From top left, clockwise: Karen Cox, Shearer West, Paul Greatrix, Margaret Monckton
This week saw the horrible news that Nottingham University has sent letters to 2,700 staff putting them at risk of redundancy. The university is targeting subjects and departments with low staff-to-student ratios, specifically including physics, medicine, health sciences, modern languages, history and music. This is being carried out under the present Vice Chancellor, Jane Norman, and her senior leadership team. Job cuts in universities have long targeted arts, humanities & social sciences. Actions at Nottingham clearly show that “blue skies” science is next.
Who is responsible for the financial distress that Nottingham finds itself in?
The financial crisis stems from poor decisions under the previous Vice Chancellor Shearer West. The guilty people have all moved onward & upward, leaving the present staff facing consequences of poor management.
The financial problems are closely tied to a major property expansion strategy that went badly wrong. A central example is the Castle Meadow campus, which the university bought in 2021 for around £37.5 million and then spent tens of millions more refurbishing, bringing the total investment to roughly £80 million. The aim was to create a flagship city-centre site focused on business links and research partnerships, expanding the university’s presence beyond its existing campuses, predominantly in Beeston.
However, within a few years the value of the site dropped dramatically, forcing a write-down of tens of millions of pounds and contributing heavily to the deficit. The situation became particularly stark when, shortly after the campus fully opened, the university began trying to sell it, having concluded that the costs of running such a large estate were unsustainable.
The university had assumed continued growth in student numbers and stable income, especially from international fees, and invested heavily in buildings on that basis. When those assumptions failed, it was left with high fixed costs tied up in physical assets that could not easily generate returns. At the same time, Nottingham already operated multiple large campuses, so adding another major site increased complexity and ongoing maintenance costs without matching demand. This is an elementary financial misjudgement, for which the then Registrar (Paul Greatrix) and Chief Financial Officer (Margaret Monckton) must bear some of the blame.
Alongside the property strategy, there was also a problematic and costly IT programme. Nottingham attempted a large-scale transformation of its digital and administrative systems. The aim was to modernise everything from finance and HR to student administration, replacing older systems with a unified platform. However, the project ran into major difficulties. It became significantly over-budget and delayed, with implementation problems disrupting core university operations. Staff struggled with new systems that were not properly bedded in, leading to inefficiencies, workarounds and a loss of confidence in the rollout. This was overseen by the then Deputy Vice Chancellor, Karen Cox.
Like the property expansion, the IT programme reflected the same underlying issue: a belief that large upfront investment in infrastructure would deliver long-term efficiency gains. Instead, costs escalated, delivery was messy and the expected benefits were delayed or not fully realised. Combined with the property write-downs and income pressures, it became another strand in a wider pattern of over-ambitious expansion and weak financial resilience.
Where are the people who presided over these catastrophic decisions?
Shearer West was Vice Chancellor at the University of Nottingham from 2017 to 2024. She joined the University of Leeds as Vice Chancellor on 1 November 2024. Her current salary is listed as £338,250.
Karen Cox left Nottingham to become Vice Chancellor of the University of Kent on August 2017. As Kent’s financial position also became increasingly precarious, she resigned on May 2024. In February 2026, the near-bankrupt University of Kent legally committed to merging with the University of Greenwich, as reported here.
Paul Greatrix spent 18 years as Registrar of the University of Nottingham, leaving in August 2025 to become Director of Higher Education Consultancy at the law firm Shakespeare Martineau. They act as ‘insurance lawyers’ for many universities.
Margaret Monckton was Chief Financial Officer at Nottingham for eight years, leaving in December 2024. She is now Chief Financial Officer for Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
Interesting how often IT problems snowball into major financial problems. Cambridge is not immune from this with its now highly delayed ‘MyHR’ software. Costs are surely building in this debacle.
Problems in Cambridge? These are just rumours… Things are fine, ask Kamal Munir!
I received an email today that reads, “A new Staff Wellbeing Action Plan sets out clear responsibilities and practical, achievable actions to support the development of a mentally healthy and supportive working environment at Cambridge…As an employer, Cambridge aspires to create a culture in which everyone can thrive and where wellbeing is an integral part of the working environment.”
How lucky Cambridge staff is for actions like this. Of course, it is never said how Cambridge staff itself, namely HR, contributes to the mental health problems of other Cambridge staff, but this is likely confidential. Ssssssssh…
The problem seems to be that the people in charge of contracting know nothing about IT even on the most basic level. Apparently even basic file operations are a struggle. Computer contract blowouts are downstream from a deficiency in human intelligence, and clearly no magnitude of pay increases for admin managers can fix that.
There’s a complete disconnect between expertise and power and authority.
There clearly is no shortage of human intelligence in places like Cambridge. But “ask the expert?” – oh no, administrators are now the experts on everything, i.e. subcontracting everything to outside consultancies, rather than drawing on the available wealth of knowledge and competence.
Disregard for freedom of speech and misplaced confidence in hierarchy mean that alternative views, informed suggestions or – god forbid – criticism are “dealt with” rather than gratefully accepted as the most sensible way forward.
The IT upgrades that are massively over-budget seems to be pervasive. I.e. University of Edinburgh spent millions (up to tens of millions) on implementing Oracle-based People and Money. That lead to students and contractors not being payed, not knowing the grant budgets for two years etc. I wonder if there is a story there, i.e. who was pushing the universtities to these complex systems that barely work and require massive payments to consulting companies implementing all that (and obviously a lot of money to big big companies like Oracle).
Very good point. Sheffield University also had an IT debacle
“The more you look into something, the more complex it becomes. And then the project leader felt like we needed to get more staff to look into that complexity, so we just snowballed the number of business analysts and spending started to go up so dramatically. Then we got in a lot of contractors and we started to have a lot of churn of those contractors, so they acquired a lot of knowledge and then they would leave,” the insider added.
There was another change in project leaders. Meanwhile, the director of IT services was an interim contract, leaving the whole IT department, “directionless,” our source claimed.
Unsurprisingly, the plan for integration also hit problems. “Every time you explore the idea of only sending back a simplified data structure, you run into the problems: namely that there’s no documentation to help you understand which systems use which data items,” the insider said.
“It’s only once they tried to build these integrations, which we always knew would be difficult, did we realise you’ve got to do the hard stuff first. Sometimes that’s easier said than done, only with hindsight do you know exactly what the hard things are. But fundamentally, they didn’t deal with some of the hard questions early on,” the insider said.
Continuing with complex projects despite setbacks has been characterised as a typical manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy, where time and money already invested in projects is used to justify future spending.
At Sheffield University, a new director of IT services, Bella Abrams, joined in 2019. Following her arrival, it was realised that one of the main reasons for doing the project in the first place – statutory reporting – had become unnecessary.”
https://www.theregister.com/software/2021/11/16/sheffield-uni-cooks-up-classic-it-disaster/1384737
Very funny, but also very sad as Sheffield is also making redundancies
It’s an interesting point — maybe there was some consultancy company pushing all these IT projects on universities
The IT system at Nottingham (UniCore) is also from Oracle. It looks like it was designed by HR and for HR. It is useless at everything else.
After Nottingham, the Chief Digital Officer, David Hill, was hired by the University of Cambridge
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-hill-uoc/
Everybody seems to be surprised! At UCam you had a worthless Little Canadian Lawyer (not) running the show. Now you have a totally clueless, mediocre and idiotic American Queen! So the place rots and decays! 800 years down the sewer!
You will love this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/feb/08/cambridge-risks-losing-unbelievable-talent-amid-phd-funding-cut
“PhDs are the lifeblood of so much of what we do here,” she said. “They’re critical to our education mission. They’re the worker bees that power the research mission. They’re critical to our innovation mission. They are the genesis of many a startup company and we’ve got to be able to fund them. We lose unbelievable talent because we can’t fund it.”
Someone should tell her how PhD students are expelled in her institution. I am sure Lord McDonald already told her, but let’s pretend she does not know.
The sad thing about UK academia is that the theory behind expansion of student numbers was to stabilise universities for anyone interested in solving difficult problems – academic or real-world – requiring focus on long timescales in academic environments conducive to doing that.
The expansion of student numbers meant that universities were bringing in increasing numbers of people less interested in solving difficult problems – academic or real-world – that then needed to be taught by people – staff – more interested in solving difficult problems which not only was less enjoyable for that group but also meant it was more difficult for that group to find others – students – more interested in solving difficult problems & that the group of people – staff and students – more interested in solving difficult problems also had less time to focus on solving difficult problems themselves because more time was being focussed on teaching increasing numbers of people less interested in solving difficult problems.
In the end expanding student numbers didn’t work to stabilise universities & the people most interested in solving difficult problems are the ones being made redundant from universities or not being funded to do PhDs in universities which are instead planning to do even more student expansion to “stabilise” universities i.e. to bring even more people who are less interested in solving difficult problems into universities.
Universities in the UK appear to be expanding – numbers of people in them is increasing – but universities in the UK are contracting – numbers of people in them matched to academia who can focus on long timescales to solve difficult problems is decreasing. Universities are being hollowed out, redundancies of academics & reduction in funded PhD studentships are clear evidence that universities are contracting. More money is being spent on universities for less overall power to solve difficult problems – academic or real-world – requiring focus over longer timescales.
Look at Nottingham University, how much time was wasted on suboptimal property development and now – physics, medicine, health sciences, modern languages, history and music – all being cut for what – for more suboptimal property development and more university “expansion” that is university contraction? Not even advanced property development, not even ground breaking property development, not even financially and environmentally sustainable property development – sub-optimal property development, destabilising property development left in a distressed state for some property developer to hoover it up & flip for a quick profit.
Some people are sensitive to status/prestige but also sensitive to what it takes to maintain or raise status/prestige – building reciprocal relationships, maintaining/raising standards, putting in significant effort in to get things of value done. Some people are sensitive to status/prestige & are attracted to organisations with status/prestige but are not sensitive to what it takes to maintain/raise status/prestige i.e. are not interested in building reciprocal relationships, are not interested in standards or in maintaining/raising standards, are not interested in putting significant effort in to getting things of value done & happy to outsource all difficult learning/ problems to AI/others or to unfairly dump work/difficult problems on others so they can have more time in the high status/high prestige environment to play around in that high status/high prestige environment they are attracted to & do whatever they want to others in that high status/high prestige environment. Having increasing numbers of people sensitive to status/prestige but not sensitive to what it takes to maintain/raise status/prestige is how organisations become less healthy environments to work in, how organisational standards degrade & how organisations stop getting things of value done. If increasing numbers of people in universities want the status/prestige of a university degree without the doing of any difficult learning or without the solving of any difficult problems then this is not going to result in increasingly healthy university environments, in standards increasing in universities & in universities getting more things of value done.
Conditions in universities are so unforgiving that if a person stalls at all they are a goner – have to drive through, become drive itself – there is no alternative otherwise the the situation in universities cannot be turned around & momentum cannot be built in universities in the right direction.
The conditions were unforgiving, I was dismissed from position after position in different parts of the collegiate university, head of department was not happy, HR was not happy …. but I spent years in the Rutherford Building in the Cavendish Laboratory and every day I looked up at the portrait of Ernest Rutherford and I remembered where he had come from & what his approach to science had been and when times were tough I thought there is no way Ernest Rutherford would have left HR to manage his relationships with other physicists and there is no way Ernest Rutherford would have left a job half done ….. if conditions are unforgiving and a person stalls they are a goner ….. if conditions are unforgiving it is necessary to drive through to a higher state of function ….to drive it through …. and when conditions are more forgiving there will anyway be more overall forgiveness to go around and maybe head of department will forgive, HR will forgive ….. in unforgiving conditions there is no alternative but to drive and to build more drive in order to increase drive until get to the level of drive needed to get out of the unforgiving conditions.
Ernest Rutherford (“the Crocodile”) would have been embroiled in continuous HR investigations if he was working at Cambridge University today
Oh, wait, he was head of department, wasn’t he. So, it’s his critics (like James Chadwick) who would have been stitched up.
Rutherford and others would be rather surprised and disappointed with the current state of UCam. The place is run by incompetent and corrupt people, and very many simply look the other way. I liked this that you recently posted in X,
“If your average VC were either (A) completely incompetent, but meant well and believed in the purpose of universities, or (B) completely corrupt but very clever at navigating economic and political realities, UK HE would probably still be doing ok.”
What makes the difference between a competent and a less competent academic Head or Leader is the ability to retain enough independence of thought to consider it possible that the HR Business Partner might be telling porkies, use misleading language and have their own agenda, to retain enough integrity to align their decision making with the institution’s statutes, and to retain enough authority to query and insist on further information, explanations, evidence and on being allowed to read “confidential” reports.
Though I really do not want to appear unreasonable I am not entirely sure Nottingham was ever world class. The list of world class universities destroyed by poor management would probably include Sorbonne, ENS, and at a stretch for the UK, Dundee, Newcastle or Reading, though I suppose Cambridge is at risk of one day joining in the Sorbonne category.
Although it can be difficult and complicated, given the size of universities, range of staff, ambitions, egos, department dynamics etc., the ‘how not to do’ the core people interaction part of running a university has been clear for years. An extract from ‘The Impact of Management’ in Section 4 of Alan Bryman’s 2007 report for the Leadership Foundation reads as follows –
‘In Stevens’ investigation of English academics, satisfaction with relationships with managers was one component of the non-pecuniary aspects of their jobs that was found to have an impact on propensity to leave UK higher education (Stevens,P.A. 2005). The limitation of such findings is that it is hard to establish precisely what it is about management practices that academics are dissatisfied with and precisely who the managers are, about whom questions like these are being answered.’
‘Some insights into the aspects of management practices that are viewed as contributing to job dissatisfaction and stress are provided by Kinman’s survey of UK staff for the Association of University Teachers (AUT) (Kinman, G. 1998). Among the factors that Kinman identifies are: the emergence of more business-oriented approaches to running higher education institutions; increasing bureaucracy; less sensitivity among managers to staff needs than in the past; greater tendency to employ non-participative approaches to decision- making; reduced consultation; and aggressive management styles. Kinman and Jones later identified ‘poor management and bureaucracy’ as a commonly expressed reason for staff considering leaving higher education (Kinman, G. and Jones, F. 2004)’.
Problems are mounting at King’s College, Cambridge.
Close on the heels of the Simon Goldhill scandal, another Fellow of King’s College has now been exposed as a sexual harasser.
Geophysicist Herbert Huppert has been stripped of his Fellowship following multiple complaints, including allegations of harassment, inappropriate touching and sexually explicit language.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/cambridge-kings-college-professor-herbert-huppert-fellowship-0x25n72l2
Surely Provost Gillian Tett will say something soon.
Dear 21 Group… please do not forget to mention his Department. I am sharing below a message from the Head of DAMTP on 10/11/2023 to all staff that can be useful to put things into prespective. Yes, this is from 2023, and I was expelled in 15 days after the report of a sham investigation against me after I made reports of harassment and research misconduct at DAMTP.
“Dear all,
I trust you are keeping well. I regret to inform you that I have had to restrict significantly the access to CMS of the retired member of DAMTP Professor Herbert Huppert FRS, effectively to the immediate period (+ 10 minutes before and after) of relevant seminars/events which he has been given explicit permission to attend. I would ask that if you encounter him at other times, and especially at any time in the office parts of the pavilions, that you contact reception immediately.
Thank you
Colm-cille Caulfield
Prof. Colm-cille P. Caulfield
Head of DAMTP”
Pretty sure the source of this leak was identified in the last thread…. the press have someone by the cojones (or maybe huevos) and are now milking them for every story they can. Though with an oddly high concentration on Kings College one must say….
Golden browne, finer temptress
Through the ages she’s heading west
From far away
Stays for a day
Never a frown with golden browne
The best part is that every leaker can offer 2-3 stories and from these leaks they get at least one new snitch ready to offer 2-3 more simply to save their own skin.
It is a chain reaction… and boom!
Is there any Fellow from King’s who has recently been involved in a major Employment Tribunal scandal and may not want that story to be published? Hmmmm, let me think… wait, can it be the same individual who was supposed to be the “Responsible Person” of my report of research misconduct in DAMTP and I had to embarrass her because she could obviously not act as “Responsible Person”? Wow, it would be hilarius if she thinks that her own story will not be known!
If you want to leak stories to the press, the best committee to be on is the HR committee. Lots of Kompromat.
Hmmm, who is in the HR Committee really? Let me check…
Chair:
Professor Kamal Munir
Members:
Dr Kirsty Allen
Professor Jude Browne
Joanna Cheffins
Professor Andrew Flewitt
Dr Michael Glover
Professor Julian Hibberd
Professor Nigel Peake (Deputy Chair)
Professor Ricardo Sabates Aysa
Professor Alan Short
Mr Tom Welchman
Professor Jocelyn Wyburd
p.s. I already sent an email to Financial Times giving them the good news on their “UK’s best employer” and, for completeness, cced Professor Munir. Now I will be even more expelled!
When I saw the GOT link in the earlier threads I thought it was the American queen but now all of a sudden it makes a lot more sense.
Huppert’s Department is Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics.
The department at the centre of the Nuno Oliveira Scandal
Sssssssssssh it is confidential!
Note that Colm-cille P. Caulfield is one of 10 people who wrote ‘witness statements’ against me, statements that I never saw, the “Disciplinary Committee” took them as absolute truth and expelled me 15 days after the hearing took place. Moreover, note that the Chair of this Committee is Professor Graham Virgo, Master of Downing College and, importantly in this context, Professor of English Private Law. He should know a bit of law, like hmmmm let me think, not providing all the evidence to respondents is against natural law, but what do I know… UCam became a irrational place!
It’s wrong to call it the Nuno Oliveira Scandal as he is the victim. Scandals are named after the perpetrator. It is their name which is immortalized. What about the Caulfield Scandal ?
My story involves so many people that it is hard, and unfair, to pick one name only. Professor Caulfield, for example, got involved from 2024 only. However, if I had to pick 1 name, then it must be the Goldstein Scandal because Professor Goldstein FRS was the first to cover up and manipulate me, knowing that I trusted him. He too wrote “witness statements” against me.
What is Prentice doing? What is Council doing? What are the Pro-VCs doing? Their regime is FINISHED! They should all RESIGN! Or Regent House should call an emergency meeting and expel them!
Who was the Head of DAMTP in 2018 when the reports of sexual harassment against Herbert Huppert were upheld? And who was the Lead HR Business Partner of the School of Physical Sciences at the time? tick tock tick tock tick tock
Do not miss the Employment Tribunal 1–28 June 2026 at Bury St Edmunds!
Answers 1 The Peakophant, 2 The Most Discussed …
Who was VC in 2018: Little Canadian Lawyer!
Who is VC since 2022: American Queen (a.k.a. Second rate psicologist).
No need to know more!
Lunatics in charge of the asylum!
All of this is certainly very titillating, and for the record, I believe it is (on balance) a good thing that those responsible for misconduct are forced to take some responsibility for their bad behaviour. Yet, none of this would have happened in quite this way, if HR had simply provided a fair and efficient means to investigate the complaints that were put before them. That is where responsibility needs to be held.
Put differently, we urgently need an external audit of HR practices in UCam, and those from the senior leadership who resist against such an audit should be named.
With the volume and nature of the various cases, this seems entirely reasonable. If I was still working as the Administrator of one of the departments/Institutes there, I would be at a loss as to how to explain to staff, academic, professional services and students, what the university’s position was and how they could be safeguarded from speaking up.
“how they could be safeguarded from speaking up.”
When Dr Catherine Mackenzie – chair of the Board of Scrutiny – was substantively unfairly dismissed, got a re-engagement order from an employment tribunal & the university refused to comply with that re-engagement order – was Regent House made aware of this and the potential implications for every member of staff? what did Regent House do? can Regent House name one action it took?
When Dr Anita Faul spoke up to the whole of Regent House after having had to speak up to the principal external university regulator – Office for Students – as recorded here – https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2019-20/weekly/6577/section6.shtml – what did Regent House do? can Regent House name one action it took?
If the academics in a university won’t give a fellow academic rights no amount of administration is going to give an academic rights. That is what these two cases show – an administrator can run every administrative process in the organisation & it makes no difference to the outcome. It also does not reduce the probability of another case being generated in future and an administrator having to run every administrative process in the organisation again. Academics in a university not giving a fellow academic rights is a constant drain on organisational resources.