Sally Hunt's reply

[This post is jointly written by Eve Garrard and Norman Geras.]

Nine days ago Eve Garrard sent her letter of resignation from UCU to Sally Hunt, the union's general secretary. Two days later, she received the following reply, which she has sought and obtained permission to make public:

Thank you for your email to Sally Hunt: I have been asked to send the reply below to you.

'UCU delegates at our congress had the opportunity to debate and set policy for the union on a host of issues. The Palestine motion does not call for a boycott. It does call for a wider debate about what is happening and members initiated that debate, as is their right, at congress. [I]t is for the NEC to consider the actions it will take regarding the motion. UCU believes that academic freedom includes the right to contribute to progressive change through free expression of opinion on matters of public interest.

The general secretary has made it quite clear on a number of occasions that she is against an academic boycott, and again refutes the charge you make of institutional anti-semitism within the union.

She regrets that you feel it necessary to resign from UCU, but has of course passed your resignation to the membership department for action. Should you wish to reconsider you will be very welcome back in UCU'.

Hunt here uses the word 'refute' in a non-standard meaning, a point on which it would be unnecessary to comment but for the circumstance that she does not, in fact, show - with reasons or evidence - the charge of institutional anti-Semitism to be wrong; she merely rejects the charge without giving anything at all in support of doing so.

A refutation, in the more usual sense of the word, would have required some actual work. But Hunt's reply is remarkable for its use of casual denial, with a striking absence of supporting argument. She says that Motion 25 'does not call for a boycott'. Two different sets of lawyers think that it is a boycott motion; the Minister for Higher Education thinks it is a boycott motion. You might expect, in the light of these opinions, that the general secretary of the union would see the need to explain why they are so completely wrong. But there's just a stony silence, as if views which differ from hers don't even need to be acknowledged, let alone addressed.

This is, in general, the character of Hunt's reply: it is a series of bald, off-the-cuff assertions in response to a carefully argued letter - a letter from a member of her union who has felt driven to resign on grounds that one might have assumed a conscientious leader of a democratic trade union would think herself duty bound to answer in a serious way.

Hunt's letter is, on the contrary, almost contemptuous in its brevity and tone. Institutional anti-Semitism in the UCU? Psssht, not us! is the best she can manage. On a topic that you'd expect to be of interest to the leader of a union which declares itself to be 'opposed to race discrimination in whatever form it takes'.

As it happens, Hunt's reply on this topic is just one more instance of the problem that led to Eve's resignation: the fact that the UCU leadership (and a significant proportion of its activists) are quite evidently untroubled by the concerns and apprehensions of many of UCU's Jewish members. All that the general secretary is prepared to provide in the face of these is a flat dismissal. Clearly, Jewish worries don't bother the union's leadership.

What a dereliction. Even supposing the charge of institutional anti-Semitism were without foundation, or based on some misunderstanding, the leaders of the union would have a responsibility to consider it with care.

Not responding to it with anything other than blank denial - the 'refutation' aforesaid - Sally Hunt, it may be noted, tries to deflect attention from the matters which matter on to something with all the odour of a red herring. The members of UCU, she says, have a right to debate, a 'right to contribute to progressive change through free expression of opinion on matters of public interest'. This right they indeed do have, but no one has sought either to deny that they do or to block their exercise of it. Rights can be exercised, however, in order to pursue noxious ends, and that is what Sally Hunt has simply, and shamefully, ignored. (Norman Geras and Eve Garrard)