We’ve had nearly a week of pickets, and I want to reflect on University over-sensitivy to witty expressions of concern over pay and conditions. Take for example this image which has resulted in emails to the UCU executive here from University management here. I kid you not.

Now, this image was embedded alongside three others in one tweet which was part of numerous tweets of images from the picket line on Monday. Nobody can claim that there was any attempt to promote that image over any other.

But the fact that it contains our VC’s name is, apparently, disrespectful and therefore a cause for concern. Leeds UCU were actually asked to delete it. I josh you not.

This comes from the same school of thought that told us last year that our pickets singing ‘Alan Langland can you hear us’ is disrespectful, because apparently asking a VC to listen to the thoughts and concerns of staff on strike is a no-go area, or something. I do not jest.

Let’s look at the image. Perhaps the people who are really upset by the image don’t recognise the meme, so they are out of touch with the context of the satire. Know your meme, boomer. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/woman-yelling-at-a-cat

TBF, they don’t get, perhaps, how memes work (and might have needed just now to google ‘TBF’) - mobilising a meme is about populating a given form that wraps a default humourous sentiment around a particular issue. And that’s funny. Witty.

And it’s satirical in that it performs a temporary upturning of power structures. But the powerful remain powerful. They are un-damaged by the satire. Its function is one of expressing a shared outrage that the powerful do better to listen to and understand than cry offense.

If we were to take the image literally, it’s actually more insulting of pickets (represented as over-emotional and out of control) than it is of the VC (represented by a calm but confused cat, one which, we should add, is not even fat).

Being asked to delete the image is of a piece with the Bristol pickets being asked to remove bunting which they were told was ‘intimidating’. What is happening here is an attempt by Universities to regain agency as a proxy for having lost moral authority. https://twitter.com/kirstanneharris/status/1199613722882433024?s=21

But it’s the thin edge of a wedge that ends with the kicking of people out of chaplaincies and worse. It’s really bad PR folks. You don’t need to do this, you gain nothing by it: https://twitter.com/birminghamucu/status/1199718274319159297?s=21

What makes it worse at Leeds is that, in requesting that we delete the confused cat meme image, the University has invoked our Dignity and Mutual Respect policy. I am not even joking now, bae.

There’s also been reference to the Code of Conduct on Professional Behaviour. Yes, I shit you not.

You would be hard-pressed to find a definition in these policies that would apply to the satirical use of your common or garden confused cat meme.

Now, what is really insulting - and articulates a real misunderstanding of staff experience - is the way that the University anyway fails to properly address bullying, victimisation and harassment, or inappropriate behaviour from top down, only from bottom up.

Both policies at least recognises that a power differential is at play and might need to be considered as a factor. The Code of Conduct refers to ‘inappropriate jokes’ about people. Hands up if you think this cat meme, in this context is ‘inappropriate’,

Isn’t it rather the wielding of mild humour to puncture a power differential that would otherwise hold the person expressing it as inferior, less worthy?

So, no, actually, representing the VC as confused in the face of tearful anger is not disrespectful. It is a manner of capturing a commonly-held experience of not being listened to by someone we are told should not be asked to listen to us through the medium of song.

Now, let’s be clear, UCU branches cannot control all their members, and there have of course been instances of unnecessary insults of senior staff by anonymous accounts and so on.

We don’t condone those, we don’t ‘like’ or retweet those, we don’t engage. If necessary, we call it out (I called someone out for using misogyny last year against a senior colleague).

But good clean satire of the powerful and well-remunerated is ages old, dating all the way back to the Lord of Misrule and beyond. Please, my over-sensitive senior colleagues, up there in the warm, think over the social purpose these phenomena, and get some perspective.

I also don’t for one minute think that Alan is upset, bothered, or even knows about this small image embedded in so many others. He’s much more chill than that. It took someone setting aside time to comb the Leeds UCU feed to find it.

If you want to improve employer/staff relations, get on board with helping seriously address the working conditions of over-worked, under-remunerated and stressed staff;

don’t demean the policies that are there to defend us, and apply them properly and equitably, and have a serious look at and get with the best practices around the sector in responses to the strike and ASOS. That should be front and centre now in your energies, not felines.

But, in order to try at least to meet in the middle, here is a redacted version of the image, that I for one will be happy to promote in a spirit of compromise.

This twitter thread is a form of satire. If it causes unhappiness, I’d be happy to talk about it. Buy me a coffee and come chat on the picket line.

Skimmed milk, two sugars. Ta.