Endorsement from Dr Mike Finn, University of Exeter

Mike Finn 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

I’m Mike Finn. I’m Director of Liberal Arts and Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter, and I’m endorsing Jo Grady for General Secretary of UCU.

I’ve been active in UCU for a long time. I’ve been a branch secretary several times, I’ve been a caseworker, I filled a whole load of roles. And all that time active I’ve never seen us have a candidate for General Secretary like Jo Grady. I believe this is a unique opportunity for us. We’ve someone who’s an expert—an academic expert—in trade union matters and employment relations and industrial relations, who’s also an activist to her core, someone rooted in the values of the trade union movement, and a frontline educator who’s got that lived experience, that classroom experience if you like, of everything that’s happened in post-16 education over the past few years. She knows what we’ve gone through because she’s gone through it herself. And to have that synthesis of both the expertise but also the experience of what we’ve gone through is, for me, unique among the candidates that we’ve got before us, and among the candidates that we’ve had in the past.

But there’s one other thing I want to flag up. I work on Brexit—one of the things that I study is Brexit and Higher Education and the international dimension. As we know, the last couple of years, many of our colleagues from EU27 nations have found themselves insecure and found themselves vulnerable in the Brexit moment that we’re living through in the UK and in UK Higher Education. Jo Grady’s been endorsed by Unis Resist Border Controls; she’s been there speaking out for this cause consistently. She’s someone whom we can trust to represent all of our members and all parts of the Union. For those reasons and for many more besides, I urge you to vote for Jo Grady for UCU General Secretary.

 

 

Published by Jo Grady