Prof Helen Smith, David Rennie and Prof John Denham on the dire state of university funding
William Davies’ article on the plight of universities struck a chord (How the Tories pushed universities to the brink of disaster, 2 July). But he underplays how culpable the last decade of university managers have been, and how damaging and dated their response is now.
Universities and their staff face the same problems, derived from the same causes, but – as Davies points out – university management embraced tuition fees and the marketisation of higher education while staff protested against them. Now universities have at last recognised that the funding system is beyond repair. Faced with a sector meltdown that should see unions, staff and management collectively embracing a new hymn sheet, universities are falling back on the same old, same old: redundancy schemes accompanied by restructurings and efficiency drives that have a whiff of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
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