[20 May 2010]
Dear Friends, Students, and Colleagues,
As many of you have heard, The School of Arts and Humanities at King's has now announced that the consultation period for its restructuring proposal is over, and we are safe. There will be no compulsory redundancies in the School, as cost reductions have been achieved through alternative means. This is welcome news, and a source of considerable relief.
We are deeply grateful to those of you who have supported us through letters, petitions, and statements during this difficult time. The campaign that you organized on our behalf played a central role in persuading the College to revise its original plans for the School. We owe our positions to you.
We wish that we could tell you that the crisis at King's has fully passed and that all is now well throughout the College. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The College management is continuing to pursue restructuring plans in other Schools, where the academic staff have been forced to re-apply for their positions. Not a few of our colleagues in these Schools remain at risk of dismissal, and some are being pressured to accept "voluntary" severance. Moreover, the events at King's are by no means unique. They are an acute instance of a pattern that we are seeing, in one form or another, in many other universities throughout the UK. As Britain's new government embarks on deep cuts in public spending in order to deal with the country's large deficit, we think it likely that processes of the sort that we have been experiencing at King's will be widespread across the entire UK university sector within the next few years.
The way in which King's, and other universities here in the UK have been responding to the financial challenges that they are facing raises at least two fundamental issues of principle. First, in dealing with a budgetary crisis does one treat forced redundancy as the last resort, to be invoked only after all other possible methods of cost reduction have been exhausted, or does management reserve the right to dismiss academic staff at its discretion in order to optimize its revenue?
Second, although academic tenure at British universities was abolished by the Thatcher government in the 1980s, a long standing norm has remained in force, whereby permanent academic staff remain in their positions until retirement, as long as they are fulfilling the conditions of their contracts with respect to research, publication, teaching, and administration. Will this norm continue to apply, or will management appropriate the right to reconfigure a Department or Faculty for the purpose of excluding certain faculty members, even when they are performing at a satisfactory standard?
These questions remain unresolved at King's, and within most other British universities. They will become increasingly pressing in the next few years. The way in which they are answered will determine the character of higher education in the UK for the coming generation. It is imperative that we defend the principles on which free inquiry and the autonomy of research depend, as these provide the very foundations of university life.
Shalom Lappin and Wilfried Meyer-Viol