Back in 2005, UCL Provost, Professor Malcolm Grant went on a mission to cut 15% of staff. The resulting 167 redundancies left College increasingly reliant upon PhD students taking up the slack. Now the Provost is looking to be even more ‘prudent’ with the budget. This time, planned spending cuts of 6% threaten a ‘reduction in head count’ of up to 400 jobs.
Official discussion about the cuts began in January this year. Ever keen to skirt around employment law, UCL failed to inform the staff trade union, University and College Union, until May. What, though, is this dire situation that our College is in? A quick look at the figures shows that rather than suffering from cuts, UCL has practically been inviting them.
Back in May, when the 6% cuts were first proposed, UCL was looking to receive an increase in government funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, a body on which Malcolm Grant happens to sit. However, College’s Head of Finance predicted that this would soon become a small decrease in funding – and so it did. How, though, does this 2% drop in funding explain a call for 6% cuts? Well, the Provost reckons that next year will see a further decrease in funding of 10% and is planning UCL’s staff reductions in advance. In other words, the man who sits on the board of the funding council is inviting cuts at his own institution.
After all, Grant has long made it clear that he is firmly on the taxpayer’s side when it comes to university funding, and would rather see uncapped tuition fees (see CG 12). If the 6% cuts go ahead, they will almost certainly be just the beginning – in fact, Grant now looks to form a Redundancy Committee, which would allow compulsory redundancies to begin. This would be the nuclear option for UCL, and would lead to a damaging fight with the unions.
A little history would help here. Back in 2005/06, the Provost’s ‘Regeneration Plan’ aimed to cut 15% of staff in order to correct a deficit that equated to 1.5% of UCL’s turnover (see CG 7). This led to a “terror campaign” by senior management to force academics into voluntary redundancy or early retirement. As one senior UCU member puts it, “they shook the tree to see who would fall out”. Though staff refused to go quietly, causing a stalemate that prevented College from making compulsory redundancies, the damage had been done.
With academics increasingly using their time to apply for research funding in order to combat funding shortfalls, UCL has replaced the redundant lecturers with Postgraduate Teaching Assistants. As pointed out in the last issue, PGTAs are often overworked, underpaid, under-represented and simply not as experienced as the lecturers they are replacing. Meanwhile, the research funding gained by academics is being diverted elsewhere, leaving UCL’s largest faculties continually in the red. Combine this with the historical expense of combining UCL Medical School with the Royal Free and the Middlesex; and the result is a 10% cut to Life Sciences.
While Grant has long hoped that market forces will drive up tuition fees, he is leaving students with a budget education, where all the expensive professors have been cut to save the embarrassment of asking for taxpayers’ money. Regardless of the reassurances made by UCL Union’s Education Officer, any further cuts will surely result in further damage to “the world’s 4th best university”.