In case you missed it, the university's plan to sack everybody bar the Executive Board made the main story on
Midlands Today a couple of days ago.
Thrill! To the BS from management!
Swoon! To the calm authority of my union leaders!
Rage! At the stupidity of massive classes, restricted courses and exhausted lecturers!
See it
here (UK viewers only, possibly).
More coverage
here and
here (including a heated argument in the comments section which starts well then degenerates into slanging).
11 comments:
Well, the chart they put up was wrong anyway. 22 at Warwick? try 10.5 in one support department alone. And not by Sept 2010, they are off by the end of this year.
We don't know where the 2010 figure comes from either, unless they mean January 2010. It's all very stressful - not helped by an expanded Executive, on 30% pay rises, as a reward for misreporting stats to HEFCE.
The Vice Chancellor saying "for a University of this standing and quality" made me spit tea all over my monitor in guffaws of laughter, and we all know the cuts are very little to do with the economic climate and much more to do with financial mismanagement, I see they've followed the example of their neighbours, the Council just up the road, argh!!! To suggest Universties across the country are being forced to cut swathes of jobs is patently untrue, I subscribe to jobs.ac.uk and there are plenty of new posts being advertised, and I can't help noticing in the national press that because of the economic climate there are record numbers of people applying to universities this year!
Hmm. Those don't quite fit together. Just because jobs.ac.uk is still advertising posts, does not mean that other posts are not disappearing. University departments are often relatively autonomous, and so just because one department chooses to deal with a budget cut by reducing staff doesn't mean somewhere else in the institution must not be hiring.
From the number of campaigns being managed by the Unions, I would suggest that very many institutions are reducing their staff, as a relatively simple way of reducing budget commitments. For "simple", read "can't be bothered to restructure or redesign services and functions so they cost less, so let's just dump a few and get everyone else to take up the slack, after all, we can't have people wasting time with things like reading and helping students out, now can we?"
As for the increase in university applications - OF COURSE THERE ARE!! Because it's much easier to bum around being a student than to go out and find a job (I know - I did the same at the end of my first degree in 1990). Besides, with the grinning idiot Blair having required that half the school output go into higher education, degrees (of whatever quality) are fast becoming a requirement. Even though practically the only way he could achieve this was by allowing almost anything to call itself a University and start handing them out like toffee papers.
You're both right and wrong in parts. My place has a recruitment freeze for posts, except (obviously) for Executive Board positions. There's also a ban on recruiting more students - the government's announced emergency funding for more on certain maths/science courses but nobody knows which institutions will get the money.
Lots of people want to go back to university and retrain because they're losing their jobs, but they're finding out they can't, except in limited circumstances. One of my sister's is about to start a nursing degree after doing a music degree and finding a social work MA not to her tastes, and my brother's paying for a postgrad law course - but most people will find it harder.
My place is reducing modules from 8 per year to 6, leading to less choice and bigger classes - which is how they think they can reduce staffing. Let's see how that plays out pedagogically…
Forgive me, I didn't express myself very well. I wasn't trying to suggest that Universities are not reducing their staff at all, rather I meant that in general terms the reductions in the average University are on nowhere near as large a scale as at Wolverhampton, which I would see as atypical rather than typical, and if that is the case the rhetoric from the Deputy Vice Chancellor was deliberately misleading (i.e. he is glossing over the financial mismanagement which we know has occured by implying many Universities are just as adversely effected as Wolves). I also meant that as far as I understand it universities have been rather modestly affected by the recession compared to other sectors (e.g. manufacturing, local government, retail), and that given the high intake of students this year the vast majority of University employees need not worry about their jobs(soapbox moment - the scaremongering in the media that we should all be terrified of being long term unemployed bothers me!). Having said all this though, I'm in a Business School and I'm guessing the arts and social sciences are more likely to feel the axe first (although I'm not saying that they should!).
The main cause is the misreporting of student numbers, and the budgeting based on misreporting. It happened in almost every university, including those with spires. The worst hit is LMU - 450 jobs to go. As to who'll be hit in departmental terms, it will be arts, particularly ones businesses don't like: history, politics, war studies, philosophy and probably languages too.
Thanks, Voley and Simon for enlightening me. Well, if the misreporting of numbers is something nationwide that universities have been doing wrong that has resulted in all these job losses (sorry, I didn't realise this, from your rants about management I'd understood it to be something peculiar to Wolverhampton)then surely this suggests it is the system that's at fault, or rather those in charge of designing and implementing it. What are they doing about rectifying the system?
I forgot to add: because it's so widespread, they'll let a couple of bottom of the pile places (Wolves and LMU) go for massive redundancies, public shame etc, then craft an amnesty, probably next summer, before the posh places get penalised. That's how it works. Fair, huh?
6 modules down from 8? That is highly annoying and choice limiting! Is that coming into place from September? I hope not.
Why oh why did I actually choose to come here, out of all the decent establishments I could have attended.
No - it comes in at all levels in September 2010, it just takes a year and a half to plan. There's no educational justification for it at all - we've asked the experts. It's just to make it easier for people to pass and saves on rooms, resources and teachers.
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