Worried about losing your job? The problem is your senior management, not your mindset

27 Apr

A blog post from the Academic Related Professional Services (ARPS) collective

We were told that change would happen. That jobs, programmes, and courses, would look different - not sure when this would happen, or how - just that we all needed to brace for it and accept it. For nearly two years, workers at the University of Edinburgh have been living with the looming threat of redundancies hidden in plain sight. And now, returning from a week-long industrial action to protect our students’ right to a good education and our colleagues’ jobs, we are faced with a mix of vagueness and toxic positivity when reading top-down communications around the future of our own jobs.

Staff in ARPS - Academic Related Professional Services - are nearing the Annual Review season, and as you all can imagine, dear readers, not knowing what parameters will deem some of us worthy of keeping our job – and not always having the time or space to engage meaningfully in this task, given the workload increase we have been experiencing – make this exercise stressful even if we ignore everything else we are going through.

Updated guidance on Annual Reviews was shared by our Director of HR in the new Conversations Hub to guide this process, including a section on ‘rebuilding morale after redundancy’. The same people in leadership who have said that no compulsory redundancies would take place until a certain time are clearly expecting redundancies soon, and the hit to morale they will cause (and have already caused!). Even more so, this betrays a disregard for the damage this will cause to students and staff alike.

MANUFACTURING INEVITABILITY AND SHIFTING BLAME

Senior Leadership has been manufacturing uncertainty, and we workers are simply being invited to ‘manage it’ and adopt a positive ‘growth mindset’ - to be adaptable, and in more extreme examples, also to be quiet about it. It’s bewildering to be asked to see redundancy and change as wonderful opportunities for greatness - almost as if the problem with increase in workload and tangible impacts to staff wellbeing and students’ learning conditions are ‘just a mindset problem’. The divorce between our lived experience and the narrative that is being presented by management is stark.

Examples of similar narratives have been experienced in a variety of Schools and settings. Some of our members shared recollections from a speech their Director of Professional Studies made during a School-wide meeting, which followed news of upcoming changes and redundancies. Staff had been worried and started asking questions, of course - an entirely human response to uncertainty. They were told “to be cautious about planting the seed of worry in their colleagues and teams.” As though the seed of worry hadn’t already been planted and nourished by the communication strategies of Senior Leadership!

By shifting the blame to individuals, decision makers elude accountability. This approach has been known to increase fear, overwhelm, and anxiety, often leading people to de-mobilise and feel more disengaged. Some of our members mentioned how they found it difficult to talk openly about uncertainty, and were experiencing more isolation and a sense of powerlessness, in the weeks following the meeting. This is a form of corporate blame-shifting. Shifting blame from systemic issues towards individuals has also been studied when looking at genocides and climate change, and history tells us that it does indeed make people feel disempowered.

There are plenty of other tactics that we have noticed being used by our Senior Leadership to deflect from the systemic issues they have created, coming from studies in various disciplines, from Psychology to Political Sciences. One of these is DARVO - Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender. A perfect example of DARVO comes from none other than our Principal, Sir Peter Mathieson.

When UCU accepted management’s offer to pause Industrial action in 2026, there were promises of meaningful consultations with the Union. These promises turned out to be empty, as management’s actions have made clear that they had no intention of meaningfully consulting with the union on the changes they already have underway. Union negotiators were barred from key meetings and senior leaders repeatedly refused to share the complete financial information used to justify cuts. Industrial action resumed as a result, following a vote. Just before strikes began, a University-wide email was shared by our Principal in which he stated that the Union had broken the agreement and disregarded the impact the strike would have on students and staff. Flipping the victim/offender seems a clear intention - when Senior Leadership makes arbitrary decisions, they get to present these as necessities and facts that are to be dealt with. When workers make democratic decisions, these are framed by leadership as deliberate intents to damage the Institution and the students we love supporting and showing up for. This is happening again in more recent communications sent to students and staff following the announcement of a Marking and Assessment boycott.

A word that has been thrown around a lot to justify overworking staff and depriving students of education and support, has been “survival”. They simply must make hard decisions for the survival of the institution, because of an imagined financial deficit that has been amply disproved. This is not about survival — it’s about curating an ideology that manufactures decisions as inevitable and frowns upon resistance.

We can learn a lot about how inevitability is manufactured by looking at areas of our University where restructuring and cuts have already happened. Senior Leadership makes the choice not to consult members actually working in departments about potential closure and the potential consequences of ‘restructuring’. When being advised to take redundancy or reassigned to other roles, staff are given the opportunity to give feedback on the process through a questionnaire, almost as if to present an apparent narrative of support and consultation.

Meeting minimum legal standards of ‘consultation’ and ignoring the wider possibilities of consultation processes is a choice. Consultation, implemented with a dignified approach, can involve democratic exchange that genuinely values staff member expertise and views about possibilities for the future, including the expertise of union members and colleagues who have encountered similar HE challenges in the past and have successfully proposed alternatives, when there was willingness to listen and work mutually.

What has been happening at Edinburgh, instead, is a betrayal of any humane approach to managing, and a choice not to apply imagination, by entrenching a top-down hierarchical model. A few people in positions of power, who do not do the actual day to day, on the ground work with staff and students, have been handing down decisions that are deeply damaging, as recognised and protested by academics and professional services members across the University.

RESISTING NARRATIVES AND DEVELOPING AGENCY

What could be done differently? In one word, leadership. In more words: choosing to apply imagination; choosing to participate in collaborative problem-solving; choosing to apply dignified, respectful understandings of consultation; choosing to role model that in a university, a place ostensibly about knowledge and claims to responsibility, there are alternative ways of working to respond to challenges to fulfil responsibilities to staff and students. These approaches are dismissed, however, with the discourse that it is naïve to challenge the stated financial situation portrayed by management. We can counteract that dismissal with our lived experience, in an institution where knowledge is supposed to be valued. Restructures could be avoided by seeking out and listening to the lived experiences of staff and students. Lacking that, the union can turn to colleagues and groups who have expertise and past experience in successfully resisting management presentations of finances, with benefits to everyone in preventing job losses and harmful restructures. Institutions would benefit from a place where dissent is welcomed as valuable input, rather than defended against by corporate and capitalistic organisational norms.

Discourses of inevitability by management are used to impose decisions (for example, restructures/closed departments or the Academic Size and Shape project) as if there are no alternatives, but the long historical record of struggles for the workplace on multiple levels, and expertise and experience of colleagues in a variety of HE settings, demonstrates that there are always alternatives, which can be implemented successfully.

The choice to neglect collaborative working with a variety of stakeholders, structures, and groups, choosing instead only to utilise capitalist discourse in decision-making, is damaging to both students and staff. There must be management accountability and a change in governance if there are truly to be lessons learned for the future, not only for the retention, but also for the nourishing and thriving of staff and students alike.

We might not see this accountability in the short-term, and our fight to protect our working conditions and students’ learning conditions still continues, whether management listens to us or not. We are not saying things will be easy - but when they aren’t, please remember that, contrary to what Senior Leadership wants you to believe, you are not isolated, you are not guilty, and no, you are not powerless. Remember that just because a message isn’t always being listened to, it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth delivering. Change will happen - and when this is detrimental to students and staff - resistance will happen too.