Featured Image: Gov.UK’s British Higher Education Showcase
Put The Clocks Forward not back….Future Nottingham is far more than an elite/mass customs house topped up with charitable projects: students and staff feel we need an effective financial alternative with real expressive consultation Friday 27th March
Sam Ojo’s beautiful expression of the practical and banal cruelty of the leadership trend to issue edicts rather than healthy and healthgiving democratic consultation (in the Guardian this morning) chimes with responses I received on University Park campus and Nottingham Medical School on Friday. The university needs to consult with all of its staff and stakeholders to find the right solution: don’t ignore the people who care about your future!
Above: Sam Ojo’s wonderful graphic in this morning’s Guardian: it does far more than express the topic of immigration just now:
On Friday I went to University Park campus and the Medical School. I spoke to fifty people: members of the public, home and overseas graduates, post graduates. Post doctoral, pre university Nottingham College students, our lovely professional and academic staff. I asked them if they’d heard about the university management plan and the university staff’s alternative plan to save the university’s financial security. It was clear that everyone had heard about the cuts, the redundancies past present and possible future but it was obvious that no-one felt the university had really taken the time to really read about our alternative financial vision. No-one thought that this essential democratic process had been seriously undertaken.
Members of the public: husband and wife going into lakeside cafe: yes, we’ve heard, we’re shocked: music particularly, especially when the govt is putting so much into the curriculum and music particularly, teacher: I teach in a primary school, moving the university to a much more enriching curriculum is vital I’ll read the staff’s financial alternative, catering staff: I have friends who work here and they’re still recovering after the terrible attacks on the students and the caretaker, nothing like that had ever happened before, yes I’ll read the financial alternative
Med student: we need openness and to use the knowledge of staff: I have real fears about the data that’s being used to make decisions, it feels unsafe.
Music Post Doctoral researcher It’s the isolation of not knowing whether you matter, whether your aspirations matter
Masters student I’m an overseas student with undergraduate qualifications and masters in tech that I did at Nottingham but found it impossible to find mentoring and work in my subject, now paying again for a qualification and working in care, I have no alternative I have no-one to complain to
Undergraduate music I want to make a career in music: I’d heard that the government is investing in music and felt hopeful: I’ll read the staff’s financial alternative
Academic I honestly would never have thought about union membership but I really feel now I have to join: we have to help the senior management to properly assess our financial alternative they really think they have the data and they don’t
Academic Our working life and right to be here is challenged (most recent harm is the new convoluted gateway into journal access) it feels as if we’re all being made migrant here, constant changing of the rules of engagement: I ask who and what is a university for?
Professional Services: Future Nottingham is also future health of Nottingham, the UK and the wider world how they all join up: to me it’s the loss of the public service and accountability to the people we have always felt we serve, the wider public health impact through lowering productivities, quality of service what year on year on cuts do to motivation, purpose and the meaning of a life. We need proper consultation on the alternative that we spent time preparing.
Academic I think it’s because of the hit and run nature of cuts in previous years: none of the previous cuts, changes, charges against a questionable compound annual growth rate have been demonstrated as a real purpose. We sit in a place that although historically it has coherence purpose and underlying support from the widest possible communities it’s as if it’s all the kind of hippy mess that the vice chancellor poked at when she implied the silliness of thinking you had a fairly low paid job for life in the realpolitik of financialisation. But we’re not contractors, we’re not consultants: no-one has even had the time to work on an appropriate educational user interface for Unicore that makes us feel as if we’re working in a university.
We all need to read the Financial Alternative and comment:
signsofanopencity 
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