BBC Radio News reported on Saturday 25th September that London Met was one of three institutions at risk of bankruptcy (the others being Cumbria University and the University of Gloucestershire). A repeat report appeared on Sunday 26th in the Telegraph. We believe such reports are based on rumour, exaggeration and ill-informed inference drawn from well-worn stories that were already within the public domain.
In no case did the reports derive from any recent comments from the institutions themselves nor, to our knowledge, were the institutions requested to report on their financial health.
The timing of these stories is unlikely to be an accident. Coinciding with the start of a new academic year and in the run up to the Comprehensive Spending Review, the reports are at best irresponsible and at worst have been put forward by groups opposed to public funded education as disinformation intended to alarm staff and students currently at London Met or the other institutions and to discourage future students.
We believe such rumours are part of a much wider 'softening-up' of the public in an attempt to create an 'inevitability' around mass cuts to higher education provision and to justify the ideologically-driven encroachment of private sector for profit companies into higher education.
UCU, UNISON and the LMSU invite London Met management and all supporters of London Met to engage in a joint campaign by all supporters of London Met to make the case for fully funded Higher Education and in defence of institutions such as London Met that provide vital training and educational provision to what are highly diverse and culturally mixed local populations at a time of recession and increasing unemployment.
Sunday 26 September 2010
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As a parent of a student who only enrolled the day before the worrying article appeared in the Daily Telegraph I am dismayed that my son has dedicated the next three years of his life to a financially unstable institution. I can only hope that senior management will do all in their power to avoid making experienced lecturers redundant to claw back money, as these are the people that make the university, and its graduates, successful
ReplyDeleteThe time has passed to save this Institution I am afraid. At best, and being generous, it has been disgracefully mis-managed, since inception, by a pretty useless senior management group some members of which are scarily delusional about their own management abilities and skills. It has some good parts that ought to be taken over by real universities. I would hope too that the hard working students and at least some of the good staff would find places elsewhere. The sad fact is that it should never have been created in the first place. Interestingly it appears that the rats are beginning to abandon the ship with 'retirements' and 'extended sick leave' beginning to surface amongst some of the senior management .. never a good sign. Watch as they take their cash and run.
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