Three Months Into Cardiff University’s Death Spiral – An Anonymous Academic Reports
After Cardiff University announced unprecedented cuts to jobs and courses, threatening the very nature of higher education in Wales, an anonymous academic gave an insider account of what was really happening on campus. Now, three months down the line and after some of the cuts have been pushed back through union action, they speak out again.
By an anonymous academic. Cover image by Ka Long Tung
Three months ago, Cardiff University staff were presented plans for 10-50% cuts to their academic jobs across two thirds of the institution. At 8:30am the next day 1800 of us received risk of redundancy letters.
Since then, we’ve had three months of formal consultation over what the University Executive Board calls ‘proposals’ but what feel like threats. For some departments, months of negotiations have clawed back jobs one by one, mostly because so many people have quit on the voluntary redundancy scheme which has been pushed hard by HR. The Executive Board has called it ‘natural wastage’. Apparently so many people have quit in Nursing and Business that it’s uncertain whether their courses are even viable anymore. To prove they need to keep staff, some departments have promised whole new degree programmes in Kazakhstan from September 2025 and January 2026 that the remaining staff will need to drive themselves into the ground to deliver. The Executive Board’s ‘target’ number of 400 full-time job losses appears not to change even as other departments strike bargains to take themselves out of the running for those cuts, and those of us remaining ‘in scope’ for redundancy have felt ever more firmly in the crosshairs.
The Cardiff UCU’s huge mandate for strike action and the planned marking and assessment boycott has probably helped union negotiators pressure senior management into promising no compulsory job losses in 2025.
But we are still facing a proposed 50% cuts to our jobs in the proposed new School of Global Humanities (broadly all of english, communications, languages, translation, history, archaeology, religion, and music), and we still have no idea what we need to do to save ourselves.
We have been asked by the Executive Board for counter-proposals to their sweeping cuts – we are supposed to pitch them ideas to save ourselves (around our lectures, marking, and funding applications). But we are not allowed to know the budgets or financial targets we have to work towards. Instead we’ve been given a run of other moving targets to aim for – ‘academic sustainability’ (whatever that means), impossibly high student to staff ratios, and maybe most grimly, ‘attractiveness’ (to whom?). Maybe if I pretended to use AI, my teaching would be sexy enough for the senior administration to keep me.
Our attempts to propose viable alternatives have gone into a black box. A few weeks ago we were told that my department’s counter-proposal to increase our income and student numbers wasn’t practicable, but we have no idea why, as we had no further feedback. This has – intentionally? – turned colleagues against each other, with some departments submitting competing proposals to try to save their factions at the cost of others’ jobs. But the Executive Board emphasise that the restructure is an ‘iterative’ process, a good way of stringing us along for apparently years of potential uncertainty.
The systemic destruction is apparently urgent, although the current Executive Board has spent years spending money on ‘visions’ and ‘futures’. They are still happy to splash cash around to build new student admin ‘hubs’ this summer and design new corporate lifelong learning programmes for the well-paying business elite (but not for plebs like us). We’ve been firmly told, though, that no Cardiff University money is going into the bare tundra outside Astana in Kazakhstan where we will be building Cardiff University Kazakhstan – with the inauspicious acronym of CUK – paid for with undisclosed funding from mysterious financial backers.
But to criticise the Executive Board for this would be ‘personal attacks’ and risk me being threatened with disciplinary action, just as the Vice Chancellor threatened our staff union recently. Our Vice Chancellor has told staff several times how hard this process is on her. At least she has not had to put on a brave face while teaching worried students at the most intense academic time of the year. Senior academics who have worked at Cardiff for twenty odd years say it’s the worst environment they’ve ever experienced. Colleagues are getting sick; I’m now on the strongest painkillers safely possible for my disability and I still can’t sleep. I am scared for my colleagues who are pregnant, ill, or carers, who are under the most pressure from this ticking clock financially and personally – does the Executive Board not remember the real risk of staff suicide from Cardiff’s already overwhelming academic workloads?
But apparently this should all be ‘exciting’ to us, according to our Chief Transformation Officer. I am struggling to feel anything other than despair. My funded projects are now up in the air; what does it matter if I get the six-figure grant I’ve bid for, if I’m then sacked in July because my department isn’t ‘attractive’ enough? Even Cardiff academics who are ‘safe’ are saying that morale has been destroyed. We don’t just distrust our leadership now – staff are openly enraged. This institution runs on overtime and our love of the work.
By 2026 I’m not sure whether there will be a university community left for the Executive Board to run.
