8th March 2024
Dear Members of Council,
We first wrote to you in November 2023 and have been asking to meet with you since then. We specifically emphasised how crucial it was for you to meet us before you approved the proposed Transformation Programme and, in particular, before the Council meeting on February 23rd2024. You claimed to have no availability at all until 28th February, a date that was offered with little notice and without consulting our own availability, which was never confirmed by us. On the morning of February 28th, GUCU received notice that SMT was to implement compulsory redundancies equivalent to 130 FTE, which, in combination with the Voluntary Severance Scheme, would decimate more than a quarter of the academic workforce. We were shocked at the profound insensitivity of the timing of this proposed meeting, which coincided with such an announcement. Overwhelmed by distraught colleagues’ requests for clarification and personally affected ourselves, we were not in a position to attend a meeting, the purpose of which you had laid out as : “ i) [to] explain the decisions that the governing body has been making in respect of the financial position of the College and the Transformation Programme, the processes followed and the reasons for the decisions made; and, ii) to listen and hear you [sic].”
The timing of the proposed meeting – after, not before, your devastating decision – sent a signal to us that Council is not interested in listening to our many concerns. But we would like to clarify that we were not seeking an explanation from you as to why you took this destructive decision. We have had access to all the financial information that we need to understand the current situation and have spent considerable time and resources getting a clear picture of the situation at Goldsmiths and the Higher Education landscape more widely, seeking expert advice when this was necessary.
The Council at Goldsmiths does not work for SMT, but it is rather meant to be an instrument to apply oversight over SMT, including monitoring the performance of the College as a whole. Despite the College having entered a period of decline, reputational freefall, and reaching levels of dysfunctionality that do not befit a modern institution, Council has repeatedly failed to hold SMT accountable for any of its shortcomings. More importantly, presented with a “Transformation Programme” that includes no recognisable strategy, lacks any level of granular details, attempts to simultaneously execute six over-ambitious “workstreams”, ignores current problems for BAU (business as usual), overplays capacity and underplays the substantial risks it poses, you have failed to carry out due diligence and ask difficult questions.
We are aware of the enormous challenges that Higher Education faces in this country, especially the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. We are also well aware of the need for College to reduce its running costs to adjust to declining levels of income. But we cannot condone a hastily put together “Transformation Programme” that reduces costs at a speed not justified by our finances, creating a situation where the very possibility of Goldsmiths surviving this “Transformation” is at stake. This is not the place to discuss finances in detail, but there are less destructive and risky alternatives to the ones SMT have presented, which you should have explored or should have sought help to understand. The “cut once, cut deep and cut fast” management ideology does not work for an institution that holds a statutory duty of care to students over long cycles of service. Opting for this route after previous botched restructures have failed to deliver on their promises betrays a profound lack of interest in the Institution you are expected to safeguard. This, sadly, echoes SMT’s own lack of understanding of what makes Goldsmiths unique, their profound misreading of what we could call, in language familiar to you, the “Goldsmiths brand”, including their baffling aim to rebrand it as a STEAM-led institution.
We are now entering what is potentially the most competitive cycle of recruitment that the UK higher education sector has ever faced, having sent a message to the world that the College is facing an existential crisis with nearly a third of its academic staff under threat of redundancy. You cannot blame the union for this. Rather it is SMT’s previous disastrous restructure and the current proposals for brutal redundancies and VSS that send this message, as do some cost-neutral but profoundly damaging measures like the proposed abolishment of Departments under Faculties, obscuring their reputation and legacy.
Staff are overwhelmed and profoundly demoralised, trying to reshape and resize departmental portfolios of modules and programmes in an irresponsibly short period, knowing that this will be used to deprive them of employment. While mistakes in the recruitment process largely contributed to the current deficit, marketing and recruitment have been left out of scope of the Transformation Programme and will be under-prioritised in the face of these simultaneous “workstreams”. Furthermore, the current student body has had almost no communication from SMT about the Transformation Programme, they do not know what modules they will be studying next year, whether their tutors and supervisors will still be employed, or whether the programmes they are enrolled on will continue to run. This does not bode well for our attrition figures.
We are far from the only university in England facing unprecedented challenges, but these are not helped by governance structures that have become increasingly undemocratic, lacking in openness and transparency. Being a member of Council at an institution like Goldsmiths carries an enormous number of responsibilities, among them not just attending meetings, but subjecting the documentation sent in advance of meetings to detailed and sustained scrutiny, keeping a long view of developments in the institution, and seeking out as much information as possible before waving through proposals of this scale. Failure to do so could have devastating consequences not just for the staff at Goldsmiths, but for the wider community in New Cross and, most importantly, for generations of students who put their trust in us.
Among the duties of Council is the duty to establish processes to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of Council itself. On this point, we ask that you explain both the processes in place to evaluate the effectiveness of Council, and whether and how frequently you have used these processes in the past five years.
Kind regards,
2023-2024 executive team, Goldsmiths UCU