From top left, clockwise: Karen Cox, Shearer West, Paul Greatrix, Margaret Monckton
This week saw the horrible news that Nottingham University 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.
9 Comments
Xerxes · 16 May 2026 at 13:49
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.
TheResearcher · 16 May 2026 at 15:33
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…
Pandas · 16 May 2026 at 19:21
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.
SK · 16 May 2026 at 15:32
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).
21percent.org · 16 May 2026 at 18:22
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
SPARTACUS · 16 May 2026 at 18:13
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!
TheResearcher · 16 May 2026 at 18:18
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.
Eileen Nugent · 17 May 2026 at 00:08
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.
Julien · 16 May 2026 at 21:01
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.