Derby University is sleepwalking into a disaster of its own making.

No, I’m not being dramatic at all. Years of short-term thinking and reactionary decision-making have left the university in a perilous state, and the chickens are now coming home to roost. The university has announced plans to cut jobs, including several middle-management and senior academic positions, leading to criticism from students and staff alike. Officially, these are just projections. We all know what that means.

Derby University in chaos

I was actually born in Derby – my parents owned ‘Seymours’ back in the day. Of course, I used to die quietly behind the bar at a popular club several nights a week, and my knees are still fucked from carrying three crates at a time up two flights of stairs every Thursday for half-time pay… the joys of hospitality.

I met a girl, and I had time to kill for a few years, and I thought I’d spend the time pretending that I wanted to get a degree – I did not do a good impression, but I was blessed to meet some wonderful people, and some of them I stayed in touch with. You get little snippets sometimes… there’s been a clusterfuck going on at the university, you say?

“Well, yeah, but the BBC have already covered this”, I was thinking. No biggie, I can wait for ballot action and check it out, but no – turns out they barely scratched the surface. I decided to do some digging, and it wasn’t long until I found myself sitting in a bar next to the station with a pint of stout, across from Francesco Belcastro, University and College Union (UCU) Chair at the university. I start this interview as I do with all the others:

Treat me like I’m five, tell me what’s going on and how we got here.

Francesco gets right into it:

So, almost eight or nine months ago, the university announced its first redundancy plan, followed by two smaller redundancy plans that have already taken place. Forty colleagues lost their jobs, professional services, leadership, and research positions. About a month ago, the university announced this massive redundancy plan. It affects more than 550 people, including 260 jobs. The largest pool is professional services, which Unison collectively represents, though we also represent some of them individually… then the academics… and some leadership roles are going too. Still, it’s mid-level leadership roles – no one senior.

Unsurprising

I’m not surprised, and of course Derby University will expect the remaining staff to increase productivity to fill the gaps that will now be left?

Because they are redundant, they cannot hire someone else to do the job, although in some areas they are actually planning to hire more junior people, which we are contesting. I can give you an example in nursing.

For those of you not in the loop, Derby University has a fantastic nursing department – I should know, my aunt was employed by the university for years after a career working in the NHS in nursing. It’s shocking to hear that they are planning to hollow out such a vital draw for students considering coming to Derby.

Francesco says:

The nursing department at Derby is very successful; they make a lot of money, and they are an excellent program. So if they manage to sink the nursing program, there’s a massive risk, since it’s accredited by the RCN. What they are trying to do with nursing is basically suck out the most senior people and replace them with junior colleagues because they would cost less. They have to sell it as if they are in different roles.

This sounds highly dubious and incredibly short-sighted. As Francesco says, these are the nurses being trained to work in the NHS – this is really serious, and it impacts all of us massively. We expect the highest standards from people working in the NHS, but how can we expect that if one of the most prominent universities for nursing starts cutting out the experience which has made it so successful?

“And all of Derbyshire relies on this”, Francesco continues:

There are many people who come to Derby who wouldn’t be able to go to university if not for Derby. Nursing attracts a lot of mature students and people with kids. There are massive implications. By wanting to save a few thousand pounds, they are risking losing accreditation, which will cost the university money. There are many people who only go to university because they received an offer from Derby.

Dampening social mobility at Derby University

This is about social mobility, Francesco says urgently:

For example, they want to close early childhood studies; these are all people who won’t go to university if they don’t get on this course. You know, mature students with kids at home, they won’t go to Nottingham, they won’t go to Leicester, if you’ve got a kid at home, they either do it here or they don’t go at all. They are denying access to education because of their damned bonuses and their stupid buildings… the ridiculous thing is, (and you know, I don’t believe a lot of the stuff they say anyway), but in their own language this should be the place of opportunity… but they are essentially going against their own narrative by cutting these things.

Well, in this writer’s humble opinion, their narrative is bullshit.

It’s wild. I had no idea things were actually this bad – it’s got to the point where if you have to ask if it’s satire, you know it’s real. You have to wonder how Derby University has got into the situation where it’s chasing its own tail trying to balance the books, and the fact that it’s literally being done with so little regard for the long-term financial and educational viability of what is clearly an important part of a small and growing city.

Lifeblood

Derby students are the lifeblood of the city. Just spend some time out on a weekend, and it’s astonishing how many of them there are. Out of around 270,000 residents, over 34,000 are students – and it’s not just about the reality that these decisions will impact directly over 10% of the population of the city – like Francesco says this is going to impact many more people much more widely through the knockoff effects, not only to the wider area with implications directly stemming from the cutting back of core programs with genuine value to society.

If there are fewer students coming to the university, there is less money going into the local economy.

The change in Derby has been stark over the last 15 years – the new market hall is beautiful – but you can’t avoid the fact that there’s still a lot of closed-up shops, boarded-up windows and social spaces which don’t exist anymore.

While I’m having a coffee on Sadlergate I get chatting to the staff there – the bartender is going to vote Reform, the rest of the politicians don’t care about working-class people like him. It’s a common tale you hear all over the place, but that’s what happens when people look around them and see decline – and we all stand and point our fingers at the government but decisions like these at the university are a massive part of the problem.

“It’s entirely a matter of cash. They spent money on ridiculous stuff. They spent £75m on the Cavendish building, the new business school, for example.”

The above headline is not news to me. I remember when I was a student in Derby, at the university, there was a huge push, and millions going into developing infrastructure aimed at attracting students for sports sciences.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; everyone knows that higher education is now a business; it’s not a service anymore. However, while this was going on, there was just one copy of the textbook for first-year geology students available in the library. A book written by the professor giving the class, who put it on the required reading list. My classmates and I were in the first cohort of students paying £9k fees and it was a regular topic of conversation – we would sit in lectures and work out how much we were paying an hour for the experience, because frankly it felt like that’s all we actually got from the university.

Frankly, it sucked walking past the building work being done on the grounds every morning for a shiny new sports building, knowing that it was my fees funding it, when I couldn’t even check a book out at the library. It felt like a con. I was lucky – I had some amazing lecturers, especially when I switched to social sciences in year two. It helped bridge that gap between accessibility and attainment – what happens to those students now if they haven’t got that passionate experienced member of staff, helping them find their own passion amongst a sea of required reading?

I mention my experience and perspective to Francesco – he seems to agree with me:

They are all about appearances… I’ll give you another example – Derby had a very successful joint honours program, four years ago, they decided to close it. They lost hundreds of students… last year they decided to reopen it, in the meantime they have lost all the students that were on the program… they realised it was a disaster, we told them it would be… they have just mismanaged it, because three years ago the vice chancellor was saying were doing much better than our competitors, we are in a solid financial position. They have completely got the numbers of the students they were going to recruit wrong – we have minutes of meetings from three years ago when we were saying, “Are you sure you can get this number of students?”

It’s not just a wider crisis

But the university claims that this is just about a wider crisis in higher education across the board. We all hear about it on the news on a regular basis – institutions are struggling to find the money they need to remain viable after drop-offs in international student numbers. Between 2023 and 2024, there was a 31% drop-off in student visas being granted. Universities UK has said that the number of students has been impacted by government policies around migration, which have “created significant uncertainty around the UK’s post-study work offer”.

Who knew – chasing Reform to the right has had unintended consequences.

Insert shocked Pikachu emoji.

But it’s not like this is just because of a drop in international students -“they are behind with both domestic and international”, says Francesco:

This is not unique to Derby.

Nottingham is on strike, Leicester is on strike… There are wider issues with education, but this could be entirely predicted. Essentially, they have spent money on the assumption that they would get a certain number of students because someone told them they would, without a realistic plan for how to get there, and now they are acting surprised they couldn’t, when anyone could have told them this would happen. What is unique to Derby is how they has wasted so much money for a relatively small university; it was doing okay financially. It’s like management went crazy and started throwing money out of the window… when we had the announcement, I laughed about how detached they are from reality.

We get onto one of the substantive issues – recently Derby University sent out redundancy notices, with the information showing in the clear envelope window – an obvious and serious breach of GDPR for which the university has been reported to the ICO. One staff member had the letter sent to a neighbour by accident, who then offered her condolences when redelivering it – one staff member was left embarrassed when a tradesperson saw their notice.

“That’s going to cost Derby University, by the way, they are possibly going to get fined for that…”

Francesco said, “We don’t know the extent of this yet, how many people are going to report it, but they could get a big fine. The way this has been announced is absolutely terrible”. And it’s not just the GDPR breach – “some people asked why don’t we start making sacrifices by taking cuts from senior management?” He continues, obviously annoyed:

They were told that last year, the senior management only received a minimum increase to their salaries.

Again, this isn’t new – there have been stories about the pay levels of senior management at the university for years. Between 15/16 and 16/17, Derby University increased its rate of pay for vice-chancellor Professor Kathryn Mitchell by 10% to £232,000. In 2021, the remuneration committee refused to accept her offer to take a cut to her base salary, which had by then risen to just over £244,000. The total remuneration now is far higher, as Francesco tells me:

3% of the salary – the vice chancellor makes nearly £330,000 with benefits, 3% increase of that… you know we now have a new deputy vice chancellor, which was a newly created job!

It’s obscene.

“The way it works is that the people who are responsible for the biggest mistakes just move on, so they can’t be blamed”, Francesco tells me:

The dean who was responsible for the new business school left under mysterious circumstances, and now, in meetings, he is the one blamed for that. They have built themselves a system with zero responsibility.

Surely there has to be a way around this?

We have suggested alternatives – the university didn’t even look at it – now Unison has tabled a serious proposal which we would back completely – voluntary redundancies and salary control measures, and the university is just not interested in that. I think it’s panic-driven. They are afraid they have borrowed money, and the money isn’t coming in.

Does he think this is an ideological agenda?

I don’t know whether there’s an ideological component – there is certainly a disregard for staff. There is a complete separation between senior management and members of staff. [There used to be] a sense that your head of schools, heads of disciplines, people in between had some say in what happens, but now they stand around like soldiers, just to give the bad news to people.

“It’s all so centralised. It’s like North Korea. These people don’t listen to anyone, there is just a circle of people that just do their own thing”.

When I got on the train this morning, I had no idea I would be listening to a senior member of a union describing the university in this way – it’s shocking – but I shouldn’t be surprised. Apparently, there is a great deal of concern and confusion about the proposed system for redundancies, and so far, I haven’t heard any of the media discuss this regarding the university. I ask Francesco if he can shine some light on this:

There are two different things – in terms of redundancies, there are people in pools like mine”. That’s right – they want to get rid of not only Francesco’s role but his entire degree program:

In some pools, there will be 17 people in the pool, and three people need to go. Everyone in the pools will be offered voluntary severance… then there is a separate scheme applied to everyone else, so there are two parallel schemes, one for the people in the pools and one for people who are not… the generic one is completely separate. This one is kind of a bonus.

So if staff from the rest of the university decide to take their voluntary severance, this won’t be offset against the cuts that are being planned with redundancies in the pool system – the university are still going to push for the total redundancies currently being “proposed”, regardless of how many decide to take voluntary redundancy who aren’t in the pools for redundancy. And some people think the university isn’t playing fair – I’ve been told that these schemes have been floated at the same time, which has led to confusion – no one really knows what is going on. And it’s not just the confusion – the university seems to be putting people in an impossible decision.

The thing that [the UCU] is really concerned about for this is the time frame – they want to close this process on the 24th November, and I had my first meeting today. There are people who will have their first meeting on 12th November. So that’s 12 days to decide, to know how much they will get from voluntary severance. And this is not casual, they are doing it to bully people out… it doesn’t affect me, I know I’m not going, and I’ve done a million of these meetings in support of colleagues… You have to imagine the pressure on someone who goes in there with the head of school, here’s one number, here’s another, you have 10 days to decide.

Derby University “have destroyed the community”.

That’s fucked. Francesco agrees, although he does approve of my language. The union has been pushing the university to give people more time, but so far they aren’t listening – hey, you can’t blame them, I guess – working-class people’s problems aren’t their problem. It’s not their mortgage – it’s not their children that need to be fed. I hope you can taste the sarcasm…

And it’s all so counterproductive – morale is on the floor. I’ve heard the stories. Everyone has. People are handing in their notices. Many people are deeply concerned about the opaque manner in which this is being handled, and they no longer want to stay and work for an institution treating its staff with such contempt.

I ask Francesco about this:

They have destroyed the community. If you look through the university now, it’s a sad place – they have made it into a sad place. But I have to say one thing: the students have been fantastic. There’s been an absolute revolt. Campus is full of leaflets, security takes them down, and they are back up again the next day. I don’t know how they are doing that. I was there on Friday, and there was nothing. I walked in at 9 am… I don’t know how the students are doing it… Derby students have never been the most political, so it means that they have really pissed them off… they have actually sent head of schools into some of the courses where there’s been the most protests – they have had head of schools going in to pressure them… I have had to step in last week because one of the students who has been more vocal, the associate dean invited them to have a one on one… and warned them not to bring anyone in… that’s how scared they are – they aren’t scared of the staff, they are scared of the students… they thought they would just walk it and the students are like hell no.

The university clearly hasn’t handled this well. After initially refusing to engage with the media at all for more than a week, the Deputy Vice Chancellor was wheeled out to offer a statement:

“It’s this perfect storm of issues which are hitting the University of Derby as they are hitting many other universities, which we have had to address, and which we have addressed to date,” Keith McLay said.

“Unfortunately, we now need to come forward with these proposals to work with our staff community to see where we can take costs out to ensure a sustainable future for the university”.

Why is it that when these private institutions fail so badly due to their own mismanagement of the situation, it is local communities that bear the brunt?

Derby University staff have not caused this problem – the students have been funding the university – the city hosts tens of thousands of students every year – the city relies on these people coming here, integrating, working and reinvesting that money back into the city through their rent and fees.

When I used to work behind bars in Derby, everyone I worked with was either a student or an ex-student. So many of those bars and clubs, so many of the restaurants and other service industries that pay wages, pay taxes and contribute to life in a bustling midland centre of growth rely on these young people coming to the city every year.

What is the alternative? What happens if the university closes? These short-term knee-jerk decisions are being made without the buy-in of the student population, and they have every right to be enraged about it.

Meanwhile, Derby University told the Canary:

Like many institutions across the sector, we are facing financial pressures due to frozen funding levels and rising operational costs.

The University of Derby has announced proposals which could see 265 colleagues made redundant. Throughout this process, we have fully engaged with the unions and other representatives, and we remain committed to continuing open and constructive dialogue.

The University has a responsibility to all its staff and students to ensure its long-term sustainability. We are not putting people at risk of redundancy because they cost more; we are reviewing areas where we may be over-resourced to ensure our staffing model is aligned with our income.

The consultation period with staff is underway – this began on 29 October and will run until at least 12 December, ensuring everyone is part of a fair and transparent process.

Our students are at the heart of all we do as a university, and we have communicated regularly and openly with them to ensure they are aware of what is happening and have access to the support they need. We are a TEF-Gold institution, and we are committed to maintaining our excellence in the student experience.

No member of the senior executive team, including the vice-chancellor, has received a pay rise this year.

It also specifically stated that:

In the letters sent to the affected staff, it appears that, for some, the subject line was visible through the envelope window. We appreciate how concerning this was for those staff and apologised to them for any distress caused. As soon as the issue was identified, we began a review of the mailing process and reported the situation to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Megan Biddulph is a PhD student and associate lecturer at the university – she’s been kind enough to take some of her valuable time to speak to me too – I ask her about Francesco’s comments regarding the student body:

The students have been amazing – vocal and passionate. I’ve got a slightly different perspective, being a PhD student and having already completed my BSC and Master’s at Derby… I’ve seen and experienced how incredible a university Derby is.

On paper in the league tables… our lecturers, the wellbeing team, the PGR team, library staff, the cleaners – even senior leadership – I can hand on heart say everyone, even if it’s not so evident present, is wonderful. There’s no hierarchy that you’d see in the more ‘prestigious’ universities. Derby is a fantastic institution.

She is bang on – Derby is a very down-to-earth, grounded university experience from my memory:

Then this. Three redundancy rounds in less than a year – it’s tragic. I can’t speak verbatim on everyone and how they feel, but I’ve spoken to a lot of students; students are afraid, they’re angry, they’re sad, some of them don’t even know how bad it is.

“The university’s communication with students throughout these proposed redundancies has been atrocious!”

The university says that it can guarantee the student experience and academic standard that it currently upholds – but Megan is rightfully sceptical:

At best, this is naivety of ignorance, at worst, an outright lie. How can we be unaffected? The executives seem to be gutting the university at all levels – placating us with lines about how it’s only 6% of lecturing posts affected… but these are people.

That’s the thing, when the rubber hits the road, it’s always people, normal working-class people with hooves to put over their heads who suffer. “And what about professional services? What about every department that seemingly keeps the university running?” she continues:

We want to be spoken to forthrightly… we want to be treated like adults; we are students, but that doesn’t mean we are naive… how have we been operating for a number of years with more than two hundred surplus roles? That is financial mismanagement!

Again, you can’t really argue with that opinion.

And the way this has fallen is massively impacting senior students:

Post grads are being disproportionately affected. We have already lost professors and senior leadership – we are specialists with specialist supervisors; what happens when they go? Are we to be refunded? Or left to just quit?

Megan is quick to remind me, though, that again, this isn’t just about people in academia. Many of the cuts will be coming from services that are all integral to the experience at the university.

“Library services, cleaners, printers?! Our experience is also because of them!”

The students haven’t taken this lying down – they have been on social media, they have been on the radio, they have been making flyers and are creating a noticeboard to put up at the university where students can post “messages of solidarity” to the staff being impacted. Megan was kind enough to send me some pictures from a demonstration last weekend at the university’s open day. “There’s just constant ideas”, she says, “how can we be heard and make change?”

From the sounds of it, they are doing quite a job of it.

The UCU is taking strike action. We will be seeing lines of staff on a picket line from 2 December, mirroring the situation currently playing out in other cities in the Midlands. We will be there too, standing with our comrades in their struggle on this latest fertile ground for the class war to be fought over. Solidarity friends. I’ll see you there.

Featured image via the Canary

By Barold

This post was originally published on Canary.