A group of Cardiff University academics have put forward an alternative plan to address the university’s £31m-plus deficit in the face of sweeping cuts proposed by management.
In January, the university announced that it proposed shedding 400 academic jobs – since scaled down to 355 – and shut degree courses and academic schools including nursing, modern languages, music, ancient history, religion and theology.
The savings are subject to an ongoing 90-day consultation with 1,400 staff still under the threat of their jobs being at risk. Now a group of academics has written an alternative proposal to get the institution back on track.
The proposal, edited by Wales’ former education minister and now Cardiff business school professor Leighton Andrews, is due to be published by the group today.
Their alternative plan is to extend the savings timetable by two years to the 2027-28 academic year and to reduce deficits to record a surplus by 2028-29. As well as a longer timescale to balance the books, they say the university should also draw on some of its legally available reserves – which they estimate is £285m.
Under this plan, academic schools would be handed the reins for making the cuts over a longer period and via natural wastage, voluntary redundancy and a freeze on recruitment and promotions. The suggestion is that individual departments can take responsibility for delivering “realistic contribution levels and staff/student ratios” in this way.
The university should also instigate discussions with the Welsh Government to review higher education finance and student support, the plan adds. Cardiff Bay should be encouraged to continue to argue to the Ƶ Government for lifting visa restrictions on international students, introduced last year and which bar most from bringing dependents with them.
Cardiff, along with many other universities across the Ƶ, has been hit by a triple whammy of rising bills, largely static home tuition fees and a fall in the number of higher-paying international students.
In the introduction to their alternative the academics, who want to remain anonymous, say: “This is a submission on behalf of an informal group of academic staff, drawing on information identified by colleagues across the university. It is a genuine attempt to reset the university on a course which can carry its staff with it. Its principles are relatively simple. It is not a soft option and it includes tough messages.”
It goes on: “We suggest that the university changes its transformation timescale from one concluding at the end of the 2025-26 academic year to one concluding at the end of the 2027-28 academic year. This is a two-year extension.
“The university would progressively reduce its deficits in the meantime and record a surplus in 2028-29. The revised transformation timescale would be based on a clearly costed programme of change with definite time-scales not vague ‘Horizons’, using available reserves within the university’s ‘liquid cash and investments’ to manage this process.
The revised transformation would be implemented through:
- Returning responsibility for achieving realistic contribution levels and staff-student ratios to schools, to be achieved on a staged basis within the extended Transformation Timescale. Schools should achieve this through measures including voluntary severance/ voluntary redundancy; natural attrition; a recruitment freeze until targets are achieved; and a promotion freeze for an appropriate period.
- Taking staff in affected schools out of scope for redundancy, removing the threat of compulsory redundancies.
- Deferring inessential infrastructure investments if necessary to free up further cash reserves for the transformation process in the short term to the end of 2027-28.
- Drawing down a tightly controlled and minimised portion of the university’s ‘liquid cash and investments’ to offset the deficits that will be incurred. It should be noted, however, that these deficits will reduce rapidly in successive years given the savings measures outlined above.
- Preparing and using fully detailed financial models to enable schools and university management to test scenarios and track progress towards financial objectives.
- Completing the work-streams in the transformation roadmap before implementing further changes, unlike the present chaotic and disorderly university approach.”
The document says it appears that the university has a larger financial reserve than almost all the other Russell Group universities. The academics explain that they take reserves as meaning the ‘liquid cash and investments’ set out as totalling £426m in the most recent university annual report, published at the end of January.
“This total is divided into named types of holding. We understand that of these holdings (1) the £53m in ‘endowments’ cannot be accessed by the university, and (2) the £7m in ‘approved capital projects’, £19m in ‘capital commitments’, and the £62m in ‘bond repayment’ may be at least partially accessible but that it would not be prudent to do so.
“This leaves £41m in ‘freely available to spend’, £144m in ‘bond funds’ and £100m in ‘long-term reserves’. These three sums add up to £285m. There do not appear to be any legal reasons preventing the university from accessing these funds.
“We are suggesting drawing down only part of this – a tightly controlled and minimised portion of the university’s ‘liquid cash and investments’ – as necessary to offset the deficits that will be incurred.
“At the same time, we suggest that the university council requires its senior leaders, senior academic management and professional services management staff to undertake appropriate management and leadership training, and that the university commences urgent discussions with the Welsh Government to demonstrate how Cardiff University will play its full part in the Welsh higher-education landscape.”
Publishing Mr Andrews said: “It is not a soft option and it includes tough messages. Our alternative is credible, strategic and incremental and more sustainable than the big-bang-shock approach which the university launched on January 28.”
