Pauline von Hellermann#AcademicVenting What makes all this all the more sad is that we really do love Goldsmiths. Just these last two weeks, I have had truly wonderful seminar discussions. Goldsmiths students and colleagues really are amazing; depite all our problems there is so much #AcademicJoy , too. It’s just 💔 that all this is in peril.
#AcademicVenting Now have to share this brilliant article - well, have only read the abstract so far, but: count me in! Here’s to #AdministrativeAbolition!
“we argue for administrative abolition, that is, the elimination of all college presidents, provosts, deans and other top level administrators who we argue form a parasitical group”
#AcademicVenting this is not venting, just crying. Things are bad enough at Goldsmiths but Kent announcing it is closing 9 humanities and social science departments - including #Philosophy and #Anthropology , and focusing instead on business and law as areas of growth, is just 💔💔💔
#AcademicVenting #Anthropology #Kent
Here is a petition you can sign and share to try and save the anthropology department. Please do.
I really do think that anthropology has so much to offer for navigating our way out of the polycrisis. The world needs so much more anthroplogy, not less.
https://www.change.org/p/save-anthropology-at-the-university-of-kent
#AcademicVenting Our financial crisis has, of course, resulted in a huge proliferation of work as we are all scrambling to try and salvage things. Hours of emergency meetings on top of all the usual stuff.
Meanwhile also been scrambling this week to support PhD funding applications; up all night revising proposals and writing Statements for two who will now compete against each other. This is the process. And now heard that redundancies will be announced next week.
#AcademicVenting But I also got an email that the staff #Wellbeing had reopened. There is now a special room where we can go talk. That will make us feel better! That will fix things!
The Neoliberal University
Yesterday we were informed we will have 130 FT redundancies. More with part time staff included. We are 644 so potentially a quarter of us. From 11 departments, including #anthropology.
We don’t know yet who. I don’t know how these decisions are made (it’s related to which programmes or modules will be closed). I feel completely sick the whole time. Far beyond venting, just existential fear.
#AcademicVenting It occurs to me that some of you might not know Goldsmiths - my university, now being decimated ⬆️.
So I want to tell you about #Goldsmiths. It is a unique, brilliant, important university. We combine arts, humanities and social sciences, producing amazing critical research, politics, practice.
I have the best colleagues and the best, best students. The fact that all this is being destroyed now is just 💔💔💔. Not just existential fear, much more.#UCU @ucu
#AcademicVenting. Today the opposite of venting. Taught the MA Applied Anthropology and Community (see this 🧵for more info) and then we recorded testimonies to use for publicity- something the students initiated & organised . All I can say is: ❤️❤️❤️. Our students are amazing and it is a privilege to teach them and learn from them. And our MA is amazing, too! A unique, necessary programme providing both critical thinking and professional practice training.
Pauline von Hellermann (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Hello! Just wanted to do a quick #ShoutOut here for a brilliant MA at Goldsmiths run by Anthropology and Social and Therapeutic Studies (STACS) at Goldsmiths. It is a unique programme combining theory and practice, academic with professional qualifications. There are three pathways: MAs in Applied Anthroplogy and Community Youth Work; Community Development; and Community Arts https://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/ma-applied-anthropology-community-youth-work/ #CommunityArts #Anthropology #CommunityDevelopment #Youthwork #Masters 1/3
#AcademicVenting well, we ALL (everyone in the 11 departments “in scope”) have to reapply for our jobs. The scale of proposed job cuts is just staggering.
Those of you who’ve been through this will relate: the physical manifestations of stress are something else. It does all feel quite existential- not just worries about mortgage, unemployment etc, but also because being an anthropologist at Goldsmiths is so central to my whole being. And to see something u love (G) falling apart is just 💔
#AcademicVenting ❤️ (on the office door of Andrew Douglas - spotted on X)
#AcademicVenting Awful news from Kent University (see posts above). It really is happening.
“We have taken the decision to phase out Anthropology, Art History, Health & Social Care, Journalism, Music & Audio Technology, and Philosophy/Religious Studies.” 💔
#AcademicVenting there were hopes that the unique, important MA Ethnobotany could be saved by being transferred into Conservation, but apparently not. Just when the world needs more #Ethnobotany, not less.💔
The people who have created and run this wonderful programme are colleagues and friends.
[and if you want to respond with “well noone wants to study it ”; “you make more money in IT” - perhaps just don’t].
#AcademicVenting The irony is, when i started this thread, I honestly didn’t think things would happen so quickly; i had in mind something quite different, little, amusing examples of the neoliberal shitshow that universities have become.
I do have dozens of new ones every week- the handling of our “Transformation” is something else but also other universities- but the bigger picture is so dire that that dominates and also, well, fear.
#AcademicVenting Queen Mary @ucu are keeping a tally on UK universities currently reducing staff. As they put it: it’s all shrinking.
#AcademicVenting. Today a different perspective - a much needed critical, honest assessment of the key strategy that UK universities have been adopting to stay afloat: the mass recruitment of international students from China.
No wonder the author had to stay anonymous: it is virtually a taboo to say any of this, but good that someone has done so.
Good to see a Guardian article about what’s going on Goldsmitths, featuring Michael Rosen and all.
There really needs to be far more public awareness of the crisis in HE. Really hoping that, with a big public outcry, these savage redundancies can be prevented.
Though putting people through all this (more than 300 of us have been sent “you are at risk”letters - i am personally in a pool of 4, for 2 jobs to go) is itself pretty savage.
#AcademicVenting this piece by Gaby Hinsliff provides an excellent, worrying overview of what is happening in UK HE at the moment - the reasons why the tally above of struggling universities is expanding almost daily. Freefall is the right word 1/2
#AcademicVenting 2/2
The story starts with the freezing of tuition fees in 2017, creating a growing hole in university finances that many plugged by recruiting more foreign students (who pay more than British teenagers for the same degree). That kept the show on the road until the resulting immigration numbers became politically toxic, prompting a government clampdown on visas and a sudden 33% fall in foreign student numbers compared with the same time last year.“
#AcademicVenting ah! For years I have been thinking someone should write “Unlucky Jim” - a 21st century campus novel - now just came across this! Hope it contains all those little details I was thinking about when starting this thread.
https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Secret-Lecturer/Secret-Lecturer/9781914487217
#AcademicVenting No doubt the lovely - avatared- person above calling me an enabler & a coward for saying in the first toot of this 🧵 people might be afraid to really say what is going on will not be impressed that this book is anonymous!
#AcademicVenting Swansea is the latest university to announce major cuts. I think this brings it to 50 or more UK institutions.
This really is a major crisis. Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at non-elite universities are crumbling. The last few months of Tories and their disastrous anti-woke, anti-thought agenda is destroying the whole sector, all critical thinking. And many 100s of us out of jobs, all scrambling for the laar few positions. It is really bad!!
#AcademicVenting I don’t know how many of you have children who are about to go to university, but if you do: it might be time to mobilise!
#AcademicVenting Please read this wonderful piece by Goldsmiths Emeritus Professor Angela McRobbie, capturing why we all weep and weep at what is happening at Goldsmiths now. It was and is something so important: brilliant arts, research, critical thinking in a very non-elite setting, for and by non-elite students. It is so important we don't lose all this. But read the piece.
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/a-goldsmiths-diary
A Goldsmiths Diary
These are desperate times in the UK higher education system. Every week there are closures of degrees or departments, and sizeable redundancies. Disproportionately it is the arts, humanities and social sciences that are affected, a consequence of their downgrading in recent years. The frequency with which common-sense
"With low or no fees, undergraduates felt freer to pursue their own dreams of being taught by the kinds of leading scholars and world-renowned artists found in an institution like my own. They could afford to take the time to find their own feet, to chop and change courses and module options. Many would tell me they had discovered for the first time the wonders of anthropology, not having had any idea of the field previously."
So lovely that a colleague from a different
.. discipline talks about the "wonders of anthropology". It really is a wonderful field! Adding here a🧵 on 8 reasons why the world needs #Anthropology. But really what I should have said: the world needs non-elite anthropologists and non-elite institutions teaching anthropology. It can't just be for the privileged at Oxbridge; it needs to be what we do at Goldsmiths - by and for everyone, especially those normally marginalised.
Pauline von Hellermann (@[email protected])
My discipline, anthropology, is not seen as a “growth" discipline, and departments are being closed down. But the world needs Anthropology and Anthropologists now more than ever! Here are my 8 reasons for this: 1. POSSIBILITIES At a time of polycrisis, when the destructive fallouts of capitalist modernity are ever more apparent, anthropology highlights that there are myriad alternative ways of thinking and living; that there is so much to learn from other peoples in the world. 1/n
#AcademicVenting Ok so this piece by Glen O’Hara really is venting.
I am conscious that I & others might come across as incredible whiners. And of course I am aware that we are, for now (50% chance of unemployment for me in 3 months) incredibly privileged. But what O’Hara describes here is completely accurate. In addition to so much other awfulness in the world, the reality of academic life creates its own unhappiness - linked to ideals of what we feel it should be.
“The modern university has become a site of moral harm or injury, perhaps mildly so, but a hard place to work and keep one’s sense of purpose and morality intact. Universities have moved progressively out of line with their staff’s view of the world, and that gap is another element in the increasing difficulty of keeping a grip on reality.“
#AcademicVenting Yes this too happened. All just borrowing from each other, or the same SMT people moving from uni to uni, wreaking havoc everywhere they go, with every step enhancing their own careers
#AcademicVenting we have now all received invitations to atend our “Stage 1 Individual Consultations”. Lovely to be encouraged by the corporate booking system they used to “grab a meeting”. Grab a reduncancy meeting, yeah!
#AcademicVenting Was a bit hard at first to read - at Goldsmiths we tend to think of UCL as the “Hoover”, sucking up all students, and indeed cohorts of 300+ history students make you weep! - but of course awful for staff being made redundant there, too, and for students having fewer and fewer module choices, vast classes, etc etc.
Universities ARE staff & students, yet management cares about neither. This is what marketisation does.
“The redundancies show that UCL cares not for their students’ role as a ‘consumer’. With the marketisation of higher education, something that has been critical in making universities neoliberal hellscapes, the student has been poised as a customer, rather than a learner. University is now meant to be a means to a greater end, with that end solely being employment.”
#AcademicVenting I think i said “neoliberal shitshow” at one point somewhere above, but “neoliberal hellscape” excellent too.
Pondering now how UK neoliberalism really is always simultaneously shitshow and hellscape. Shitty hellscape or hellish shitshow maybe. HE, water companies, NHS, the lovely Tory government itself- everywhere the same combination of cruelty, ineptitude and, of course, MONEY thinking.
#AcademicVenting That is what this is: we are governed by money itself, and it brings cruel unimaginative rightwing mediocrity to the top everywhere. (Second crossover with #FollowTheMoney 🧵 here!)
Sadly forgotten name just now, (will edit), but remembering podcast with Cambridge prof saying people worry about being ruled by AI , nonhuman entities, but that is exactly what corporations are. Nonhuman entities are already running everything.
Pauline von Hellermann (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image #Budget #UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it. “Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.” This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n) #FollowTheMoney https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/05/banker-budget-mega-rich-traders-jeremy-hunt?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
#AcademicVenting 🧵. Different theme but all related anyway: Dr Abu-Sittah’s truly brilliant inauguration speech at Glasgow. Highlighting the moral role that universities play, but also their complicity. He and Glasgow now provide important moral backbone, but all this has withered through neoliberal marketisation in English universities (see Glen O’Hara above). Mostly just shamefully neutral, bland statements on “middleeast crisis”.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/dr-ghassan-abu-sittah-tomorrow-is-a-palestinian-day/
#AcademicVenting 🧵. Just realised I hadn’t added here yet Zoe William’s excellently researched piece about our crisis at Goldsmiths. Really great we have had so many people speaking out for us. Loved this piece in particular as it’s also about the student occupation about #Gaza, and it cites a brilliant student who I have had the pleasure of teaching, Danna.
Best perhaps the final sentence: “But I don’t think ita done deal”.
The Goldsmiths crisis: how cuts and culture wars sent universities into a death spiral
Arts education is essential – yet on both sides of the Atlantic, the humanities and critical thinking are under attack. With massive redundancies announced at this London institution, is it the canary in the coalmine?
#AcademicVenting The vice chancellor of York (a Russell group university!), Charlie Jeffery:
“There is no other way of saying this. The UK higher education system is in crisis. The way it is funded just doesn’t work anymore. A rough guess is that about half of the sector is responding by cutting jobs and courses”.
#AcademicVenting 🧵 another really excellent piece on the UK higher education crisis, by Hannah Rose Woods in The New Statesman”:
Experts believe it is already “too late” to avert the oncoming funding disaster: “all everyone can do now is brace”.
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/04/university-funding-is-in-crisis
“With wearying inevitability, cuts will be borne disproportionately by arts, humanities & social sciences. Some will doubtlessly cheer the trimming of supposedly “low-value” subject areas. They may be less enthusiastic about the knock-on effect their demise would have on more expensive to teach science and technology subjects, or the wider impact of rapid restructuring in a sector that supports more than three quarters of a million jobs and contributes £130bn to the economy.”
One reason why it’s all falling apart this year are changes in visa regulations for international students - Tory gov trying to curb immigration - who are no longer allowed to bring dependents.
Hey James Cleverley and Michelle Donelan - stop denying and ignoring this MASSIVE crisis that you are causing! You are destroying a vital sector with your stupid short-sighted policies. You will lose anyway- stop wreaking havock now! (I know this is 💯 pointless)
#AcademicVenting Finally read Jonathan Miller's #DeathSpiral piece, and I wish all SMTs across the country getting rid of all their PRODUCTIVE lecturers (ie, the people actually making money for universities, through student fees and research income) would read it, too. They genuinely don't understand what they are doing!
Please, understand the British Leyland's 1970s coat [*EDIT: this should be cost! I copied a typo! See @rubinjoni
below!* 😅] allocation death spiral
#AcademicVenting I think I have actually not really expressed so far how awful the redundancy process is. To everyone who has been through this or is going through this right now: HUGE solidarity. To those who haven't: what has taken me by surprise is an exponential, unbelievable increase in work. All the normal stuff plus endless meetings, strategies, statements, reports, questionnaires, campaigns, counterproposals, for weeks and weeks on end. Frazzled!
#AcademicVenting Couldn’t have put it any better. Not just the redundancy process; just so sick of all it, what it has become. #Neoliberalism #university
“I am sick of higher education leaders, I am sick of neoliberal thinking, I am sick of scarcity mindsets, I am sick of austerity, I am sick of senior management lacking morals, I am sick of education being decimated, I don’t know how we hang on + do important work for students”
#AcademicVenting Good 2021 piece by Asheesh Kapur Siddique linking rightwing university politics - ie, the oppression of #Gaza student protests we are currently seeing - to this 🧵’s overall theme: the marketisation of HE. Tight establishment control (with all its crappy values) is a direct result of marketisation.
About the US but much of it applicable to UK and Australia too.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/campus-cancel-culture-university-boards
#AcademicVenting 🧵 and now this piece by Jessica Wildfire @aral shared earlier today.
“Universities aren't institutions of knowledge anymore. They're assets. They're revenue streams. If they're not generating money for the top, then they only pose a threat, and they have to be weakened and destroyed.”
Aral Balkan (@[email protected])
“A lot of rich people don’t actually want an education system or the educated population that would come along with it. Sure, it would be better for everyone. But it would also mean having to share, and these people have let their greed literally drive them insane.” https://www.okdoomer.io/im-a-professor-heres-why-im-walking-away-from-my-tenure/ 1/2
#AcademicVenting Reading "Tips for Redundancy" compiled by a UCU colleague elsewhere:
"Keep a Diary
Going through a redundancy process is traumatic but you will find that you become hardened and come to expect the mistreatment to which you are being subjected. Keeping a diary of how you felt at points throughout the whole process is a way of tracking how it is impacting upon your life (both work and personal)."
It's true, writing things down helps! But also: you definitely harden up.
#AcademicVenting I had not mentioned so far: Goldsmiths lectures and union are resisting redundancies in many ways, including a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB). Senior Management have responded with highly punitive 50% salary deductions, for 2 months. So we are losing one month pay!!
This too is unbelievably stressful - in fact, is stressing me out more than anything at the moment (unappreciative teenage children for a start). Especially when you might still end up jobless. #UCU.
#AcademicVenting We now have a GoFundMe for our Goldsmiths #UCU hardship fund, due to 50% salary reductions for marking boycott. If you are in HE and in your union, perhaps you could ask your branch whether they could contribute? Feel awkward about saying this but: every donation welcome.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-goldsmiths-ucu-fight-mass-redundancies
#AcademicVenting we are trying to fight draconian redundancies at Goldsmiths at a time when there is a concerted effort by government, the anti-woke brigade and others to reduce the HE sector as a whole. There are more and more articles like this one, talking about how little bits of optimism amount to a collective “cloud cuckooland”.
There is a real onslaught.
#AcademicVenting this coincides with the UK government’s calamitous attempt to combat “net migration” by reducing the number of international students; they are no longer allowed to bring dependents (neither are care workers. The cruelty!) This is a tweet by our lovely prime minister. We have a government that is actively hostile to HE (one of the economically most important sectors in the country)
#AcademicVenting They tried to go one step further by abolishing the current work visa for international students (allowing int students to stay for 2 years after graduating). Luckily the Migratory Advice Committee firmly pushed back on this last week, and hopefully none of this will come to anything once Tories are out, but it’s impacting
International students decision making - we already have offer holders pulling out of our MAs.
#AcademicVenting Just to say again: all this is so stressful- losing 50% of your salary for a marking boycott that maybe won’t make any difference, given the wider hostile environment. It’s not even about the reality of challenges; it’s the fact that all these reports are out there, right now. It gives ammunition to those wanting to fire us, and weakens our case.
#AcademicVenting The crisis in HE (higher education) is so tangible it’s making headline news; our dangerous exposure to changes in migration/visa regimes and therefore whims of government ever more apparent.
Who is completely silent on all this (as fas as I know), as on everything else? Starmer, Labour. It would make a massive difference, and would work for them. But no. Everyone beholden to the same - imagined! - anti-woke, anti-immigration, anti-university voter.
#AcademicVenting Anyway, here a nice comment piece by Polly Toynbee
“Tories and their pollsters see as clear as day that the growth in highly educated citizens, above the OECD average, is a social and political revolution not in their favour: the more educated people are, the less likely they are to vote for what John Stuart Mill called “the stupidest party”.”
#AcademicVenting I haven't been writing much here as it's just been too stressful. We are now officially in Stage 2; none of the counterproposals, none of our objections during "collective consultation" made any difference; still planning to make over 130 of us redundant. But we are resisting! Students have occupied Deptford Town Hall! #NotADoneDeal #UCU @ucu
@ucu Just in case anyone is still there: there is a Twitter/X Storm going on right now. Yes, I know, I shouldn't be on there anymore either. #NotADoneDeal
Pauline von Hellermann 🌳🌴🌹🌻🌍 (@PHellermann) on X
Goldsmiths management is threatening to carry out the most severe cuts of any British university to date - 130 lecturers are facing redundandy. But we are resisting! Students have occupied Deptford Town Hall! #NotADoneDeal @GoldsmithsUoL @GoldsmithsUCU
#AcademicVenting if anyone wants to know what Stage 2 of the redundancy process is like:
#HungerGames with mitigation forms.
Today our “Individual Assessment Form” (IAFs - formerly known as SMQs - “skills management questionnaires” - no idea why the name change but who cares)
are due in. We all have to attach things like student evaluations and progression data as well as publications, grants, etc. Then we will be scored against each other and some of us selected for redundancy. I am in a pool of 4 (with 3 wonderful colleagues) - we are going down to 2.
#AcademicVenting #HungerGames for the last two days i have been getting the loveliest student testimonials and frankly been in a complete state. All that kindness and caring. But i can’t bear that simultaneously these are also instruments of potential harm against my colleagues. I have not even started work on my IAF, partly due to other deadlines, partly because i simply can’t bring myself to.
#AcademicVenting #HungerGames Here is my lovely colleague Michael Rosen at the picket line yesterday, asking:
how will they score “We Are Going On A Bearhunt”?
#AcademicVenting Did this post separately but want to add to 🧵 😊
Pauline von Hellermann (@[email protected])
“Self-care in the age of collapse” This piece, like many others by the very brilliant Jessica Wildfire before, captures so much of what I feel right now, battling in the place i happen to be caught in in the malstroem of the #polycrisis (Goldsmiths meltdown, together with everything else). It’s recognising, as JW says, that “there are no good options”, but having to find strategies somehow. 1/2 #ClimateDiary #AcademicVenting https://www.okdoomer.io/self-care-in-the-age-of-collapse/
Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈@pvonhellermannn awww, glad to see he's still out and about ✊
David P. Carey@dpcarey1 Individual Assessment Forms (in the post above)
@pvonhellermannn ah here it is
Ko-Fan Chen 陳克帆@pvonhellermannn really sad and shortsighted action from university 😡
@kofanchen
Thank you so much for your support, I really appreciate it 🙏🏼
Thank you so much for your support, I really appreciate it 🙏🏼
@pvonhellermannn pressure must be high for you 🙏
Anna@pvonhellermannn this is horrible. So many levels of poisonous and purposefully cruel. (Is this normal procedure in academia??) Sending you strength!
Ma Quest 
@pvonhellermannn This is despicable. I am so sorry, Pauline.
@pvonhellermannn 🙏 this is a sea side trip a couple weeks ago; this weekend seems to be sunny at Eastbourne too, hopes it lift the mood a bit
MeerderWörter@pvonhellermannn @ucu A unversity is nothing without its teaching body.
❤️ exactly, thank you so much. teaching and research
David PSame in Australia.
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE@pvonhellermannn Toynbee and I have been known to disagree (emails in decades gone by). But she's certainly right about this one.
🇳𝗮ꜟ𝖼𝘩@pvonhellermannn
I think this applies to pretty much everything they have done for the past 14 years.
I think this applies to pretty much everything they have done for the past 14 years.
Axel Foley@pvonhellermannn Dead man walking, it's all irrelevant now...
@Roadwarrior29 i hope so but with so many universities (including my own) on the brink of collapse all this talk now affects international student decisions to come to UK this September and a significant drop there will be disastrous for some HEIs.
@pvonhellermannn Tel me about it, you probably know that University education in Scotland is free and prior to Brexit, we welcomed uni students from all over the EU and offered them free education. An offer that was also made to David Cameron for English students which, he refused....
Alex Dimitrovski@pvonhellermannn The stupidity of this aside, there surely must be a better way to fund universities than using foreign students as cash cows, right?
@meeshqoyoo well yes ..
@pvonhellermannn Not that you would hear it from Labour, or Polly Toynbee for that matter.
Jonathan Schofield@pvonhellermannn I totally agree.
I understand why, but I wince slightly when we make arguments for education in terms of economic benefits. Similar to how we frame the economic worth of ‘ecosystem services’ as a reason not to cut down a forest. And then… cut it down, bit by bit.
But we’re in so deep that we’re clutching at straws
@urlyman i know! I winced as i was writing that sentence, but yes, clutching at straws..
Chad Briggs@pvonhellermannn Sorry you have to deal with this
Will Tuladhar-DouglasMay you find the strength to protect those tender, compassionate, altruistic parts of yourself from which authentic curiosity and research arise. I found that bitterness was my worst enemy.
@yetiinabox This is incredibly helpful. What a true and important thing to recognise in yourself and to share, I appreciate it hugely. And will make sure to hold on to those parts. Thank you! ❤️
Marcy RockmanI'm cheering here for Teen Vogue. Before the Trump term it wouldn't have occurred to me to look to a Vogue magazine for cutting reporting on equity, labor, and power structures. And I really wouldn't have expected it in a title directed to teens. Now I do- and I'm grateful for the voice they've created.
Simon Brooke@pvonhellermannn the words 'college' and 'collegiate' should be clues: a university is a *collective* institution for discoverers, curators and transmitters of knowledge. Anyone who isn't part of that collective, has no place (and should have no voice) in the institution.
MarjorieR@pvonhellermannn in addition humanities and social sciences cost less per student than STEM subjects to teach but have the same tuition fee income coming in (at least for UK students).
Cutting those departments puts the average cost per student up.
Obviously there was a time (the great expansion) when they actually made a profit on those students but, as fees haven't gone up recently, these days they at least just lose less money, after overheads, on them.
Perhaps paying VCs less might help?
Cutting those departments puts the average cost per student up.
Obviously there was a time (the great expansion) when they actually made a profit on those students but, as fees haven't gone up recently, these days they at least just lose less money, after overheads, on them.
Perhaps paying VCs less might help?
Albert CardonaIn the short term, the cost cutting makes the decision-makers (VC and pro-VC) look smart among themselves. Plus all they need is another year or two of holding the fort until stepping down – they “serve” a term, you see, they aren’t owners or dictators – to then pick up a golden parachute into charing a charity or towards actual retirement.
Accountability isn’t ever for them. It’s that old approach to crises from “Yes, Prime Minister”:
Bernard Woolley : What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Then we follow the four-stage strategy.
Bernard Woolley : What's that?
Sir Richard Wharton : Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
Sir Richard Wharton : In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Sir Humphrey Appleby : Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
Luka R.@pvonhellermannn This thread would be so much better if Leyland failed over actual coat mismanagement...
@rubinjoni 😄 true! I have to confess i failed to read up more about it. I didn’t actually quite understand how coats came into it at all!
@pvonhellermannn Engineers and machinists leaving Leyland because C-suits were hogging all the coats...
@rubinjoni ah! Thank you
@pvonhellermannn (it's a typo, and the thread is about cost mismanagement)