Redundancies at your university?

[Oh2beatsea]

Are any of you working at one of the many universities that are struggling financially?
Our university announced the financial pressure it's under recently and they are now talking about redundancies. I know a few in the sector are in a similar position and wondered what stage you might be at and how has the process been managed? Have they offered voluntary redundancy first or have they gone straight to compulsory redundancies?
Unsettling times.

Is there a VC that earns £500k? The average is around £300k. DVCs and PVCs, COOs, CFOs typically £100-£150k. Which given they're in charge of organisations with thousands of staff members and turnovers of hundreds of £millions doesn't seem massively outrageous.

RG uni senior lecturer. Vol severance is coming we've heard on the grape vine. I would love to take one but the package is poor and I need 4 more years.

Oh yes.

And more than one.

https://thetab.com/uk/2023/01/17/ranked-the-eye-watering-salaries-of-all-the-russell-group-uni-vice-chancellors-289590#:~:text=Four%20Russell%20Group%20unis%2C%20including,Minouche%20Shafik%20got%20%C2%A3539%2C000.

Hmmmm I'll take official data over the Tab any day!

https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/finances/statements/senior-pay#vcpay

£10m deficit at my place, we were told. Due to decreasing OS student numbers plus 'unexpected' costs due to rises in CoL, heating, etc. The last is ridiculous - all of the offices on my floor are fucking boiling from October to May and have no thermostats. So in the winter I have to have my window open while the ancient heating system belts out. They probably could have saved about £1m by sorting that out... The whole thing is enraging, because while this deficit is not a surprise (deficit last year that they filled by using their 'reserves'), neither is the decrease in OS numbers, they've continued to invest in various vanity building projects, launched new (very expensive programmes) and are currently hiring 3 new middle/senior management types in my faculty.

Cuts seem to be across the board, but some faculties/ schools/ depts are being disproportionately affected, including mine (humanities) and another (arts). No surprises there...

There are rumours of gross financial mismanagement...

My friend's children have hardly any face to face anymore. Variety of universities. Prerecorded lectures being delivered virtually. What did lecturers (wanting to work from home) think was going to happen.

My students have 100% face to face teaching.

The only time they were taught fully online was from March 2020 until the end of that Academic year (which for them was the end of May 2020) and we did a hybrid of teaching online and in person (50/50 was the aim but we had to also follow government guidelines regarding Test and Trace and isolating) but only for the Academic year 2020/21. We were back fully face to face for everything from September 21 onwards.

Neither me, nor any of my colleagues "wanted to work from home" and hated online teaching even more than the students did.

I work 20% of my hours (one day a week) remotely when I can and that's all admin and research. All of my teaching and meetings with students takes place in person.

This is by no means unusual.

I'm sorry your friends' childrens' experience has been different but it's certainly not the normal, please don't tar us all with the same brush. I'd be encouraging them to transfer.

Most colleagues I know who run courses are 100% back face to face teaching. Yes they have recorded lectures they can look back on ( or for the lazy students who can't get out of bed that day to attend) but it's not a replacement for the face to face. Maybe some folk's children are not giving the full story!

At my place we have to get permission from the Deputy VC to move a lecture online and the majority of requests are denied.

Interestingly every module feedback has students asking if we could do online teaching to save them travelling into campus

Which universities and departments are these, please?

Same here. The issue is the opposite of what that poster claims, i.e. it’s more a case of dragging students back to the classroom. I don’t know anyone who wanted to teach online. We had no choice during the lockdown, but colleagues hated it. Who would choose to run a seminar for a group of students with their cameras turned off?

We're definitely in the same place and faculty @Flockameanie !
Ancient offices where you can't control the heating and a pointless restructure involving 3 new middle management roles. The whole thing is bonkers.

Also online teaching by special permission only here.Apparently students want all face to face but funnily enough they can't actually be bothered to turn up.

I work for a commercial firm which supplies specialist goods to the research labs of a particular university. We know that those labs receive very large grants from a certain industry to fund that research (highly technical and groundbreaking STEM). Yet we are not being paid by the university for the goods supplied. They are now months behind, we are refusing to supply the labs with any more goods, and the scientists are extremely frustrated. They know that their research is funded, and by whom, and that the money should be available.

What is happening to those funds? They should be ring-fenced and earmarked for these specific research projects. One can't help wondering whether the accounts people have had to 'borrow' the money in order to keep the rest of the university going.

We also supply other universities, and they (for the time being at least) pay on time.

'I've never heard the argument that pension conts are the problem, it's the UG fees and declining overseas that are the issues.' @titchy

Our last restructure was about reducing pay costs, and they mentioned pension contributions specifically as a massive and expensive problem. THIS restructure is about reducing ALL costs because of the fees situation, and they still mention pay costs and the associated pension contributions as part of that. They're just hammering it less this time because too many people are asking questions like 'Why didn't your last mass redundancy restructure solve this problem?' and they aren't prepared to answer them.

When 60% of universities are forecast to be in deficit you can stop blaming single factors. International student recruitment has cushioned many for a while but that's pretty much over as international student recruitment is falling off a cliff.

The cause is chronic underfunding of the entire sector. We either grow funding in HE or we shrink the size and number of universities in the UK. This is not about a handful of overpaid staff or individual universities being mismanaging, it's about the fact that the student fee has been virtually unchanged since 2011.

Yes, the reasons given for the financial crisis were

• less students applying generally (CoL crisis)
• the government reducing the number of international students (these students pay more for the course than a home student, so the loss of money will be greater)
• the 5% pension increase that needs to be paid to all in the Teachers Pension scheme has to come out of the individual university budget.

Where is this happening?
It's all face to face teaching at my university unless a course is specifically validated for blended or distance learning. In which case, you know what you signing up for. In our case it's only a small number of postgraduate courses which are validated as DL.

Just echoing that absolutely no online teaching here for UG - nobody (staff or students) wants it. At PGT/PGT level, the majority of supervisions can be online but that has always been the case

@summersock are you sure? Teaching is all face to face now at my uni and the other unis I know.

This is almost certainly because the Uni finance department is incompetent or using systems and processes out of the Dark Ages.

I’m not being unnecessarily unkind to my finance and admin colleagues, it’s just that most of them have had absolutely no exposure to how modern finance and billing works.

Students are not always reliable in the information they convey back to their parents. I was there when a student told his parents that he wasn't graduating from architecture, which he had initially enrolled on, but fine art, which he had switched to. That was 10 minutes before his graduation ceremony, 3 years after the switch.

Ah. Is this Surrey by any chance @dodi1978 ? Have name changed just to post this!

This all sounds like Surrey…. SO like surrey

I think the children are having your friends on. I'm professional services but DH is teaching a huge Y3 module (STEM) at the same redbrick with loads of face to face contact hours. He's taken to doing a register because so few students ever bother to turn up for lab classes. He's got 50+ who haven't been to any classes, taken any online quizzes or even logged onto his online blackboard resources yet this semester.