What it’s like working in a university hit by budget cuts and job losses

Martin Shipton

A Cardiff University lecturer has written a bleak account of working in an institution diminished by financial cuts and job losses.

In a piece first published by voice.cymru, the worker writes about the ongoing damage caused by major financial cuts and job losses: “At the end of the 2025-2026 academic year, Cardiff University’s continued programme of self-gutting is speeding up.

“The trade unions won a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies for 2025 and again for 2026, in the face of a proposal for 400 academic staff cuts – we also stopped Nursing and Music from being closed entirely.

“But a new Voluntary Redundancy scheme opened a month ago, targeting both the sciences and the humanities. This is, we’re told, based on projected student numbers (of course, these predictions are not shared with us). It looks like any department is a bad month of numbers away from being panic-cut.

“In the sciences, academics are also being told that they need to teach a whole undergraduate cohort in Kazakhstan from September, in person for weeks at a time, with no additional staff back at home in Wales. Kazakhstan’s new anti-LGBTQ+ law is worse than Russia’s: anyone who even recognises the existence of queer people, including in private messages, is at risk of detention.

“Staff haven’t had any guidance on how to protect themselves. We still don’t know how the Kazakhstan campus is being funded, but some of our Executive Board are now directors of “CUK Holdings”, which is fun to say quickly.

“In the humanities, we’ve been told we need to make 50% profits from our mostly UK students to give back to the central administration. This central administration has threatened to close the humanities floor of the library (although they have just paused these plans following a student-led campaign), and academics are all being moved into shared workspaces.

“Three days after our new voluntary redundancy scheme opened, we were told that we can get rid of books and belongings via the big red skips that were located outside the building.

“The cuts continue at the heart of the university in the “professional services” teams who run all our administration, libraries, labs and services, in a similarly chaotic fashion. Hundreds of staff currently don’t know what job they’ll be doing by June. Many have already quit. In the words of one former colleague, ‘I can see the car crash coming and I want no part of it.’ Mass centralisation means that expert staff are being taken away from departments that desperately need to get through exams, graduation, and clearing in the next three months.

“It’s still unclear to us on the shop floor why we’re doing this. The Chief Financial Officer has pointed to a continued deficit created, it looks like, by £24.3m of redundancy costs last year and £49.8m of depreciation whacked on the balance sheet, to put us firmly in the red.

“The cost of my colleagues’ happy escapes via voluntary redundancies therefore means I am still at risk of being cut, though at the same time I’m marking double the essay load of last year because we lost key staff. My projected workload this year was over 140%, and we still haven’t had a “finalised” workload plan for the academic year about to end. Black humour has turned to despair in my building. The anti-suicide lock on my window has recently been checked. I have to move out of it soon in any case, so I won’t have an office to meet students for the next six weeks of the exam period.

“It feels like a sinking ship. Two Academic Registrars (managing our programmes) have left in the space of 3 months; a director of finance, the Director of Student Life, and the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education and Student Experience have all left in the last few months. It’s unclear who’s leading any of this.

“The Chief Operating Officer is either in Kazakhstan or apparently on holiday (despite the huge restructuring of university-wide professional services which she is responsible for). Our Chief Transformation Officer, who considers himself an ‘innovative disruptor’, has had his contract extended. And in the union meeting two weeks ago, we heard that our Vice Chancellor hasn’t met with the three trade unions since April 2025. Where’s Wendy? [Vice Chancellor Professor Wendy Larner]

Concerns

A Cardiff University spokesperson responded: “We do not comment on anonymous sources.

“If the anonymous source is a Cardiff University staff member, we’d urge them to raise any concerns with their line manager, in the first instance, or through the appropriate University channel.

“They can also raise individual or wider concerns through one of our three recognised campus trade unions. This ensures that concerns are raised in the correct way, can be investigated and, if necessary, action is taken.”