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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…

In our previous posting, we raised the issue of the spending by departments and central administration at Cambridge University, based on the End of Year accounts here. As illustrated in the Figure, adjusting for inflation reveals that departmental budgets since 2016 are flat then fall. At the same time, the Read more…

Cambridge’s problem is not lack of money. It is where the money goes. Over the past decade, the university has steadily starved its academic departments in real terms — while allowing the central administration to expand at pace. The result is a university increasingly run around teaching and research rather Read more…

Harvard Business School is well-known for its case-based learning model, which includes real-world examples of companies and organisations that failed. Universities are brand-driven institutions. Brand-dependent organizations unravel quickly when misconduct and corruption is exposed. The 21 Group predicts in ten years time, there will be Harvard Business School MBA course Read more…

Imperial College London has a formal zero-tolerance policy on bullying and harassment. Like many universities, however, that policy is hardest to enforce precisely where power is greatest: among the senior leadership team. Professor Alice Gast was a chemical engineer who served as 16th President of Imperial College, London from 2014 Read more…