There’s a particular species of jargon which exists solely to make unsettling news sound like a team-building exercise at a corporate job. Words and phrases such as ‘restructuring,’ ‘strategic realignment’ and the like keep cropping up with regards to The University of Edinburgh’s reports of its financial distress. Regrettably, it is not only this vocabulary which is flourishing, but the proposed staffing cuts, too.
Whether the university is indeed facing financial difficulties of the proportion it claims is largely secondary to whether its “remedies” are justified. The university has been condemned for its plans for mass redundancies, especially when its principal, Professor Sir Peter Mathieson ‘defended his six-figure salary to MSPs at the same time as he refused to rule out making compulsory redundancies as the institution seeks to make £140 million of savings.’
This threat to academics and student satisfaction has unsurprisingly attracted the attention of the University and College Union (UCU), who remain adamant that the university’s decision-making lacks transparency. They express that ‘it is very difficult for the union, and others in the University community, to propose alternatives when we have limited access to the full picture of the UoE financial situation.’ This posits the patent question of why, on the face of it at least, the university is being so reticent in divulging details of its finances.
When people are being expected to take job losses on the chin, the burden of explanation should be high. As it stands, the UCU has deemed the explanations too ambiguous to be intuited as reasonable. If the cuts to staffing the university is proposing are really unavoidable, then greater transparency about how that conclusion has been reached would in fact make their case stronger, not weaker.
If the university is ‘announcing plans for £140m of cuts to tackle severe financial difficulties,’ staff and students deserve to understand how that figure was reached. Greater clarity on the kinds of assumptions being made about student numbers, research income, and government funding are necessary if the university wants its decisions to be perceived as legitimate.
However, as much as we hate being put on the spot by a lecturer, The University of Edinburgh must surely hate it even more. There very well may be legitimate reasons for the university to not publish some details of their financial plans. Some information may be commercially sensitive, or proposed restructures may not necessarily be final. Publishing provisional figures can certainly create unnecessary alarm, as regrettably, forecasts are not facts.
Even so, the university’s lack of transparency is unacceptable; if they expect students to pay hefty tuition fees then they ought to show them how they plan to protect them academically. This, lamentably, does not mean releasing a bulky spreadsheet and congratulating themselves on their ‘transparency’; uploading a PDF is not a difficult feat. Instead, the university should clarify why they are prioritising redundancies over other viable alternatives, and specify which other options they have already considered; crucially, they must strive to make the logic behind their decisions coherent.
Image by Ulia Makoveeva for The Student
