The University College Union of Edinburgh (UCUE) have described the Academic Contribution Framework (ACF) as “anti-intellectual”, “career-wrecking”, and “discriminatory” in a report released in late October.
The ACF is a new mechanism created by the University of Edinburgh in order to decide which members of staff they will target for redundancy.
The university management are in the process of making staff cuts to save up to £92 million in costs, putting up to 1,800 full-time jobs at risk.
According to the UCUE, the mechanism measures academic contribution over a three-year period from 2022, which they describe as an “absurd” timeframe.
Academic contributions include publications, grants, teaching, citizenship, and collaborations.
The UCUE said: “Everything about academic work is long-term: academic productivity ebbs and flows in prolonged cycles of reading, thinking, funding, and writing that fit around the obligations of life.”
Though the ACF mechanism supposedly includes a provision that it must take account of individual circumstances, one concern noted by the UCUE is the lack of transparency around how this will work in practice.
It is not clear how panel members will be chosen and there is no requirement for them to have expertise in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).
This is expected to cause problems, as staff who work part-time (often due to factors such as health, childcare, or eldercare) will be most at risk.
The UCUE claim: “No-one, anywhere, has made a well-substantiated case for why this is happening, beyond ‘weakening income streams, alongside increasing costs’.”
“The cruel reality is that these cuts will bring about precisely what they purport to address: an expensive upheaval that will damage our core mission and income.”
“Old College, University of Edinburgh (24923171570)” by LWYang from USA is licensed under CC BY 2.0.