What 'everyday' cost-saving measures has your university put in place?

[YopMeMama]

I've NC for this but long-time poster.

As well as the 'big' stuff like removing our personal research budgets, the VS scheme, compulsory redundancy, push for massive income generation etc., my university also has a number of day-to-day cost saving measures which range from cruel to illogical to downright weird.

At my institution:

> We've been told no more tea/coffee supplied by the university. If you want a hot drink, bring your own supplies.

> The thermostats have all been turned down, our portable heaters have been removed, and we've been told no offices are to be more than 18C.

> Our printing is being closely monitored. No more than 200 pages of A4 per academic, per term. External printing (unless for specific things like big posters, recruitment materials etc.) can't be claimed on expenses.

> Lunch can only be ordered for events which last more than four hours regardless of what the event is and who's attending.

I get the point - taken together across the institution, these measures could actually add up to quite a bit of saving. But when I tell non-academic pals these things, they're just baffled.

What's happening where you are?

The academic life used to have quite a few perks - and as PP have pointed out was very much unlike other public sector organisations.

I always regarded the perks as a mitigation for the years of precarious fixed term contracts with poor pay. (Followed by threat of redundancy on an annual basis) My place hasn't had a cost of living or in fact any pay rise for around 2 years and promotions are largely frozen.

My friend works in education and they released guidance on additional income revenues available to staff to supplement income eg private tuition….onlyfans was on there with rules on not to show your face..so feet pics was okay 😕

I think I'd be quietly leaking that to the media!!

Send the students a pdf and let them print it if they want

This breaks copyright if it’s a reading. I can imagine the outrage from students who accrue £50k debt for a degree being asked to print out their own worksheets. No uni provides lunches fgs until perhaps a special external. We have not had ‘perks’ for 25 years but have seen real pay decline annually.

My department generates tens of millions in profit for the university, not to mention our VC salary not far off 1/2 million pounds and posters think it’s okay for faculty (the people responsible for teaching the students) wear thermal underwear in unheated offices?

Please do not fall into the trap of thinking the solution is to attack each other. Nor to adopt a Monty Python argument of that’s heaven compared to when I was a lad!

We’ve only ever been able to do most of the things here if we had grant funding to cover them. Never had bonus, been paying for parking for years (which is fair enough, I am comfortable with attempts to reduce car useage).

My current department stretches to free instant coffee, tea, hot chocolate and milk.

We still have tea and coffee but pps are describing it like it was just for staff. Our tea and coffee is only for when we have external visitors and has always been that way. So if we are hosting a research seminar and prestigious speakers are there for example.

Our institution is doing 'ok' so the biggest measure has been over subscribing students to ensure we remain 'ok'. So double teaching loads for everyone as a result.

Never had tea or coffee in 8 years of being an academic.

Moved to one academic per poster presentation/osce exam with recording it on video as an alternative to a second marker. It works for poster presentations I guess, not so much for practical OSCE exams as two people having a tick list is helpful for comparison to see did they do x, did they do y. Sometimes it goes so fast you miss it. If I was by myself I’m not watching every recording back so they’d just lose marks if not ticked.

university is looking at moving to AI for clinical skills as they say long term it will save money. If a student with a headset can simulate giving an injection it saves on consumables, long term it may save on clinical skills suites and techs.

my annual extra payment for being programme lead hasn’t gone up in eight years. Only £500, not worth it.

no external speakers to be paid for.

thankfully they haven’t looked at the printing yet, I’d be fucked in two weeks with a 200 sheet limit! 🙈😆

I’m forever printing scenario sheets for group work, quizes, activity sheets to do “active learning” in sessions. God forbid people try and make sessions interactive.

I assume fanny pics are also ok! 😁👍

The printing thing is awful for student experience. If I don't print out sheets I have a room of 20 students in a seminar just staring at screens. I ask them to discuss and work together and their response is to open up a shared Google doc rather than actually talk. The only way I can get them to speak to eachother is to request all devices closed/off and to look at paper instead.

What a miserable existence. It makes me appreciate my warm private sector office with free hot drinks and sparkling water, including a decent coffee machine, bonus, free lunch and dinner and open bars at events.

Yes, I could accept the lower salary and longer time it took to qualify to do the job if there were a few perks. I went from having my own office, to sharing with another, to sharing with three other people, to a hotdesk in a cold office with a dripping ceiling. It just finally dawned on me that it wasn’t worth it anymore and that the SMT were cutting things to the bone to preserve their high salaries. I took as much VS as I could and retired. I feel desperately sorry for my younger colleagues putting up with this guff.

To be fair, I received a nice lunch when I was an external examiner for a PhD viva. I did not like having to chase my honorarium however.

'Everyday' savings?

Cutting PS staff to the bone and telling academic staff that tasks that PS staff used to do "No longer fit into PS workloads"

So who tf will do them? Oh yes, academics, who obviously have no workload ...

Changing our contracts universally, to cut research time to 20%

We never had free tea or coffee, so don't miss that.

Not emptying office bins. I don't do housework at home (I pay someone else, far better use of my time & money) so why should I do housework at work?

They've always turned off heating in the Christmas break - apparently the savings made are huge so I don't grudge that.

Nothing really egregious (bar the research time ting) but just more & more overload of work via surveillance, moderation, checking, umpteen different online systems, and PS staff just saying "No."

That all sounds miserable. I'm in academia, but not in the UK. We have free coffee, tea, milk, and fruit provided. We used to have a weekly coffee gathering with cake, but nowadays the cake has been downgraded to basic biscuits. Training events and some departmentally management meetings will have lunch and/or snacks provided.

On the other hand, we have no departmental funding for conference travel (only competitive funding at faculty level) and our research allocation can be as little as 20% unless you bring in external funding.

Crazy - all the extra time that must take compared with the days of being able to access what you need straight away.

As a teacher in state schools this sounds normal to me! My school has started supplying tea and coffee for staff and it’s the first time I’ve had it happen in 20years of teaching!

Tax payers don’t pay for universities

I get all this trimming round the edges but until universities can pull out of TPS/ USS/ LGPS pension schemes they are really going to struggle to make a dent. Those schemes are significantly more expensive than other employers offer.

they also need to modernise employment packages ie reduce holiday allowances and not pay excessive sick leave

Oh and sorry to say from my experience most universities have a few academics knocking around taking a salary for years and year and no one has a clue what they’re doing or where they are based (and have tracked a few down to find them in full retirement having not stepped foot in the university for years, still being paid every month)

It’s widely acknowledged the sector is too big for the market and has been for many years. Now the cash that funded that gap is running low and universities are sinking. Quite a few will need to go under to steady the ship, sadly

There's been no tea and coffee , no lunches, rigorous printing monitoring etc in the public sector for years!

It strikes me that quite a lot of money could be saved by getting rid of a lot of the "non academic" jobs. It seems bonkers to hack away at the core purpose of a university when there is a whole industry of fluff jobs going on. I've lost count of the people I know (we live in a university town) who have strange "justifying their own existence" type jobs at the university

They need to go back to being academic institutions.

Presumably you're talking about those on 0.2 contracts who are kept on solely for REF purposes? Because otherwise it's really hard to see how this could possibly happen.

As for annual leave (your previous post), it's 30 days where I work. Not unduly generous, given that a lot of us use that annual leave to give ourselves space to get on with research uninterrupted.

Of course I’m not talking about 0.2 FTE- I would’ve said if I were- although of course they are a smaller financial drain if you pay a few of them to puff out your ref.

30 days (plus bank hols) is generous compared to most. Plus this is obviously a volume game- and extra 5 days worked a year over 3000 employees leads to a significant saving

Perhaps have a think about why there are aspects of this specific job that require us to have things printed out. For example, I have three PhD students finishing this year. That's three lots of thesis drafts for to read (each around 300 pages), probably twice in each case. It takes roughly a week to read a thesis. Reading that on screen makes my eyes start twitching. I have previously ended up with blepharitis because of the amount of time I spend reading on screen. Aside from PhD theses, we read a lot of other things that are substantial in terms of length and concentration - journal articles, reports, committee papers. The scholarship applications I will assess shortly run to over 3000 pages in total. I can manage those on screen but some people can't.

I have a job that also involves working with huge amounts of dense texts, legislation, case law, drafting enormous documents. I am constantly being scolded by my optician for the amount of screen time and I have a serious condition that affects my eye muscles. Believe me I neither like nor support the printing clampdown. I am allowed to print but have to justify it and our department is charged for the cost.

I wasn't saying whether these changes are right or wrong, merely pointing out that it has been a good 10-15 years (probably longer) since I have seen a free tea/coffee or lunch in central or local government

In that case, I repeat what I said. It's very hard to believe that this is possible, given that they will have had line managers who are responsible for both workloading the department and overseeing the budget (and who take the flak from both lower down and higher up for those things, respectively).

Most academics are working those extra five days (and more). The leave gets used for research - it's the only way you can be left alone to do it. You could take it away, but then I suspect people will actually start using their annual leave as annual leave.