News & Investigations
were helpful, the disabled student in question maintains: “I feel overall SSW did their best, but my understanding is that at the time (and maybe still? I don’t know) SSW were not actually allowed to force departments to act if they chose not to implement SORA or other disability-related adjustments”. Ultimately, a top-down approach from UCL may be required to elicit change - and to manage improved disability support within all aspects of the institution. A spokesperson for UCL said: “All UCL students with a disability or longterm condition have the right to high quality support, ensuring they can demonstrate the full extent of their academic abilities and achieve the very
The Cheese Grater Spring 2021 3
best results... We have apologised to the student and both the Student Support and Wellbeing Team and the department will ensure all the recommendations made by the Panel are implemented and the best support is provided to the student moving forward.” SSW has started to recruit disability support workers directly from student communities within departments where speciality knowledge is needed. Last year, the UCL Student Experience Committee set up a Task and Finish Group, to look at the experiences of disabled students and with a view to making positive improvements. They have asked SSW and Disability Rights UK to review the student journey at UCL. This includes reviewing SoRA
implementation and the complaints process. The Committee’s co-chair, Professor Deborah Gill, praised their work so far, adding: “We very much welcome Professor Sasha Roseneil’s appointment [to the role of Pro Vice-Provost (Equity and Inclusion)] to carry on and augment some of the important work started by this group.” In spite of recent measures perceived to improve disability support for students at UCL, substantive changes have been few and far between. Although this incident has momentarily spotlighted UCL’s failure to uphold its responsibility to disabled students, many cases still go unnoticed due to a lack of knowledge and transparency surrounding disability rights.
Academia and air travel: how sustainable is UCL? Juliette Grieve & Riddhi Kanetkar Despite a growing awareness towards tackling the climate crisis, many UK universities ‘have spent tens of millions of pounds on hundreds of thousands of flights over the last four years’. This is concerning due to the detrimental impact that air travel has had on the environment. As one of the major pollutants on this planet, air travel needs to be curbed if universities are to reduce carbon emissions. Indeed, with academic integrity being tied to a heightened international reputation, the association between academia and aviation is strong. Many academics are ‘frequent air travellers’, who visit countries abroad for conferences and research purposes. However, with the world now confined to a stationary framework of online Zoom calls and lab tutorials, there is hope that aviation emissions will decrease. Between 2016 – 2020, UCL was named as one of the ‘biggest polluters’ for their use of air travel. With a reported 21,138 flights accrued between the our years, questions can be posed about
UCL’s commitment to sustainability. This concern was echoed by Sustainable UCL, who outlined that: ‘Travel makes up almost half of our total carbon emissions, three times as much as heating and powering our buildings! We can combat this by promoting active travel, and by improving teleconferencing facilities and online resources.’ With this in mind, one would expect that reducing the aviation output would be a key concern for the university. UCL’s sustainability goals. UCL has published its environmental goals for 2019-2024 in a document titled Change is possible: The strategy for a sustainable UCL, with its priorities listed under “Headline Commitments for 2024”. However, neither air travel nor reducing transport more generally were mentioned in this section. The document does later acknowledge the issue of travel under its “Positive Climate” campaign. Here UCL states, vaguely, that it aims to “explore ways to help our staff and students reduce the climate mpact of their travel” in order to maintain global connections without
leaving London. The only concrete solution which was mentioned to tackle the issue of air transport was the enhancement of video conferencing software as a replacement for in-person meetings. However, platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams have existed for years, which begs the question: why did it take so long for UCL to propose this solution? Whilst the use of video conferencing is possible in internal meetings, UCL may not have control over the way other institutions run their academic conferences to which they are invited. As such, UCL could promote a cross-institutional consensus on using video conferencing software, which could effectuate change across UK universities. In his ground-breaking 2019 article, The case for letting anthropology burn, Ryan Cecil Jobsen touches on the uncomfortable irony surrounding academic conferences. Even in subjects concerned with tackling oppression, climate change and its impacts, academics often fly miles to attend conferences, adding to the climate crisis in
