The University Malaise
The UK University sector is currently struggling very badly. The latest piece of news I have seen is from the University of Nottingham, where it seems the Management is planning to cut over 600 jobs. New appointments are being frozen and a voluntary severance scheme launched, but it may well come to compulsory redundancies given the scale of the proposal. I feel sorry for anyone there caught up in this because the mood must be very gloomy right now. None of this is the fault of the academics or support staff on whose positions the axe will fall.
The financial predicament of the University of Nottingham is largely the result of a reckless management decision to acquire a new campus called the Castle Meadow complex.
I worked in Nottingham from 1999 to 2007. At that time the Castle Meadow campus (left) was owned by HM Revenue & Customs. It’s next to the canal and not far from the Railway Station, but not very close to the main campus. I remember passing it many times on the train going in and out of Nottingham.
The University of Nottingham bought the campus from HMRC in 2021 for £37.5 million and spend over £45 million redeveloping it, with the idea of siting the Business School there (among other things), but there was no demand for it and in 2025, the university announced plans to sell the campus at a considerable loss.
Now you would think that the people responsible for this fiasco would be held to account and pay at least some of the price for their incompetence. But no. The former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham, Prof. Shearer West, with whom the responsbility for the Castle Meadow campus disaster, left her post in 2024 to take up the position of Vice-Chancelor at the University of Leeds on a salary of more than £330K, leaving others to clean up the mess. I’m sure the staff and students at Leeds are waiting nervously to see what plans she has in store for their ruination. No doubt she received a glowing reference from Nottingham.
Anyone who thinks that positions with high salaries are always held by highly skilled people need only look at the Higher Education sector for definitive counter-examples.
The pattern of incompetent “leaders” switching jobs before the impact of their incompetence is revealed is a well-established one, but it’s not only the fault of the people at the very top. The entire system of governance is rotten, and not only in the UK. universities and other higher-education institutions have forgotten that the exist above all for education and research. Nowadays they have been captured by a self-serving management class that has lost sight of this and instead acts as if the only purpose is the generation of revenue, not to be spent on teaching and research but on vanity projects (like the Castle Meadow campus) and employing even more managers. Even if they were not being steered unerringly onto the rocks, universities would in any case be in danger of sinking because they are unable to support the weight of their bloated management superstructure.
I saw a post on Bluesky recently that included the following:
I asked a senior administrator what’s causing the University budget deficit.‘Research & teaching,’ he said, ‘both lose money, not financially viable’
I said, ‘Funny, then, we weren’t losing money in the past when central administration was half the size’
That’s it in a nutshell.
I only wish this were an isolated example. It’s a systemic problem. Management bloat, expensive vanity projects requiring the diversion of funds from teaching and research, and deeply flawed strategic decisions, are symptoms of a widespread malaise. Unless there are drastic changes, the HE sector is going to shrivel and die.
In the Dark 
April 26, 2026 at 1:51 pm
Dear Professor Cole,
After watching the following video, I wonder which country’s universities are faring worse for you, those in Australia or UK.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅
April 26, 2026 at 2:37 pm
Thanks for highlighting the situation at Nottingham, Peter. A new accountability strategy for senior management has recently been introduced so I’m sure that stakeholder confidence, institutional agility, and sector-leading excellence will soon again be the order of the day. Trebles all round, as Hislop et al might put it.
April 27, 2026 at 10:20 am
It lost me at the use of the word ‘holistic’….
April 27, 2026 at 11:15 am
That’s sort of the point.
Strategic Holistic Accountability Model : SHAM.
Further down we have “Pilot Accountability Reflections: Outcomes, Developments, and Yardsticks”, i.e. PARODY
…and then right at the bottom, in the context of the farcical QS World Ranking boll**ks, we have: Bilateral Academic Collaboration and Knowledge-Sharing through Collegial Recognition And Trusted CHannels: BACKSCRATCH
I clearly read too much Private Eye…
April 26, 2026 at 3:49 pm
@telescoper.blog why does any of this need to be financially viable in the first place? Not everything needs to generate money in order to exist.
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April 26, 2026 at 7:07 pm
in the Uk the problem has three common origins. The 1992 Tory government’s decision to make all higher education institutions “universities”, even the very effective polytechnics that were not research based and focussed on skills. Then came the 1997 Blair government’s commitment to 50% or greater of 18 year olds going to the university sector. Finally the financial madness of the student loan system. Taken together you get Mickey Mouse degrees, student penury and a collapsing system. Politicians of different persuasions destroying a once effective system!
April 26, 2026 at 9:56 pm
“The running of the world is moving into the hands of the managers. Capital has virtually lost its control already, and it will be displaced, not by labor, not by socialism, but by the role of the administrators in business and government. This revolution is as broad as the world and as comprehensive as human society.” – front cover of James Burnham’s book, The Managerial Revolution (1941).
April 27, 2026 at 7:51 am
There are many poorly-paid, overworked administrative staff in universities who do an exceptional job and are worth their weight in gold. In my experience, they tend to spend their time battling with appallingly poor infrastructure on behalf of academics.
The problem is not “administration” per se – every institution needs people who keep things running. (There’s a great (Mitchell and Webb?) sketch, which of course I can’t source now, where all the administrators at a hospital are sacked and the nurses end up having to nip out to Boots on their lunch hour to refill the medicine cabinet…)
The problem, instead, is managerialism. Academics and students are now simply inputs into a system whose real priorities are income generation, risk management, reputation management, and, of course, bureaucratic self-preservation at the highest (and not-so-highest) managerial levels.
Framing this as administrators vs academics distracts from the core issue. Burnham’s book is, after all, titled “The Managerial Revolution”.
April 27, 2026 at 9:48 am
Add this to YouTube’s URL (I’ve not figured out how to post links):
watch?v=JAk448volww
April 27, 2026 at 9:58 am
Thank you!
April 27, 2026 at 10:20 am
Yes one needs people to provide administrative support – do the tasks that academics should not be doing – basically, academic support staff. The problem is with those who only job is to manage and monitor the performance of others. In academia this in turn leads to academics doing jobs that years ago were done by academic support staff.
April 27, 2026 at 10:23 am
My university went through the redundancy exercise last year – the University of Ulster has now just announced one.
April 27, 2026 at 4:42 pm
[…] A blog about the Universe, and all that surrounds it « The University Malaise […]
May 14, 2026 at 7:57 am
[…] background to this disaster is explained here. In summary, the University’s current financial meltdown is caused by the actions of the […]