A repurposed UoE: what might management’s dream university look like?
Photo credit: By Tobias "ToMar" Maier - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50065987
This post looks into the logic behind the restructuring plans that are part of achieving the target of an £140m cut in the annual budget of UoE over 18 months. A review of documents accessible to staff, including many public documents, reveals that this is part of a long-term shift towards a downsized, standardised and (even) more commercial university.
The University’s management is adamant that the plan of brutal cuts it is embarking upon is not just to ‘address emerging financial pressures’, but to downsize, reshape, and change ways of working: in other words, it has a plan for the university of the future, one which will need between 1400 and 2000 staff less than today, and will allegedly bring in more secure revenue.
So, what model of university is on the horizon?
It’s instructive to first turn to where management sees financial salvation come from: as illustrated in the quotes below, non-core activities of the university (consultancies, space rental and student accommodation) are, we are told, saving the University’s finances: but, rather than just bolstering the institution for its key educational mission, might they do more than that - provide the blueprint for the University of the future? Some key quotations from recent published documents provide some clues:
Last year, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) … [were] driven almost entirely by income from our non-core activities rather than our core business of teaching and research. Without this additional income, the University would have reported a deficit. (from ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ of the Finance sharepoint website, accessible to all staff)
The University’s non-teaching and research income remains a key component of our funding model… Driving this is the improvements we have seen in our commercial operations with income from our accommodation and catering business [primarily student accommodation] increasing to £98 million in 2023/24 (2023: £93 million) and income from other services, like consultancy, increasing to £66 million in 2023/24 (2023: £59 million). (Annual Report and Accounts, 2024: 41)
In the aftermath of Covid, management somewhat counter-intuitively announced the ‘re-purposing’ of the large Estate programme that had been launched in 2017 (a £1.4 bn programme of capital projects – both physical and digital), towards ‘student facilities, equipment and accommodation’: in other words, towards the facilitation of ‘student experience’. This is exemplified in the following statement:
We have also used the time [of the pandemic] wisely to re-prioritise our capital plan that will see us invest an additional £300 million over the next five-year budgetary horizon on new major projects including new student facilities as well as a significant investment into student accommodation. The University still retains a large cash balance from debt raised in recent years that we will use towards funding our capital plan. (Annual Report and Accounts, 2021: 36)
As noted by Ashiru et al (2022), ‘in the UK, universities compete to attract students against domestic and global competitors … they promote their “unique” student experience, perhaps by promoting a “vibrant city centre location”, “a spacious campus setting”, or through “second to none sporting facilities”.’ This is what architects are calling ‘sticky campuses’ – where students are likely to ‘stick’, including digitally.
And ‘sticky campuses’ provide glue for capturing value!
The notion of student experience is not just about chill-out and campus enjoyment, it is also about shifting the use of campus spaces, as the view of the architect quoted above explains, towards ‘places that are more playful and encourage [students] to speak out, explore new ideas and experiment – learning from workplace environments like Google’. Fostering autonomous thinking is of course what we all wish education to be about, but here somehow these new sticky campus spaces and ‘learning hubs’ are supposed to create these possibilities spontaneously, by themselves.
A paramount exemplification of this vision of the future university is of course, as its name indicates, the lavish Edinburgh Futures Institute, whose budgeted capital expenditure of £140m (Annual Report and Accounts, 2021) had to be supplemented. This additional expenditure is noted in the Court minutes from April 2023, but the amount of deviation from the original planned cost has not been disclosed. As noted in a previous post, the total cost is said to be £250m. The expectation for such massive expenditure is that, as noted in the same Court minutes: ‘Significant returns to the University were expected even with increased levels of investment, given the high-value activity that EFI would facilitate.’
This should be put together with the ‘rationalisation of Edinburgh’s teaching portfolio’ planned by management under its first ‘workstream’ for the proposed ‘restructuring, which is, indeed, discussed in terms of student experience. Rather than securing more future revenue by attracting more students, however, this rationalisation is meant to steer the profitability of the capital projects (physical and digital) through the ideal allocation of space dreamed of by the Senior Leadership Team: large teaching spaces for ‘rationalised’ courses with +200 students run by ‘streamlined’ teams of teaching and support staff, alongside spaces for student experiments and experience – preferably totally ‘autonomously’, with as few staff as possible. Recent communication on the idea of having more ‘challenge courses’ confirms this mode of reasoning.
Staff into expert resilient consultants
The other non-core source of funding highlighted in the Annual Report and Accounts of 2024 was ‘income from other services, like consultancy’. Here again, we might think that this side-activity provides a small but helpful financial contribution that is then mutualised for the benefit of the core educational and research purposes of the university. However, again, in the eyes of management, this is much more than that: it is the direction that research as a whole should increasingly go, toward commodifiable ‘products’ that can be sold to paying customers.
Indeed it is significant that the second workstream of management’s downsizing plan is entitled ‘Research and innovation’ – rather than just research. ‘Innovation’, in managerial speak, tends to point to commercial expectations. And so, the stream includes consultancy activity, with the aim being to double its income – presumably over the 18 months of the plan. But this workstream also aims for research as such to ‘maximise returns and grow our commercial opportunities, thereby maintaining our status as a research powerhouse’. One of the ways to achieve this is the ‘new innovation career pathway, [that] further aims to encourage staff engagement in commercial activities, which could deliver future income streams for the University (as well as benefiting staff to develop key skills of relevance to innovation, impact and commercialisation)’.
Tellingly, however, the suggestion that it is non-core activities that will save the university financially is rather misleading. Whilst income from ‘non-core’ activities increased by 46% between 2018 and 2024, expenditure associated with such ‘non-core’ activities increased by 105% over the same period. In other words, whilst the share of “non-core” activities in the overall income of the University remained stable at 16% between 2018 and 2024, the share of expenditure associated with these activities rose from 8 to 12% of the total expenditure. So, whilst the contribution to income from these activities is significant, their operating model is not as virtuous as we led to assume.
Overall, what we see surfacing through these plans, is management’s view of students, of staff, and of themselves:
Management’s vision of students is one of calculative subjects as well as creatures of enjoyment – in short, consumers. They dream of them as wealthy kids, concerned with getting the degree title, the social networks and the cultural habitus that will yield them VIP careers and maximum earnings. They accordingly see the university as a degree-awarding, student experience and en-suite accommodation provider, competing with other such providers on the global higher education market. This is quite a contrast from the majority of the students we interact with, who are inquisitive, keen to develop critical thinking, asking for more interaction with academic staff, politically active and challenging the university on its endless dithering on divestment from companies supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza; and on the other hand disciplined by management, worried and stressed, especially about finance and accommodation, and often having to work to support their studies in an increasingly expensive city.
Management’s vision of us staff is clear in all of their communications: staff are a cost. Not by chance is there a ‘workstream’ on staff, independently of those on teaching and learning, and research and innovation – one almost wonders whether there need to be staff in an education and research institution at all. The workstream blurb actually starts with a lament about growing staff costs. In fact, as we have already documented, the share of staff costs in the overall expenditure of the University has actually been decreasing steadily since 2017, from 57% to 54%, and is in any case much lower than the 60% share, which is the recommended limit in the university’s own ‘Risk management policy’. By contrast the share of the cost of premises – maintenance and amortisation, + interests on the debt contracted for the capital programme – has grown from 12% to 15% of total expenditure. Management want to see staff shrink to only include ‘resilient expert teams’, presumably ‘resilient’ because they will have survived the cuts and restructuring, and not been in one of the 1800 jobs disposed with, and ‘expert’ so that they can deliver ‘innovation’.
The ‘staff workstream’ puts forward an ominous ‘example’ of how a ‘smaller staff base’ might be achieved: through cuts to posts in professional services, into which it has taken a ‘deep dive’. However, it is these very professional services staff who deliver the new ‘Student Support model’, which was one of management’s ‘large strategic programmes’ for their Strategy 2030 not long ago, and supposed to improve ‘student experience’ (see for example, Annual Report and Accounts, 2024: 16). It is grimly ironic that management now seem to be protesting that the pressure from ‘staff costs’ on future surpluses may prevent them from carrying out such ‘strategic projects’ in the future. Perhaps that would be best, given that the fortunes of such strategic projects always have fateful consequences for staff, never for their instigators.
Finally, management’s view of themselves is likely to be what a Deloitte report hailed as the ‘strong and visionary leadership’ required to deliver an ‘institutional culture that puts the student at the centre’ and new financial incentives ‘to unlock the entrepreneurial spirit of individual schools and faculty’ (quoted in Shore 2024: 7). As such they think they are in the know, and will deliver change whatever it takes, against us staff, recast as conservative forces.
Such ‘visionary leaders’ nevertheless seem to be taken aback by the lower growth of international student numbers. The finance director even dared to call this an ‘unexpected challenge’ (Annual Report and Accounts, 2024: 38), when programme directors have been questioning the reckless race for international students for years. They also seem to fault staff for the growth in staff numbers, whereas the programmes for recruiting international academic ‘talent’ and professional support staff came from the top.
Management also respond to their own disastrous past strategic projects (the maximum exponent of which is the People & Money fiasco) by proposing more. The latest wheeze has involved creating a completely new structure to oversee ‘strategic change projects’, the so-called 'University Initiatives portfolio board', which gives management even more unaccountable power. This group was set up following the recommendations by the PA Consulting group in charge of the external review of the implementation of People & Money for 'managing future change' projects, allegedly as a remedy for the ‘lack of trust’ between staff and management pointed out in the report. It hasn’t started well; staff have little faith that it will result in anything but more disruption, pain, and misery in our working lives.
The bottom line…
In short, from reading management’s own statements over a number of years, we can see that the current plan of cuts is not really about savings for a non-existent deficit. It is clearly a staff reduction plan as management's view of the future university is one where returns are maximised at every point: through standardisation and thus savings on teaching and admin staff; and through the generation of commercial revenue by 'expert' staff (those resilient enough to survive the cuts).
They seem blissfully unaware (or cynically oblivious) of the fact that staff are the University, and that these cuts will be disastrous for the future of the institution.
We will not stand for this! Join us and fight back!
Joint Unions Finance Working Group
References
Ashiru, F., Whitfield, I., & Warwick, P. (2022). Business school capital and study choices in undergraduate education: A student-centred approach. The International Journal of Management Education, 20(2), 100633.
Shore, C. (2024). Management consultants and university futures: Academic capitalism and the capture of UK public higher education. Public Money & Management, 1-10.
