Email sent to members on Monday 8th June 2026.
As part of our campaign to defend jobs and working conditions at the University of Nottingham, we will be sending regular emails, authored by different UCU members, examining key elements of management’s restructuring plans. Today we discuss the reasons for, and the importance of, participating in the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB). Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.
‘I wasn’t going to do the MAB. Then this happened’
Full disclosure: I wasn’t going to do the marking and assessment boycott.
My reasons were many, and they included the following:
- I don’t teach many Finalists, mainly first years. My participation in the Mab achieves not a great deal.
- I don’t want the University to take my money; I want my money for me.
- Also re money: I am probably being made redundant. A couple months’ pay takes on a greater significance in this context.
- My students this year have been through enough. From finding out in the middle of the semester that their department is closing and their lecturers being made redundant, to being invited to a meeting in which their bags were searched and they were told that the university would rather welcome ‘higher tariff’ students, they have been through enough nonsense. Do I want to risk contributing to any more disruption to their year?
- And also, I really quite fancy actually marking their work.
I genuinely want to reward those students who turned up and did well. The thought of them getting some derived mark, based on their performance in, what, January? – when every good teacher knows that the rate of learning and accomplishment on a project is not the same at the end as it is near the beginning or the middle – is unappealing.
So I wasn’t going to do the MAB. And then I changed my mind.
It wasn’t just the redundancy letter, and it wasn’t seeing the shock on the faces of colleagues who were seeing the pool numbers and understanding the implications for the first time. No, it was that Wednesday 13th May, the day full of meetings. The FN2 presentation that was riddled with errors (‘Oh, that’s actually wrong on there’, muttered the presenter when reading off the slide, as if encountering it for the first time).
It was also things like seeing that not only are Modern Languages degrees going, the Language Centre is apparently now going too. We had always been assured that, yes, we are still a global university, and no, we are not destroying language provision in the East Midlands. We are keeping the Language Centre. We are keeping the Language Centre. This was always the response from above to concerns voiced by supporters. Now it seems that this is no longer the case. It was seeing how management had, apparently, changed their mind on that one. (See? See how easy it is to change one’s mind?)
And it was the suggestion, from the presenter, that we all ‘Take the time’ to digest all this and take it all in. (‘Take the time’?)
Coming out of the day of meetings, I overheard two colleagues talking about the MAB. ‘I just hope everyone does it this time’, I heard a friend say.
And by that stage, I knew I was going to do the MAB:
- No, I don’t teach Final year students but I can still participate in the MAB.
- If colleagues are losing money on my behalf, then I don’t want the money either. I can earn more money later. I will gladly accept an unpaid sabbatical.
- Actually, my students understand. I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of students who have reached out to say thank you for the work we did this year, and who took the opportunity to say how sorry they are about what’s happening. (Many students have gone above and beyond. To the students who curated the Endangered Species exhibition to draw attention to programme closures: thank you! To the students who have asked their lecturers not to mark their work – thank you.) The students, who are aware of what’s going on, do get it.
- And our branch has a track record of getting things done, and doing them well. The summer when there was that big push against casualisation was the summer the university created a number of permanent jobs to ward off the bad press. The summer when we got our pensions back and everyone got a £500 bonus. Branch action contributed to nudging those things along.
What the last few weeks really have shown me is that what’s happening now is bigger than my job, bigger even than the jobs of everyone doing the MAB. We don’t need to take action for our own sakes. But we want to act with integrity, and this is a chance for that. And it’s a reminder that it’s never too late to change your mind.
