Union’s outrage at ‘offensive’ jobs cut proposal with claims university sitting on £120m
REDUNDANCIES EXPECTED
A LECTURERS’ union has hit back after Leicester’s De Montfort University (DMU) set out the thinking behind its proposal to make dozens of people redundant.
The DMU branch of the University and Colleges Union (UCU) has said the comments by a university spokesman last week were “offensive”.
The DMU spokesman had said the university was faced with the difficult choice of making an expected 58 people redundant in October as a consequence of the pandemic and the ongoing cost of living crisis. However, those comments were blasted by the UCU this week.
Its spokesman said the university did not need to shed jobs.
He said: “We find it particularly offensive that a crisis that affects not only our members, but working people in general, is being used to justify job losses, the very thing that will exacerbate the financial peril faced by our dedicated lecturers and researchers.
“De Montfort has about £120 million in cash reserves, but all we hear about is a projected deficit of about a tenth of that figure,” he added.
“Does it make sense to damage the institution by destroying jobs, when there is money to pay down a manageable deficit?”
The Mercury has approached DMU for a comment, but its latest annual report from July last year shows the £120 million figure to be accurate.
This was a drop of more than £18.5 million on the year before.
As of Tuesday, May 17, there were 30 jobs advertised on the DMU website, including for lecturers in policing, engineering mathematics, fine art and fashion buying at just over £35,000 a year each at the lowest end of the salary offer. We calculated the total wage bill of all the advertised roles, based on the lowest amount offered, at £912,567.
The DMU spokesman said last week the steps were necessary to make sure the university would be “financially resilient into the future” and could keep providing “high-quality teaching, learning and research” and community contributions.
However, the union believes the cuts, which could include academics and professorial staff, as well as non-academic staff, would actually undermine the standard of teaching.
“We don’t see that ‘high quality teaching’ can be delivered when outstanding teachers, researchers, and professional services staff are being thrown on the scrapheap,” the union spokesman said. “At a time when our staff-student ratio is one of the worst in the sector, management’s response is to compound the problem by losing what might amount to 58 essential roles. We also question the notion that the university’s current leadership is really dedicated to ‘high-quality teaching, learning and research.’
“All we have seen under this regime is the rushed move to the inferior block teaching system (where 30 credit modules which would traditionally be termlong modules are taught and assessed in seven weeks), the mass exodus of expertise, swinging cuts to research support, and the threat made to break apart our research centres.
“If senior managers are not careful, they will lose any chance of recovering from this situation, because they will have destroyed the base that could turn things around. When executive management say making people redundant was the ‘last thing’ they wanted to do, we would disagree,” the UCU spokesman added. “It’s more like the ‘latest thing’ they had already decided to do.
“We remain entirely unconvinced that our executive agonised over its recent decision, which seems to match the old adage about shedding a few ‘crocodile tears’ to garner wholly undeserved sympathy.”
DMU has previously said: “DMU is entirely dependent on its dedicated and brilliant staff to make it what it is and as such this is the last decision we wanted to take.”