Cardiff University’s decision to implement 400 academic job cuts across multiple departments continues to reverberate not only in the university sector but more widely across the Welsh economy.
Having read the university’s consultation document several times, I fully understand its need to address financial challenges resulting from reduced international student numbers and rising operational costs, a situation that most universities in the º£½ÇÊÓƵ are also currently dealing with.
However, applying Bananarama’s first principle of management - it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it - the process outlined in the document raises significant concerns about whether Cardiff University has followed good business practice in its decision to close or scale back departments.
In most successful organisations, major structural changes, particularly those involving redundancies, are accompanied by a transparent, consultative process that engages staff and stakeholders to explore alternative solutions. In this case, the university appears to have adopted a top-down approach, implementing decisions without fully leveraging the insights, ideas, and potential innovations that individual departments could have offered.
Given many of those staff are amongst the best in their disciplines, you wonder why senior management did not just ask them for their views prior to threatening their careers?
Indeed, the irony is not lost on many that the business school, which sells itself on providing world class management education, was not involved in this exercise and will be losing 40 academic posts. Clearly, it’s okay to teach strategy and business operations to international students at £33,200 each but not to utilise that expertise closer to home to solve the challenges facing the university.
I am sure if they had bothered to ask some of the leading academics at the business school, they would have been informed that good business practice typically encourages a collaborative process, where those closest to the challenges - in this case, academic staff and heads of schools - are given the opportunity to develop adaptive strategies in response to external pressures such as changing student demographics or financial constraints.
In the business world, restructuring processes often involve scenario planning and performance-based targets before final decisions are made. In the case of Cardiff University, it would have been good practice that departments had been given time to propose and implement growth strategies.
Instead, senior management has moved directly to a closure-first strategy, potentially missing opportunities to create innovative revenue streams through industry partnerships, transnational education, and modular short courses tailored to new market demands.
More relevantly, as any good organisational scientist would confirm, now that they have largely destroyed any goodwill amongst the staff at the institution, it is going to be difficult to get those academics left to embrace any change agenda in a constructive way.
Ultimately, while financial prudence is essential in any organisation, the lack of department-level input and the absence of a structured opportunity for creative problem-solving suggest that the process did not align with best practices in organisational change management.
A more decentralised, consultative approach - giving departments time and resources to develop tailored responses to external challenges - could have provided more sustainable, less disruptive solutions.
This decision also raises serious concerns about the university’s long-term strategy and whether it has fully explored the potential opportunities available to these departments before opting for closure or significant scaling back.
For example, given its desire to be more internationally competitive, the decision to cut up to 30 jobs in computer science and 15 jobs in mathematics appears fundamentally flawed, especially when the demand for skills in these areas is higher than ever.
The World Economic Forum estimates that 75% of jobs globally will require advanced digital skills by 2030, with AI specialists, data scientists, and cybersecurity experts topping the list.
A recent report from PWC also showed that the growth in AI jobs was nearly four times that for other roles and that employers were prepared to pay a 14% wage premium for workers with AI skills. By cutting staff in disciplines that feed directly into these sectors, Cardiff University risks sidelining itself from this wave of digital innovation.
The decision to downsize also neglects the significant opportunities for growth through research, innovation, and industry collaboration. The º£½ÇÊÓƵ’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport projects that the country will need one million additional tech professionals by 2030 suggesting that they should be growing these areas and not reducing the staff that can teach these workers of the future.
Only in January, the º£½ÇÊÓƵ announced a new £14bn strategy with the creation of AI growth zones designed to attract businesses and foster innovation at its heart and it would be expected that one of these could come to Wales.
However, how serious would any proposal be in an environment where our leading university is signalling that neither computer science nor mathematics are important?
There also seems to be a lack of understanding about the multidisciplinary opportunities available. In medicine, AI is driving innovations in diagnostic imaging and predictive analytics and in business, data science is transforming marketing, finance, and operations. In engineering, robotics and machine learning are revolutionising manufacturing processes. By reducing the capacity in computing and mathematics, the university risks weakening its broader academic opportunities.
Yes, the challenges Cardiff University faces are real, and its leadership is right to seek ways to restore financial stability. But rather than taking a top-down approach to cutting courses, departments should have been given the opportunity to come up with alternative strategies themselves and that the university should have adjusted its finances to allow for this to happen.
It’s not too late to explore these alternative scenarios and to apply a proper strategic approach to dealing with financial issues rather than a knee-jerk reaction to cut jobs that not only impacts on the institution but on the future potential of the Welsh economy.
