Cut, cut, cut! Teaching jobs go at Sheffield University
Keith Burnett protecting jobs
On 5 May this year, the Vice-Chancellor sent this reassuring email to staff: ‘I want to give you all a commitment that, here at Sheffield, I will be doing my utmost to protect jobs, and avoid redundancies.’ Sadly for the students and employees of the University of Sheffield, this was not the last email the VC sent on the subject.
Prof. Keith ‘Protector of Jobs and Avoider of Redundancies’ Burnett sent another altogether more miserable email, three months later on 17 August. ‘I am writing to let you know the outcome of the University’s recent Voluntary Severance Scheme.’ In it, he revealed that 320 staff will be leaving the University, 5 per cent of the university’s entire staff.
5 per cent might not sound like a lot, but it will directly affect your education. A 5 per cent cut in staff means fewer lecturers, fewer IT technicians and fewer librarians and lab-assistants. As a result your lectures and seminars will be more overcrowded, computers will take longer to be fixed and the university’s already under stocked libraries will be more disorganised. In other words, your university education has been made that little bit worse.
Those who defend the staffing cuts may point out that only 67 of those leaving are ‘academic/teaching’, which is just 2 per cent of the total number of doctors, professors and teachers at the University. They will argue the student’s education is no worse. They are, however, completely and utterly wrong. Lecturers cannot lecture without an array of support staff. I remember a lecture in first year that was ruined because the lecturer (a very clever bloke, but one I doubt knows how to change a light bulb) could not get PowerPoint working and no one was available to come and fix it. With fewer support staff, events like this will only become more frequent. Quite simply, with less staff the University will be worse.
Less staff also means fewer quality contact hours. What needs to be stated again and again and again is that students are paying more and getting less. While ‘The Protector of Jobs and Avoider of Redundancies’ may dismiss criticisms that students are getting a worse deal (describing them as ‘perceptions [that] are not necessarily based on evidence’ – a description that is not necessarily based on evidence, either), the fact of the matter is that there are more students and fewer lecturers. This is hardly likely to increase standards. If anything, the University is treading water and if senior management continues hacking at jobs the University’s standards will sink.
Unfortunately, my moralising and whining does not solve the £25m hole in the universities budget that must be plugged. In total, the Voluntary Severance Scheme has managed to cut £13m from the University’s staffing budget (which is almost enough for an Arts Tower refurbishment). The University still needs to find £2m more if it is to reach its target of reducing the staff budget by £15m. This means that – if the university continues on its current strategy of shuffling people into a room and leaving them with a brandy and a revolver (for it is ‘voluntary’, after all…) – there are more job cuts to come.
Such a strategy shows a real dearth of ambition from the university’s leaders. They fix a short term problem (a budget shortfall during a recession) by creating a long term problem (dragging down the university’s standards). Job cuts are not the only possible solution; they are a pessimist’s solution. Oxford and Cambridge have both launched well publicised fundraising drives and have raised hundreds of millions of pounds in the process. Without any Oxbridge glamour, the University of Alberta in Canada rose around £300m in 5 years. And yet sorry old Sheffield is hacking its staff down to size to raise a paltry £15m. Rather than pushing more staff towards the door, the University needs to set up an effective, well publicised fundraising scheme. Prof. Burnett needs to get rid of the pessimism and show some ambition.
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