Email sent to members on Tuesday 5th May 2026.
As part of our campaign to defend jobs and working conditions at the University of Nottingham, we will be sending regular emails, authored by different UCU members, examining key elements of management’s restructuring plans. Today we present a range of views on management’s strategy by students, staff and members of the wider public. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.
Put The Clocks Forward not back … Future Nottingham is management’s pipe dream. Students and staff feel we need an effective counterproposal with real expressive consultation.The university needs to consult with all of its staff and stakeholders to find the right solution: don’t ignore the people who care about your future!
Last week, I went to University Park campus and the Medical School. I spoke to fifty people: members of the public, home and overseas graduates, postgraduates. Post doctoral, pre university Nottingham College students, our lovely professional and academic staff. I asked them if they’d heard about the university management plan and the university staff’s counterproposal to save the university’s financial security. It was clear that everyone had heard about the cuts, the redundancies past, present and possibly future, but it was obvious that no-one felt the university had really taken the time to engage with staff about alternatives. No-one thought that this essential democratic process had been seriously undertaken.
Members of the public – husband and wife going into lakeside cafe: ‘yes, we’ve heard, we’re shocked. Music particularly, especially when the government is putting so much into the curriculum and music.’
Teacher: ‘I teach in a primary school, moving the university to a much more enriching curriculum is vital. I’ll read the staff’s counterproposal.’
Catering staff: ‘I have friends who work here and they’re still recovering after the terrible attacks on the students and the caretaker, nothing like that had ever happened before, yes I’ll read the counterproposal.’
Medical student: ‘we need openness and use the knowledge of staff. I have real fears about the data that’s being used to make decisions, it feels unsafe.’
Music, Post Doctoral researcher: ‘It’s the isolation of not knowing whether you matter, whether your aspirations matter.’
Undergraduate music student: ‘I want to make a career in music. I’d heard that the government is investing in music and felt hopeful. I’ll read the staff’s counterproposal.’
Academic: ‘I honestly would never have thought about union membership, but I really feel now I have to join. We have to help the senior management to properly assess our counterproposal. They really think they have the data, but they don’t.’
Academic: ‘Our working life and right to be here is challenged (most recent harm is the new convoluted gateway into journal access) it feels as if we’re all being made migrant here, constant changing of the rules of engagement. I ask who and what is a university for?’
Professional Services: ‘Future Nottingham is also future health of Nottingham, the UK and the wider world how they all join up; to me it’s the loss of the public service and accountability to the people we have always felt we serve, the wider public health impact through lowering productivities, quality of service what year on year on cuts do to motivation, purpose and the meaning of a life. We need proper consultation on the counterproposal that we spent time preparing.’
Academic: ‘I think it’s because of the hit and run nature of cuts in previous years: none of the previous cuts, changes, charges against a questionable compound annual growth rate have been demonstrated as a real purpose. We sit in a place that although historically it has coherence, purpose and underlying support from the widest possible communities it’s as if it’s all the kind of hippy mess that the vice chancellor poked at when she implied the silliness of thinking you had a fairly low paid job for life in the realpolitik of financialisation. But we’re not contractors, we’re not consultants: no-one has even had the time to work on an appropriate educational user interface for Unicore that makes us feel as if we’re working in a university.’
Management’s Future Nottingham Phase 2 plans clearly have no support—from staff, students, or the wider public.
There is always an alternative. Read the UCU’s counterproposal, its report to Council!
Come to the rally tomorrow, Wednesday 6 May, at 10.30 a.m., South side of Trent Building. Let’s make sure that Council hears our voices!
