Save Physics & Astronomy at Sussex!
Not long ago I posted an item about cuts to the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Nottingham, which included a link to an open letter protesting the decision. About 2700 people signed that letter. It remains to be seen whether it makes any difference.
At the end of that item about Nottingham I wrote
I fear more such news is coming. The UK Higher Education sector is shrinking rapidly. Nottingham University won’t be the last, and I doubt the contagion will be restricted to the UK either…
There have indeed been other announcements of redundancies, including Exeter and Hertfordshire and another at an institution I have worked at, the University of Sussex. The Department of Physics & Astronomy there has been informed that it is to lose 35% of its staff. That means about a dozen posts have to go, with letters going to those in Astronomy and Particle Physics. The authorities at Sussex are no doubt taking their cue from the decision of the Science and Technology Facilities Council to cut grant funding in those areas.
As regular readers of this blog will know, I was Head of School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at Sussex, which encompassed the Department of Physics & Astronomy, from 2013 to 2016 (when I stepped down for personal reasons). That was a very upbeat period for Physics and Astronomy at Sussex, which makes it very painful to see how badly things are going now just a decade later. When I was Head I was very conscious of the danger of relying too much on STFC science, so we did diversify quite a bit, but even in my worst nightmares I had no idea things would come to this.
Anyway, there is an open letter about Physics & Astronomy at Sussex which I encourage you to sign. When I last looked it only had 336 signatories, but the cause is at least as worthy as at Nottingham.
In the Dark 
June 26, 2026 at 12:41 pm
If I had been asked to guess, I wouldn’t have put either Sussex or Nottingham in the top ~5 UK universities to be first to plan cuts to their astronomy activities. The research at both must be well above “average” for their institutions (certainly they are in terms of their national standing).
June 26, 2026 at 12:57 pm
I suspect that in both cases the main factor was not research but student recruitment.
June 26, 2026 at 3:59 pm
Just what role are management consultants playing in all of this? I note that Sussex shares Nottingham’s predilection for PA Consulting (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/hub/pa-consulting). Despite the regular claims of being broke, Nottingham senior management somehow manages to find many millions to spend annually on consultancies. I’d be gobsmacked if this weren’t also the case at Sussex.
From the Consultancy Spend section of the Nottingham UCU counter-proposal (https://uonucu.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/UCU-Phase-One-Counterproposal.pdf):
“Every £1 million diverted from consultancy could support around 25 or so full time salaries in teaching, research and professional services”
Sussex and Nottingham are particularly high profile cases right now, but they’re very much part of a broader (inter)national problem: just how much are management consultants leeching out of the HE sector (i.e. from student fees and taxpayer funding) while vice-chancellors plead poverty?
A recent analysis found that Australian universities spend an eye-watering A$1.8bn per year on consultants and contractors, while (like their UK counterparts) simultaneously claiming financial crisis, cutting staff and closing departments. Nobody appears to know the equivalent figure for the UK.
Every Vice-Chancellor/University Executive Board (UEB) Town Hall meeting we rank-and-file UoN academics attend feels like sitting in the audience of a Wankernomics show. Senior management (VC, deputy VC, and the coterie of PVCs) are paid inflated salaries simply to parrot mindless corporate boilerplate off PowerPoint slide desks prepared by consultancies.
Infuriating.