This week my university announced that almost all academics in the humanities and social sciences (HASS) were to be placed in redundancy pools and essentially be required to reapply for their jobs. 114 posts – almost a quarter of the members of the HASS faculty placed in the redundancy pool – would be cut. While some other subjects faced cuts, almost 80% of reductions will be in HASS.
My own job as Professor of International Relations is at risk as well as those of all ten members of staff for whom I am “academic lead”. The only permanent academic staff not at risk are those who serve as managers, a new category of quasi-academic called “professors of practice”, and handfuls who work in subjects of “strategic importance”.
Everyone else faces a process where we are scored from 0-3 across eight categories including two categories of “future strategic alignment” which are double-weighted and thus count for 40% of the total score. There is a great deal of confusion about what “future strategic alignment” means as presentations by managers have mentioned the UK government’s industrial strategy, the university’s strategy 2030, and the departmental strategy (which many departments don’t have).
The University of Exeter is not alone in proposing large-scale redundancies. You can see details of cuts proposed by British universities here. The list includes many of the UK’s top universities, including Cambridge. Cardiff and Nottingham – both, like Exeter, in the elite Russell Group – have faced especially devastating proposals by managers which they continue to fight.
What is perhaps remarkable about the Exeter cuts is that they are targeted at some of the university’s most successful departments, many of which turn over a profit even after they have made enormous and increasing contributions to the central university budget. Most HASS departments include subjects in the UK Top 10 or Global Top 100 rankings. Many of the subjects not targeted in other faculties are less successful (by the standards of these crude rankings, obsessed upon by university managers and many student applicants).
What drives these cuts is not financial necessity as if that were the case they would be spread across all three faculties and perhaps target those parts of the institution with lowest income from student fees and research contracts. What drives these cuts is strategy and executive choice – the judgment of university leaders that HASS subjects can be (almost) as successful with 25% fewer staff.
In this longer essay than usual, I’m going to try to offer my perspective on how UK universities, and my institution in particular, got into this mess. There is a very real financial crisis in UK higher education. But the current solutions proposed merely compound the problems which created the crisis. Let’s look at three problems.
Image: The crest of the University of Exeter includes the motto Lucem sequimur ("We follow the light"). But do we?
Government Neglect
First, the UK sector has suffered from at least 15 years of malign government neglect. This is widely known and largely attributable to Conservative-led governments from 2011-2024.
In 2011, I spoke to an occupied lecture theatre as students protested the rise in tuition fees from £3,000 to £9,000. I argued that the most significant problem with the coalition government’s proposal was the financial unsustainability and politicisation of the system.
As the terms of the loans were changed to make them more financially sustainable, a very strong impression arose that university was not “value for money”. This meant that public sympathy towards universities disappeared and for many years the government refused to raise the fee level by the rate of inflation. The real value of fees has now dropped below £6,000 in 2011 money.
In 2016, the politicisation worsened. Universities were seen as on the “remoaner” side of the Brexit culture war. On 23 June 2026, we lost the argument and eventually began to lose many EU students and colleagues as well as leaving EU programmes like Horizon and Erasmus in which the UK had out-performed other member states.
In the last ten years, the politicisation of immigration had led governments to constrain the terms of international student visas, restricting their rights to bring family members to the UK and to work after graduation. These – and other changes in demand – have led to big reductions in international, high fee-paying students.
When Labour came to power in 2024, it failed to address this crisis. By then top universities had begun to plan for compulsory redundancies. While the Starmer government eventually applied an annual inflationary increase to student fees, it also introduced an international student fee levy and increased national insurance contributions, wiping out the gains to university budgets.
University Mismanagement
This leads to our second reason. University managers like to point to the above as evidence of the unfortunate necessity of the cuts. But the reality is that at each of the key moments, many have made poor decisions, investing in massive expansion on the assumption of ever-continuing growth in student numbers. The university system is more like a cartel than a market. Among managers, there is far more imitation than innovation. This can lead to bad ideas – like “traffic light systems” of performance management of academics – being copied across the sector.
At most key moments, major misjudgements were made. In 2011, after universities were flooded with cash, they took on huge debt to fund capital projects and wrote budgets which assumed the good times would keep rolling. After Brexit, and with the Boris Johnson open door to immigration, I heard university managers argue that the country had overcome the immigration problem. Indeed, public attitudes to immigration did improve from 2016 to 2020 but anyone who thought that hurdle had been crossed was very naïve about long-term political trajectories in Western democracies.
The big “strategic choice” made by managers at the top universities a long time ago was ever-increasing expansion. This was especially true of Exeter as it was one of the smallest Russell Group universities when it joined almost 20 years ago. When I was on the university’s senate from 2014-2018, elected senators like me occasionally asked about the risks and limits of growth. These concerns were ignored. No one had a plan to be a middle-sized successful university.
In 2020, Covid-19 hit, universities switched to online teaching, and the student experience became miserable. What was so significant about this period was the shift towards online working for both students and staff, apparently diminishing the value of a campus-based university. Perhaps most significant of all was the divide between managers and academics. Relations had already become toxic after successive strikes prompted by the fact that university pay and pensions for most staff had worsened despite the £9,000 fees. After Covid, almost all meetings are now conducted online; the empathy generated by in-person meetings has been lost and management-staff relations are terrible.
It is this context, in which the proposal for redundancies take place. Managers have made decisions based on inaccurate and incomplete data from IT systems rather than listening to their staff. They have used a workload model called SWARM whose data is always wrong and was previously presented as merely “indicative” to claim that HASS staff are all under-working. They have taken class size and publication record information from systems called SITS and Symplectic which are replete with errors. All individual staff were sent personal records this week with these data. I have counted several major errors in mine. Everyone I spoke to has found such errors.
Bloated Management and Rising Executive Pay
This leads to our third reason for the crisis: not mismanagement but simply management itself. The growth of universities has led to an obsession with “strategy” and the surge in a class of managers on higher rates of pay. Most of these people have PhDs, may be called Professor, but have not been inside a classroom, a lab, or on fieldwork for a long time.
Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency suggest that from 2010-2025, the growth in these senior managers was far faster that that of academic staff. A basic ChatGPT analysis of this data suggests that management/professional leadership has grown by around 60% in this time. Academic staff numbers have grown by about 25%, flattening in recent years and falling slightly in 2024/25.
The number (and proportion) of staff earning over £100,000 has grown substantially faster than overall staffing. At Exeter, this is especially so. In the last five years, the University of Exeter has been cutting costs to the bone while overseeing a vast increase in highly paid staff. The number of staff earning over £100,000 increased from 157 in 2020/21 to 404 in 2024/25, an increase of 247 staff (+157%). In the same period, the overall FTE salary cost of staff earning in this pay bracket more than doubled to over £30 million. This Linked In post gives more detail and some discussion.
The above data is taken from the University of Exeter annual reports which are legally required to publish numbers of staff earning >£100K as well as the Vice Chancellor’s salary (£394,000 in 2024/25). These are a crude measure and there is no easily available public data on which of these high earners are managers and which are the highest earning professors. However, we can infer certain things from context. Two things at Exeter stand out.
First, there has not been a professorial pay review over this entire time. I am a Grade 1 professor (the lowest level) and have only below-inflation rises which have kept my pay well below £100,000. There will only be small numbers of more highly paid professors in pure academic (non-manager) roles which will fall in this category, and this surely cannot explain an increase of 247 staff over four years.
Second, over these four years the university has recruited to many newly created managerial positions such as Deputy Vice Chancellors, Pro Vice Chancellors (PVCs), Deputy PVCs, Assistant PVCs, and many such roles in areas like research and impact, global outreach, business engagement, people and culture, etc. Academics apply for these roles where they receive a pay uplift (often into the >£100K band); their work stops being about teaching and research and largely takes for the form of strategy meetings and external engagement.
Most academics cannot understand why other academics want to do these jobs other than for money and status. We assume that colleagues have lost interest in their research and teaching. And as they lose interest, they appear to lose empathy and understanding too. On the other hand, it may be argued that these roles are a natural function of growth. Large institutions need lots of managers and they need strategic direction, don’t they?
What’s the (theological) problem with strategy?
The fact that the growth in managers and highly paid staff far outstrips growth in universities is telling. It is surely the clearest indication of a deep inefficiency. What universities do (or sell!) is teaching and research. The rise of a highly paid class of managers who do neither teaching nor research right at the time of an emerging financial crisis is testimony to a failure of leadership on their part. The fact that it is they who are exempt from redundancies while making an argument about excess capacity among HASS academics is bitterly ironic.
A redundancy programme among senior managers must be part of any solution to the UK’s higher education crisis. With indirect and estate costs applied, the 247 extra highly-paid staff Exeter over four years may cost in the region of £30-40 million (far more than the cuts it hopes to make via academic redundancies). If these are, as I suspect, mainly in senior manager roles rather than world-leading clinicians, this cannot be justified. The problem is the very people who have caused the financial crisis are unlikely to accept their responsibility. As they say, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.
Some readers who have stayed with me may be unconvinced. They may be managers themselves and have seen how much positive difference it can make. But this is not a point about management or strategy in general but about it being implemented in academic institutions from the top down and without a clear sense of purpose. As this is supposed to be a theological blog, I will close some points on this problem from a biblical perspective.
Perhaps one of the most important but difficult to understand passages on management in the bible is the parable of the shrewd manager from Luke 16 (sometimes called the parable of the dishonest manager).
Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So, he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’ The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg— I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’ So, he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ‘Nine hundred gallons[a] of olive oil,’ he replied. The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’ Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’ ‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied. He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’ The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”
Luke 16:1-9 (NIV)
The message here is rich and multi-vocal, as it so often is in Jesus’ parables. Interpreters tend to take a few points away. First, management is not in itself a bad thing and “the people of the light” would benefit from some shrewdness. It is not an answer to the university crisis to say that all management has no value. Eventually wealth will be gone but we can prepare for this.
Second, management is best done from the bottom up not led from the top down. Jesus goes on to explain in the next verse: “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much…” (Luke 16:10). In the university context, this means that most management should be done by lecturers in classrooms and researchers on projects not senior figures writing corporate strategy. People embedded in contexts of “very little” can ascend to more senior management. That was how it used to work in the older system of academics stepping up reluctantly and temporarily to be deans of faculties.
Third, for management to be of value it must be focused on “eternal dwellings”. In a university context, that means the greater purposes of truth, knowledge, and wisdom (not just maximising personal income and feeding the labour market). The University of Exeter’s strategy aims for a fairer, greener, and healthier society – worthy goals which I would describe as eschatological. But managers must defer to those on the frontline. The strategy can only be implemented from the bottom in diverse ways, many of which cannot possibly be anticipated by managers.
This seems to me to be the most negative change in the university sector over the last generation: the notion that university leaders are responsible for pursuing a single vision of the common good. Many students in humanities and social sciences still come to university to increase their knowledge and understanding and change the world for the better. The fact that we can’t agree on this is inevitable and part of the struggle and joy of studying humanities and social sciences. Until universities relearn these “non-strategic” aspects of academia, the crisis we face will not be resolved.
NB. Minor amendments were made on 1 July 2026 to correct typos and improve presentation.
I have very little sympathy, apart from agreeing with the problem of bloated management and admin costs.
Why should universities expect to extract money from foreign students to prop up their institutions? This was never the case historically, so why is it OK now? And the broader costs of foreign people coming here is handed to the British Taxpayer and society in general - it shouldn't be for the average British citizen to be forced to accept vast demographic change and the attendant pressure on housing services and a changed society. The theory that more education and more immigration would lead to economic growth has been tested to destruction and shown as baseless and false ideas.
Universities are now almost exclusively left wing to Marxist, so please drop the 'big back Tories did it to us' lline'. New Labour had a huge role too in the overexpansion of higher education and the exclusion of any voices dissenting from left wing orthodoxy.
In recent years university academics have failed to challenge to the Covid absurdity, went all-in on BLM and woke, and generally aopear to value ideological conformity over questioning open-mindedness and academic rigour.
All these people taking glee in the layoffs at Exeter seem to think that it will have no impact on them or on the real economy. But Exeter employs 7500 people directly (and probably at least 5000 more through contractors). It has 33,000 students. If these job cuts fail to bring in the predicted savings, or even (quite likely) make the situation worse, then it’s likely that the university will either need a bailout or will go bust altogether. And the direct impact of that on the wider Exeter economy would be enormous.
There’s towns, entire shires in fact, that still haven’t recovered from the pit closures. The university closures would make them look like a storm in a teacup. And that’s not even considering the broader societal impact on scientific research and the knowledge economy.