What Does It Feel Like to Live Under the Threat of Redundancy? | Independent Social Research Foundation

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What Does It Feel Like to Live Under the Threat of Redundancy?

by Glen O’Hara

Published on: June 9th, 2026

Read time: 7 mins

What is it like to be threatened with redundancy from a university? To be placed ‘At Risk’, and to live ‘In Scope’ of redundancy? Many academics and other Higher Education staff have already found out; many more are going to find out in the years to come. We’ll probably lose ten thousand jobs or more every year if we go on like this, trying to make an irretrievably broken Higher Education system work, and in the end the sector will probably be a lot smaller than it is now. So supporting each other and talking about where we’ve got to and how we’re feeling, will be more and more important.<br>I’ve personally been through a few waves of Voluntary Severance and also been placed at formal risk of redundancy once, late in 2023. In the end I personally kept on working where I was, the situation was cleared up pretty quickly and professionally, and the high-octane period of uncertainty didn’t last very long – just a few months in my case. So I’ve been one of the lucky ones to survive, so far. Still, it wasn’t exactly a pleasant ride and given the way so many colleagues across the sector have been pushed out or agreed to go quietly, it seems more than important to understand what the ‘At Risk’ experience is actually like.<br>I must confess, crass or tasteless as it may be to admit this, that my first triggered emotion was fascination. As a historian of public policy, and of the way in which large organisations work, it was both involving and absorbing to see how one of the great Public Policy Disasters I’ve reconstructed from archives, statistics and interviews really feels like from the inside. I was keyed up and intrigued to see what happened. That’s probably not how most people reacted then or would now, and my specialism perhaps makes me an outlier, but that was part of my own experience.<br>One thing became clear very quickly: the modern university does not exist. That’s not quite because it’s a simulacrum, a multi-coloured, immersive screen or façade designed to hide reality, as Jean Baudrillard once argued of the Gulf War in the early 1990s. Nothing in Higher Education happens quite as deliberately or suddenly as that. These institutions’ illusory reality is down to the fact that our universities have now become hollowed-out and unmoored from their original purpose, allowing two vital changes to buckle and poison their very nature.<br>First of all, they are nothing like the institutions that outsiders imagine. Rapacious devil-take-the-hindmost student recruitment means they are more like aggressive medium-sized enterprises struggling for market share than the school-like cloisters that voters perhaps picture. That has utterly changed their internal character. As all power has passed from frontline lecturers and departments to senior management working at ‘the centre’, universities have increasingly struggled to work with, count, even understand what is happening across their unwieldy empires. Many resemble nothing more than a paper bag with the word ‘university’ written on it.<br>There is however a second and more overwhelming emotion running through redundancy after redundancy – it’s sadness. Long term, living through the decline of a sector whose peak for now seems to have pass is an enervating experience. Although academics are used to very long lead times on some projects, often working on a book or a paper for many years, watching the light on the front of the train coming at you for a decade or more – while you can’t move out of the way – is never going to stimulate a particularly large measure of optimism.<br>There’s a wider sorrow, too, and it’s watching waste. Absolute mountains of the stuff. Colleagues at so many universities are going into early retirement when they still have huge amounts to offer students, and so much more to write. Watching departments, indeed whole faculties, built up with so much taxpayers’ money just cave in because of the whims of a mere here-today, gone-tomorrow fashion for markets. Seeing whole areas of the country without an accessible Chemistry department, a Drama school, a Languages faculty – so that young students who can’t afford to move away from the parental home simply can’t consider those subjects. What a waste.<br>It seems depressing, too, that universities have now lost their bearings as centres to educate, enlighten and enliven – to really move and engage people with the daring adventure of learning. Heavily metricised, buried in audit and groaning under the weight of paperwork, no one seems to have told universities that these techniques were tested and found wanting by most private sector companies in the 1980s and 1990s, and by the UK’s central government in the 2000s and 2010s....