Many thanks Liz!

Only the Beyondest get the big bucks. It’s curious that institutional deficits often correspond inversely to a sudden growth in the number of £100k roles, the sum financial total of which tends to map that deficit almost exactly.

Ah, ofc. “After a thorough review it transpires that we are spending far too much money on paying our staff, which constitutes one of our major outgoings.” A classic.

Yes. If it’s cheap to run it can’t be making any money. As you say, without the low-cost courses they create the death-spiral.

In what sense? Eng Lit seminars require a room. How astonishing. Presumably they are using an SSR metric.

I daresay staff responses to redundancy plans will now be collated via AI, which in its usual obsequious, fawning, Uriah Heep-like way will misrepresent if not invert those responses.

And so dangerously amnesiac. Likewise Arts&Hums subsidising sciences & business — and how the idea of a university was promoted at such times — but when Arts&Hums need support they’re on their own.

I’m sorry Liz. The terrible short-term thinking that produces such decisions cannot conceive of the recruitment oscillations that a dept of 60 years’ standing has seen. It’s what got us all in this mess: Subject X is popular now ergo Subject X will always be popular. Subject Y is not, ergo is over.

I’d like to be optimistic about the relatively small turnout but I live in Norfolk and have read all the FB and local paper comments on the event, as well the comments on Pride, which took place simultaneously, and the huge support for the former & hatred of the latter is almost total, depressingly.

Also even if 3/4 others are involved it doesn’t result in a penalty beyond “poor academic practice” (at best) & marking the essay as if the AI bits weren’t there. This ignores the ruinous effect on essay structure, which reduces the mark further, and the wild variety of usage in terms of AI volume.

Yes, the HE branding motto genuinely is “Keep it simple, stupid”. I really am expecting to see an institution using Beyondest now.