Dear Charles (and others observing or participating in this debate)
This has been a fascinating exercise in practical social psychology. For someone in the trade it has been impressive to watch colleagues deploying the instruments of social influence - impression management and self presentational, construction of group boundaries, management and manipulation of identity, denigration of the out-group - to do good, promote justice, defend the weak against the abuse of power. But in the end I am not a disinterested onlooker. I find my self altercast in the role of villain.
I could retreat into the anonymous ranks of the "Management" and hope my personal culpability will then remain unnoticed. I could, I suppose, distance myself from this grey monster, invoking the Nuremberg defence. But the fact is I was a party to the policy; and was the architect of this "final solution" in the particular case of the Psychology department.
You letter setting out the "bare bones" is of course only part of the skeleton, and in the event quite short of anything so solid as bones. Its one unambiguously factual claim is actually wrong. There will be seven fewer posts in Psychology. This includes the posts of four colleagues who are taking voluntary severance. Beyond that the letter is into less solid matter, preferring a range of qualifiers - "small" (as in financial cushion), "a number" (as in individuals who felt they were at considerable disadvantage) and "several" (as in those who felt they had no option). I do understand these rhetorical devices have been recruited in the service of honest and decent intentions, but for all that they are still devices. My point here is one familiar enough to all social psychologists: there is no such thing as the one "true" account; there are many accounts and most of them destined to be contested. What follows is mine.
In any management position, including mine, you know that unpleasant and difficult moral challenges might turn up. You rather hope these will not actually materialise but you accept that they just might. And this time one did. Effectively, I found there were no longer enough places for everyone in the lifeboat. I find it an odd and alien idea that anyone could relish such a situation, let alone regard redundancies as the easy option. On the contrary, it is a nightmare scenario and you desperately hope it will pass you by, that by looking hard enough you can find an escape clause.
It has been suggested not enough was done to examine other sources of saving before cutting jobs - equipment budgets, other recurrent expenditure, associate budgets. But cutting posts currently occupied by anyone is not an option to be favoured for any other reason but that all others have been exhausted. Talk of new buildings, or statues or replacement windows is a red herring. HEFCE requires all universities to put some resource into maintaining the fabric of their buildings. And money for capital projects cannot be diverted to cover recurrent expenditure. But even if this was allowable as a one off solution this year, salaries still need to be paid next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. Given that staff costs are far and away the largest source of costs, reducing these to balance the books becomes at some point unavoidable. We got to the point at which the bare minimum number of posts we could lose and still hope to be financially viable was seven. The process of consultation allows such conclusions to be tested. But thus far no one has identified the flaw in them.
What of unfilled vacancies? These options too were taken. And one colleague resigned to take up a post elsewhere. But there were still too few seats in the lifeboat. Once this point is reached, what other options are there? One would be to close an entire area of the department down and sack everyone in it. But we thought there was another possibility short of compulsory redundancies. We could ask for volunteers to take severance pay. And to provide a context for individual decisions about this offer, it was necessary to set out a plan, an indication of the future shape of the Department and the posts within it. The University did this and sought to make this option more attractive by enhancing the package on offer.
I am struck that in your letter this loses any benevolent intent to become a convenient device behind which management can hide its determination to sack people. So it is worth reporting that a lot of people across the University apparently found this package attractive enough to apply for it, a number rather larger than could be accepted.
Let me pick up on two other assertions in your letter, starting with the suggestion that that new posts were so defined as to place those opting for voluntary severance at a considerable disadvantage. In other words if they did not jump voluntarily (sic), they were going to be pushed. (Regarding one of your qualifiers, the "number" of individuals who say they felt this is two). In defining the new posts some care was taken to exclude no one from applying on the basis of their particular expertise. And in case you were wondering, I did not exempt myself from the competition and nor, though it might be assumed so, was any post defined to ensure I would have an easy passage. It will have been the case that three staff looked at the plan and could see no position at their grade. But it was open to argue for a different grading of posts in the provisional plan, and others have done this.
The second assertion relates to the "several" of those who did not want to leave but felt they had no option (and incidentally neither I, or anyone else can say with any certainty what the outcome might have been had they not made this choice). In response I would make two observations. We all, the entire department, had this choice to make, to seek a post in the new structure or apply for the voluntary severance package. Forty staff made the former choice.
My second point is that of those who made the latter choice, two others have presented it differently to your "several"(as it turns out also two), who declared they had no option. To quote one, "This is not the case (that we have been made redundant). Speaking for myself, it was a positive choice and I made it myself" and also "I would rather the message did not go out ... that I was made redundant, or that I lost my job, since this is simply not the case." The second endorses this, saying "We have not lost our jobs or been sacked." You may say they privately felt something different, but neither you nor I are entitled to decide for them what they privately felt. We are, I think, obliged to respect what they say as being what they mean to be understood about their choice. However, I would not also want to deny any nobility to their motives. In making the choice they did, each will have been fully aware that it produced one more place in the lifeboat and perhaps for a colleague with fewer options, less able to swim if cast out.
On this point you say we (the discipline?) have lost excellent colleagues with international reputations. That is as yet unknown. Their excellence and international reputations are more likely to secure them jobs elsewhere than had the process run its course and resulted in the redundancies of those lacking these assets.
Finally, our jobs are not threatened by management and options they "seemingly" favour. They are, however, threatened by the current economic climate and the intention, well-advertised by any plausible future government, to cut higher education funding by a further 10 to 15%.
I accept the good intentions of your campaign but it will not create a single additional place in this particular lifeboat. And I fear it could actually damage the prospects for those in our Psychology department, the forty staff who have opted to stay and who are as deserving of a decent future as those who have decided to leave. You also put at risk the dignity of these latter who have declared their choice was theirs alone.
Nick Emler
Dean, Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences
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