Britain’s largest university to cut 171 jobs amid Brexit worries
The University of Manchester, Britain’s largest university, is planning to cut 171 jobs, mostly academic positions in the faculties of arts, languages, biology, medicine and business.
The university is blaming the new government legislation and the prospect of Brexit as major factors threatening its future income, saying it needed to invest in its strategic priorities.
Still, the University and College Union (UCU), which represents lecturers and researchers, said Manchester’s finances were fine and that the university was searching for excuses in order to implement cuts, The Guardian reports.
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“We see no economic rationale for jobs cuts on such an enormous scale. The University of Manchester is in a strong financial position and we believe it is using recent government policy changes and Brexit as an excuse to make short-term cuts that will cause long-term damage.” said Sally Hunt, the UCU general secretary.
Recruiters say that Brexit is already detaining EU workers from taking a UK job
“It takes a lot longer to rebuild a department than it does to dismantle one. If the university wishes to maintain its position as one of our leading institutions it needs to rethink plans to sack large numbers of professors, lecturers and support staff to create what it has called ‘financial headroom’.” he added.
The university’s financial statement revealed it had reserves totalling almost £1.5bn, of which £430m was cash.
Manchester University has almost 40,000 students and more than 12,000 staff, including almost 7,000 academics and researchers, with three Nobel laureates on the payroll – the physics professors Sirs Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, who invented graphene, and Sir John Sulston.
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