A voluntary redundancy scheme has begun today at the University of Edinburgh which is facing financial difficulties which management say mean necessary cuts in overhead costs.
Professor Sir Peter Mathieson, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, said: “The higher education sector across the UK is facing serious and urgent financial challenges, placing its stability under threat. At Edinburgh, we have been transparent about how we are managing these pressures while strengthening our position as a world-leading, research-intensive university.
“As part of this, we have today announced a Voluntary Redundancy scheme for staff in senior grades, alongside an enhanced Retirement scheme, which will support efforts to remain financially sustainable and avoid compulsory redundancies wherever possible.
“This builds on our earlier cost-saving measures – including recruitment restraint, a pause on promotions, and a previous Voluntary Severance scheme – which have resulted in projected staff cost savings of £24 million.
“We remain firmly committed to open and regular engagement with our community as we take the necessary steps to safeguard the future of our University.”
UCU Edinburgh
Sophia President of UCU Edinburgh Branch Committee said: “Unlike some other universities, Edinburgh does not have a deficit, and there are plenty of other ways it could reduce expenditure without cutting staff even further. For example, unions have proposed reducing capital expenditure, which has been out of control.
“Since cuts began last year, there have already been many job losses, and management is now proposing more, pushing senior staff to leave. The unions have been asking repeatedly: how are we going to do all the work with even fewer staff?
“We know that the majority of Edinburgh staff are already chronically overworked, and more staff cuts will make it worse. The quality of research and teaching will inevitably suffer. We’ve also pointed out that such radical cuts over such a short time period could actually reduce the University’s income.
“Our members are going on strike for a week on 8-12 September, during Welcome Week. We don’t take such action lightly: we care about our students, and our work. But we have no choice to do this to sound the alarm about the damage management is causing to our university in the name of ‘financial sustainability’.”
University and College Union (UCU Edinburgh) said earlier in the year that the university management in restructuring the university to cut £140 million from the budget in 18 months is a move towards a “downsized, standardised and (even) more commercial university”.
Quoting from university reports and papers UCU said that there had been undisclosed sums spent on capital projects such as the “lavish” Edinburgh Futures Institute where the spend is said to be £140m but UCU claim may have been as much as £250m. This responds to an architectural demand for “sticky campuses” – where students are likely to “stick” or hang out and exchange ideas. UCU is both welcoming and damning of this train of thought on how best to spend University funds: “Fostering autonomous thinking is of course what we all wish education to be about, but here somehow these new sticky campus spaces and ‘learning hubs’ are supposed to create these possibilities spontaneously, by themselves.”
The union also said that staff were considered little more than numbers on a spreadsheet or a cost to the university, and say that the share of staff costs in expenditure is less than it was in 2017, and is steadily decreasing.
In May UCU said: “In short, from reading management’s own statements over a number of years, we can see that the current plan of cuts is not really about savings for a non-existent deficit. It is clearly a staff reduction plan as management’s view of the future university is one where returns are maximised at every point: through standardisation and thus savings on teaching and admin staff; and through the generation of commercial revenue by ‘expert’ staff (those resilient enough to survive the cuts).
“They seem blissfully unaware (or cynically oblivious) of the fact that staff are the University, and that these cuts will be disastrous for the future of the institution.”
