Email sent to members on Tuesday 17th March 2026. The below has been modified from the original email for the purposes of the website, but the content and meaning has not changed.
Dear Members
Following the VC townhall meetings, where the Vice-Chancellor stated: “Unions declared a vote of no confidence in me and my executive team, and I want to say at the outset, I absolutely understand the motivations of individual union members who have voted for that. I understand that … the compact you feel about working for a university has now been broken … the compact that you weren’t going to earn very much money, but you had a secure job for life in a comfortable environment without a heavy workload – that’s gone” we, the Branch Committee wrote to Jane Norman last Friday.
We stated: “this comment caused widespread anger and disbelief across the University of Nottingham. Staff understood your remarks as implying that university employees have so far enjoyed a “comfortable environment without a heavy workload”. That characterisation bears no resemblance to the lived reality of working at this institution. Furthermore, the idea of a “job for life” ignores the prevalence of fixed-term contracts among academic staff and the recurring insecurity faced by professional services staff due to repeated restructuring programmes at the University level (e.g. Future Nottingham Phase 1 and Project Transform), within central services, and across Faculties”.
We asked her to issue a public apology to stafffor these remarks and advised that recognising the commitment and workload of staff would be an important first step towards rebuilding trust, that Staff at the University of Nottingham continue to work extraordinarily hard for their students, their research and the institution as a whole and that commitment deserves recognition and respect. (the full email is here).
Jane has replied to us (this Monday), a long email. The upshots of which are :
- She is sorry to hear that we and some others understood her remarks as “implying that university employees have so far enjoyed a “comfortable environment without a heavy workload”.
- She will reflect on our remarks as they prepare further engagement sessions.
However, she did not engage with our ask for a public apology. There has not been one.
On other committee work, we have had JNCC meetings, where the Promotion Pause was fiercely opposed and ignored, we had the deep dives on SSR and Research time and patiently explained how it impacted on FTEs, global rankings and knowledge advance. We have a workstream meeting on Thursday, where “Summary of deep dives” is one of the agenda, (but don’t hold your breath, there was a reason why members of all unions submitted a VONC , but….)
Our final Dispute Resolution meeting will occur in April. Please do remember to vote, it would be great to announce the results at the dispute meeting!
Full solidarity,