'Draconian' measure: King's to cut 205 jobs

In both Palaeography and Philosophy at Kings enormously well-respected Professors have been threatened with redundancy and it is surprising that this was not mentioned in the article.


The Professorship of Palaeography is the only one in the United Kingdom. An Online petition to save Palaeography has over 2500 signature and the decision has been condemned by the entire Mediaeval academy of America as well as academics and archivists all over the world.

I'm not a legal expert, but surely redundancy should be based on whether a job is required or not rather than 'performance'. Is there an established criteria of performance which means that below a certain performance threshold a post is no longer required? For example, if an academic doesn't generate £nK of research income they are no longer required - despite their PhD students, teaching load, and other academic activities?
In any case HEIs are not exactly known for their expertise in 'peformance management' so surely any appeal would point out that academic contracts probably do not require staff to 'perform' in relation to the criteria set out in any redundancy selection proceses -thus it could be seen to be unfair to expect them to meet performance targets that were unaware of, and which have been developed purely for this process (and possibly on the hoof). Furthermore publications and research income are two separate and not necessarily directly connected measures of 'performance', and how do you measure teaching 'performance' ?
I'm surely the legal bods will navigate these issues with elan, but something doesn't seem quite right here.

'If an academic doesn't generate £nK of research money they are no longer required.' In that cae about 60% of the profession should be sacked immediately. That's roughly the failure rate for grant applications.
How did we get to a situation where we have to raise the money to pay our salaries? And from an ever diminshing pot..

This looks like unfair dismissal to me. Those who are going to be dismissed with judgments made on performance grounds (grants generate £nK of research money) must take their case to court and grill the management of King’s.

The HE sector expanded too much, and now the old, established pillars of research and teaching excellence in the UK has to suffer. The government should exempt the top institutions from any cuts and instead increase their base funding: Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Imperial, UCL, KCL and couple of others. It takes many decades to build up an internationally recognized research and teaching university and many countries never succeed at it. We cannot afford to water-down the top universities in this nation. The costs of these should not be traded off against the costs of mediocre post-1992 institutions.

@Tom -- Well said! Let's hope that the mass closures of departments in the weaker post-92s will be sufficient to allow eventual restoration of funding to the better institutions.

I am glad Dr Frederics you are rebuilding your life in the States and that you are still interested in what's happening over here. I don't, though, agree with your point about 'mass closure'. It seems rather unfeeling to wreck so many lives by making people redundant. Presumably many families being destroyed is justified by someone discovering something about new about Schoenburg? How about this instead? Stop all funding to the humanities. They don't do 'research', they explore values, question ends and promote creativity. Does that mean no-one should write books or articles? No, of course not. Just that they can do that on a sabbatical where their teaching will be taken up by colleagues who will have their sabbatical in turn. And so on.

I wonder if Dr. Frederics would like to come down to my university - one of the "weaker" post-92 institutions, and tell my students that they should not be getting a university education because the money is needed for UCL and Imperial. And what does "weaker" mean? It's just pejorative and prejudicial gloss. Does Dr. Frederics think, for example, that our teaching is "weaker"? Or maybe he thinks our students are weaker?

I went to UCL for my education, and fully subscribe to old Bentham's ethic of the "greatest good for the greatest number". Now thanks to the arrogance and incompetence of a powerful few, the ability of this ideal to transform lives and society is in danger of disappearing.

Quite a few of these post 92 places need to be shut ASAP, with the money saved being spent on proper university education.

This a real shame in the effect it has on individuals but it's naive in the extreme to believe one can continue with an overblown education system in a time of financial cutbacks. How can academia be so intelligent and yet so deliberately obtuse.

If there isn't enough money to run a business the business needs to identify its areas of cost and do its best to reduce them. It would be better to engage and use the same skills to plot the most sensible course.

Too many people are happy to suggest others are being wasteful and fail to look at themselves. Lecturing to a group of four anyone? Costing courses and ignoring the back end costs in revenue predictions? This is where we need to be smarter.

Look out - other institutions are making greater numbers than this redundant, but are hiding those redundancies by doing them in staggered redundancies of small groups of people. Some others are also pretending that a department redundancy of 5 is separate from all departments losing 5 so that the insitition can claim that instead of 200 lost job there are only average of 5 jobs lost. It is sinful change of figure

Richard Trainor is a great reformer. He was the first to realise the strategic importance of having new academic gowns designed for King's College London. And he recruited a top designer to do this.

dose of reality says "Too many people are happy to suggest others are being wasteful and fail to look at themselves". Perhaps this also applies to posh-building-buying, gown-designing senior managers? Let's have a gander at their 'performance' - oh, of course there are no suitable metrics available to rate leadership and management, are there....?

I graduated from King's a couple of years ago and Rick Trainor used the ceremony as a fundraising event - repeatedly emphasising our debt to the college and the importance of us making donations. His speech really tainted the event for me, but perhaps it's just an indication of how desperate things were getting. I would donate, but I have no faith in the current management given the total lack of direction the college has under them.

Don't give them a brass farthing - they are betraying their trust.
I see that the joke called RAE has been used again (in that horrible creature called a "consultation document") to legitimate threats of sackings. - But "the REF is not about finding "true" answers to questions of the absolute or relative "quality" (used by Hefce in the fake, managerialist-audit-descriptor sense of that term) of research. It is about ... [depriving] academics of control over their own work and over the universities themselves" (THES 16 December 2009). As we see in this case.
What a farce! "Russell Group"! Still, when our children ask: what is philistinism? we can answer: look, there's King's College London. It was once a university institution, but it fell on cruel times.

Unfortunately, the deplorable decisions by King's management are piled so high that this THES article, like most of the coverage of this debacle, is missing perhaps the most sinister aspect of this whole 'restructuring plan'. While all academic posts are being put at risk in the search for 22 redundant staff, 6 new positions are being simultaneously created, several of them very expensive and unwanted in principle by the departments concerned. This exercise is manifestly being driven, therefore, not merely by financial necessity, but in order to consolidate a new 'strategic plan' which transforms HEFCE's funding priorities into KCL's mission statement. The effect of this plan will be radically to curtail the ability of KCL's academic staff, departments, or schools to set their own intellectual agendas long after the financial crisis has run its course. In a word, Trainor’s plan will use the financial crisis as an opportunity to eliminate academic freedom and turn a great university into a simple tool of government policy. And since government policy, driven by the electoral cycle, is often ill-considered, short-sighted and constantly in flux, staff will need to be culled at regular intervals henceforth, every time HEFCE adjusts its funding priorities. Redundancies aside, everyone who values genuine intellectual creativity should resist this plan: it is not merely draconian but deeply misguided, short-sighted, philistine, and ultimately counter-productive, insofar as it will undermine the ability of a great university to produce really important innovations over the long term.

Do you really think that all University managers are forcing through these restructuring exercises reluctantly? Of course not. As pointed out by many, massive spending on infrastructure continues (e.g. at Kings and Imperial) whilst managers feign poverty. The RAE and funding cuts are the excuse not the reason in many cases. Work-force engineering is commonplace in industry - and in many instances is the real driving force behind these manpower cuts. This is an attempt to fundamentally change the way universities work, without any transparent discussion, nationally or even locally on how best to do it. What’s going to be lost and do we really want to lose it? Academia UK: where a person’s worth is judged not by their actions but by the money in their pocket. How long will it be before UK universities start to publish annual profit reports?

I'm agreeing with my Myopia above. The almost 3750 signatures in 24 hours on the petition to save Palaeography at kings

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?spkcl10

come from almost every mediaeval scholar classicist and archivist in Europe and the United States and elsewhere. Anyone dealing with the history of writing or communication recognises that London needs a Chair in Palaeography to advise onthe maginifent collection of manuscripts Professor Ganz is advising on the digitising of manuscripts for the Britsh Library. He is helping to teach (and always able to advise) the historians archivists and teachers who enable thousands of people to consult archives tin pursuit of their family history. He has advised the British Museum on the handwriting and inscriptions of the Staffordshire Hoard and Sotheys on manuscripts for sale.

A parallel and slightly more advanced process is going on at Leeds. The driver is said to be ecomomies but in reality the push is to move up the world rankings. To do this management see the need to retain only research-active staff. Even though teaching income is greater than research income in most cases, the attitude is that anyone can teach whereas only an elite few can carry out nationally/internationally respected research. Therefore, get rid of the teaching only staff and the ranking will improve.
Sadly, the managerial and central admin staff who neither teach nor carry out research seem to be in line for cuts.

Whoops! Last sentence should read:

Sadly, the managerial and central admin staff who neither teach nor carry out research DON'T seem to be in line for cuts.

But at kings both the Professor of Palaeography and those sthreatened with the sack in Philosophy are extremely reseach active.

But they probably don't fit in with BP's notion of "innovation".

The management of King's is indulging in what every public sector manager does faced with a demand to cut a budget. In order the minimise the amount of the cuts, the first port of call is always high profile frontline activities. In the same way that a local authority faced with the need to reduce expenditure will always focus its cuts on the meals on wheels service or refuse collection, King's has chosen a unique professorship likely to rally international support. If King's had taken its axe to its facilities management, HR or marketing departments, deeper cuts would almost certainly follow. As it is, HEFCE and Mandelson may not have the political nerve to come back with phase II. This attitude on the part of public sector management will be one of the major obstacles to getting the UK budget deficit under control. Cameron and Osborne (or Brown and Darling if they win the election) have to come up with a strategy for dealing with this across the public sector and not just in HE (a few snap inspections by the Audit Commission perhaps?) otherwise their economic policy will be shredded by back bench rebellions.

Yes hit the road- i was thinking about Mr Mottershead

BP

"The Texas City disaster was caused by organisational and safety deficiencies at all levels of BP Corporation," the board says. "Warning signs of a possible disaster were present for several years, but company officials did not intervene effectively to prevent it."

In my last count there was plenty of deadwood academics at Kings.

Ricky Trainor and his Vice-Principals have already become the laughing stock of the academic community both in the UK and abroad. They are a disgrace to King’s College London and should resign as soon as possible. So, yes, hit the road Rick and never come back!

There are some extraordinary letters from mediaevalists around the world here- well worth a read to see way this is seen elsewhere-


http://www.palaeographia.org/cipl/actu/paleoatkings.htm

@Oliver K. Kings has so much deadwood academcs as Hello says. Looking for jobs for life. Cuts are coming mate, even if you do not like it!

Yes, cuts are coming- and the question is what should be cut- Inspiring teachers and researchers or expensive new buildings? Respected academics or expensive vice-principals? internationally successful research projects or bullying managers?

@concerned academic. Bullying is not confined to managers but fellow academics bully very frequently. Look at this blog, the threads and the discussions. The moment any one expresses another point of view , the so called Respected academics bunch jump on the person asking for his/her identity, rubbishing the person calling names whilst themselves hiding in a nom de plume! Those who manage internationally successful projects should have no worries as they can take their skills elsewhere.

I'd be happy to come down and tell that to your students, given that most post-92 "unis" are little more than buffers between secondary school and the dole line. At least half of these places should go if that it what it takes to save the real universities.

Don't worry, the administrative staff at Leeds are in line for similar 'economies' in the light of 'centralisation'.

Please sign the petition against workplace bullying in Higher Education: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Justice-Bullying

Rest assured that King's academics will rise to the occasion and will lead the way nationally in defending education. Their struggle will set an example to academics in other universities and will become part of King's legacy.

@academic. Say defending jobs, academics like you think are for life. idiots.

Some Questions:

Should senior management from BP a company whose admitted mismanagement killed 15 people and injured over 100 in Texas be deciding the future of education?

Is it true that Kings has £150 million in its reserves?

How many academics do you ahve to sack to pay a vice principal - and his or her pension?

Mr Mottershead joined King's College London from BP, where he worked for 30 years... not a job for life?

Let the powers that be at this London institution reduce all things to a question of "cost effectiveness." Oh, by the way, London U, you are not even a player in the game, you have prostituted academia.

Unfortunately, my above comment does nothing to help the scholars, whose shoes I am not worthy to unloosen, from a fate that they should never have to face. Philip Sherrard and Arnold Toynbee deserve better than to have their life's work dashed against the rocks by some Philistine accountant on a regent's board. If other so-called universities follow suit, there will be a backlash and these brilliant decision makers, if justice is served, will be constrained to resign. I'll be on the picket lines. If our academic freedom goes, my friends, we academics are screwed. (So much for being subtle...I'm pissed.)

I am a PhD student at King's and my department will 'discontinue' because of the cuts. Academic performance has little to do with keeping your job. The main criterion is whether you teach a subject that attracts external funding and international, high paying students, and is to the liking of the principal (e.g. British History). Compulsory redundancies will be accompanied by new appointments of academics!!
(So much for the 'necessary', 'unavoidable' and 'performance-based' redundancies)

I was a postgraduate student at Kings College (MA in Modern Greek Studies - KCL - 1995-1996). I consider my self as one of the lucky Greek Cypriots who were admitted to this course during all these years. It was a well designed course, delivered by academics committed to their task (excellence in education) and personally I consider an honor having as a tutor Dr David Ricks (for the purpose of my dissertation). Meeting the elite of Modern Greek Scholars and Academics in seminars and conferences that either the department of Byzantine and Modern Greek department of King's College organized or took part (Oxford, Birmingham) was also a priviledge.
I have read the news at a local newspaper yesterday considering KCL and its department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. I wish that this decision is not definite.

As a student for the upcoming year, I am appalled at KCL's conduct. 'Restructuring' never means anything good, and as it's in the department I'm interested in-Philosophy-again it's more than a bit of a pain in the arse. Not only that, but the way in which they have handled applications-yet again, as it doesn't seem to be a one-off problem and you'd expect them to have realised this by now-by only beginning to consider them after the deadline instead of when they come, creating a HUGE back-log, not helped by threatening people with being sacked, a big increase in applicants and less funding and places! I applied in october, I got acknowledged in January, and have not heard anything since. I phoned, and got someone explaining how someone else's personal life had stopped them from being able to do as many applications, and got assured I'd get an answer in the next few weeks. I need to know now so I can secure accommodation; it seem sto me King's biggest problem isn't the lack of government funding so much as lack of competent management! If they had learnt from passed mistakes, they would have started earlier, they would have a plan of action for this current crisis, and I wouldn't be mad at some poor stranger who has personal problems for delaying my application and therefore my chance having somewhere decent to live that won't aggravate my disability! I don't care if they refuse me, I just want a bloody answer. why is that too much to ask?

Garry East and Richard Middleton 'left' Aston University because they were pushed- and the Cash Cut has nothing to do with it- Aston University has actually not done too badly in the latest round of cuts.

No- Garry East, Director of Estates- and as with the the other heads of support services except Finance/Business- actually reported to Richard Middleton, COO. A brand new "Director of Capital Development role was given to Alan Charters, back in 2009 with much of East's (published) job description finding its way into that of this new Director.

Charters is now said to be managing many of the same personnel as Mr East too, effectively taking over much of the reposnsbilities of the former department. So the idea that this was anything to do with responding to the cuts seems just a part of a bigger story.