Dear Editor The Financial Times’ recent ranking of the UK’s “Top 400 Employers” has been greeted with interest and puzzlement. Several results appear curious. For example, the strong performance of organisations facing well-reported financial and governance difficulties or even near-collapse, including the University of Dundee, is striking. The generally high Read more…
This image is taken from the listing of “Fellows of the Colleges” published in The Reporter here on 19 January 2026. Following an investigation by Gabriel Pogrund, Whitehall Editor of The Sunday Times, it was admitted that Ann Limb’s claims on her cv that she had an MA and a Read more…
The Financial Times (FT) yesterday provided a list of the top 400 employers here. It is based on a joint survey carried out by themselves and Statista. It placed the University of Cambridge at the very top. Statista is a market research/data aggregator company. Statista itself describes its rankings as Read more…
Dr Bernhard Fulda is a College Teaching Officer (CTO) at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. He is also Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of History. In 2023, he applied for a permanent University Teaching Officer (UTO) position in Twentieth-Century German History in the Faculty of History, but was not appointed. (The successful candidate was external to the College system). Read more…
The UK government’s decision to remove the statutory cap on unfair dismissal compensation is one of the most important structural reforms affecting accountability in higher education in a generation. For decades, Universities have operated within a legal framework that placed an upper limit on the financial consequences of unfair dismissal. Read more…
Before 1988, academics in permanent posts in the UK could only be dismissed for serious wrongdoing or failure to perform their duties. This gave them strong protection comparable to tenured professors in North America. The Education Reform Act of 1988 changed this by permitting redundancies on standard ’employment law’ grounds, Read more…
At the University of Cambridge, higher-paid groups see larger pay increases over time, leading to ever- widening inequality. The plots show how pay departs from the University of Cambridge average across progressively smaller, higher-paid groups. The outer layer is the “Golden Fifty,” the fifty highest earners, introduced before. Within this Read more…
Here, we will track the real performance of Cambridge University’s endowment over time and isolate the impact of administrative spending growth above inflation. We express values in constant 2025 pounds, taking inflation into account through CPI index, and we benchmark investment performance against the MSCI World Index. We show a Read more…
The mean inflation-adjusted pay of University of Cambridge staff has been flat for more than a decade. In isolation, that might sound like stagnation. In context, it is far more revealing. When pay rises are captured by those at the top, the average should rise. If it does not, there Read more…
The 21 Group has extracted some statistics from the University of Cambridge’s End of Year Financial Reports. They make interesting reading. Given this background, we highlight again the interesting contribution made on the previous thread by Autophagy here The corruption has advanced in several phases 1. In the first phase, Read more…