UK HE News
@HigherEd_UK
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Posting about the state of universities in the UK. Spoiler alert: it's not good.
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One way or another, the era of the dictatorial, corrupt Vice Chancellor is coming to an end. The only question is how many will take their universities with them.
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Killing universities is all fun and games until you realise half the town depends on downstream income from them.
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Academics have been coming to work in the UK based on legacies of past success. It's obvious when they arrive that uni managers and the Government have together killed all of that. This will have consequences.
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UK academics should fully accept two facts and proceed from there. 1. Vice Chancellors are uninterested in and insulated from the survival and reputation of unis and 2. UK HE has already so minimised academic influence that withdraw of labour can have only an indirect impact.
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A test of whether your university is still a university: Has a department been targeted for closure solely due to lack of student recruitment? If so, this is no longer a university. It is an "HE provider" that sells degrees and creates and cuts instructional units accordingly.
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All university staff should understand that if UCEA are successful in achieving a scenario where staff leverage is gone, with strikes and ASOS ignorable or the union broken, there will be staggering mass redundancies across UK HE.
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Dear
@ITV
, please make a film about Government destruction of UK HE and the managerial incompetence and corruption that has enabled it.
Thanks
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Among 100s of ways unis are not actually businesses, one big one is that the academic staff supply essential work outside of contracted hours based on "goodwill" rather than remuneration. This means that productive relations with management are especially crucial to uni survival.
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VCs had three options to deal with disruption to their degree sales businesses.
1. negotiate with staff and proceed uninterrupted, restoring a functional uni
2. stop many graduations and make negative headlines
3. quietly abandon all academic standards and hand out degrees anyway
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Uni management alone invented the idea that each department has to pay for itself as an independent degree sales business rather than part of a whole university that contributes on multiple fronts. They also made the reckless spending decisions that made this 'untenable'
Unpopular view, but I’d suggest that if the Scottish govt really wants better language training, it should look at its level of support for HE. Aberdeen is not the only culprit here; arguably they’re making painful decisions in untenable conditions. Like other UK unis …
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The UK REF is like the entire uni sector desperately trying to 'get tenure'. Except, at the end, no one has tenure, millions are spent for nothing, and vast opportunities for actual world-leading scholarship and real-world impact have been abandoned in the name of metric gaming.
@page_eco
@mmuthukrishna
I'd love to see the same analysis for tenure cases (I've seen a similar race to push out a ton of articles right before people go up).
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Cancel REF 2029. Problem solved.
Leaders of the British Academy have today warned that the proposals for the REF 2029 open access approach could have negative impacts on research and researchers, calling on UK higher education funding bodies to pause and undertake further research:
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'People' do not really think this. They do think that Academia combines a practically unlimited workload with the inability to leave an employer without leaving the industry. That gives managers exploitative leverage rarely seen elsewhere.
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There should be no such thing as a "professional HE executive" who moves from uni to uni leaving a trail of destruction.
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The purpose of UK uni academic posts right now is to bring in grant income and student income to meet their managers' targets. Neither is advanced by questioning truths or consensus.
'For me, the primary function of a university is ... to question the truths of the time - whether they are the truths of the universe or of the social consensus.' (Immanuel Wallerstein, 1971)
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Your regular reminder that if students are graduating as normal under a marking boycott that means the uni managers are faking the marks, not that there is "limited effect."
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If academics all worked to contract, unis would grind to a halt more dramatically than any industrial action.
Can universities function without 'goodwill' on the behalf of their staff?
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Uni students may be asking, why don't VCs offer even a slight concession?
The answer is not that they can't afford it, but that they want the union to appear as ineffective as possible, and to see it ultimately dissolve.
Then, their real agenda would face no resistance.
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If it is a university, then academics can criticise managers. If academics cannot criticise managers, then you can conclude the entity is no longer a university, but just a degree mill.
Should academics be free to publicly criticise their own institutions and managers/administrators without career consequences? Tell us in our Academic Freedom Survey
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The strategy of maintaining an HE sector by repeatedly declaring it "world leading" while quietly and gradually gutting it in every possible way may be reaching its limits.
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'Let's reimagine our university as a place no one wants to work anymore'
NEW:
@aberdeenuni
academics could be rousted from private offices, The Gaudie understands, after recent 'reimagining' workshops suggested a move to hotdesking & hybrid spaces
An spox says proposals haven't been formalised & all ideas are at an early stage
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The way UK HE drops whole departments to reflect immediate (supposed) student demand is confirming that these are not research institutions. The transition to pure degree sales is complete and the immediate comparators are the US for-profits.
At the University of Kent 58 jobs are at risk. We will lose English Language and Linguistics, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Journalism, Health and Social Care, Anthropology, Music and Audio Technology, Comparative Literature
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UCEA knows a modestly improved offer would be accepted. They even know it would have even saved them money in the short run. But for them, the hope is to eliminate any resistance to future unmitigated exploitation of the large and desperate academic labour supply.
It doesn’t. The really really stupid thing about the current dispute is that if UCU had been offered a ‘reasonable’ but probably still in single figures pay rise plus commitments on pay gaps, workload, casualisation in November we’d likely, as a collective, have accepted it.
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Actual universities have departments regardless of fluctuations in the degree sales market, because they are research institutions. It is impossible to have an HEI that aligns lecturing capacity exactly to the market demand for degrees and also offer degrees of any value.
A note for university leaders, managers, decision-makers about strategic priorities and the student recruitment in years to come: the marketplace and share of market interest in History is expanding. Invest in History departments and staff to prepare.
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Dear Vice Chancellors, if you didn't want to be blamed for the collapse of your university, you should not have accumulated absolute autocratic power and conducted all business without any transparency or meaningful consultation.
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Degree value is collapsing in the UK because of a growing perception that they no longer signal anything meaningful. This resulted from removing research academics from meanguful involvement in education. The process of making unis 'businesses' has made their product worthless.
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If there's one thing that all of the business wizards who run UK universities agree on, its that their hands are tied and they are powerless.
.
@oxford_brookes
confirms music and maths closures despite protests: university blames external factors for cutbacks as accounts show improving financial position.
@TWilliamsTHE
reports
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The biggest challenge facing UK HE is not looming deficits. It's that the core research and education functions of universities have been at best neglected and at worst systematically destroyed by management.
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'Chipping away' of working conditions sounds overly optimistic.
Lecturers at modern universities in the UK fear a “chipping away” of their working conditions in the current round of cost-cutting and redundancies, which could bring a “massive change” in what being an academic means, writes Tom Williams
@TWilliamsTHE
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Academics are disposable, interchangeable, window dressing in UK HE. The business model is purely degree sales now, coasting on the reputation built by past academics, until that runs out.
A powerful thread and another proof that, in the end, the corporate university and its managers don't care about decades of commitment and devotion of scholars or professional service staff.
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In UK HE, professor salaries are comparatively low and flat. This means that those motivated by money must find administrative roles, despite incompetence and contempt for the institution. The management pool is ultimately composed of only the most depraved individuals.
Not everyone wants to be a line manager…
Yet often the only way to progress at work is through managing more. It forces people into roles they’re not good at and can result in a rubbish culture.
What about promotions and pay rises just for being good at the actual job?
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"After months of research, our answer is that we must increase VC salaries to attract even more global talent, by which we mean someone who just destroyed another uni in England."
The question we have asked ourselves is: what does this country need from its higher education and research system, and what do we need to do differently to deliver that?
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Tuition fees increased university income, which led to more spending on non-research, non-education areas, in search of even more income. That approach was unsustainable, with resulting cuts going straight to research and education, leading to a sudden collapse in core activity.
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Why is the UK the only country in the world that can't determine how well a uni is performing without forcing them to dedicate enormous time and resources distracting them from performing?
Is anyone still spending time on REF, TEF, and KEF these days? Or has it collectively sunk in that they were all scams that have no bearing on whether your uni survives, much less succeeds?
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Higher Ed desperately needs a new generation of leadership that understands that justifying universities on the basis of applied skills training has been a disasterous miscalculation.
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No one knows for sure where the unsustainable UK University system is heading, but one thing that you can be certain of is that every Vice Chancellor will retire a multimillionaire in all scenarios.
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Is anyone still spending time on REF, TEF, and KEF these days? Or has it collectively sunk in that they were all scams that have no bearing on whether your uni survives, much less succeeds?
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REF almost certainly will not take place as planned. The next few years will be mass exodus, mass layoffs, and and total rebellion from those that survive. Good luck recruiting an "impact case study" in the dystopian hellscapes employers are about to create.
I will do my job, as I always do, but no excess of zeal where REF is concerned from me. At this point, I feel it will have to be cancelled.
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Despite their rhetoric, University VCs have actually loved the last 14 years, a period that made charlatans into millionaire mad kings, with unis as their playground. VCs fear a serious return to academic credibility for UK HE. They have no place if research and education matter.
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There should be no surprise about Government and public indifference toward widespread uni failures in the abstract. UUK/VCs spent the last 15 years fundamentally rebranding unis as businesses with no public value, focused only on income generation (at which they have failed.)
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Vice Chancellors knew that tuition fees were not indexed to inflation. They also knew that sources of international students can fluctuate wildly.
Yet, VCs engaged in rampant debt-driven spending based on fraudulent projections.
Was that incompetence, corruption, or both?
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This article was written in an alternate universe in which 700k/yr is needed to entice someone previously on a UK academic salary to take a job where the worst case scenario is to become a multimillionaire in several years regardless of performance.
Repeated calls for pay restraint among university leaders could be dangerous | Independent
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UK unis have been on a decade-long race to creating a degree mill structure where academics play no substantive role. MAB mitigation is a trial run of the new system. If they have their way, it will become fully normalised.
At one level you have to be impressed at how 'flexible' some unis have been in the face of MAB, but this is an absolute bin fire of all of the procedures and academic standards that they've spent years claiming to be committed to.
They're not committed to staff/students at all.
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When redundancies are made, your VC only regrets the headlines. The decision itself, under the cover of a crisis they can blame on "sector-wide challenges", is seen as an opportunity to reshape the staff makeup to fit their political and personal career priorities.
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If UK VCs were running actual businesses, they'd not only be immediately removed, they'd never be hired again in any capacity.
When you're running a billion £ business you should be paid the big bucks says VC Prof Quintin.
Except you and your cronies are running universities into the ground but yet there is zero accountability.
Failure is consistently rewarded with ever more loot. It's a racket 🤬
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No one could have predicted that university managers destroying the value of UK degrees for a decade would leave only historically 'elite' institutions in a position to recruit
It's brutal as selective universities hoover up students and resources...
Four days from results day, 169,570 students had accepted places at high-tariff universities, up 7.6%. In contrast, low-tariff institutions’ intake of 141,800 is down 3.9%
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We still need to reach crisis announcements from 100 non-RG unis, or at least 10 RG unis, until achieving national newsworthiness, not counting the opinion pieces cheering on the impending closures.
Alternatively, a single modest inconvenience affecting Oxbridge would do it.
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What students want most from a degree is the ability to credibly claim that they completed a difficult academic task regulated by experts in their chosen field.
The university management's job is to maintain that credibility.
They have instead systematically undermined it.
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The flaw in national HE bargaining in the UK is that VCs, collectively as UCEA, do not care about the outcome. The future of HE means nothing to them. VCs individual reputations must be put on trial, and their own futures should hang in the balance.
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The reason VC salaries come to mind so readily is that, given that unis are objectively spectacular managerial failures, the fact that the self-styled 'CEOs' continue to be rewarded so handsomely is puzzling to most observers.
Asked the “things about unis that first come to mind”, the most common responses were VCs' salaries, international students and unis crying poor. "That is so far divorced from who we should be. It’s no surprise we’re on the wrong end of government policy.”
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UK HE has the greatest centralisation of power in the hands of senior management anywhere in the world (comparable only to Aus/NZ), combined with no accountability for leadership. This has enabled an unchecked decline in staff and student conditions.
The structure of UK universities is different to European ones
It is so much easier to hush up wrongdoing in UK
#universities
There is little or no external scrutiny, together with somnolent or indifferent Vice Chancellors
#academia
@RussellGroup
@UniversitiesUK
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University academic staff working for free.
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And where are the VC removals and resignations for this dismal managerial performance? They sacrificed every aspect of universities for "income" and objectively failed on their own terms.
One in five UK universities are in deficit.
Per-student funding for teaching home undergraduates has fallen by 18% in real terms since 2012/13.
According to data from the OfS, providers in aggregate expected only a tiny surplus of 0.8% in 2023/24.
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VCs cannot be bargained with in any traditional sense because they are detached from the fate of their organisations. They will allow or perpetuate unsustainable decline in staff morale. They will do virtually nothing to protest the onslaught of hostile Government policy.
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How about we end the "customer model" of UK HE?
National Student Survey 2024:
@timeshighered
crunches the numbers to calculate which university performed best
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The excesses of MAB punishment are designed to send all staff a message. That message is that this is not your university in any sense. They want you to leave. They want replacements too desperate and disoriented to resist -- until they can sell degrees without academics at all.
One thing becoming clear: pay deductions for MAB are a hideous blag by uni leaders. So much inconsistent and contradictory messaging. At UoN, staff also getting holiday blocked at no notice, just as schools breaking up. Too late to book holiday clubs for kids. Dark dark days
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In fact, most VCs are former failed VCs from other institutions they destroyed. Occasionally, a failed VC is imported from Australia or NZ. Although usually, they leave voluntarily for a higher salary before the true effects of their corruption and mismanagement are public.
@21percentgroup
@UniversitiesUK
This isn't true. One of the worst I worked for got sacked (socially dysfunctional, obsessed with NSS scores) and then popped up in another uni where it was clear they learned no lessons. Arrogant, dismissive and with a ludicrous sense of self worth.
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This is happening throughout the sector, even in unis without compulsory redundancies. Experienced and visible staff have been pushed out to turn unis into businesses with no customers. There is no demand for for this product, but the sector pushes ahead off the cliff.
I made the decision to leave
@GoldsmithsUoL
before this mess as I don't want to work for a bunch of incompetent clowns, proposed redundancies in Visual Cultures would mean only the cheapest members of staff will remain, with almost all senior staff out of the picture. It's over.
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If only UK universities had some sort of representative body that might have addressed the UK HE financial crisis before it happened.
"I would like to see the government, and if they don't, then the opposition, set up an independent commission to look at future funding"
Lord Blunkett tells us about his hopes for the future of higher education funding🎤
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Every UK Vice Chancellor, regardless of personal politics, is right now a willing agent of a Government who has made destroying universities a priority, often using policies that disguise this aim within business as usual.
Higher ed and academia will be drastically different in 5-10 years. Who knows how many of us will be left.
At least, that’s the goal of corporate admins who span the political spectrum + RW politicians.
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This will become obvious soon. The point of the REF was to *pretend* like there was a level playing field for uni performance. But now it's pointless to hide the agenda: if you weren't considered prestigious 40 years ago, you will be eliminated regardless of what happened since
If universities are just going to close depts all over the place (they are), there's no point running exercises like the Research Excellence Framework, cos those unis will just pocket the money and it won't go to the subjects it was supposed to. A massive waste.
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Your VC is not a victim of 'external forces affecting the entire sector'. Your VC is a corrupt and incompetent individual who made your uni unnecessarily *vulnerable* to external forces affecting the entire sector. And you, not your VC, will pay the price for that.
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Among the many reasons UK HE is in crisis and verging on collapse is that VCs -- through UUK/UCEA -- have the power to speak as a cartel on behalf of universities, allowing them the power to hide their own failures --- until the breaking point of mismanagement is reached.
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This is not something that just comes and goes. The non-union staff are watching. They too are making decisions about whether it is worth cooperating with management in the future. Uni income is built on this cooperation.
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The failure of UK HE has many causes, but the most pivotal is that telling the truth about it is punished. That must change for there to be any hope.
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THE is getting close to the target.
Managerial “amateurism” and “toxic work environments” are forcing large numbers of academics to leave the UK sector, according to a study led by
@rpwatermeyer
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Dear journalists covering HE - if you talk to a representative of Vice Chancellors, you are not talking to "universities." You are talking the greatest threat to universities and someone who will lie compulsively to play the victim. Minimal investigative effort will confirm this.
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When tuition fees were introduced, university degrees had value from decades of academic credibility. VCs exploited that value to cynically sell degrees and use the short-term income to justify their own pay. Now, years of extraction without investment has left UK unis barren.
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This is already at the root of UK HE decline:
"...expanding generic, easy-to-deliver courses with poor student-staff ratios ... does little to allow unique specialist programmes to thrive, and it certainly does not enhance the wider pursuit of knowledge."
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The Government wanted most UK universities to face financial crisis, and this is happening. UUK wanted their members to become millionaires in the process of managed decline, and this has also happened. Everyone with any power in UK HE has gotten exactly what they wanted.
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The first step for UK universities to operate more efficiently would be dissolve UUK.
Vice-Chancellor of St Andrews and President of UUK tells the UUK delegates that “we”, in universities, “need to continue to operate more efficiently”. 😐
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VCs are responsible for what has happened to UK unis. They made the decision to borrow and spend vastly more than sustainable projections would justify, relied on wildly optimistic trends, and ignored the risks of policy change and obvious long term threats.
This studied helplessness&ignorance cannot fly.
1) If it's all out VCs' hands, why do they get those salaries (
@QMUL
: £375,000 🤯) supposedly in recognition of their responsibility?
2) If they're so terrible as planning for the future & build in contingency, why are they in post?
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The Government hasn't simply underfunded universities, it gave university managers incentives to make universities worse -- and that is unsustainable. Until academic influence is restored at universities, cash infusions won't solve the fundamental problem.
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The creation of the OfS was the UK's statement to the world that it had abandoned the historical role of universities as fundamental research institutions and repurposed them as education 'products', indistinguishable from any other commercial service.
The House of Lords established a while ago that the OfS isn't fit for purpose
When the regulator of a complex sector reduces that sector to 'students as consumers' without any thoughts about research stability, about finance &governance, you get a mess...
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Good start. Also, just bin the REF entirely and shift the savings of time and money into, well, research
(but, first, reform unis so that there are actual incentives to develop a research reputation, rather than having to give VCs direct cash incentives to bother with it).
Time to bin all
#REF
open access rules, say
@UniofOxford
research chiefs: “excessively bureaucratic” and “unaffordable” rules on
#OA
proposed for the next REF should be discarded, university executives argue in
@HEPI_news
blog.
@jgro_the
reports
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Some universities at least know that it is embarrassing to openly propose that any random person could mark student work. Some are perfectly fine with this. The latter set is referred to in the HE press as 'unaffected by MAB'.
DO NOT APPLY
@GoldsmithsUoL
advertised for external markers who won't have worked with students or be able to engage meaningfully with submissions. Punishing staff deducted 50% for the MAB risks seriously damaging industrial relations. Students and staff deserve better!
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The core UK HE problems are internal. First, a permanent class of anti-academic grifters circulates throughout management roles in the sector. Second, they have absolute power to use a university as a plaything. This has brought about the financial and political weakness of unis
It is, apparently, tempting to believe that the problem with UK HE is a lack of funding. A 'model' -- one based on managerialist governance and degree sales -- has been in place so long as to form an entrenched an anti-academic culture in the sector. Money alone won't solve that.
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They are some of the dumbest people you will ever meet anywhere. Truly the last people anyone would want in charge of an organisation of any type. But they are products of a system designed to slowly kill universities, not manage them.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that HE management no longer understand the purpose of universities in society. By purpose, I mean why universities still exist after 100s of years. Managers think they are working for a corporation. This has a profound impact on academic value
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The collapse of UK HE is accelerating. Managers are profiting from it. Government is actively killing its political "enemy." And no one is talking about the fact that UK has ended its role as a research and education leader.
There's a huge staffing crisis on the horizon in UKHE. People are
#LeavingAcademia
in unprecedented numbers due to appalling management, atrocious conditions and falling pay and anytime I ask excellent MA students if they're thinking of academia they basically laugh in my face
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One of the myths of UK HE is that Oxbridge/Golden Triangle/some RG, are somehow immune to the university sector's collapse. They'll not go bankrupt of course, but the era of crude metrics and managerialism has still undermined their real-world reputation.
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Will all the VCs who do not support the UCEA please speak up?
🦗 🦗 🦗
Honestly. Where are the university managers that are going to stand up and DO SOMETHING to stop this theft of wages and wrecking of university lives?
This is where we are now: Universities deducting wages from workers who actually tackle injustice, workers on whom others depend
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It was not easy to anticipate that UCEA would want to bring down the entire HE sector to avoid even a basic discussion of staff grievances. However the ensuing crisis has, at least, laid bare the rot at the core of UK universities.
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We are on the verge of a massive academic exodus from UK HE, with thousands just tired of the incompetence and corruption of management and government hostility/indifference.
140 academics at Hallam have left/are leaving, and over 120 others are now at risk of redundancy.
This is a colossal management failure; the galloots who've enabled this shitshow should be the first ones to leave. And not to further up the ladder but out.
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It is, apparently, tempting to believe that the problem with UK HE is a lack of funding. A 'model' -- one based on managerialist governance and degree sales -- has been in place so long as to form an entrenched an anti-academic culture in the sector. Money alone won't solve that.
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Academics know there is no future for research in the UK. If they have a place to go (and many do), they are actively planning to leave as a result of the rapid deterioration of the sector and the lack of any apparent pathway out of the anti-intellectual wasteland it has become.
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Get ready for total panic at your institution and unprecedented acts of corruption and incompetence from management.
UK university applications down for third year in a row:
@ucas_corporate
data reveals drop in application rate among UK school-leavers and significant declines in international interest from key sectors, with least selective institutions bearing brunt
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That is correct. Upon reflection, UCEA are willing to give you what you are already legally entitled to. It was a tough choice, but that's what leadership is all about.
Wait wait wait. Does that mean UCEA admits that employers *do not* already recognise pre-booked leave arrangements for people on boycott and that they *do not* already recognise the importance of having a reasonable workload? 🤔
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It seems obvious that this should be allowed, but it requires that universities not be corporations with brand protection as the primary aim.
Should academics be free to publicly criticise their own institutions and managers/administrators without career consequences? Tell us in our Academic Freedom Survey
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The UK reoriented HE entirely around education, not fundamental research, and then replaced education with simply selling degrees.
The result is that the role of academics is marginal.
Academics are needed for symbolism, but otherwise interchangeable and ultimately disposable
It's always fun to get comparative salary data. Linked in pushed me a Lecturership add (CS/CE) in Australia. Low end of the salary ranges is (equiv) GBP£63k. Low end of the SL range is £76k. The first is close to my professorial salary in the UK. The second is well above it.
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Yes. It is safe to say that the concept of a university has been fully abandoned and that most elites couldn't grasp it even if they were not hostile to it. Unfortunately all of the benefits of unis, which were important to the UK in particular, have also been abandoned.
@HigherEd_UK
In a real university, being a guild of scholars, academics should be able to sack managers.
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Universities wanted to keep promotions to a minimum but also used strategic hiring for various short-term gaming purposes without any regard for sustainability or retention. Now, of course, the wheels are falling off.
It's easier* to apply for new jobs than it is to go for promotion within your own institution.
*Applying for jobs in HE really IS a king-sized pain the arse.
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Some VCs will wait until MAB is fully resolved and then put out a statement supporting the outcome that is cut and paste from some other uni. It's called global managerial talent and it demands respect.
Ahead of
@UCEA1
@ucu
talks today, the branch has approved this joint statement with
@durham_uni
executive committee bringing an end to deductions for those currently participating in the MAB.
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Without academic involvement in governance, UK universities are nothing more than hollow degree sales machines. The value of those degrees is based on the false perception that there is some form of academic involvement in running the uni. That was not sustainable.
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" universities are falling back on conservative leadership appointments, dusting off efficiency programmes they have already run unsuccessfully ad nauseam, and shutting down opportunities for the talented students and staff."
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What difference would it make at this point? UK HE teaching is already tightly controlled by non-academic management, on the path towards total standardisation with review from comms and interchangeable instructors.
Should university managers/administrators have the right to alter an academic’s syllabus or remove an academic from a course if they consider it necessary to avoid students being offended or harmed? Tell us in our Academic Freedom Survey
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UCEA will need to be disbanded if UK HE is to survive.
Will this be the week that UK VCs stop taking orders from a group of extremists at the heart of UCEA? Who have weaponised it in pursuit of a personal vendetta against the UCU?
Nothing about this is looking like rational bargaining. And universities are being ruined as a result.
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The collapsing quantity of academic jobs in UK HE follows a long term collapse in the quality of those jobs. Even those with the most security and (relatively) highest pay suffer from the rapid decline of research and teaching environments within the failed UK HE 'model.'
Did not expect, following being told my job is ‘at risk’, to feel quite so much toddler energy. No, I don’t want to do that pointless admin task. No, *you* sort that complex issue. Oh & stuff your chipper Uni round Robin newsletters which don’t have a whisper of what’s happening.
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If there is to be a way forward for UK HE, it will need to abandon any optimism about formal industrial relations and recognise the unique effects of the oversupply of academic labour coupled with a leadership that exclusively focuses on gaming metrics and personal enrichment.
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Studies do not exist because there is no puzzle to resolve. There is no one who thinks a research university would attract and retain internationally recognised academic staff without giving them offices. Management don't disagree with this fact either. The just don't care.
@EldenRay
@HigherEd_UK
Tried to tell management this at my last place, but couldn’t locate any studies to back up my thoughts.
Staff eventually got a drawer to keep out things in, prior to that it was carry all your stuff, or have a locker in the staff room 3 floors up.
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The moment fees are increased, every VC will take out a new loan and buy a new building.
"The story starts with the freezing of tuition fees in 2017...."
I think the story started earlier, with the removal of student number caps and the shrinkage of the block grant for HE teaching. Unfreezing fees isn't the answer to all of the sector's woes.
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VCs like to say they are just running the uni like a business. In reality, no business could survive this level of incompetence and hostility toward staff.
@qm_ucu
I totally agree. The sad thing is I've come back to uni from industry and I love the students, staff, and teaching. I also know no other employer would treat staff this way.
If I treated my staff the way QM has, I'd have to close my business.
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