Email sent to members on Monday 13th July 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 discuss management’s mantra that ‘doing nothing is not an option’. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.
Doing Nothing Is Not An Option
It’s remarkable how a power structure will remain wedded to its way of doing things even when all evidence points to it not working. At present the University Executive Board is – from an observer’s perspective at least – doing just that. They (or maybe their parasites consultants?) have invested so much psychic energy into the plans for Future Nottingham 2 that over time it has become increasingly difficult for them to admit that there are fundamental problems or listen to reasoned advice about its various flaws. UEB spent months and months pushing back the release of FN2 plans because they were not ready. The delay heightened the commitment to the plan, so when they did unveil it, including a new academic structure and swinging FTE reductions, they had already sunk costs into this specific pathway, the One and Only route to surplus (the end goal). The One Plan also has a specific timeline to give it (seemingly) exogenous pressure. Budging on any fundamentals is thus hard to do when one is emotionally invested in the correctness of one’s approach, and when there is a limited amount of time to execute it. The welter of negative media attention, the response from dumbfounded staff members – all of this just demonstrates the ultimate correctness of the One Plan and its Vision. Those who display such “resistance to change” (as staff have been repeatedly characterized) are simply unwilling to accept the “difficult decisions” and brute necessity of 1991-style shock therapy. Because of this commitment, alternatives cannot be evaluated on their own merits, but instead for compatibility against the One Plan. Requests for more data will be heard as retreading old ground or attempts to slow the process since the One Plan – by virtue of being the One Plan – is intrinsically well-evidenced and time-sensitive. And so on.
This is set against a backdrop of increasing authoritarianism in the university’s governance structure. It was always there, because it has been set up this way for a long time. Greenaway’s dictatorial format gave way to West, who seemingly attempted to respond to staff desires for greater democracy in governance, but turned out more a matter of change in style than actual substance. Norman and her team are simply using the tools that were already baked into the organisational structure, exploiting the withered mechanisms of oversight and scrutiny, and constructing circular self-dealing architectures of governance (aka ‘marking your own homework’). But the key legitimacy problem for this style of authoritarian and unaccountable university governance is the bare facts of the track record. And the track record is horrible. It gave us the Castle Meadow Campus debacle. It channeled surplus into top-down pet projects (“Beacons of Excellence”) rather than building up reserves. It gave us bad IT procurement processes like Unicore and Campus Solutions that never bothered starting with actual staff needs. It gave us the deleterious restructures of Project Transform. It gave us many millions of pounds in Estates backlogs and attendant failings for the Biomedical Services Unit, various roof collapses, emergency repairs to University Park’s Precambrian district heating system, etc. And it gave us interminable negotiations over the Malaysia Campus. The fruits of UoN’s existing governance structure are rotten.
UEB is a fan of the phrase “doing nothing is not an option”. Staff have now heard or read it countless times. What this device does is to position any criticisms of the One Plan as advocating “doing nothing” (e.g., “the data doesn’t justify this plan”, to which one responds “well, we can’t do nothing!”). But there isa matter at UoN for which “doing nothing is not an option”. And that is doing nothing to change the governance of the university. We’ve extensively stress-tested centralized and authoritarian style management structures, and they have led us to spiral out of control. Doing nothing really isn’t an option here. Instead, we need some radical shifts in governance principles: we need more decentralization and devolution of power, and we need more participatory democracy. This option has not been tried. And the risk assessment for such a change: things can hardly go much worse, now can they?
On behalf of the Branch Committee