The Story So Far...
Student opposition to an Omnishambles at King’s College London
How it all started...
On May 13th, Professor Sir Robert Lechler, vice-principal of the Health Schools at King’s, summoned academic staff at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP), School of Medicine and School of Biomedical Sciences to a fateful meeting. Here he presented proposals for “restructuring” (textbook double speak) the Health Schools which centred on dismissing up to 120 academic staff, a rather sizeable 15% of its workforce. These dismissals were dependent on staff bringing in an arbitrary set amount of money, or an arbitrary number of face-to-face contact hours with students during a two year period. Staff on the shortlist were required to prove that they were ‘mission critical’ to the Health Schools over two pages of A4, a humiliating process for some of the brightest and most respected minds in the country. This marked the start of a 45 day consultation period, notably, the minimum statutory requirement.
Justification from Lechler et al. consisted of the need for “maintaining and improving our position as one of the world’s leading institutions” and “changes in the external funding environment”. The latter relates to a need to satisfy lavish aims for a 6% financial surplus per annum that funds “capital projects”, i.e. the physical infrastructure of higher education. Public funding for capital projects is now significantly reduced and it was put forward that dismissing up to 120 staff would generate around £6.5 million to appease structural deficits in the Health School. Importantly, this deficit partly exists because of commitments to financing capital projects. So a not unreasonable assessment is that senior management have decided to prioritise spending on light bulbs and new buildings at the expense of the talented academic staff that both give King’s its renowned reputation for excellence in research and education.
The Start of the Campaign
Against this backdrop of fait accompli, devaluation of academic staff, and marked threats to education - a student-led petition was launched via change.org. This explicitly rejected the justification of staff redundancies and called for a meaningful and extended consultation period to explore alternatives and assess the impact of redundancies on teaching and research. We believed this was a reasonable request, and were soon overwhelmed by support as the signatures flooded in, with 1000 accrued in the first week.
Momentum for our campaign rapidly grew with public critiques being issued by prominent figures including Professor Sir Robin Murray (“incompetent and callous KCL management is severely damaging the IoP and its staff”) and Professor Dorothy Bishop (“One feels that if KCL were falling behind in a boat race, they'd respond by throwing out some of the rowers”). During this time, over 100 students covered the front of the IoP with heartfelt messages of support for staff. This was soon followed by over 60 senior staff across the Health Schools taking the unprecedented action of submitting votes of No Confidence in senior management to the College Council.
Our first demonstration! / College Council
A ‘flash mob of fury’ was planned for June 24th to coincide with the delivery of 4000+ strong petition to the College Council. Over 150 students and staff gathered outside the James Clerk Maxwell building (after a last minute change of venue by senior management) to produce a visual re-enactment of the rash ‘restructure’ as Lechler mask wearing persons wielded (cardboard) axes as they frantically popped 120 balloons, to symbolise staff at risk of dismissal. We wanted to send a clear message; we value our staff, education and research above everything. This is sacrosanct.
Regrettably, the College Council response was in full support of the redundancies. As a result of the Council’s disappointing response, members of University and College Union (UCU) voted overwhelmingly in favour of taking industrial action on July 10th. Fate would have it that on this same day, the Princess Royal, was scheduled to open a new clinical neuroscience institute at the IoP (we also appreciated the irony!).
Strike Action (and a cancelled Royal visit)
Our plan was to fully support staff on the picket line and for the strike day to culminate in a rally at the royal opening. Impressively, both students and staff scheduled to participate in the opening agreed to boycott the event in a powerful show of support for affected staff. Notably, this boycott also took place in clear opposition to the vacuous efforts of the College Principal, Sir Rick Trainor, who organised an emergency meeting in a desperate attempt to persuade senior staff in the neuroscience departments to participate in the royal opening, in order to keep up appearances with important donors. The actions of Trainor clearly reveal a principal out of touch with the very people he is supposed to represent, he eventually acquiesced on the eve of the strike and the royal opening was postponed.
The build-up to the strike was further peppered with senior management inspired farce. This mistake was impressively surpassed by the decision of King’s to make a highly significant announcement on a comments section of yet another measured Professor Bishop article (she was again expressing her concern at the senseless purge) that “as a result of a robust and thorough review process which has taken place over the last 6 weeks, we now know that less than half that number of roles remain provisionally at risk”. It is unfathomable, that in a time of great uncertainty and anxiety for staff, senior management thought it appropriate to make such an important announcement via such a medium.
Rather appallingly, a formal announcement to staff followed 24 hours later and you would think this would be reason to be upbeat, given that the “scope of the exercise” had been significantly reduced. But let us take you back to the first ‘consultation’ document which states “After having explored and accounted for possibilities of revenue sharing, revenue increases and other possibilities, it is proposed to reduce the academic workforce within the specified health schools”. We cannot quite understand why this first review was not as thorough as the second one. This all smacks of incompetence and no reasons were proffered as to how the numbers of redundancies were reduced.
The strike went ahead with a number of students joining staff in solidarity on the picket lines. Despite the rain, another impressive turnout of over 200 students and staff ensured a passionate march from Waterloo and Guy’s, where several moving speeches were made by staff still at risk of dismissal. During the march, we reached 5000 signatures. Importantly, it is now apparent that there is no contingency plan whatsoever to deal with the teaching load that will remain when staff are dismissed. The ‘spare capacity’ for teaching repeatedly asserted by senior management in response to concerns about the impact on education is a nebulous construct and further evidence our College is the hands of an unskilled group who have lost the backing of the entire community .
Recent Developments (where we learn these redundancies are far from essential....)
The final twist of this story is perhaps the most shocking. We discovered a 2013 report by respected credit ratings agency Standard and Poor’s on the financial health of King’s which states that KCL is deemed to be in a "very strong liquidity position" as "one of the recipients of the largest amounts of research grant", and is described as having "substantial cash reserves" and "relatively low net debt". The report went on to say that the plans for capital investment were considered one of the few financial "risks", with a suggestion that KCL should aim for a more "realistic" surplus of 3% (as opposed to the "ambitious" 6% KCL are aiming for); however, they also noted that there was potential for "substantial flexibility to defer expenditure", and listed a multitude of ways KCL could finance these investments.
So senior management have taken upon themselves to flagrantly ignore the advice from an financial report. Thus, we find ourselves in a truly astonishing position whereby the restructure is neither financially prudent nor necessary.
Now what?
So where do we go now? How do correct this wrong? How best to mitigate the senseless purge? This is down to all of us as a College community. If you want to support the campaign, we need to have your active involvement.
Please email stopkclredundancies@gmail.com to find about our meetings and to have your say on what action we take next.
If you support our efforts but find yourselves in the unenviable point of writing up your thesis, we can still provide you with a fortnightly update, again email stopkclredundancies@gmail.com and we will keep you in the loop.
Our campaign has been continually praised and we are grateful for this acknowledgement but we are still determined to preserve the entirety of our best resource, our academic staff.
KCLHealthSOS