Can we have one of these inquiries here, please? #UKHE is also leading a stupid amount of money from the public institutions to these leechy private businesses. And yes, the lack of accountability is a key part of the issue about that.
295 modules cut in the School of the Arts Race and Racism in Performance Performing Illness and Disability Performance and Visual Culture in South Asia Queer Borderlands Iraqi Literature in English / English Translation Transgender Perspectives and Interventions Refugee Writing Indian Cinema Slavery, Colonialism and Postcolonialism Language and Ethnicity Multilingualism and Bilingualism Cinema and Disability Intersectional Feminist Writing Reading South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh Plus cuts to Arabic, Bengali, Catalan, French, German, Japanese Mandarin Chinese and Russian! Management is cutting The research-led modules that make QMUL QMUL
Management paid nearly a quarter million to the external consultancy NOUS, whose generic 'framework' is now used to turn QMUL into a Cookie Cutter University.
These modules make QMUL. They bring students in contact with the cutting-edge research & widen the scope of academia. #UKHE
the departure of over 200 staff who took voluntary severance and redundancy has resulted in more work falling on fewer shoulders...there appears to be little understanding of the implications of these sweeping restructures for staff workloads, research time and quality of teaching
The Vice Chancellor of Cardiff University has been criticised for attending a property conference in Cannes while staff at the university are facing job cuts ✍️Martin Shipton
What better way to end your weekend than by co-signing this petition in support of @ucuessex.bsky.social calling out the devastating cuts which their management is making.
Let their governing body know managers may not care about the wider public, but the wider public sure does care. #SaveHE
Cardiff UCU Casework co-ordinator David Wood and I posing with a table full of Union propaganda and cheap plastic tat. Still love our Union’s hot pink colour scheme. Gotta say.
Attended a Cardiff Uni “wellbeing” event for @cardiffucu.bsky.social today.
Argued that the best way to improve staff wellbeing is to save jobs, improve pay & conditions, join a union, and become an active member.
Recruited well, had lots of great conversations, & actually listened to colleagues.
🩷✊
Also, maybe don't use this as an excuse to cut courses and programs that are currently profitable? And make faculty who bring in research funds redundant?
Seems, I don't know, obvious?
#stopthecuts #savehe #UCU #UoNUCU #UON #UniversityOfNottingham
🔊 Cardiff UCU members: remember to post your ballot today!
You're voting to demand:
1. Removal of all staff from scope
2. No compulsory redundancies
3. To stop the dangerous workloads
4. To commit to staff H&S
Cambridge apparently scrapping veterinary education is a very normal thing to happen to one of the best universities in a very normal higher education system in a very normal island #UKHE
🔊 Calling all Cardiff UCU members: get your vote in by next Monday!
⏰ The countdown is on:
www.cardiffucu.org.uk
In yet more devastating news, the VC has confirmed her plans to cut 80% of academic staff from Essex Pathways, our foundation year department. This would effectively close down all our existing foundation year programmes through the back door.
But it's not a done deal yet. Please share urgently.
🔊 Calling all Cardiff UCU members: get your vote in by next Monday!
⏰ The countdown is on:
www.cardiffucu.org.uk
Swansea University staff have voted no confidence in Vice Chancellor after announcement of £30m in cuts, £25m from staffing
400 staff have already left through voluntary severance & 200 vacancies frozen
The destruction of Welsh universities accelerates
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
Cardiff University Kazakhstan featuring on BBC Wales Today, with contribution from Cardiff UCU's @llantwit.bsky.social
Your Sunday read on #UKHE:
‘Prof Larner said establishing the campus was "low risk", while acknowledging that the former Soviet republic was "in an interesting part of the world" at a "volatile time geopolitically".'
This is a very necessary but depressing list.
More jobs being cut.
Worse for staff and worse for students.
Our working conditions are student learning conditions.
Modern Languages; Music; and History, Archaeology & Religion remain in scope.
Compulsory redundancy is a red line.
It is time to vote in the consultative ballot on industrial action NOW - the deadline is tomorrow.
'Huddled under blankets in my freezing office, because the anti-suicide lock on the window has seized slightly ajar, I am – like everyone –frantically trying to make it work for the students, [since] any hit in our student satisfaction scores will be an excuse for management to cut more jobs.'
Members! September is flying away, so that means it is time to check your emails to vote in the indicative ballot. Deadline Oct 3rd.
A reminder to members to vote in the indicative ballot by October 3rd
Such deeply sad news for @hefindavid.bsky.social 's loved ones & community. Such a loss.
Hefin was a great friend of our branch & a committed
@ucu.org.uk member - we will always be grateful for his solidarity.
The final stages blend “grasping” and “capitulation” in a toxic and potentially fatal mix. The tales of cuts, closures, and intrusions I heard over the last month point to three main elements. First, programmes and collective expertise that took decades to build are abruptly thrown away. Second, financial factors dictate academic outcomes with unappealable force. Finance is owned and deployed by administrators with unilateral legal and institutional backing from governing bodies. Usually no coherent and complete financial data are offered such that staff can understand the forces destroying their careers, much less develop and negotiate a better plan. Third are the partners in destruction: staff apathy, fatalism and/or resignation. These attitudes are both completely understandable and now completely unaffordable. They come from academics seeing no mechanism for engagement or authorized path to better results. To repeat, it’s understandable that the relatively powerless feel defeated. But fatalism locks in the idea that firings, closures and cuts are the only solutions available to UK and US university managers. This idea is slowly ruining the intellectual functions and educational effects of higher education, perhaps irreversibly.
“measures like firing people and closing programmes always seem tough yet rejuvenating, yet always block recovery and hasten decline.“
Neat-yet-painful summary of Where We’re At with #UKHE. The fatalism is understandable but disastrous. None of this is inevitable. isrf.org/blog/a-new-r...
