University crisis – Dundee UCU fights back

UCU members at Dundee University have just completed three weeks of strike action in response to a financial crisis and the threat of massive redundancies. rs21 spoke to Melissa D’Ascenzio, a UCU member at the university.

The crisis affecting many British universities shares many characteristics with that at Dundee – neo-liberal management paying themselves large salaries and speculating in infrastructure projects in the expectation that fees from foreign students will continue to grow and generate the cash required. Scottish universities don’t charge fees to Scottish students but receive income from the Scottish Government through the Scottish Funding Council, but the events in Dundee will look familiar to those elsewhere. 

 Below, Melissa explains how strike action and a rapid response to the revelation that the university was making large losses every month has started to turn the tide and meant that the university has been forced to withdraw its plan for 632 compulsory redundancies. After a meeting at the Scottish Parliament last week, the Scottish Funding Council announced an emergency bail out of £22 million on 20 March.

“You can see the crisis that is unfolding within the context of what is happening in higher education across the country. But there are very specific factors that are unique to Dundee that make this crisis much, much worse in scale. The principal at the time, before he resigned in November 2024, sent a message to all staff saying that they had just discovered a £30 million deficit.There had been no indication that the university finances were in difficulty or that we had a deficit, a large deficit.  

On 19 March at the Education, Children, and Young People Committee at the Scottish Parliament the interim Director of Finance was interrogated by members of the parliament. What she said is that on her first day on the job she realised that there was something wrong with the cash flow. She found this £30 million deficit on her first day. She declared a critical incident and everybody was notified.

One day, the Principal resigned…

And then the Principal resigned.  One day he was here, the next day he was gone. The Chair of Court sent out a message to all staff without a thank you note, nothing really suspicious, just saying he’s resigned. So, we knew that the situation was serious.

The interim Principal who took his place has since been designing a recovery plan without involving unions, staff or students. Even school managers and deans have said that they have not had any significant input into this recovery plan. The interim Principal hired an external consultancy firm, PWC, and they’ve been running the accounts and telling him what to do.

A couple of weeks ago, management came out of the blue and told us that they were going to get rid of 632 FTEs (full-time equivalents). What is interesting, and shows the lack of compassion in the university leadership, is that when the Principal was questioned in front of the Education, Children, and Young People Committee on 19 March, he didn’t know how many individuals are behind those 632 FTEs.  That’s on top of roughly 237 FTEs in unfilled vacancies partially caused by the hiring freeze that has been in place since last November. So, we are looking at losing over 800 FTEs, almost a third of the university staff. The University of Dundee has roughly 3000 employees and not all of them are in scope because some of them are grant funded. The scale is huge. They said in the recovery plan that they want to cut 20 per cent of academic provision.

We’ve done a lot of lobbying from UCU. We’ve been on strike for three weeks.

The university leadership have been gaslighting staff for months, saying that UCU was jumping the gun and asking why we were even balloting.

We started balloting in January because we had asked them to remove compulsory redundancies from the table and to have a conversation around a decent voluntary severance scheme or alternative ways of saving money that did not necessarily involve staff cuts.  But they didn’t even follow their own redundancy avoidance policy.  They just jumped to compulsory redundancy. To show how inhumane this whole thing is – when the principal was questioned on 19 March, he admitted that the plan was just a financial plan, that he had not considered the wider impact of the plan, the human perspective, the impact on the city.  He had not considered any of that. It was just a book balancing exercise.

From the start as UCU, we did not trust them when they were dragging their feet, drip feeding information, filibustering at meetings. We challenged the narrative because they were trying to use the drop in international student numbers as the reason why we had this very large deficit.

Financial mismanagement

It is now clear that there has been financial mismanagement at the university. The interim Principal admitted to that at the Scottish Parliament. On multiple occasions, management was asked whether they recognised that incompetence was at the core of this debacle. They were trying to blame his crisis on the funding model first, but the model in Scotland is different to the rest of Britain. The MSPs were having none of that. 

Then they blamed it on international student fees, which is partly true. The income from international students has dropped. But there have been decisions made in the recruitment strategy that are questionable. In particular, the choice to over-recruit students from Nigeria when the country’s economy wasn’t particularly stable. When the Nara crashed the students did not come anymore. 

Despite this unfortunate event, the strategy to over-recruit international students was never going to be sustainable. At peak years of international student recruitment, students were living in Aberdeen because they couldn’t find a flat to live in Dundee and staff were asked to host students in their homes. 

But management was still behaving as if this was going to be the new norm, this was the number of students we were going to get in and this was the amount of money that we were going to make from student fees every year.

At that point, what we think happened is that they started spending on a lot of capital projects. Effectively this created the large structural deficit that is at the core of this crisis, as the university chose to raise finance for capital expenditure from current expenditure rather than incurring debt. This created severe funding squeezes on education, research, and administration. An investigation is being set up by the Scottish Funding Council into what happened and how it was possible for all these capital projects and expenditure costs to be hidden in the budgets.

The university said that unless they do something dramatic, they will run out of cash in the summer. It’s a very difficult position to be in. However, we do not believe that their proposal will bring the university back to financial stability, since it does not address the core issues that caused the issue. 

UCU changed the narrative

In fact, what I think we did well as UCU was to rapidly change the narrative at the very beginning of this crisis. 

When they announced this £30 million deficit and said it was because of international student fees, we said “let’s look at the data”.  We went and dug through the financial reports from 2019 to 2023 and we found that a large amount of the deficit had been created by capital expenditure and bad investments. We challenged their narrative immediately. 

We organised a massive town hall. I didn’t know what to expect, to be honest. We sent out an invitation to all staff that said: we are meeting on this day, if you want to come, it’s hybrid. We had more than a thousand people in attendance. More than a thousand staff logged into the town hall to hear what we were going to say. It was good at that point that we had immediately looked at the finances and had produced a position paper for the union that we could disseminate and say, be very careful because this is not just about international fees. 

I think that changed the narrative and we could start banging on doors of MSPs and MPs. Management admitted at the meeting on 19 March that, originally, they thought that they could do an investigation on their own – appoint an internal investigator and mark their own homework, and everything would be fine. Our work stopped that and really contributed to bringing to light the scale of the crisis.

Then the Vice Principal International retired to the House of Lords

In the meantime, the Vice Principal International retired to the House of Lords. We had already lost a Director of Finance, and the Principal. Then we lost the Director of University Executive and Strategy Office, that makes four members of the university executive that have resigned or left.

By challenging the narrative immediately, we managed to get through to staff and to politicians and external bodies. So now there’s going to be a proper external investigation. 

Going on strike very early brought the attention of the media to the situation at Dundee. It also allowed us to respond very quickly to the threat of 632 redundancies.  And in fact, within a week, the Principal was called to the Education, Children, and Young People Committee to provide evidence. We had multiple meetings with the Cabinet Secretary for Education and with the Minister for Higher Education and Further Education.  There was no political party, no politician that said this plan seems sensible.  So now management are back to the drawing board because the government told them we are not going to accept the plan.  

The upsetting thing, and this speaks again to the lack of compassion that we have in our management, is that they asked for money from the Scottish government to keep the lights on until the summer, but they didn’t ask for money to avoid redundancies.

They were going to go for compulsory redundancies straight away.  They are not even launching a voluntary severance scheme yet because they don’t have the funding. 

The bulk of this deficit comes from capital expenditure, bad investments, bad business decisions – so cutting staff, management’s plan A, is not going to solve that. In fact, it might push the university into a spiral of death where, in order to address the deficit, you cut the main source of your income. Our principal said there are three plans. Plan A is to cut the staff. Plan B involves merging with other universities.  Plan C is administration.  Dundee UCU believes that plan A is, in fact, plan C by stealth. 

What does winning look like?

So, what does winning look like?  We’ve already won in a way; we’ve got them to retract the threat of 632 compulsory redundancies. The Cabinet Secretary gave an interview to the Courier, the local newspaper, saying that the Government is keen to support the university beyond the £22M that it has already provided, if it helps saving jobs.  What we want the University Executive Group to do is to ask the Scottish government for money to plug the current deficit that’s been created by all these bad investments.

Dundee is a small university, so I think winning will be getting that money, get some job security and stability, keep recruiting students, and remove the threat of compulsory redundancies.

Send messages of solidarity to ducu@dundee.ac.uk Follow the campaign at https://sites.dundee.ac.uk/ducu/