Email sent to members on Monday 1st June.
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 the so-called Consultation of the Future Nottingham draft business plan. Feel free to share this post with non-UCU members in your area.
It’s not a Consultation. It’s a Countdown!
The University of Nottingham is not going under. Let’s be clear about that from the start. University Park is lovely, the buildings are still standing, the endowment is intact, and the vice-chancellor’s and senior management’s salaries remain comfortably unthreatened. What is happening with “Future Nottingham” is not a rescue, but a choice to pursue an excessively large financial surplus that will be used for more grand capital schemes. But nothing comes for free and this particular choice requires staff, students, and the wider city of Nottingham to pay for it!
Over 2,700 more members of staff have now received redundancy notices. Physics, Chemistry, Music, Languages and Medicine to name but a few areas are heavily “in scope”. Departments built over decades by people who dedicated their careers to this institution are being lined up for closure. And the university calls for a “Consultation”. So, let’s talk about the “C” word …
“Consultation”, by any reasonable definition, involves listening. It implies some reasonable possibility that you don’t know everything and might be persuaded otherwise. But when a detailed alternative proposal was submitted by unions months ago and management refused to even read it, the pretence collapsed. Receiving a redundancy notice is not an invitation to a conversation. It is a statement of intent dressed up in the language of HR process. The decision, it seems, has already been made and the “consultation” is a necessary formality that heralds the countdown to a lesser university.
University management continually say that doing nothing is not an option. And they are right but only in the narrowest, most self-serving sense. What options have UoN management elected for? Spending millions on management consultants while cutting teaching staff is an option. Pursuing aggressive surplus targets overseen by the same committee responsible for a string of failed capital projects is an option. These are choices, and the people making them should own them and take responsibility but they don’t.
So here we are again, sacrificing wages and careers with ASOS, strike and MAB because we actually care for the University of Nottingham. Meanwhile the university had the audacity to express disappointment that industrial action is causing stress to students at a difficult time of year. What peculiar kind of logic is it that asks workers to quietly absorb job losses and course closures out of consideration for students, while the University Executive Board responsible for the disruption escapes scrutiny and accountability? Staff did not arrive at this moment willingly. We arrived here because 350 jobs were cut last year and hundreds more are now at risk. It’s because it’s the same old UEB that, whilst telling us we’re not wanted anymore, thinks nothing of blowing nearly £100M on the failed Castle Meadow Campus without doing as much as the due diligence you’d do before trying a new flavour of crisps, and because every other avenue has been exhausted.
The disruption students face this summer is real, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But the disruption that will follow if FN goes ahead is of an entirely different order. Pastoral support teams and “mental health apps”, however well-intentioned, cannot replace courses that no longer exist, a supervisor who has been made redundant, or a department that has been quietly wound down. No procedure fixes the absence of a physics lab or a music department. And here is perhaps the most important point of all: The students who will suffer most from these cuts are not yet at the University of Nottingham. They are teenagers sitting in school classrooms right now, imagining their futures, researching university courses. They will look at what Nottingham chose to become, and they will choose somewhere else. The reputational damage being done today will echo for a generation.
The University of Nottingham became a great civic institution because of the people who work within it; researchers, lecturers, technicians and support staff. Asset-stripping that human infrastructure to fund foolhardy balance sheet targets is not a strategy, no matter how much management consultant “speak” one uses. It’s a slow, careless, one-dimensional demolition job that highlights the extent to which management are out of their depth.
Isn’t it time that UEB stopped floundering around and instead for the first time in many years meaningfully listened to the people who actually know how to make this university work? Without a new era of trust in staff no amount of management consultancy fees can ever rebuild what is being lost. And no amount of “consultation” can hide the fact that “Future Nottingham” is actually a costly, chaotic, countdown to Failure Nottingham. Grow up UEB and let the adults enter the room!