Sean Wallis (University College London)

Principal Research Fellow, Department of English, University College London

Election address

I am a lifelong trade unionist and a university researcher. I have given many years of service to the union and members. Currently, I am a national negotiator, an NEC member, regional secretary and branch secretary.  

I am standing for Vice President (from HE) because we need our union to stand up for Higher, Further and Adult Education, critical research and publicly-accountable science as a social good. 

We need to talk about the big picture. 

UK Higher Education is facing a three-fold crisis:  

• an unsustainable and grossly unfair Fee Market funding system 

• a growing far-right political threat to universities, science, and international staff and students  

• a widespread adoption of generative AI that threatens graduate jobs and the very idea of science and fact. 

The current Trump administration is a clear warning of what Farage and 'Reform' want to do in the UK. By the time the winner of this election becomes UCU President, we could have a Reform government. We must stand up to racism and scapegoating, whether of refugees, our members or students. 

This assault undermines Further Education as well as Adult and Prison Education. I believe in the Robbins Principle that everyone who can benefit should be able to participate in Education.  

We need an alternative vision: a programme for the defence of education in the 21^st Century - including Higher, Further and Adult Education. My starting point is ordinary members are best able to articulate this threat and advocate positive solutions. For example, as scientists, we don't just say that correlations are not causes. We say you need education for humans to control AI! 

Defending education also means standing up for ourselves. We must act urgently to stop any attempt to bully post-92 colleagues out of their pensions, stop redundancies, oppose casualisation and defend national agreements. 

We need to rebuild the UK-wide pay fightback because any union that only fights locally can be beaten locally. Solidarity is not an added extra. We must keep our eyes on the prize: the defence of education, research, and members' jobs, pay and conditions. 

When we lead members into battle, we must not abandon them. The 2023 MAB debacle must not be repeated. That means electing (left-wing) NEC reps who stand by democratic decisions of members. 

I convened the Convention for Higher Education in 2016-17 (and 2020), building the argument against the HE market system in Parliament. I have helped coordinate the UCU Solidarity Movement since 2020, helping union reps organise solidarity, member-to-member, branch-to-branch, meeting weekly for 5 years. 

I am a member of UCU Left (https://uculeft.org), a hard-working branch secretary and a staunch defender of research staff. Vote for me for a union that represents you and fights for you.