Thread by @PlashingVole

Hello from the ‘other’ end, where my dept doubled its REF output, and went up 40 places, while coping with all the pressures Jim mentions amid mass course closures and redundancies.

https://twitter.com/jim_dickinson/status/1526810208193880064

Our management rightly say that government hostility to the arts, school curriculum changes, more prestigious HEIs recruiting more widely and the STEM agenda all make courses less viable.

But I find myself wondering why senior managers thought it was ethical or sensible to do a deal with agents in a very poor country to recruit 700 students from one particular place largely to a single course with very few checks on qualifications.

I might not have then refurbished a mothballed residence at huge expense only to discover that c. 10 of the 700 moved in. Of the others, quite a few dispersed into the ‘informal economy’ and I gather the police enquiry into modern slavery and sex trafficking is ongoing.

I gather progression rates for the cohort are terrible. There’s the morality of treating people as an undifferentiated mass (would you sign up 700 people from Bolton or Bath without asking them what they wanted or needed?). Then there’s the enormous financial loss.

I might have resigned as Director of International Recruitment at that point. I certainly wouldn’t have decided that the losses would be covered by closing courses that the missing 700. WEREN’T EVEN ON.

Not that I think any of my colleagues should lose their jobs other than the vice-chancellor and the director of international recruitment. The academic and support staff did amazing things to help those students.

I’d say all this to their faces but their faces don’t show. Oddly it’s only a decade since I told a previous VC she should resign for misreporting student numbers to HEFCE and instituting redundancies to cover the clawback. She didn’t resign: she became VC at a bigger place.

Admittedly the face-off with that VC was less dramatic than it could have been because I had flu and could only whisper to a colleague who repeated what I was saying out loud.

Finally, some financial perspective. We are £20m down and at panic stations. A close friend works at an HEI with a £180m PhD funding scheme. Elsewhere, Manchester Uni has more research funding than all the Welsh universities combined. And yet we’re all ranked as though

there are no structural or historic contexts.

I will add that there is one deputy VC who hasn’t been here long, must feel like she’s made the worst move ever and understands what we do and the wider landscape. I’m not an ‘all management are bastards’ type.

Also: many of our students are mature, part-time or have family ties and can’t leave the area to do courses offered at few places, such as specialist music. They won’t go somewhere else. They’ll be lost to HE and to wider society.