Hundreds of people have joined forces to protest at swingeing cuts to staffing at Sussex University.
The university plans to save £5million by cutting 115 jobs from “unpopular” courses, such as Informatics and Life Sciences, where one in three are set to lose their jobs.
The staff and academic services department is also set to lose 22 staff.
The university says this will help it invest in more successful departments – but the protesters say they are being made to attract lucrative fee-paying foreign students.
On Friday, scores gathered at the university condemning the cuts. More than 1,300 people have joined a Sussex Stop the Cuts Facebook group and hundreds more have signed this petition.
The creator of the petition said: “The proposed redundancies are set against a backdrop of the marketisation of Higher Education.
“More young people are coming through our doors. The University is seeking to increase its number of fee-paying overseas students.
“Yet The University proposes to cut teaching and support staff and is presenting a fiction that this will improve the student experience.
“We believe that the proposal will deter students from coming to Sussex and will lead to the decline of our world-leading institution.”
The consultation on the cuts will end in March next year, when a final decision will be taken.
http://defendsussex.wordpress.com
The University of Sussex plays a vital economic and cultural role in our city. Any redundancies or cuts – or even threats of them – are the product of privatisation and the introduction of the profit motive into the provision of higher education and must be opposed.
It is for the Government to fund universities, including Sussex, properly – not just leaving the job to vice chancellors to do so by juggling the figures, short-changing students and slashing less profitable academic courses.
I urge the vice chancellor to reconsider his decision, and to appeal to the Government to put its money where its mouth is in terms of its support for universities and students.
See this website for further information:
Save Sussex Education
Life-sci unpopular? Are you kidding me, every year Life-sci is full here. This is as “unpopular” as it has always been, because degree level science is *hard* and only for clever people (i.e. people who deserve to be in university, and people that this country actually need to properly educate!). The administration would like to invest in easier, more trendy courses for the masses, regardless of how useless they are. For gods sake, if you want to study media and tourism go to Brighton University, and Sussex pumps out far more International Relations graduates than all the NGO’s in the World can cope with already!
Presumeably, the administration want to make the univeristy more profitable, rather than excellent, so that they can give themseleves even more 30% increases to their 6-figure salaries?