On Thursday 30th November, representatives of the Cambridge UCU Justice 4 College Supervisors (J4CS) campaign met with representatives of the Colleges and the Office of Inter-Collegiate Services (OIS). Present at that meeting:
Cambridge UCU: Max Long (Research Fellow, Jesus College), Lydia Richards (UCU regional official), Matthew Lloyd Roberts (UCU Postgraduate Rep), Emily Sandford (UCU Casualisation Rep).
Colleges and OIS: Robert Gardiner (Secretary, Bursars’ Committee), Judith Bunbury (Associate Secretary, Senior Tutors’ Committee), Malcolm Millbrook (Deputy Head of OIS).
Joint Statement
With Dr Richard Anthony unable to join due to illness, Mr Robert Gardiner joined the meeting as a representative of the Bursars’ Committee.
As previously agreed, today’s meeting was dedicated to discussing the J4CS campaign’s demand of a fair and secure contract for supervisors. Both sides agreed that this is a complex issue with important ramifications for the organisation of the Cambridge supervision system.
Both sides agreed that establishing a greater degree of stability and security is desirable for both supervisors and the colleges that employ them, and that introducing a supervisor contract is one way to achieve this goal. Similarly, both sides understand that the nature of undergraduate supervising and teaching allocation requires an important degree of flexibility.
We discussed a range of possible approaches for defining the model of the relationship between colleges and supervisors. Important to this is the existence of different categories of supervisors, including a) postgraduate students studying at Cambridge, b) other supervisors with a formal relationship to the Cambridge system, such as JRFs, UTOs, and CTOs, and c) supervisors whose sole relationship to the collegiate University is through delivering undergraduate supervisions.
Both sides agreed to continue the discussion on the topic of contracts, drawing in these discussions on example contractual arrangements at other UK HE institutions.
Our next meeting is scheduled for December 12th, when we will return to the pay-related questions that we last discussed at the meeting on November 9th. We also settled on a new schedule of meetings for next term, starting in January. This will ensure continued discussion on the campaign’s main demands, with a view to meeting the deadlines established in the joint Programme of Work.