ats:
"Academics at Northumbria University have voted to go on strike indefinitely, in a serious escalation of the higher education pay dispute."
"The vote - at an "angry" and "determined" union meeting - was sparked by the university's decision to stop paying about a dozen staff."
Wow, guess I was wrong yesterday. Go Northumbria!
"Never before has a university in the UK instigated a lock-out in any local or national dispute -- Natfhe official Andy Pike"
No, and they haven't this time either. A lock-out is when the employer won't let any union employees work, not when the employer stops paying some of them for not working.
Also: "about 250 of his 630 members had attended the meeting [...] Asked what the mood had been, he said: "Very angry, very determined, very united.""
A 40% attendance rate doesn't sound terribly united to me.
ats:
This seems odd -- why would they cancel exams owing to a marking boycott?
(Invigilation isn't an issue, since you can always find postgrad students to do it...)
David: At this point it may be time to make a comment about the Welsh
ats:
I suspect this is a case of Aber not being very organised, since most universities will have made sure they had the papers available well in advance of the exams. (In our case it's February, if I recall correctly.) Maybe they've had some previous Aber-only industrial action to contend with?
The affected exams only span three days, which is even odder.
But in other news, the NUS now appear to be against the action, which would be reassuring if the NUS actually represented the majority of students in any reasonable way.
David: As opposed to being an organisation dedicated to getting students a shiny discount card?
ats: Oh, that'd be the selling-students'-personal-data division of the NUS, rather than the meaningless-political-rubbish division.
ats: You know what the world (or at least the UK) needs?
A good, consistent, well-organised, easy-to-navigate design for university web sites.
They all have nearly-identical content -- even down to a department level. Yet they're all different, and all uniformly awful.
Perhaps this'd be a good thing for UKERNA to throw some money at...
Alternately, it might be an interesting project to come up with a standard tree structure for an index page, and then write one for several different universities.