Endorsement from Dr Des Fitzgerald, Cardiff University

Des Fitzgerald has made the following video endorsement for the #Grady4GS campaign!

You can see it on Twitter or on YouTube (below). The transcript is at the bottom!

Transcript

My name is Des Fitzgerald, I’m a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Cardiff University, and I’m very happy to endorse Jo Grady as General Secretary of UCU.

I think we’re really heading potentially into moments of quite significant crisis in both the Further Education and Higher Education sectors, and I truly think we’re at a moment in which we need a form of leadership that is not only skilled at pulling the normal levers of industrial dispute, but is also able to embed those disputes in a much wider strategic analysis of the economic, political, and in fact cultural landscape in which they are embedded.

And for me, what distinguishes Jo Grady’s candidacy is that she’s produced a manifesto that not only talks in a very detailed way about the ‘bread and butter’ issues facing the Union today, but offers a really compelling vision of how the Union of the future needs to be so much more attentive to issues around casualisation and privatisation, around the ongoing attempts to marketise universities and to metricise the lives of the people who work in them.

Actually she offers I think a compelling vision of how we can build a financially sustainable union around those issues. I also think it’ll be really exciting actually to have a General Secretary who comes from the frontline of research and teaching and admin. I’m really happy to endorse Jo Grady as General Secretary.

Published by Jo Grady