From 1 September 2023, the Vice Chancellor of Cardiff University has been the New Zealander, Prof Wendy Larner.
During Larner’s tenure as Provost at Victoria University of Wellington (2015–2023), the university faced financial challenges that led to “strategic decisions”. In May 2023, the University confirmed a NZ$33 million deficit, attributing it to declining student enrolments and a shortfall in government funding. To address this, the university laid off ~250 staff members.
Once in Cardiff University, Larner identified a £30 million black hole in its annual budget. At least 400 academic staff are now likely to lose their jobs (~10% of the workforce). Many departments are to be amalgamated and others are to be abolished outright – including subjects like music, ancient history, theology, modern languages and nursing. There has been an outcry. This massive destruction is just the start, as the savings will amount to a mere ~ £9 million – making a small dent in the mountain of debt racked up by this badly-run, bloated basket-case
Those paying the price of decades of mismanagement are the staff. ‘Two Weeks in the Death Spiral of Cardiff University‘ provides heart-breaking testimony of what is happening from the standpoint of an anonymous academic, who is expecting to receive a pdf that she or he is being made jobless.
On the second day of classes in 2025, in a series of group meetings, academics filed into the main lecture hall and were presented with a short powerpoint explaining that the university would cut around 10% of its total academic staff – we were told at least 400. These cuts are uneven: some groups were ‘safe’, others (like medicine and bioscience) were told they would lose 10% or 35% of academics. In the merged ‘humanities’ meeting, an Executive Board member admitted that half of those in the hall were facing the sack. Many colleagues were faced with a slide announcing the end of their programme, and likely with that their job.
Colleagues were in tears – and then had to return to teaching classes. In the humanities meeting, the presentation’s slide on ‘mental health support’ prompted collective laughter (which was edited out of the official recording). Later a colleague found out that (alongside self-care websites) the free counselling helpline’s appointments were already fully booked until March.
Eighteen hours after these announcements, at around 8:30am, just under 2000 staff received risk of redundancy notices by email, including me. There was no information about how those ‘at risk’ were chosen, and this started the statutory 45 days’ consultation over our jobs. But in an all-university meeting with the Vice Chancellor in the same lecture hall that day, we were told that we should engage with the ‘proposals’ and offer counter-proposals. Security staff stood along the corridor as we left the hall. I could lose my job in a month, before the end of the academic year, [Anonymous Academic, Voice Cymru]
After all the work, all the teaching, the research, the innovation, the mentoring and the effort, the late nights and lost weekends, all a university wants from you is for you to leave without making a fuss. This is physical control (“security staff“), emotional control (“in tears“) as well as coercive mental control (“half in the hall were facing the sack“). These people are lying thugs (“edited out of official recording“). As in many universities, the staff are in an abusive relationship with their employer.
The brutalist style is typical of the self-interested individuals who have captured the management of UK universities. The oil that wheels the cogs of destruction is the Human Resources (HR) department. “Our risk of redundancy notices said that equality impact assessments had been done; so far we have received some copy-paste pdfs described by HR as unfinished “live documents”. These are the usual vacuous and content-free documents provided by any HR in any university, mash-ups of smiling people who love to be made redundant together with managerial buzzwords (“help with organisational change … blah blah … fundamental reimagining of our services“).
Remarkably, even as the Cardiff campus is burning down, the university is preparing to set up in Astana, Kazakhstan. Larner said: “University collaborations can often strengthen the bonds between two countries. We see the delivery of education programmes in Kazakhstan as the first step to a long and prosperous relationship with Kazakhstan and her people.” Some Cardiff academics were told that offering to teach in Kazakhstan might save their jobs. Foundation courses are already being advertised. These are “in high-demand fields, including education, engineering, and IT. Special focus will also be given to programs in geology and renewable energy – areas of critical importance for Kazakhstan“.
The management of Cardiff University has a complete contempt for Wales. The university’s foundation was made possible by the financial donations of Welsh workers, industrialists and philanthropists. Its establishment was supported by the gift of Welsh land from the Marquess of Bute. The university must transform itself into the essential centre of intellect, excellence, scholarship and learning that Wales wants, needs and deserves. Gwirionedd, Undod a Chytgord.
As for Prof Larner and her senior management team, let them relocate to Kazakhstan. It’s a country famous for arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, torture and ill-treatment of detainees, according to Human Rights Watch. It has high levels of corruption and nepotism, as judged by Transparency International.
Given her menacing management style, Prof Larner looks to be well suited to the place.
We recommend shipping to Kazakhstan the whole Executive Board: the Deputy Vice Chancellor Prof Walford Davies, the 6 Pro Vice Chancellors (Profs Roger Whittaker, Claire Morgan, Rudolf Allemann, Urfan Khaliq, Steve Riley, Gavin Shaddick), the Chief Finance Officer (Darren Xiberras), Director of People (Sally-ann Efstathiou), Director of Communications (Laura Davies), Chief Operating Officer (Dr Paula Sanderson) and Chief Transformation Officer (David Langley). It is Larner, Morgan and Allemann who figure prominently in the youtube video, prancing around Kazakhstan.
Many of the Executive Board will be much more culpable than Prof Larner, who has only been at Cardiff since 2023. This is a mismanagement scandal a decade in the making. We note the previous Vice Chancellor Colin Riordan suspiciously left in the nick of time. Now Secretary General of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, he is also highly blameworthy and kickworthy.
The 21 Group urges academics to sign the petitions to save Nursing , Modern Languages , Music, Theology and Ancient History. Over 300 mathematicians have already opposed the plans to cut Mathematics. Those with a vote in the 2026 Senedd elections might like to contrast the attitude of the Welsh Government with the more proactive intervention of the Scottish Government at Dundee University.
After excellent diagnosis of the academics in Cambridge’ University’s Dignity at Work video by commenters at https://21percent.org/?p=1393 , body language experts might like to look at the Cardiff video.
Larner seems to have a tendency to switch from rolling her eyes wildly, to animated hand waving, to neo-comatose acceptance of her fate. Her behaviour seems odd. She looks a desperately unhappy woman.
The 21 Group — apropos of nothing at all 😉 — have often wondered why a University hires a Vice Chancellor from thousands of miles away.
They turn up, knowing nothing of the place and knowing no-one. They are prisoners of the senior management whom they have no option but to trust. They are often set up.
Was Larner set up to take the fall?
~ 7000 staff including the VC, appoint a new VC, how much difference does making that new appointment really make to the overall governance dynamics of the organisation in the absence of any other overall organisational changes?
Cardiff University has already had two preventable academic staff deaths that took place in the university in conditions of years of severe overwork [Dr Mark Jarvis in 2018] and [Dr Malcolm Anderson 2014]. The death of Malcolm Anderson in 2018 should have triggered an investigation from the health and safety executive because it followed the same pattern as the death of Mark Jarvis in 2014. The organisation has been unsafe for staff for over a decade. It is not a surprise that staff are being subjected to the treatment described in this article, it was the same approach during the last wave of strikes under the last VC, all the default organisational approaches maximise the stress generated by the organisation for staff in already difficult and stressful situations. The state of that organisation, it will take more than appointing a VC from across the globe to fix the organisational problems there.
Mental health support – collective laughter – two individuals have already died overwork deaths in this organisation. The organisation now has a legal obligation to regulate work-related stress – that is a health and safety issue. One more preventable death and that organisation is getting a long overdue heath and safety investigation. Migrate to Kazakstan with your family to keep your academic post, no stress generated there at all – can easily pop back to Cardiff for family support with childcare, only -20C in Astana in winter.
Don’t get me wrong – I voluntarily applied for an academic post in Kazakhstan through UCL because it seemed like an interesting opportunity to me at the time – but it was not a permanent position, I had no dependents and I was under no pressure to go to Kazakhstan to retain any form of academic employment.
Shocking. They are exiling staff to the Gulag!
The point about workplace suicides is very important. Drivers of workplace suicides include precarity, high levels of stress, unmanageable workloads, low pay, bullying & harassment, unsupportive or hostile management. Academia has all of these.
We are not aware of any studies specifically on work-related suicides in academia but it does seem a really important area for research
It would be useful to collect data, but to our knowledge even that is not done.
There is a 2021 report (Waters & Palmer, Journal of public mental health, 2022, 21, p.35-45) on workplace suicides generally. It contains a tragic example of a university lecturer with an unsustainable workload. We read “In the case of a 48-year-old university lecturer who had stated in his previous three years of staff appraisals that his workload was unmanageable, who complained of mounting pressure in the weeks before his death (February 2018), and who left a suicide note specifically blaming work, no PFD report was issued. In an interview, one of his colleagues remarked: “his suicide wasn’t properly investigated as a work-related death. As a result, the employer was able to brush the suicide under the carpet.”
There are also some well-publicised examples of suicides in universities that were driven by uncaring management or institutional bullying. The case of Imperial College’s Stefan Grimm, Prof of Toxicology, is one.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/imperial-college-professor-stefan-grimm-was-given-grant-income-target/2017369.article
The case of Newcastle University’s linguistics lecturer, Christina Dye is another
https://linguistlist.org/issues/33/883/
Interestingly, there was much more information about the later case on the web a year or so ago. Somehow, the circumstances of her death seem to have been removed from the web by someone (Newcastle University?)
Which brings us to one of the main difficulties of studying workplace suicides in universities and understanding why they happen. The universities regularly cover it all up — as Waters & Palmer quote “the employer was able to brush the suicide under the carpet“
The Waters & Palmer paper is available here for those without institutional access
https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/181375/3/JPMH%20paper%20revised.pdf
The HR policy of our institution in this regard follows the maxim: “no person, no problem”
The person is identified as the problem in every instance.
Then everything is done to remove them, bullying them to suicide if necessary.
The HR department may be teetering on the brink of facing charges of corporate manslaughter
“A company will be guilty of the offence of corporate manslaughter if the way in which its activities are managed or organised causes a person’s death”.
The case of Magdalen Connolly alone was very shocking. Her health was completely broken by the case.
As Chandi points out in the previous thread, there are more cases waiting to come out.
Corporate manslaughter charges will be landing across UK higher ed. Will be a watershed moment, like the Natasha Abrahart case regarding student health and safety.
Innocent academics have been humiliated, harassed, bullied, and victimised by employers, simply for doing their jobs. This is done as a matter of deliberate policy. It produces foreseeable deaths – in most cases warned by the victims themselves, as they begged for mercy beforehand.
A primer on the Abrahart case is here https://21percent.org/?p=868
Our feeling is that you are correct.
The University of Bristol fought the parents of Natasha Abrahart in multiple court cases. They even appealed the original judgment (which the University lost) in an attempt to bankrupt the Abraharts.
It is hard to believe the stupidity of the people who run universities — who in their right mind would want to end up in court fighting against the parents of the daughter who committed suicide at your institution. This case should have been settled at outset.
Irrespective of reasons of decency and probity, it should also have been settled because it has cost Bristol University lots of money and it’s been a huge public relations disaster.
No-one has resigned from the senior management team at Bristol University because of this. Why is the Registrar at Bristol University (Lucinda Parr) still in place, she must have sanctioned this?
Bob Abrahart (Natasha’s father) had an explanation. He said to us that many of those at the top of universities are consumed with arrogance, they genuinely believe that they can’t do wrong.
So, we predict that there will be a big court case involving a suicide or near-suicide of a member of staff and a university (likely Cambridge) in the next year or so.
Also worth mentioning : there is a big announcement coming from the ’21 Group’ and ‘For the 100’ (https://www.forthe100.org.uk) in Spring this year
‘For the 100’ is the campaign group set up by the Abraharts.
The danger the university runs is having a practice of a) no longer complying with GDPR or court document disclosure requests, and then b) lying in court under oath about the things they hid .
This is picking up pennies in front a steamroller. Sooner or later it will flatten them because the evidence cannot simply be hidden and they are stupid to think people don’t have backups or recordings.
Agreed — we’ll be running an article shortly on two Heads of School who are in violation of GDPR through suppression of evidence
You may be right, perjury will get some of them
The cover up is normally more dangerous than the original mistake, as more people get sucked in.
What happened to Natasha Abrahart was tragic. Natasha Abrahart’s death made it clear that something has gone fundamentally wrong in the current higher education system. The purpose of higher education is to impart learning of value to students, learning that will serve both them and others well on their life journeys. If a situation arises where the education processes themselves start posing a significant risk to the health and safety of a student – an upward spiral of stress is nucleated in a reasonable examination adjustments process that has hung [people process anaphylaxis] – then clearly for as long as a life is actively at risk continuous counter-adjustments to that process would need to be made to reduce the health and safety risk to the student and to give them the space to improve their health and continue with their degree whilst incurring the minimum disruption to their life.
What was the point of repeatedly putting a student through a particular type of examination process when their subject knowledge could have been equally tested with modified version of the same examination process or using other types of examinations processes? A fundamental pillar of upholding academic standards on a degree course is that individuals should be alive at the end of the degree course, they should be able to tell others what they have learned on their degree course.
A legal advisor advised the University of Bristol to go into a court after a student death it was subsequently found to have contributed to and to argue that the university had no duty of care to any student. That is a fundamentally irrational action for an organisation to take in such circumstances. Had it accepted a duty of care to all students including Natasha it would have been straight forward negligence in the case of one student but since it argued it had no duty of care to any student, that simultaneously demonstrated intent at the level of the organisation to not care about Natasha and organisational intent to not care about any student in similar life-threatening circumstances going forward. The act of going to court and making that legal argument actually sets an organisational intent to harm students – permit fatal cases of people process anaphylaxis – organisational intent to do the exact same thing in future similar cases in full knowledge of the possible range of outcomes – possible death. Instead of fixing a problem at the first opportunity, Bristol University went to court and created an even bigger problem for itself as an organisation.
The Kirsty Wayland Memorial Disability Lecture this year will be about the Abrahart case
“Competence standards and disability: what next for universities following the Abrahart case?”
It’s on 22nd April 2025, and will be held at St John’s College, Cambridge
The Abrahart’s are inspiring because … Bristol University did a terrible thing to them, and they did not back down and they did not go away
University senior management everywhere needs to learn this: they have the power to screw us over but we are not shutting up and we are not going away
This holds true for the terrible things that Cambridge University has done.
My understanding is that the university and its information officer have already been taken to court for failure to comply with GDPR and had to acknowledge fault.
Invariably the records they fail to release are those showing the actions of senior HR figures, so as to implicate naive professors as the source of all wrongdoing. As the cases of Professors Bullmore and Wagner show, they are more than happy to let us suffer the consequences as long as their own actions remain secret.
Not sure it went to court, as the University & Dr Knapton conceded early on. We read
“Sued University of Cambridge and Dr James Knapton, Information Compliance Officer, for refusing to disclose an employee’s personal data in breach of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) resulting in a pre-hearing settlement and the provision of previously withheld information.”
from https://www.cambridgelegal.co.uk/profile/
Also, the 21 Group looked at data on complaints to the Information Commissioner’s Office here
https://21percent.org/?p=955
Cambridge is very secretive. Cambridge is actually top of the universities for the most serious complaints where the ICO takes action
There is a critical point here from a corporate/organisational governance perspective that is easily missed and perhaps quite specific to Oxbridge.
Members of the Regent House are the formal governors of the university. Therefore, if a member or members (for example academics) have GDPR requests refused, with motive of concealing the malfeasance of an executive employee (potentially against not just one but many members of the Regent House), this is a different category of misconduct from an organisational perspective than simply trying to “protect the reputation” of the organisation.
A better analogy would be if members of the Executive Board of a public company refused requests for information from key shareholders and owners of the company in order to conceal misconduct by the CFO or COO against them. It would not simply be a GDPR issue but also one of corporate governance malfeasance, especially if it later transpired that they were causing deliberate damage to a shareholder or shareholders trying to hold them to account.
I think University senior management everywhere needs to learn : they never had the power to screw anyone in the organisation over, it is not their best interests to screw anyone in the organisation over just like it is not in anyone else’s best interests for anyone in university senior management to get screwed over by anyone else or by the organisation. The screwing over of any person in an organisation is generally in no one’s best interest and certainly not in the best interests of the organisation. Having met the Abraharts – there is no chance of them shutting up and going away – it has taken them all they strength they had left after their daughter died to come this far, why would they be shutting up an going away now, they will be keeping going and getting that student duty of care job done. Can’t shut people up on these issues, if people are already speaking publicly about them in the courts, can’t shut them up then. Can threaten legal-costs-award-charging-order-bankruptcy in a British court, can’t threaten that in the European Court of Human Rights. Universities now need to get to grips with these issues, organisational change dynamics are here whether they accept it or not, whether they are prepared for it or not, whether they like it or not. Universities all thought they had plans for change but it now seems that change has plans for them.
I cannot speak for anyone else with regard to their individual cases since every individual case is completely different. I am not taking action against an individual who handled my case. The root cause seemed to be the existence of several organisational faults, this then lead to people process anaphylaxis on a complex stress generating case using people processes with no effective work-related stress safeguard in place. It is as close to work-related stress accident as it is possible for an organisation to get. People did want to process the case somehow and to get rid of the case but I don’t think they realised the potential impact of doing that the way it was being done. I don’t think anyone handling the case had any intent to harm me, it seemed to be more there was a lack of understanding of the harm that could be done and the need for the organisation to mitigate health risk, add some work-related stress regulation – carry out a situational work-related stress risk assessment and act on it. That was my final assessment of my own case.
It was more efficient to put that one with the regulators, would have been a waste of societal resources to go to an employment tribunal on that one. I don’t care about individual remedies, I will take care of my own individual remedy.
Societal knowledge that could be applied to these situations did exist but it was in a poorly integrated for, there was then a general lack of societal understanding of these situations and situational risk as opposed to the individual risk that could interact with the situational risk, legal solutions to these situations are only now being built. Before tackling a significant organisational problem and attempting to apportion “blame” for that problem it is important to define the organisational problem.
Get that wrong and an already significant organisational problem will become much worse. Get that right and the whole organisation will see improvements in one go. Gains in organisational health, gains in organisational productivity, more organisational energy to do things for society that the university wants to do and are worth doing.
Regulators expect organisations to be able to self regulate. If regulators have to do the regulation for the organisation, universities will be paying for that regulation.
Even more relevant comparison would be executives of the BBC refusing to answer questions from BBC trustees, and then, working to undermine or retaliate against them. BBC like Cambridge is public entity but with a formal system of trustees ensuring accountability for the crown, more similar to how the Regent House is supposed to govern the university and uphold academic integrity, standards and accountability.
Worth noting that if this happened it would be a huge scandal. It would very soon have parliament on the backs of the BBC leadership calling for answers.
The governance machinery in Cambridge is a complex beast, Cambridge is expected to be able to solve its own governance problems.
Ultimately the solution to internal problems within an organisation has to come from within the organisation.
Safety lines to external sources of organisational support during times of internal organisational change are only ever a temporary measure.
It’s the governance machinery in these organisations that is failing, the standard employment and education processes that have been in place for > 2 decades are on a direct collision course with new legal health and safety obligations in relation to staff and students. Instead of RAAC in the buildings putting the buildings at risk of a sudden collapse, its unnecessary stress generation in people processes with no safeguards putting the governance machinery at risk of complete failure.
A university could try pinning all the human impact an organisational fault like that solely on a new VC, the university might then struggle to recruit its next VC. Every leaders worst nightmare is to lead an organisation with a complex, embedded, organisational fault that the whole organisation needs to work together to find a solution to in an organisation that is prepared to turn around at any minute and to blame the leader for the existence of the organisation fault and all the impact that continues to flow from it whilst they are in the process of trying to find a solution to it.
VC Hermione Grainger of Hogwarts University seems very happy.
Just sayin’.
That little Christmas piano performance was our version of the Emperor fiddling while Rome burns.
Professor Deborah Present-but-not-Involved
present but criminally negligent
I used to work in Kazakhstan. Still have friends at KIMEP, ENU.
Years ago, one of them explained to me how the regime used to divide people in to two categories. The lambs; and the fish.
The fish — are the ones you can kill en masse, and they simply remain silent.
But the lambs; they can be a problem.
You can still kill them, of course. But it is just that when you do, they make a lot of bloody noise.
I hope that our Welsh colleagues will prove inconveniently loud lambs, and not silent fish.
This is being driven by the banks. It’s caused by the burden of debt for buildings, along with the lack of offering for international students.
All those new buildings on Maindy Rd have big debt repayments.
The VCs forgot a basic thing. It may not be a good idea to take out a loan/bond when interest rates are low, because these rates usually go back up.
(Same story in Newcastle)
FYI COD C.J.
[…] as long as their own actions remain secret [Poster on ‘Prancing Butchers’ thread here […]
[…] Cardiff University has an exceptionally poor record in health and safety. There is already evidence of a pre-existing problem with regulation of organisational workloads when Cardiff University was in a more financially stable state, given the sad deaths of Dr Mark Jervis & Dr Malcolm Anderson. Exploring and tackling the entrenched work pressures at Cardiff University—linked to Dr. Jervis’s death—might have helped prevent Dr. Anderson’s suicide less than four years later. The present Executive Board of Cardiff University seems to have handled the financial difficulties in an exceptionally callous and chaotic manner, as discussed earlier here. […]
[…] outdone itself, even in a sector famous for grotesquerie. Faced with a £31 million black hole, the grand solution of Vice Chancellor Wendy Larner was, of course, to start hacking away at subjects like nursing, […]