17 June 2025

KCL’s UCU branch has called for a consultative ballot on academic freedom and staff safeguarding to end the administration’s harassing of colleagues who speak out for Palestine including by the lengthy and intrusive investigation of their social media posts including those posted long before they even joined KCL.

Consultative ballot on academic freedom and staff safeguarding at KCL

Posted on 11th June 2025 by KCL UCU

VOTE to show management that you’ll take a stand for academic freedom and the safety of colleagues at KCL!

What is this dispute about? What are the demands?

In March, KCL UCU formally notified management of a Trade Dispute over the College’s failure to safeguard staff, its mishandling of complaints procedures, and its failure to protect academic freedom. This relates to a prolonged campaign of targeted harassment and intimidation against staff, involving the abuse of KCL’s complaints system, doxing of staff and students, unauthorized recordings of teaching shared with right-wing media, targeted harassment and intimidation at rallies, and death threats. For example, our members have been named by students as ‘supporters of terrorism’ in interviews with Nigel Farage on GB News. Others have had their names and photos circulated, with protests organised outside KCL calling for them to be ‘banned’, sacked and deported. External far-right organisations have been directly involved in this targeted harassment, including Betar, a group included in the Anti-Defamation League’s ‘glossary of extremism and hate’.

The Branch has demanded that management (1) Safeguards staff who have been targeted for their pro-Palestine positions; (2) Issues a clear public statement reaffirming the College’s commitment to academic freedom, anti-racism, and the protection of its community; and (3) Commissions an independent review of the handling of the complaints procedure and related investigations over the last 18 months.

Our dispute is focused on protecting our members who have been targeted and remain under investigation. This dispute is also about our wider workplace conditions, which depend on academic freedom for all of us who teach and enable learning at KCL. If we are aggressively targeted by those who disagree with our views, and secretly record us and our students in the supposedly safe space of the classroom – will our employer step up to protect us? The war on Gaza has brought these issues to the fore over the last year, but there are so many other contentious issues – reproductive rights, trans inclusion, for example – that we need to be able to discuss safely in our classrooms without fear of harassment.

How have the negotiations gone?

Management have refused an external assessment of the (mis)use of Report and Support, instead offering UCU some (undefined) input into the terms of reference/scope of an internal review. Management have indicated some willingness to issue a joint statement after the conclusion of ongoing relevant investigations into staff and student conduct. Management have also said that any further actions in regard to demand no.1 will depend on the outcome of these investigations. However, it is important to emphasise that these investigations are not just focusing on students who have targeted our members, but also on those members themselves (including colleagues from Gaza whose family members have been killed). Their writing and social media content is being investigated – and potentially criminalised – by the College, including content from years before they were even employed by KCL. Repeated delays in the investigations have harmed our members and has left the branch questioning the integrity, confidentiality and capacity of these processes. More broadly, the failure of the College to take prompt action against harassers has allowed this campaign of intimidation to escalate over the last year and affect an ever increasing  number of staff.

What’s the bigger picture here? 

As spaces for critical debate, universities are under numerous forms of attack worldwide. These include populist right-wing targeting of scholars focused on social justice, government attacks on international students, along with worsening threats to funding. King’s is failing to protect our community and we believe that institutional double standards have been on display in its response to the student Encampment calling for institutional divestment from war crimes in Palestine. The Encampment students were immediately threatened with non-academic misconduct charges. One has been excluded while an investigation take places into their involvement in a May protest against a KCL-hosted event that was sponsored and supported by arms/security companies that enable war crimes in Gaza, alongside explicitly pro-Israel lobby groups. By contrast, none of the students who have publicly threatened our members and targeted them – by name and with photos – in hate demonstrations on campus have been formally warned, suspended or excluded pending the outcome of investigations into their conduct.

Also relevant to our dispute, we should remember that the Encampment was policed by management using a new protest policy that was adopted last year with no consultations with the campus unions or staff. And while KCL follows an untenable policy of ‘values based neutrality’ (again, formulated without any consultation with trade unions), it continues to invest in arms-technology companies and other firms implicated in violations of international law and human rights abuses.

But this dispute is not just about Palestine – it’s also  about how the College chooses to protect its staff who teach and research on a huge range of contentious and difficult topics, and how it protects the safe space of our classrooms for our entire community.

What’s a consultative ballot? If I vote, does this mean we’ll go on strike?

This online consultative ballot asks you whether you share the Branch’s concerns about management’s protection of academic freedom on campus and whether you would want to hold a formal industrial action ballot if the issues raised by the current dispute are not resolved swiftly. Depending on the results of the consultative ballot (and continuing negotiations and national UCU approval) we could move to a full postal ballot that would give the branch a mandate to undertake some form of industrial action, e.g. ‘action short of a strike’ (ASOS), or strike action.

Why should I vote?

Members should vote in order to participate in union workplace democracy. Like the decision to open the formal dispute itself, the decision to hold this consultative ballot was reached through debate and voting among members at our monthly General Meetings (which are open to all). The consultative ballot now puts these issues to the whole membership. Although the branch has communicated to members about these problems for the last 18 months, because this is a dispute about multiple individual cases and ongoing investigations, it is often difficult for the branch executive to share information that would give the full picture of the severity of the issues. But we have been sufficiently concerned about management’s handling of these cases (and the wider implications of this for all of us) to have launched this dispute. Negotiations continue, our members are still under threat, and our negotiators need a strong message from our wider membership to push management to take meaningful action and protect our colleagues. Please use your vote to help us!

What can I do to support the campaign?

Making sure that our wider membership is aware of the issues and the importance of this ballot is no small task! As with any ballot, the branch needs volunteers to help get the vote out. If you are willing and able to join the volunteer group, please let us know ASAP at [email protected].

Even if you can’t join the volunteer team, having conversations with colleagues about the ballot and the issues explained above can make a huge difference to turnout.

Please vote, please discuss with your colleagues, and please help us show management that they need to do much more to protect academic freedom staff safety at KCL!