mamadriel ponderer

The University of Exeter has never had a true monetary deficit. What they’re quoting is actually a projection relying on predicted falls in student numbers, which doesn’t match what is actually happening in some departments (History being a clear example, where the student recruitment numbers are trending upwards). And even if you take the projection at face value, we're talking about a possible £1-5m shortfall over like… a couple of years. And that is, for an organisation of that size, small change against the £211m they hold in cash reserves. Which is to say that the University is not in deficit at all. It has £211m in cash reserves.

So obviously the question then becomes why the actual fuck is a hypothetical, contested forecast being used to justify actual job losses in all the ‘left wing’ departments when the university has always had more than enough money put aside to ride out much bigger deficits several times over? Two hundred and eleven million pounds don’t disappear in the blink of an eye, it takes a considered and deliberate decision to forget such a big sum.

Which is to say, there is no reason for a single job cut at that university, let alone for making five hundred members of staff redundant. The £211m cash reserves ostensibly exist in order to prevent job cuts. There being job cuts anyway only proves that the redundancies aren’t the ‘cost’ of the university’s overarching strategy but the ‘product’ of it, ie what the strategy was actually built to engineer.