'Toxic combination' threatens jobs cull

There are many other mean job-cutting machines out there using the voluntary redundancy and voluntary retirement schemes rhetoric. It's disgraceful and very unsettling even for those who are not 'at risk'.

Yet again the academic community expresses its horror that the University sector should be exposed to the real world. There is nothing wrong with building surpluses, indeed in the longer term these will benefit the academic community. Surpluses create cash, which in turn is used to fund capital expenditure and keep borrowings down thus giving the sector a lower gearing and allowing more income to be spent on academics producing mind bogglingly useless research rather than going on interest payments. Cash reserves also generate additional income for an institution through investment income. Kings London's Standard and Poors rating will have been decided after close scrutiny of their current and future plans. It is possible that King's quite realistic approach to the issues facing them contributed to the upgrade ( which will have mightily pissed off another institution by the way). How much is it going to take for the academic community to realise that they don't live in the protected cocoons of ivory towersand haven't done for the last 30 years( since the days of the blessed Margaret). I worked in the sector for 25 plus years and now work in the real world. It's far more stressful, but it's fun, particularly dealing with people who don't have over inflated opinions of themselves. We recently had to ask staff to take a pay cut. It was purely voluntary but 95% took it up. I understsnd UCU are still insisting on a pay rise this year. Get Real.

Fred the shred: you might have some pertinent points that present an interesting counterargument. The problem is you wrap in in such condescending and, quite frankly, insulting language that I can only guess your "25 plus years" in the sector did not involve teaching diplomacy. If you want to make a point, make it reasonably. Otherwise, give it a rest.

Jonathan, presumably you mean the type of diplomacy used by academics when a manager, quite reasonably, questions what they are doing. I spent an awful long time trying to be diplomatic with academics. If you think I am being insulting I suspect you are being a touch sensitive.

Fred the Shred is a dreary troll spouting the tedious line that HE is somehow "not the real world". I particulrly enjoyed the inept mixed metaphor of "protected cocoons of ivory towers"! The private sector - those splendid and self-deprecating chaps that brought us the credit crunch? - are very welcome to his second-rate intellect (and third-rate rhetorical skills).

Don't feed trolls. QED.

Surprised old Fred has the time to reply in that "fun" Real World job of his. In my cocoon of ivory towers, I. on the other other hand, have the leisure to reply (in between working on mind-boggling pointless research of course).

Thanks to Fred for his message from the real world - there they lay you off in the lean times, but in the good times they reward you more, and pay you for the hours you work. It academe, being asked to work more, for no reward, but threatened with rumours of redundancy, is a fact of life. Of course, presuming that Fred the Shred works in Finance, he'd know exactly what being overworked is - oh, hang on, somethings wrong there...

What is the point of having a surplus if it's not to insure against a rainy day? Is it not chucking it down outside? I suspect we have been a bit too obsessed with the pay of academics recently; it seems to me that the number of academics is more of an issue, especially as university is becoming a more attractive option because of government encouragement and lack of jobs for school leavers. How many times have you bumped into a colleague in the corridor complaining that their pay doesn't match the pay of some other profession? Now compare that with the number of times you have bumped into a colleague in the corridor complaining that their workload is too high. Demand for university education is increasing and what do we get? A reduction in the supply. A perfect formula for making more profit for those at the top, while students find it harder to get a place and individual academics have to work even harder to make up for there being fewer colleagues. My own institution, by the way, has managed to avoid too much talk of compulsory redundancies, but in my own smallish department (about 10 lecturers) I have two colleagues whose contracts are not being renewed this summer, plus one moving abroad and one retiring. And one more is changing from full to part time. None of these people are being replaced. We may manage to buy in some casual teaching to cover most of our modules for the next academic year, but we may not. We are certainly having to cut down on the modules we offer to students. And through relying on casual teaching we lose out on research and admin contributions and on continuity and stability in the department. And still we are expected to increase our student numbers. And still we are expected to improve the student experience once they are here. And still we are expected to improve our research output. Fred the Shred implies I might have an over-inflated opinion of myself, being an academic. I can assure him that I am quite aware already that I am not doing my job as the university would like, thank you very much. But not to worry: they'll soon be able to get rid of me when my own contract expires next summer. Pity the poor people who are left, though. And the students, who have every right to expect some attention from them.

"...quotes Paul Greatrix, registrar at the University of Nottingham, saying: "Are we bad for wanting to make a profit? Does this put us into the Gordon Gekko league? Perhaps not. Call it 'surplus' if you're squeamish." I call this a very questionable statement, given that most/all(?) universities enjoy charitable status and the tax advantages this brings.

Good point What's up Fred. Part of that other Fred's problem is that he's fallen for the idea that the private sector is the embodiment of efficiency, toughness (when required), hard work and a firm grip on reality. But recent events in the financial world have shown significant parts of the private sector to be anything but. Why should higher education listen to Fred and co? Instead of universities being lectured to on how to 'get real' (lecturing is one skill Fred has retained from his quarter century of wasted working years), maybe the private sector should come to HE and learn about how well we've adapted to growth and change. Take-home message to Fred the shed: You. Don't. Get. To. Lecture. Us. About. How. We. Manage. Ourselves. Anymore.

I did the opposite of Fred and spent 25yrs in private sector before joining the hallowed world of academia. So for what it's worth I've got two points. One; I think the idea that most university staff are detached from the real world isn't my experience, I dealt with as many deluded colleagues in the Private Sector as I have at my institution. Second; despite the offensive nature of the comments of Fred (and one wonders why he bothers, having left the sector) there is a grain of truth in his comments re the need for institutions to build up reserves. There is no point in us slating the private sector for its over-leveraged inadequecy and then argue that universities should deplete their reserves, which are one of the measures used in assessing their credit-worthiness.

Don't feed trolls. All I said for the private sector was that it was stressful but fun and lives in the real world. On efficiency I would have to agree with you, although the Committee structure can be a little unwieldy at times. Actually I didn't lecture, and I don't now work in Banking. Extrapolating banking to the whole of the private sector is a bit like saying every University has a student record system capable of recording student drop outs as accurately as London Met. I also know how well University's have adapted to change and growth. I did work in the sector throughout the 80's and 90's. Inverse Fred, I too have met colleagues in the private sector who are not quite real, but then I work in R&D and many of them used to be academics.

Funny how someone supposedly advocating rhetorical skills uses the most basic argument block- using the insult (troll) to try to persuade us against the argument - perhaps this is because 'Fred' has a point that you can't accept.. yet can't argue against! Because there has been a collapse in banking does NOT mean that therefore all private sector organisations are poorly managed - this is responding to a totally different point 'Q: Why is there no cheese in the fridge? A: Because Coke is a brand." fool. Fred makes some uncomfortable points that academics freak out about. If we (managers) gave in to every 'don't change' tantrum as well as every 'don't tell me what to do' huff nothing would ever get done. What the University sector has done is inflate salaries of managers without the comparable increase in management skills or monitoring, so we get useless managers on high salaries failing to get the best out of their workforce then sacking 1 person in 20 at the £15K level, but still taking home enough money to reach for a half million poind house in five years. If all senior managers took as little as a 10% pay cut most of the job losses could be avoided. Will we see that? Will we chuff. But are those managers any good? Many are absolutely awful, but many are rubbish. - oh look, we also pay academics up to £100K a year - oh we get them to spend 20 hours each a month on management tasks - oh look that costs the same as employing a team of 6 managers full time. etc etc etc

will we see a 5% pay cut for people on salaries over £40K (i.e. (as someone else has mentioned somewhere) a packed lunch twice a week)? I seriously hope so - it gives so many good messages, keeps people in work and makes sure the jobs get done. Please, lets force the sector to get pay cuts from the over £40K brigade - In terms of academics - lets say 'drop it from your budgets or it comes from your salary' watch academics get 'commercial' then!

Hero. Never underestimate the importance of insult and ad hominem in the repetoire of rhetorical strategies. You seem to getting a little hot under your managerial white collar about my defence of UK HE's remarkable successes in dealing with rapid expansion and change on relatively little money. And while you object to my lumping all of the private sector in with the idiots who brought down the banking system, you have no problem in lumping together all HE 'managers' as overpaid and incompetent. Actually, I agree that the job losses in HE are likely to be amongst lower-paid colleagues rather than the higher paid - a practice I tend to see as an import from the private sector. The worst bits of UK HE are the ones where we've mimicked the private sector. My main beef with Fred - and you, Hero (I like the name as I appreciate irony when I read it), is the assumption that those working in HE have been insulated from the rough, tough 'real world' that the private sector cope with so well. Not so for many in HE on low salaries and/or temporary contracts.

Hero. Never underestimate the importance of insult and ad hominem in the repetoire of rhetorical strategies. You seem to getting a little hot under your managerial white collar about my defence of UK HE's remarkable successes in dealing with rapid expansion and change on relatively little money. And while you object to my lumping all of the private sector in with the idiots who brought down the banking system, you have no problem in lumping together all HE 'managers' as overpaid and incompetent. Actually, I agree that the job losses in HE are likely to be amongst lower-paid colleagues rather than the higher paid - a practice I tend to see as an import from the private sector. The worst bits of UK HE are the ones where we've mimicked the private sector. My main beef with Fred - and you, Hero (I like the name as I appreciate irony when I read it), is the assumption that those working in HE have been insulated from the rough, tough 'real world' that the private sector cope with so well. Not so for many in HE on low salaries and/or temporary contracts.

Don't feed trolls - don't let them get to you. But just to pick on one of your points - I work in Business Studies, so I know a few things about numbers (they're eternal debatability being just one of their charms) and as a result I have an issue with a sentence you use about rapid expansion on relatively little money, the data I have states that the sectors annual income is over £23bn, and that seems like a lot of money to me. Actually, there is another great article in the THE today titled "Accentuating the positive in private". I read it after I'd been on this page, and I have to say it made me smile.

Good point! I think that £23bn is out of date - and lower than current spending but will suffice. I think it may also exclude money raised through commercial activity - or the other way around I forget which. The current government have been extremely good in putting lots of money into things that have stayed off the radar - education being one of them. In some of the top universities, there are typically over £200million of projects ADDITIONAL to the normal department functioning being set in place EACH YEAR. When you appreciate that about 80p of every £1 goes through Tescos and they only make £7bn of profit a year, perhaps you should revise those comments about 'on very little money'. Remember we are in a sector that thinks the whole 'real' world gets paid salaries over £100K (see some of the posts on some other threads) when patently they don't

Sorry to hear that Barbara. We organise differently where I work, but there are some similar frustrations - I have managed to increase recruitment of income generating students by about 120%, quality of students from typical 2ii entry to typical masters entry, increased overseas students by 600%, and improved almost all of the monitoring and progression activities. I have done so on a budget that equates to £200 per student including staff costs. A colleague of mine who is two higher on the pay scales is running a department with 30 students, where recruitment is declining as is quality of intake. To do this my colleague requires two more subordinate staff and a budget six times mine. I recruit nearly twice per year than ALL the students in my colleague's department. The expenditure there is over £2,000 per student recruited. Another of my colleagues on the next pay scale in the same department is spending about £1,000 per recruited student. She has ovespent her budget every year and this has been used as a lever in payscale negotiations to justify greater responsibility each year. ITs a racket and good budget managers are not rewarded. Luckily we all have enhanced severance opportunities where I work, but I'd rather have worse severance and an extra £10K a year in my pay packet - trouble is academics have both!!

Sorry to hear that Barbara. We organise differently where I work, but there are some similar frustrations - I have managed to increase recruitment of income generating students by about 120%, quality of students from typical 2ii entry to typical masters entry, increased overseas students by 600%, and improved almost all of the monitoring and progression activities. I have done so on a budget that equates to £200 per student including staff costs. A colleague of mine who is two higher on the pay scales is running a department with 30 students, where recruitment is declining as is quality of intake. To do this my colleague requires two more subordinate staff and a budget six times mine. I recruit nearly twice per year than ALL the students in my colleague's department. The expenditure there is over £2,000 per student recruited. Another of my colleagues on the next pay scale in the same department is spending about £1,000 per recruited student. She has ovespent her budget every year and this has been used as a lever in payscale negotiations to justify greater responsibility each year. ITs a racket and good budget managers are not rewarded. Luckily we all have enhanced severance opportunities where I work, but I'd rather have worse severance and an extra £10K a year in my pay packet - trouble is academics have both!!

Whilst using the credit crunch as the excuse, cut backs are planned but the top level of management who managed us into the financial mess in the first place, keep their jobs and make redundant any who raised their voice against them. Most redundancies are the negative balance of budgeted interest on cash holdings against the interest on bank loans, many of which are at the limit of HEFCE rules, and some have even applied to go over that limit. If these "great" institutions had been run properly, always with a view to long term, not "my next years bonus" or "I'll retire before the worst" attitudes, then Uni's with three times loan to annual turnover ratio would not have had the crippling capital repayments but mercifully low interest payments. Also, the previous year's 10% salary increases may have had something to do with the 10% need for redundancies. JUst a thought.

Has Vice Chancellor remuneration a direct correlation with University position in the league tables. Often not. If you are 35th with delusions of being 9th, for example, can you argue the 3rd highest pay rate? Now lets look at those institutions where this is somewhat standing out, couple it with outstanding debt, measure it against say, ROCE, and what should you get, ....... oh no..... it's redundancies. Well, academics aside, can a modern university, with ever growing pension exposure, loans and senior payroll, afford 25 days leave and 6 or 8 stat days (sames as the health service!!), final salary pension schemes, lunch breaks.... well only wuss's take lunch, unless it's a senior free lunch on expenses, taking that extra time out to digest all that rich food before a game of golf. Well what I mean to say is, if I pay for my lunch, at a week end as can't find the time during the week, why do the 2% earing over £120k never reach into their pockets but do get theirs. And with superfluous travel it is almost proportional to 3% of the 98% remaining wage bill, which is about 50% of t/o. Nevermind we''ll claw that back through some culling of the plebs. Tee off at 3. Must dash.

No, life's just not fair is it? All i can say is i've worked in the private sector (SME's to multinationals) and i've worked in HE, and i know which i prefer. In the private sector i dealt with redundancy twice and short term contracts frequently. It's a tough world guys.There are plenty of lazy incompetent managers in the private sector too. It's human nature - if people can get away with such modes of behaviour without being held to account, they will. The powerful dominate the weak. Surprise surprise. I too was on short term contracts when i joined HE. The trick is to make yourself useful. Work hard. If everybody did that, rather than form a committee to see how we can delegate the graft elsewhere, we'd be in better shape. Quibbling over figures and the interpretations thereof makes no difference. No i am not a manager, i'm a teaching academic with the highest teaching and admin loads in my department. HE is no paradise but it's varied, interesting and challenging. And we too should have to justify our utility to society as much as anyone else.I would support the contention that redundancies if they must occur should not be restricted to lower grades. There is plenty of dead wood to go at!

Actually in HE the weak dominate the powerful - weak and inneffectualism is likely to keep you in your job and give you persistent pay increases and give you the power to exclude and lever out people who are better and more effective than you. The more powerful people move around and don't get so much permenancy.

An interesting point Hero. I'll keep my eyes peeled for the latest Staff Development programme: "How I made it to the top in HE through weakness and ineffectuality"; or maybe it will have a more trendy title like "Only fools and horses and academics....There is No Justice". Happy weekend!

Redundancy is a fact of life. It is however, a tragedy and anyone affected has my sympathy, no matter what their job is. It is a tough old world.

Redundancy is a fact of life. It is however, a tragedy and anyone affected has my sympathy, no matter what their job is. It is a tough old world.

I was made redundant yesterday from my .2 post in HE (several of us at the same level were). Now all I have is the hourly paid temp teaching I've had for 13 years and even some of those hours were cut last year. Gromz says those of us on short term contracts should work hard and make ourselves useful then we'll succeed. I've always worked hard and gone to meetings unpaid etc. I thought I had succeeded when I moved onto a fractional post a few years ago. Now that's going and I'm left wondering how much more I could have given to the institution to have 'succeeded'. Maybe being a single parent and requesting teaching at times to work with my childcare has been seen negatively by my institution. Maybe I didn't suck-up enough to the top managers. I don't know but I do know I love working in HE despite it being insecure, and tiring juggling different p/t contracts. Maybe people could be a little more understanding and less generalising in their dismissal of those of us who haven't found secure decent paid HE posts. It does hurt a bit, especially when lecturers on £30-40k complain about their jobs, or someone in the private sector dismisses all tutors/lecturers as naive, deluded or selfish. Some of us are decent, hard working people trying to do our jobs well - students give me good feeback on my classes which means a lot when your work is undervalued elsewhere. I'm devastated to be losing my course, my .2 post, future students. Whatever you think of UCU I have to say having the support of a Union rep in my redundancy meeting made a lot of difference to how I took the news. it was just good to feel like someone in the room understood how difficult it was to be hearing the bad news. To have a bit of moral support. I'm grateful to UCU for that. Be kind people.

Redundancy is real writes: 'I was made redundant yesterday from my .2 post in HE (several of us at the same level were). Now all I have is the hourly paid temp teaching I've had for 13 years and even some of those hours were cut last year.' ... I'm in - or rather out of - a similar position myself, and similarly devastated by the loss of a job I've loved and always done to the best of my ability. My students nominated me for an 'excellence in teaching' award, but that doesn't seem to have made much difference to my employability. So - if I got the best evaluations from students, went to all the meetings, did unpaid office and surgery hours to see students and generally worked my socks off - where am I going wrong?

Now that we have had posts from redundancy is real and Sally M. perhaps we can all pause and realise that real people will be hurting over this. So can future posters please post with some sensitivity?

I would still go back to the 'everyone on salaries over £40K taking a 5-10% paycut (i.e a couple of thousand in real terms - i.e. a couple of hundred pounds a month ie stepping down a brand level for half your shopping) to deal with this rather than (as is happening in my place) employing people on salaries of £60K to work out new and more economical structures and sack maybe three staff on grades lower than £20K. - (the economics of that just doesn't work out at all! - because the loss of jobs means loss of service which means loss of performance which means loss of customers which means loss of income) Sure much more management could be more efficient - but that should mean more time freedom that means that people on expensive salaries could actually contribute what they are supposed to. Losing people at the moment is the silliest thing to do. Its interesting that 'academic' is seeking sympathy, but probably won't similarly come in and help with real cash or fight for people in Sally and 'redundancy is real' to be kept on. We do still have to lose poor performers, but what is happening is that we arelosing people who are easy to lose - and that does not equate to the same thing at all. One other weird point - how many institutions are offering enhanced severance? In my case the institution is prepared to pay out about £10K per agreed redundancy in order to provide the opportunity to re-emply at a lower grade which a) screws up the job evealuation programme anyway but b) costs about £20K to re-recruit anyway c) costs some admin and panel time to get the job regradted d) costs time and lost performance in the ramp-up time (and with the poor job transferability and management in HE that is magnified) e) loses the familiarity (which can be bad, but can also be positive especially in teaching) . What's even crazier in my case is that every time the person holding my job has changed there has been a drop of 1/3 in terms of income it generated (I was lucky because I then went on to double, then treble the income - but even I had a dip at the beginning because of the lack of training and management of the inductioin in). I think this redundancy programme is a poorly thought out cost-saving exercise rather than a well- thought out cost-benefit activity with lower operating costs as the outcome. I have seen examples in my institution of assistant registrars championing their own 'successes' in chopping and compulsory redundancy-ing several jobs but when you say '[can I see your plans for delievering this service next year' the answer is ' I don't know what's going to happen' One let slip that they thought they were going to re-recruit after a few months gap - if they are doing this because they think it will gain them points and save money then it just re-demponstrates the point that assistant registrars can't think commercially - as this is guaranteed to cost money time, expertise, effort stress and a reduction in service - again a cost. If your assistant registrars are behaving like this - then dock their pay instead.

Hero, I know nothing about you and you know nothing about me. So why are you second-guessing what I might and might not do? It seems divisive.

Universities worry that lecturers' salaries and pay demands are more than they can afford. Lecturers complain that they are working at least 50% more hours than they are being paid for. Research-active staff complain that they don't get enough time to write and publish books and journal articles, they do most of this in their own time anyway, but it enhances their prestige and employability. Early career researchers and postdoctoral academics complain that there are too few employment opportunities to make use of their knowledge and talents. Therefore, why not hire more part-time academic staff on a 3-day week? You would then have more staff working in the department, representing a much broader knowledge base and a greater diversity of academic opinion. It would create more jobs and harness much more academic talent, while freeing up researchers 4 days a week to read, write and spend time with their families, and lecturers to improve their subject knowledge and teaching materials. Part-time academic salaries would pay a reasonable living wage comparable to that of a full-time school teacher, and anyone who was dissatisfied with the salary on offer would have several days a week free for consultancy work or professional practice. It's got to be better than the current waste of talent whereby we see staff redundancies, routine non-renewal of fixed-term contracts, and the huge waste of talent we see currently.

I cannot recognise my institution from the descriptions above. Where I work we all know that he have to write papers that are well cited, be good teachers, and get contract income that ideally supports a standing staff of 1pdra and 3 pgs. Substantial failure to do this results in job loss. In my dept there is always 1-3 people who are having earnest chats with management and we probably lose one per year. I know that our dept is not unusual. Our technicians, administrators and clerical folk are great and I would regard them as exemplary professionals. Where I work the highest paid are required to deliver most and we all know what happens if they fail. If I aspire to promotion....and I do, then I had better make sure that I can maintain the momentum otherwise I will be pushed. Not forgive me if I am wrong but that sounds very much like the real world doesn't it?

I agree about the review of the higher graded Managers. 5% cut on £40-50k is easy, it was half of last year's unnecessary increase. But 10% for £50 to 75k, with a top level of say 33% of the remuneration over £76k. Any one with a golden hello or handshake in their contact should be reviewed and removed. There is no incentive to perform well, rather to take the pay off and start again. Also the matter of hidden perks. BUPA for Directors and their families and statutory sick for the plebs, but the latter backbone to the industry are the ones who pay the price for the decadent and not too clever senior management. Lucky I am rich enough to last to 85 without pension, so redundancy does not overly concern me, but the principle of the "mismanagers" lording it over the rest of us, thinking we have not noticed exactly what has happened and continues regardless is about as appropriate of me standing for parliament and expecting to pay for my new house on a 5 year mortgage. Oh, they spotted that!! And it is still ok to claim, just ignore the criticisms. Ok.

Also, whilst we are coming up with ideas, could we please stop the inequity that means that if I want to go for a coffee or lunch with a colleague it is regarded as 'lunch' and i have to cover the cost, but people on salaries over £40K (and sometimes less) have an unlimited expenses card so that their 'lunches' are classed as 'meetings' and they can eat for free - there is nothing more galling than a person on a large salary who gets away with never spending his/her own money as well! And whilst we are there, how about the two computers, 'essential' paid mobile phones bills, the blackberries, the additional screens for home use, the extra printers, etc etc that some people on large salaries are claiming - the bigger the salary the less likely you are to have to pay for any of your home or mobile computer and communication equipment - how unfair is that?!

As i said above i've been through the redundancy mill and i know all about the psychological and financial effects. Grim. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But i think we need to get real. Not all people on 40K+ are loaded (some might have kids in college themselves!) and many will do a good job in terms of value-for-money. (Think solicitors and medics and then tell me 40K is a lot). And worrying about who can or cannot claim meals on expenses is a side issue. (In case you're wondering, i would quite often make an evening meal out of a Cornish Pastie when on University business - and probably not claim for it). The real issue is "moving goal-posts" in terms of key performance indicators such as SSR, the rate of surplus return expected on turnover (40%+ here and rising), and being at the whim of a market driven by the choices of 17-year-olds who can barely tie their shoelaces (I know, i have one!). These performance instabilities are the result of short/medium term fluctuations in income and expenditure, despite endless planning rounds. I return to the maxim "First do the right thing and then do the thing right". We may all aspire to do our jobs well, but we have to answering real needs, and properly resourced to do so. Obvious stuff, I know. Another issue i've seen is inflexibility in some staff across many grades, sometimes outright refusal to do a reasonable day's work, and disappearances for months on end on full pay. HE lacks the HR teeth to manage this kind of behaviour. Everyone needs to pull their weight. We all know people who play the system. The problem with dishing out marginal pay cuts is that, while apparently relatively painless, this becomes a slippery slope (what do the Unions think?) may be used unscrupulously, and generally raises resentment in already overworked staff. I reiterate not all senior pay-grade staff are simply lording it up at the expense of others. I have never acquired any home computing equipment at the expense of my institution - apart from paper to print work out on using my own ink! We could go on for ever, couldn't we? ......

The opportunity is given widely in my institution and many take some advantage (the amount of free coffee I have been given by people I bump into is enough - let alone all the similar 'meetings' that happen). The argument that 'some might have kids in college themselves' is effectively saying that people on large salaries are poor if they spend their salaries but not if they save them - what rubbish!!. If you have a large salary and still overspend it is because you are managing your money badly - not our problem. Let's not forget that having a kid in college is a privilege,and that most of the people who work at UK universities are earning LESS THAN THE RECOMMENDED LIVING EXPENSE NEEDED TO BE A STUDENT THERE. Which means that most people (non-academic) can't ever afford to finance a child to go to the institution they work at - so the argument is dually offensive. The reason I think it is justfied in this case is a) a great deal of inefficiency wastes money and people on the largere salaries are more responsible for this and b) the objective particularly of managers on larger salaries is to reduce costs and keep things running which is better done by reducing 'more than living wage' salaries than reducing those of people already squeezed and/or sacking them. The stress level for someone on £60K - usually with savings, investments, high house equity and great credit ratings (unless they have screwed it up in which case, tough) of a slight reduction in salary for a year is miniscule, for someone who might go bankrupt it is intense and can result in severe stress-related outcomes, greater cost to the country (in terms of benefit, health care, debt counselling etc etc) whereas for someone with £60K it would mean 'getting someone to cook some meals and put them in the freezer'.

A calculation: One free coffee a day (£2) and three free lunches a week (3x£6) = £1613 a year (47 weeks) = 2% of £60K salary = 9% of a £15K salary. i.e £60k people following a pattern similar to above are effectively given additional pay equivalent to a 9% payrise for their lower paid colleagues. Just casually. Without batting an eyelid.

I earn 40K+ and still have to pay for lunch and coffee, must be going wrong somewhere!

IAbsolutely! (unless you are including your investments) you should definitely apply for an expenses card or equivalent - you need to know all the scams if you are to progress..

To inject a bit of realpolitik for a moment, we are never going to see a situation whereby senior academics and managers agree to a 5% or 10% pay cut, or the university is able to impose it upon them. Firstly, the VC would have to take a similar pay cut to justify it, and that's never going to happen. Secondly, senior appointees are not known for self-sacrificing behaviour. Thirdly, the union would fight very vigorously against such a measure, because if you concede one pay-cut you are going to be less able to resist the inevitable next one, and also because a large part of the union's members and activists are going to be in the £40k+ salary bracket themselves. I think my idea of more job sharing is more practical. If universities made all or most new appointments on a job-share basis then a greater number of talented individuals could be employed as academics, which would share out teaching duties and enrich the intellectual life of the university.

More HE support, new contracts, different annual leave calculations, pension implications, more probation panels, more disputes when contracts end more management and supervisory time, more timetabling issues, more annual appraisal, more induction training, more teaching load management time, more marking moderation ... are you sure you've really thought this through? Have you worked out the additional administration time and the costs of extra staff/staff time needed to administer this and the corresponding impact on research output? Sometimes I think I spend all my time teaching academics basic management skills.. <sigh>

You may have noticed that my job-sharing proposal would mean lower salaries earned entirely from academic work, although the pro-rata pay rate would remain the same. It's not a huge problem, as it would only apply to new appointments, and it would allow outside earnings. You don't miss what you never had in the first place. The job might not then attract applicants who think they need to earn £40k+ per year; but then nobody absolutely needs to earn that much. £40k+ a year just gives you access to a more comfortable lifestyle than £30k a year, and could be argued to justify the responsibility, long hours, years of professional development and target-driven work culture of C21st academia. Academic salaries should be set according to how much academic work is valued, not how much academics think they need to live on.

<sigh again>. 3 day week on £20k compared to '5 day week + 50% more' given by full-time academics on £40- 50k?. but still with the extra admin I describe above.

Well, if you can't employ twice as many academics to teach the same number of hours without doubling up the administrative staff to deal with the additional admin load, then your HR section isn't very efficient. What new contracts? All you need to do is calculate a pro-rata salary and stipulate the number of hours worked. You'd only need to make one annual leave calculation and apply it to half-hours lecturers accordingly. More probation panels and annual appraisals? That's an extra two hours per full-time post, for which you'd be getting an extra faculty member available to provide teaching cover, etc. "More disputes when contracts end" - are you serious?? Better to have as few employees as possible then, to save arguments! More management and supervisory time? What, in addition to the zero hours currently allocated? More timetabling issues - no; you'd be timetabling them same number of hours for two part-time tutors as for one full-time, so it wouldn't create any 'issues'. Whoever is the course leader would just timetable lectures accordingly. More marking moderation? No; the same amount of teaching would get done, requiring the same amount of moderation, but with twice as many staff on hand to do that moderation and share the burden! The 'corresponding impact on research output' would be that more academic staff would have more time to publish more of their work. That would be a matter for the academic staff and need have no impact on the administrative section whatsoever.

My local community college employs more than 50 part-time lecturers, many of whom teach only 2 hours a week. They have an admin staff equivalent to not half a dozen full-time posts. They manage perfectly well to sort out all timetabling, wages, annual leave, performance and timetabling issues, no problem. If one of their lectures teaching 10 hours a week were to leave and be replaced by 5 more lecturers teaching only 2 hours each, the existing admin staff would deal with it without needing to hire any extra admin personnel. One might think a university would be able to similarly benefit from economies of scale. In advocating Job-sharing I am proposing an alternative to the highly stressful working pattern of today's academics, which involves long hours, uneven work-home balance and the antagonistic relationship between teaching workload and research. If anyone finds the present scheme whereby everyone is contracted for 35 hours but works at least 50, and good academics are squeezed out by lack of job opportunities, I won't argue with them. I'm just saying there are other possible ways of doing things. I have met lecturers, who work part-time in other industries outside lecturing, which brings a useful practice-based perspective into their teaching, for whom job-sharing works very well. I did presume their working arrangements don't cause their university's managers and admin staff endless headaches, but now I'm not so sure.

I'm not following this perhaps you can help? How do you propose that annual leave is collected and reported on?, I thought you were talking about 3 days on two days off, how will halving annual leave work here?, How does an extra two hours per post (x how ever many jobs you halved) with each new post on half hours mean more staff? It means more individuals working the same hours doesn't it? So how does that mean more staff available? Are you proposing to timetable them with gaps so they have to hang around? Can you explain how teaching committees research committees and academic administration loads are worked out if there is 'zero' management time? Can you explain, if people are going to take additional consulting or teaching jobs, you will deal with guaranteed hours when people need them? More markers means more moderation inevitibly - and you aren't employing eny more academic time to do the moderation -because its all prorater isn't it? Are you trying to 'trick' people into working more hours because 'they have more time to themselves'? 'more academic staff would have more (unpaid) time to publish their work you mean! 'No Impact on the administrative section whatsoever' - now we see why the utter incompetence of academics should never ever be used to make administrative load allocations.

Enjoyable! Reminds me of dilbert's classic in this case applied to academics - do you think anything you don't understand is easy to do and takes 'no time at all'!!!!

You know what? I never thought it was the admin department's task to come up with reasons why you can't change the way you or they do things. I thought the purpose of having a dedicated admin staff and management was that they would know how to implement changes and make them work efficiently. If you know I'm talking about a 3-day working week, you should know how to calculate annual leave on that basis. Don't you have a formula or an algorithm for that? Job sharing means more staff because it increases the number of individuals doing the same amount of work. That means two people are in a job and can afford to pay their mortgages and feed their families instead of one, and the benefit to the department is two individuals possess more knowledge than one. I'm not proposing to timetable gaps to keep people hanging around. I'm saying you could ask someone to come in on their day off and fill in for a colleague at an hourly paid rate or time off in lieu if they aren't committed to a second job. What are all these teaching and research committees? Sounds to me like managers making work for themselves. Am I trying to trick people into working more hours because they have more time to themselves? Are you trying to tell me that universities don't do that already? When do you think I found time to moderate a pile of 100 exam essays? I did it over the weekend! If there had been two people doing my job instead of one, we would have had 50 each. It's that simple. And no, there aren't enough hours in the working day for me to have done that marking at my desk. Ask any lecturer how much of 'their' time they spend doing university work and they'll tell you. The same goes for research and writing. How much of that gets done on the weekend? At least working a half week you'd have time to do owt besides marking and research on your days off; and how much research you did outside your three (okay, 2.5 if you like) days on campus would be entirely your own business. I still don't see where the administrative load is in regard to my research. I do it, I know where the library is, I email my work to the journal, they get it refereed and publish it. How exactly am I creating any more work for the university?

Hero: I will look into getting an expenses card... Sounds great. As for this job-sharing nonsense, my guess is that most part time academics would dearly like to be full time. Further, there would be little continuity within depts where there was a high propotion of transient staff. And there would be the danger that these part time staff would be considered second class by their full time colleagues. Also I do not consider academics to be wealthly, most are in the 40-52k bracket, and it is not hard to think of professions who earn at least twice that amount.

...or, indeed, half, but on a 40-hour week.

Its not hard to think of PROFESSORs who earn at least twice that either! As for 'where does the admin come from' comments - its no wonder that More Job Sharing! is not in management or administration! The point is that admin implement changes yes, so they are more expert in telling you what changes need what resources - if you are thinking that admin is serf territory you are making a big mistake! its not 'your wish is my command' you know! I think what you are saying is: 1. Get two people's knowledge for the price of one 2. Give you an academic colleague to help share your marking load 3. You are expecting your 'part time' academics to work full time - just perhaps less at weekends, (i.e invest their own money into producing research that the university benefits from) I think what you are really saying is 'reduce academic salaries' and if you think timetabling two staff instead of one will take up zero admin time then you have obviously never worked out a timetable!

Would we also need more administrative resources to implement that 5% wage reduction?

Well, yes of course! But as the jobs won't change, the structures won't change there won't be (anymorethan usual) any more work left undone, management structures won't change, people 'left behind' won't be demotivated etc I would imagine that once the decision is made and Union agreement sought (similar to that needed for the loss of jobs) then it would then be a payroll issue - similar to a blanket payrise and therefore less difficult to implement - some tax issues may arise but this is all calculated automatically so could correct before the next financial year. Some time would be used explaining the situation on web-sites and the press but similar to that needed to explain job losses - and then of course there are all the positives including good press that result from NOT sacking people

"and then of course there are all the positives including good press that result from NOT sacking people" - nice one, Machiavelli !

'as it would only apply to new appointments', writes More Job Sharing! ,,, I'm not quite sure what would be resrticted to new appointments only. I have worked part-time and contractually full-time in the past and would bite off the hand offering me a permanent job-share in my enthusiasm to remain a lecturer. £15,000 would do fine for 50% - it's what I've had before. I'd better stop before I start writing a round robin CV here.

This talk of a wage reduction for people on 40K+, which is just about all staff at established universities, is total nonsense. I think the starting salaryfor a lecturer is around 38K these days! Probably this is considered by some here as far to much. Let me ask a question: How much do you think the starting salary for a lecturer should be? The real problem here is that the most talented young UK people are turning their backs on academia in favour of better paid jobs elsewhere, and they are being replaced by people from overseas. I do not have a problem with this as such, but one can envisage a time in the none to distant future when 90% of staff in some depts are not of UK origin. No, the real solution is to shut all these new universities (post 92) down and use the savings to provide free education for students and higher salarys for staff at the remaining 50 or so institutions.

Well! Fancy thinking we are talking about all academics from starting salary upwards! We AREN'T we are talking about people on salaries over £40K. Most talented people in the UK aren't turning their back on academia - and they are NOT being replaced by people from overseas! - In fact most people entering academia in the UK are from the UK, and most people applying for the PHD from the UK have higher qualifications than those applying from overseas. One can envisage that 90% of staff in some departments are not of UK origin - but not in all, nor the majority. ' The idea that reducing the number of university places drastically in order to fund the rest is a bit ridiculous - all you have then is a smaller elite that is paid for - you certainly don't develop more talent buy doing this - see the points made about stupid rich kids getting into top universities ahead of talented clever kids in the 'massification' thread.... Why pay higher salaries when we are competing globally on the salaries we already pay?

Hero: I do not know where you work, but in my dept most new appointments are from overseas already and that is also the experience of my colleagues elsewhere. Uk people do not apply or are not able to complete for the positions available. If your experience is different then I accept that this is not yet the case everywhere. Do we really need 150+ universities? I suggest we do not especially as the level of education varies so much within these institutions. Would it not be better to provide free education at fewer institutions. I certainly do not come from a well off background, yet went to university in the 70's like many of my friends from the same sort of background. We benifited from an excellent education and moved on to rewarding careers in meny fields. Reducing the number of universities back to that sort of level would clearly not be ridiculous. What is ridiculous is conning kids to go to hole in the wall universities, allowing them to run up hugh debt while obtaining a second class education, only to find that at the end they are back where they started taking whatever work they can.

@Jack Black: I think you are exaggerating slightly; using phrases like 'hole in the wall' is unnecessarily derogatory. The institutions of the kind which you might not have wished to frequent in the 70s, but which do now share the title of 'university' with those that you did attend, do not hand out qualifications in mute response to cash input. Few students leave HE 'back where they started' - of course there will always be some hooray henries, some who drank their way through three years and some people who still can't express themselves who have somehow passed through the system untouched, but most graduates have received huge benefits from their experiences. We now have a diverse HE system which much better provides for our diverse community and provides opportunities for personal, academic and professional development for many more people. It isn't the same system that many of us benefited from in the 70s and 80s but I think that this is a good thing. Let's not undermine the considerable achievements in HE provision by bickering (snobbishly?) about which institutions 'deserve' to be closed and work more co-operatively to ensure that everybody who can benefit from it gets the best quality HE we can provide.

concerned about standards : I am very concerned about standards.

It all depends on where you cut the numbers - either there has always been only a limited number of clever bods that has increased only because population has increased (and they are all going to uni) then you might have a point, but even in that model there would be increasing numbers of potential academics. With the other idea, that access to HE is key rather than innate intelligence alone (leaving aside the obvious privilege argument) then you would expect that more people passing through HE would provide more appropriate quality teaching, which would in turn generate more appropriate-level graduates etc etc. Perhaps also In a society where apprenticeships and trades are dominant, apprentices and trade education flourishes - in a service economy more 'soft' learning dominates which explains the shift away from tecnhical and practical learning to University-style learning. Also what used to be working class values are more normalised now so it doesn't freak people out as much to be around their opposite. When I went to uni, almost no guys I met liked football or lager or chavvy tarty girls but now that is on the cards at every uni night.

Mike: maybe kennels would help.

So, what exactly are you saying, Mike? That increased student numbers have meant a massive increase in the number of numpties going to university, because the unexpanded university system was big enough to soak up all the clever ones already? Or that expansion, putting more people through university, has increased the number of well educated graduates because the benefits are all in the learning experience and have nothing to do with the innate qualities of the entrants - basically that you can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear? Where does the 'appropriate quality teaching' in the expanded system come from? Increased numbers of graduates having absorbed the necessary knowledge and skills to enter academia? Or the expansion of higher education has de facto created more teaching positions which are necessarily filled by quality teaching staff rather than merely filled? Are you saying that in a service-led economy, universities and not apprenticeships supply the skilled labour we require? I take your point about working class values becoming normalized (there's a thought-provoking but small 'c' conservative documentary showing in two parts on Thursdays at the moment on BBC2, called 'The Death of Respect', which puts forward exactly that argument, but with value judgements, in part 1). Football, lager and chavvy, tarty girls? You've vividly captured the changing scene of UK student life over the past 20 years there. When I went to university, student life was about being away from home, among new people, trying out ideas among a scholarly community and seeing how what you learned changed how you thought about your everyday life. Over time it has become more about staying close to your geographical roots, resisting any connection between what you study, what you do and who you are, and taking unchanged cultural norms with you to university and carrying on much the same everyday life as you had outside university, often with the same group of friends you had before. What has brought about this change? 1. Lowering admissions standards for university degrees; 2. Reducing the intellectual and scholarly demands of university study; 3. Widespread propaganda that nobody in our society counts for anything unless they've been to university; and 4. Changing the financing of degree study, so that students have a much larger disposable income, largely in credit form, than at any time since Thatcher froze the student grant and abolished students' entitlement to welfare benefits.

I think I was saying that touch wood you should never buy a pig in a poke.

I am recently retired from being a UCU branch officer and am an experienced caseworker (trained on employment and equality legislation by NATFHE and have presented at UK Employment Tribunals). A concern is that some institutions do not appear to understand the statutory requirements in respect of potential redundancy situations. There is no meaningful consultation at formative stages with the recognised trades unions and individuals. This can then lead to unfair selection for redundancy, failure to redeploy and potentially unfair discrimination of part-time staff (fractional and hourly paid) . This may also have the added dimension of unfair discrimination against females and members of ethnic minority groups as statistically part-time staff are predominantly from such groups. It can also lead to ‘bumping’ redundancy on to others unfairly. It’s a stressful process if your post/work is declared redundant, and I have great sympathy for those currently in this situation in HE and other sectors . Your trade union representatives will be able to advise you of your legal rights. An institution must be able to demonstrate that the post is no longer required or the work has diminished. Information must be provided to the recognised trades unions and individuals themselves must have the opportunity to respond early in the process. An additional issue is that the Employers and HE Trade Unions agreed implementation of a job evaluation/role analysis scheme as part of the National Framework Agreement (implementation 1 August 2006). It also seems that some institutions are now trying to down-grade posts through declaring redundancies and offering redeployment at lower grades when work (not the person) should be properly evaluated through such schemes (HERA or HAY). A library of academic role profiles against demand levels (fitting to grades and job families) was part of the agreement. Redundancy must be genuine (demonstrated) and not a regrading exercise or for dealing with capability issues. The health, safety and well-being of people (including their families) are at risk if those responsible for staffing decisions are not fully qualified, trained or experienced and due process is not followed.