Redundancies at Cardiff

[Rhythmisadancer]

DD is holding an offer from Cardiff for Sept this year, and one of the departments that is closing is Ancient History. Her place is for joint History and Ancient History - but it was the Ancient History that really caught her imagination. Does she need to have a big re-think, as she was just about to accept it as her firm.
I know there are bigger problems around this, people are losing their job, and nursing going sounds massive 😢
What do people think the implications are for students thinking of Cardiff this year - or for those already there?

I know someone who teaches midwifery and she says the same, i.e. scraping the barrel, students with very poor attendance, failing modules, cheating, etc.

Nursing academic here and our admissions dept tell us we have to take any level 3 qualifications at a bare pass in order to put (paying) bums on seats.

If it's anything like the RG univ I worked at for many years, they absolutely could cut the number of managers. There was a big VR soon after lockdown and I now hear that the department I was in have recruited a group of grade 6 middle managers, no doubt to replace the group of grade 4s who took VR (and who did the vast majority of the work).

I did my nursing degree at Cardiff uni. I did my post grad diploma at Swansea, and I'm currently doing my masters at Swansea uni. I actually prefer Swansea uni to Cardiff uni. The student nurses we have on placement with us seem to enjoy the degree at Swansea.

Yeah because no one needs to be processed or accepted, or requires any student support, or their accommodation arranging, halls repaired etc.

I'm not saying there no level or management that could be reduced but people take a very simplistic view of 'we don't need that'.

See again. Simplistic.

Sustainability is a really important measure in QS rankings. If you can't show this, your league table position suffers. Drop down the QS world rankings and you can't recruit international students. Lose those, lose jobs academic or otherwise.

I'm not saying this is how universities should operate but that this is the world they do operate in and no single institution can change that.

And communications (not very many people in my place) is something we need to handle press, marketing, reputation.

Diversity officers are a favourite bugbear at the moment. We are a large university - top 20 for size - and we have one HR official who has diversity and equality as part of her remit. That is not disproportionate with hundreds of staff and all the issues around disability, gender gap, race and religion etc that people bring.

You'd spend more on lawyers, frankly, if you decided not to bother with diversity and equality.

thanks @Alwaystired23 - she is very keen on Swansea so that is great to hear. I should stress that dd1 is not a ‘scraping the barrel type of applicant- she’s desperate to do adult nursing, has all 7-9s at gcse including triple science,’relevant work experience and good a level predictions. I’m just hoping that she meets others like her who really want to do the course and are committed to the career.

I’m sure she will, there are still high flying academic students who are keen to be nurses. The issue is that within their cohort there is also likely to be the polar opposite.

It can make teaching challenging as it can be a struggle for some in the cohort to understand which must be frustrating for the others if they have someone constantly asking for stuff to be explained over and over. Then there are the people who sit and chatter/loud whisper throughout because they’re not interested and distract others.

I wondered this- if every department has a full admin/support etc staff then maybe this can be trimmed. I don’t think it said 400 academic staff.

We’ve had a recent round of VR, after some fairly dire warnings from senior leadership it was hinted the next step would be compulsory (though not this year, though we are in deficit as many, many HEIs are). It’s not rare, though seems a hell of a bad time for it to come out for them with the UCAS deadline tomorrow

That is not in fact true. There are university departments that are very strong and under no risk at all of going under in the medium term. Obviously no one ever knows what the future holds but three years is not a long time. It's a very good idea to do some independent research on a university's finances.

I don’t think it said 400 academic staff.

"Cardiff University announced on 28 January it is proposing to cut 400 academic staff alongside axing subjects and increasing student and staff ratios."

University admin staff have already been trimmed to the absolute bare bones. One of the many reasons academics are so stressed and busy is that they're expected to do huge amounts of their own admin now that they never did even 10 years ago.

This has been going on a long time, cuts and redundancies are not a new thing.

When i started in the nhs it was really hard to become a student nurse or midwife. Some of the students we get now have no interest in actually learning or enthusiasm for doing tasks while on placement. You can see how it’s dropped….

Well said @Looksgood

If you don’t have comms, how do you attract home and international students, how do you attract grants for research?
If you don’t have student welfare, you have a higher drop out rate. If you don’t have careers, your ranking.goes down because your students don’t get jobs. Etc.

Universities do not blithely carry unnecessary layers of management in non-academic staff. Where I am, if anyone leaves, there is a huge process to prove their role is still required, the upshot of which is often that it is, but can’t be justified, so everyone will just have to muddle through.

The sector is suffering for many reasons, a reduction in international students following. Brexit (which stopped the uk being a gateway to the EU) and changes in immigration policy being a big one.

I see that Cardiff might be merging departments and that will lead to a reduction in admin staff, no doubt, as the chemistry admissions officer has to do the job for physics and earth sciences as well, or whatever, and her workload triples.

@PrioritisePleasure24 it makes me so sad re nursing. I might be very naive but there seem to be many careers in it for talented, resilient people. DD1 is brilliant with people, pretty clever, cannot bear the thought of an office job and will - I hope - go far - if she's not put off.

I did point out to her her course might be peppered with people who really don't care about their education or struggle with it. She said 'but school was like that up to sixth form. I'm used to it.' So there's that, I guess...

Good for her. For what it's worth, nursing in my place attracts lots of mature candidates who take the training and role very seriously. She can go on to do great things I'm sure. Where you train matters to your experience of course, but not to the career path.

My partner is a senior lecturer in Ancient History at Cardiff. As we understand it after yesterday's meetings, they are still recruiting students for this September and current Ancient History students will be able to finish their course, but after that, Ancient History as a named degree will no longer be offered. There will be Ancient History modules within the History degree, but they've been told to expect around half of the Ancient History posts to go. This is devastating for him, and for all of us - he's been there nearly thirty years, was Head of Department for several years, and has absolutely given his all to his students (and will continue to do so). It's a case of whether to look for a post elsewhere (difficult with a late teen DS whose friends are all in Cardiff) or cling on until early retirement.

@spiderlight I am so sorry - it sounds miserable all round and so hard with a teen in the picture too. I hope you all come up with a plan that works for you in the coming months.

Thank you. He has exams coming up so we're not going to say anything to him yet. It's a blooming nightmare though, after all these years when DH's job was so well-established. I suspect a lot of younger staff with fewer ties to Cardiff will jump ship.

Sorry to hear this @spiderlight I suppose the difficulty even for colleagues with no ties to Cardiff is what other academic jobs are about? I suspect not many in the current climate.

There aren't other jobs around. That's what's so difficult about these redundancies - academic staff aren't just losing a job, they're losing a career that they've built through significant work and personal sacrifice over decades.