Your editorial on the university funding crisis (11 February) rang painfully true from inside a crumbling old campus building opposite a shiny but soulless new campus expansion. We have known this crisis was coming for years. While staff numbers have been cut in administration and teaching, and funding available to staff and postgraduate researchers reduced, class sizes have simultaneously exploded and campus experiences have been hollowed out, including removing fieldwork teaching and scrapping essays for undergraduates in my own humanities department.
The university has been whitewashing its tomb, with millions spent on new campus buildings while budgets are being cut to the bone. The story has been the same everywhere, and vice-chancellors and ministers who have overseen this crisis will face no consequences for what they’ve done to a sector that was once genuinely world-leading.
When factories close and hundreds of people are put out of work, the state rightly negotiates with companies to try and keep them open. What is the state doing when hundreds of jobs in almost every city and town are at risk as the disastrous marketisation of universities comes home to roost? Cardiff, Newcastle, Dundee are the first, but they will not be the last. Unless national and devolved governments reform the funding model at pace, the university crisis will soon spiral out of control.
This crisis won’t, of course, reach the government’s beloved Oxbridge supercluster, the alma mater of our prime minister, chancellor and education secretary. But when this crisis is over, will there be any other universities left to attend?
Name and address supplied
• It’s not just academics who have been affected. Universities are staffed by thousands of admin staff, caterers, cleaners, lab technicians and other facilities staff. We are all suffering the consequences of cowardly policy decisions by both Labour and Tory governments going back decades. No government has addressed the funding model for higher education in more than a decade. The cap on tuition fees was increased to £9,000 per year in 2012 and has barely increased since. As a consequence, the real-terms funding of higher education has collapsed.
I’m a lab technician in a regional university, and in the last 15 years I have watched my grade’s wage shrink in real terms by more than 16% against CPI and a staggering 33% against RPI. In the last year, more than one in six of my colleagues have lost their jobs through voluntary or forced redundancy. You want to know who’s really paying for your children’s education? It’s the people keeping the toilets clean and the labs running.
Richard Carey-Knight
Norwich
• Your editorial notes that a rise in the tuition fee cap will do little to address the overall problem. Indeed, other government actions are exacerbating it through the cut in funding for a range of foundation programmes and the increases in national insurance contributions. As a result, many universities will actually see their funding streams reducing still further.
The Department for Education estimates that the rise in tuition fees will increase income for the sector by about £325m, but then the reductions in foundation programme income are estimated to be of the order of £200m and the national insurance uplift will cost about £430m. More cuts will be on the way.
Prof Jon Scott
Cosby, Leicester
• I was made redundant in January from my lecturing position, having contributed to the university’s teaching and research in that area, and months after a promise of a secure contract. That same university is now proudly boosting its sustainability credentials, with photo ops on social media. This shiny veneer – embodied in the steel-and-glass monoliths that dominate modern campuses – obscures a precarious and exploited early-career vanguard.
Many redundancies, like my own, are hidden as they are fixed-term contracts that are brought to an early end: classed as redundancies, but HR has to be twisted into admitting it. They know that word carries a lot of weight. Several of us had to listen to a dean lie to the department that “there are no redundancies” while the seals on our redundancy letters had barely dried.
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