What is it like to be threatened with redundancy from a university? To be placed ‘At Risk’, and to live ‘In Scope’ of redundancy? Many academics and other Higher Education staff have already found out; many more are going to find out in the years to come. We’ll probably lose ten thousand jobs or more every year if we go on like this, trying to make an irretrievably broken Higher Education system work, and in the end the sector will probably be a lot smaller than it is now. So supporting each other and talking about where we’ve got to and how we’re feeling, will be more and more important.

I’ve personally been through a few waves of Voluntary Severance and also been placed at formal risk of redundancy once, late in 2023. In the end I personally kept on working where I was, the situation was cleared up pretty quickly and professionally, and the high-octane period of uncertainty didn’t last very long – just a few months in my case. So I’ve been one of the lucky ones to survive, so far. Still, it wasn’t exactly a pleasant ride and given the way so many colleagues across the sector have been pushed out or agreed to go quietly, it seems more than important to understand what the ‘At Risk’ experience is actually like.

I must confess, crass or tasteless as it may be to admit this, that my first triggered emotion was fascination. As a historian of public policy, and of the way in which large organisations work, it was both involving and absorbing to see how one of the great Public Policy Disasters I’ve reconstructed from archives, statistics and interviews really feels like from the inside. I was keyed up and intrigued to see what happened. That’s probably not how most people reacted then or would now, and my specialism perhaps makes me an outlier, but that was part of my own experience.

One thing became clear very quickly: the modern university does not exist. That’s not quite because it’s a simulacrum, a multi-coloured, immersive screen or façade designed to hide reality, as Jean Baudrillard once argued of the Gulf War in the early 1990s. Nothing in Higher Education happens quite as deliberately or suddenly as that. These institutions’ illusory reality is down to the fact that our universities have now become hollowed-out and unmoored from their original purpose, allowing two vital changes to buckle and poison their very nature.

First of all, they are nothing like the institutions that outsiders imagine. Rapacious devil-take-the-hindmost student recruitment means they are more like aggressive medium-sized enterprises struggling for market share than the school-like cloisters that voters perhaps picture. That has utterly changed their internal character. As all power has passed from frontline lecturers and departments to senior management working at ‘the centre’, universities have increasingly struggled to work with, count, even understand what is happening across their unwieldy empires. Many resemble nothing more than a paper bag with the word ‘university’ written on it.

There is however a second and more overwhelming emotion running through redundancy after redundancy – it’s sadness. Long term, living through the decline of a sector whose peak for now seems to have pass is an enervating experience. Although academics are used to very long lead times on some projects, often working on a book or a paper for many years, watching the light on the front of the train coming at you for a decade or more – while you can’t move out of the way – is never going to stimulate a particularly large measure of optimism.

There’s a wider sorrow, too, and it’s watching waste. Absolute mountains of the stuff. Colleagues at so many universities are going into early retirement when they still have huge amounts to offer students, and so much more to write. Watching departments, indeed whole faculties, built up with so much taxpayers’ money just cave in because of the whims of a mere here-today, gone-tomorrow fashion for markets. Seeing whole areas of the country without an accessible Chemistry department, a Drama school, a Languages faculty – so that young students who can’t afford to move away from the parental home simply can’t consider those subjects. What a waste.

 It seems depressing, too, that universities have now lost their bearings as centres to educate, enlighten and enliven – to really move and engage people with the daring adventure of learning. Heavily metricised, buried in audit and groaning under the weight of paperwork, no one seems to have told universities that these techniques were tested and found wanting by most private sector companies in the 1980s and 1990s, and by the UK’s central government in the 2000s and 2010s. ‘Get with the programme’ feels like chewing on dust when that programme is from the early eighties.

Systems corrupted by metrics, unintended consequences, targeting numbers not quality and performing to the test – none of the obvious problems with these long-ago techniques seem to have shone into the darkness of Higher Education governance at all. All universities can do is ‘merge functions’, by which they mean sack, slash and cut. That’s partly because they just can’t bring in any more money. But it’s still pitiful to watch such woeful performance from institutions full of actual experts who understand all those pitfalls.

Some people ejected from the gloomy trudge Higher Education can actually start getting happier than they were before, freed from their own burden of professional interest and a kind of permanent grit lodged somewhere between thought and feeling. Some feel liberated at being finally forced to make a long delayed decision to move out of the university sector, and immediately forge creative, dynamic careers in other fields. Change can be liberating, infuriating as it is to be told so – especially if the people telling you that aren’t changing anything or going anywhere themselves.

Elsewhere, there’s a great deal of anger, even fury, grief and depression. Many academics thought that they had sacrificed higher pay for a secure job and a good pension, only to find that their jobs are just as insecure as everyone else’s and that their pension is seen as a perk and a problem. Some colleagues hadn’t noticed the incoming and existential crisis until it was right on top of them, so they got hit by a runaway truck not a train they’d spotted a long way down the track. Some people are so invested in their identity as ‘academic’ that the shock is deeply, intensely hurtful all the way down to their core. It really, really hurts. We should talk about that too.

In the end, universities are chopping off their own arms and legs in a vain attempt to protect the heart. I’m afraid that the blood will still pump out of the wound and into the world, even more quickly now that limbs have been removed. Invasive surgery that would embarrass a butcher of a surgeon out of Tudor England will probably hasten, rather than stem, decline: it certainly won’t do any good.

That’s interesting for me as a public policy professional, a historian of education and its governance and an expert in Public Policy Disasters. But it’s crushingly sad, too. The waste, the ham-fistedness, the stupidity, the inevitability, the hurt: none of them were really necessary had the sector been planned properly, acted together, been backed up by governments who understood it. It’s likely too late for all that now, with most university staff just a spreadsheet or two away from hazard. A truly humanistic and open understanding of what it’s like to live with the permanent threat of redundancy is therefore deeply needed and truly urgent.