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#CardiffUniversity

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Vashti

The #ForWalesSeeWales podcast are saying #CardiffUniversity cut the nursing course because it's a low entry requirements course (i.e. not AAA) that pushes them down the Russell Group rankings.

Modern Languages and Translation, my personal bugbear, is also a low entry reqs department.

Great podcast btw, them ripping the piss out of Darren Millar for going to Trump's prayer breakfast was a treat.

forwalesseewales.buzzsprout.co

BuzzsproutEp19: What's for Breakfast? - For Wales, See WalesIn this week’s episode, the gang personally thank Darren Millar for creating content for them. No he didn’t come on the podcast, but he did jet off to Washington DC for a national prayer breakfast with Trump which was, apparently, more important t...
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In the Dark

Cardiff University in Crisis

I saw in the news today that Cardiff University has announced a series of mergers, closures and widepsread job cuts in order to deal with a financial deficit. If I understand the announcement correctly, the intention is to terminate the equivalent of 400 full-time academic posts, which is over 10% of the academic staff complement. No doubt there will also be job losses among the important professional services and support staff. There is plenty of doubt, however, as to whether they will extend to members of the Senior Management Team who made today’s announcement and who should really be the ones held to account.

Cardiff is by no means the only UK university being decimated in this way. It is just the latest in a long list. The crisis in UK higher education has been brewing since Brexit, and the subsequent reduction in overseas students needed to balance the books in the absence of significant ncreases in tuition fees for UK students. A burst of inflation post-Covid and, more recently, increased National Insurance contributions have taken many institutions to the brink of solvency. That’s the official line. You can add, unofficially, poor decision-making at senior management level, in many cases pursuing expensive and over-ambitious vanity projects that have ultimately proved unaffordable but impossible to cancel.

One has to remember that when university managers make decisions on closing down units, it’s not often on the basis that those units are losing money. For a start, universities operate according to complicated and arbitrary financial models small adjustments to which can easily move a department from black to red or vice versa. Moreover, over half the income of a university is not spent on the front-line activities of teaching and research: a huge slice is absorbed by the central administration to fund “strategic” investments (i.e. risky projects) and of course to pay vast salaries to the VC, PVCs and other assorted cronies. Departments therefore tend to be judged not on whether they can cover their own costs but whether they return a surplus to The Centre.

(Incidentally, while the UK Higher Education sector is in turmoil, there is no sign of vice-chancellor pay packages being cut. Quite the opposite, in fact.)

I’d be the first to admit that running a large university is a difficult job. Even in the lower levels of management as Head of School at Sussex, I agonized over many decisions. During that time I came to the conclusion that being a successful manager of something is very stressful if you actually care about it. This is why so many of the people who prosper in senior university management circles are not people who care at all about what makes a university what it is. They just see everything as a sterile combination of metrics and spreadsheets and boxes to be ticked. This, not the funding shortfall per se, is why universities are experiencing an “existential crisis”.

Anyway, among the specific proposals at Cardiff are the closures of courses and whole Departments in Ancient History, Modern Languages, Music, Nursing and Religion & Theology. Job cuts (or, as the announcement puts it, “reductions in staff FTE”) will affect (among others) the Schools of Biosciences, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine. The list of Schools to face job losses look to me to be mainly those who had relied strongly on overseas students as a source of revenue, a source which must have dried up.

Another proposal (one of four mergers of Schools) involves the creation of a new School of Natural Sciences formed by merging Chemistry, Earth Sciences and “Physics”. The latter should be “Physics & Astronomy“, not “Physics”. I hope that carelessness is not typical of the forthcoming process. Physics & Astronomy is not earmarked for losses of academic jobs, but the merger is almost certainly intended to allow cuts in support staff. As per the above paragraph, Chemistry staff will be cut, so the new School of Natural Sciences will not be off to a happy start.

I worked at Cardiff University for many years, and am in regular touch with a number of friends and former colleagues still there, so this news is very distressing. All I can do is offer a message of solidarity and encourage everyone who is not in a Union to join immediately! I have a terrible feeling that today’s announcement is only the start.

The exterior of a Cardiff University building with students entering
BBC News · Cardiff: University confirms plans to cut 400 jobs - BBC NewsVice-chancellor Wendy Larner says "it is no longer an option for us to continue as we are".
#CardiffUniversity#SchoolOfPhysicsAstronomy#UCU
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A.Stringer

"Although was demolished by Tony Blair’s former Chief of Staff at his last QT outing, his mounting appearances are causing grave concern about the ’s motives in allowing him so much airtime. Is he an or, as many people on the left believe, a vacuous and who the would like to see as the PM?

Is the BBC now the official mouthpiece for ?
yorkshirebylines.co.uk/news/is



Yorkshire Bylines | Powerful Citizen Journalism · Is the BBC now the official mouthpiece for Reform?A study of the BBC’s Question Time has raised concerns about representation and political impartiality
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In the Dark

The Cuts in UK Higher Education

Today friend of mine send me a message pointing out that in order to save money the University of Sussex is planning to make about 300 staff redundant; you can see an article about it in the Times Higher here. For the time being it seems the plan to make these savings via a voluntary severance scheme. I don’t know whether academic and administrative staff will be treated equally, either.

This is grim news. I worked at Sussex from 2013 until 2016 when I resigned my post as Head of School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. I took that decision largely for personal reasons but there were professional reasons too. From 2013 the University had embarked on an ambitious growth plan based on buoyant student numbers and the fee income generated thereby. Staff numbers grew too, to cope with the increased demand for teaching. Unfortunately the management was unable to match this with real improvements in infrastructure, largely due to the disastrous outsourcing of campus estates and services. Many promises made to me as Head of School by Senior Management were broken. I wasn’t the only Head of School to compain of this, either. Although things were still going relatively well when I left in 2016, and I was optimistic for the future of the School then, there were severe risks to its financial stability if student recruitment dived. Sadly, that’s exactly what happened. Falling student numbers – especially from overseas – left the institution very vulnerable, especially since the fee per student did not change. That problem was exacerbated by a burst of inflation. AlthoughIt has clearly been a very difficult time for the University of Sussex, largely due to national and international forces beyond its control, but exacerbated by ineffective, and at times incompetent, institutional management. It should be said also that many University leaders enthusiastically embraced the fees-based system that has led their institutions where they are now, though most of them have now departed and left others to carry the can.

It worries me that Maynooth University is also trying to grow very quickly, without adequate investment in infrastructure especially teaching. It isn’t increasing the number of academic staff much either, preferring to hire more and more managers; yet another such position was advertised this week. I don’t know whether Maynooth’s financial trajectory will follow that of Sussex. The funding environment is very different in Ireland compared to the UK, so it may not. It is clear that the enviroment for education and research here is being steadily degraded by the current leadership.

Anyway, when I saw the announcement about Sussex, I checked other Universities I’ve worked in over the years. There’s a list here. It seems that while there are particular factors at play at Sussex, there are similar difficulties across the Board. Cardiff University has a deficit of £35 million and the VC has refused to rule out compulsory redundancies there. I’m not sure how this is all affecting the School of Physics & Astronomy. Nottingham University, where I worked from 1999 to 2007, has deficit of £30 million, in response to which it has opened a voluntary severance scheme, introduced hiring freezes, cut non-pay budgets, and refused to renew 500 fixed-term contracts.

There certainly are cold winds blowing across the University landscape in the United Kingdom, and there is no sign of any respite. This is just the start.

Times Higher Education (THE) · Around 300 jobs set to go in ‘very difficult’ Sussex redundanciesVice-chancellor says university has ‘done everything’ it can to reduce costs before cutting jobs
#CardiffUniversity#HigherEducation#Sussex
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David A. McKay

I'll be giving the next Cardiff University School of Earth and Environmental Sciences public lecture on November 12th, covering what climate are, how close they might be, and what we can do about them - come along if you're around Cardiff then!

cardiff.ac.uk/earth-environmen

Cardiff UniversityPublic lecture seriesPublic lecture series events are free and all are welcome to attend.
#ClimateChange#SciComm#Cardiff
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joe•iuculano :mastodon:

@mattotcha

Excerpt:

Damage seen in brain w/ #Alzheimer's could B linked to T cells targetng healthy brain cells & blood-brain barrier being compromised, w/ P460L 2 blame 4 both

"Discovered..P460L variant disrupts normal behavior of EphA1 & impacts immune responses & blood vessels in brain," says clinical neuroscientist #HelenOwens from #CardiffUniversity

"Study suggests P460L variant alters EphA1-dependent signaling, having implications 4 blood-brain barrier function in late-onset #AD"

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