Review of the Faculty Structures announced- where is the leadership?
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Dear members,
By now you have likely heard the news that the University intends to move from a structure with five faculties to one with only three faculties. In the Vice Chancellor’s email to all staff, he states that “...changes to our faculty structure would…help us to create greater consistency in staff and student experience, and enable more interdisciplinarity and collaboration”, while alluding to the potential for yet more cuts to Professional Services staff in faculty roles, and simultaneously claiming that there will be “...no changes to schools, academic disciplines or programmes…”.
These claims, and this announcement, are at this point beyond preposterous.
In 2019, the University Executive Board (UEB) moved the School of East Asian Studies into the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Then in 2024 they moved it into the School of Languages and Societies.
In 2020-2021, UEB restructured countless Professional Services (PS) teams in academic schools, disrupting valued and respected expertise and centralising staff in certain roles into faculty hubs, as well as green lighting the “Future of Languages project”, in which language teachers in the School of Languages and Cultures were moved the MLTC. Staff may also remember that these were the years when the University threatened to fire and rehire every single staff member during Covid then very quickly backtracked when it became clear their panic had been unfounded, announced the closure of our world-renowned Archeology department, and finally scrapped the entirely failed Student Lifecycle Project, after pouring in excess of £30 million into it.
In 2023, UEB undertook a major restructure of the Student Recruitment, Marketing, and Admissions (SRMA) team, which led to such unhappiness and so many staff taking voluntary severance that over 70 posts in the new structure were unfilled for months, and the disruptive impact of this restructure is still felt today. 2023 was also the year of the disastrous Student Support Services restructure, which dismantled the University’s Sexual Violence Liaison Service for students, and in the Autumn, the “New Schools” restructure was first announced.
In 2024, UEB reduced 41 academic schools and departments into 21 in the ‘New Schools’ project, creating major disruption for every staff member in the University which we are still navigating the effects of, and placing hundreds of PS colleagues in scope of stressful change management. In an all staff survey SUCU conducted, 92.3% of almost 1000 respondents (which represents over 10% of the total staff body) indicated a lack of confidence in this project.
And now, at a moment when the University is pursuing substantial staff cuts in Materials Science, Chemistry, and East Asian Studies, and threatening more cuts in 4 other academic disciplines, the Vice Chancellor has announced a shift from 5 to 3 faculties—a shift which, the VC admits in his email, may result in more redundancies down the line.
This list by no means includes every single bit of change management. Since the Vice Chancellor arrived, we estimate that he has overseen over 45 restructures of teams across the University, including the New Schools Professional Services restructures, which impacted over 800 staff in one fell swoop.
Every single time one of these changes has been announced, we have been told that the purpose is to “strengthen the institution” or “support our world leading ambitions”, to “future-proof the University”, make us “more competitive and agile”, and improve our “financial sustainability”.
If these assurances are true, then why have not a single one of these changes led to the lofty results described above? Why does UEB need to keep constantly imposing changes that lead to more instability, a weaker University, and over-workloaded and under-supported staff and students who can barely manage any ambitions, let alone world leading ones?
And where is Council? As the body which has regulatory and strategic oversight of the University of Sheffield, why do they continue to approve these changes? The Vice Chancellor, and UEB, are not alone in making these poor decisions.
It comes down to this question: Why is the leadership of this University still in post and still making the same ‘strategic’ changes over and over when their previous changes have not had the desired effect?
The truth is that restructuring for restructuring’s sake does not have the positive impacts that our University leadership claims. To be clear, we are not claiming that every single change is necessarily a bad one, and there may be some restructures in the list of 45, or even in the list we gave above, that staff viewed as positive. But every restructure is disruptive, and the sheer number that University management have pursued over a 7 year period is irresponsibly damaging. Moreover, we stand by the position that a substantial proportion of the restructures that have been pursued were both unnecessary and ill-advised.
The leadership of our University is keen to reference a myriad of crises facing this University (including financial, which we as a branch strongly dispute), but much less keen to take responsibility for how their decisions have negatively impacted the staff and students of Sheffield.
It is beyond time for this programme of destructive change to stop. We cannot add yet more change on top of the relentless change that has characterised the last 7 years. This branch has collectively pushed back against the poor strategic decisions of University leadership, but while our activism, organising, and negotiations have mitigated the effects of detrimental policies, and held off the level of staff cuts and redundancies that management were initially pursuing, we cannot change the direction of this University without a fundamental change in leadership. Every member of this University needs to stand up and demand a new vision, and new leadership of this University.
In solidarity,
Sheffield UCU Branch Committee