancer is in your 40s or “if you’re fit”. That narrative is painful & genuinely dangerous!