Archive for Job Cuts

The University Malaise

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , , on April 26, 2026 by telescoper

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.

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Universities: Death by Bullshit

Posted in Education, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , , , , , on March 9, 2025 by telescoper

Just time for a quick post to pass on an Editorial by Masud Husain with the title On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities which appeared in BRAIN magazine (which I buy for the Spot-the-Cell competition). I agree wholeheartedly with the article, which is available free of charge so I recommend you read it in full here, but I thought I’d give you a couple of tasters. The first is:

For some years now, it has become increasingly apparent to me that we are sleepwalking into a disaster. We are losing sight of the academic mission: to think, to enquire, to design and perform new research, to innovate, to teach and communicate our findings for the purpose of societal improvement. There are many reasons why this has occurred over just a quarter of century but a key contributor has been the corporatization of academic institutions.

The second is

To undertake corporatization, universities have borrowed principles that they think work in the private sector. These involve creating layers of administration to run different sectors of our institutions. In the UK, for example, between 1995 and 2019 while spending on university departments roughly doubled, the amount allocated to administration and central services more than quadrupled.

As you probably imagined, the piece borrows some themes from the book Bullshit Jobs (subtitled The Rise of Pointless Work and What We Can Do About It) by anthropologist David Graeber that I wrote about here.

The other day a colleague asked me if what I thought could be done about the underfunding of UK universities and the consequent job losses. I replied to say that I don’t think the problem so much that the universities as a whole are underfunded, but that the core missions of such institutions, by which I mean teaching and research, are. What is happening is that a huge slice of the money coming into universities is dissipated on bullshit jobs in a bloated management superstructure instead of being spent in the departments, which have become entirely subservient to “The Centre”. That is not only the case in the UK, but also here in Maynooth. Hardly a week goes by without some new bullshit job being advertised while our student-staff ratio soars and we academic underlings are starved of the resources we need to do our real jobs properly. It’s very dispiriting that Management continue to get away with this nonsense. If it continues, Ireland will undoubtedly encounter the same structural problems as are currently affecting the UK. I’m sure this is also the state of affairs in many other universities around the world.

It seems obvious to me that when your income falls, among the first things to do is reduce waste. If I were in charge of Higher Education funding my first priority would not be to increase funding but to impose penalties on universities that spend too little on what they’re actually supposed to be doing and too much on bullshit.

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