There’s no way round it: the redundancies are necessary
Rector Brian Bech Nielsen can’t give any guarantees, but he believes that the cuts will place AU on a firm financial platform, enabling the university to avoid further redundancies in future. He also concedes that the redundancies will have an impact on our research.
When announcing the number of redundancies, you said you hoped the cuts wouldn’t affect our core services. But how will you ensure that? We’re going to lose almost 400 members of staff.
“The senior management team is convinced that the university can handle the current situation in such a way that it won’t affect the quality of our degree programmes. But the same thing doesn’t apply to our research, because some of our researchers are going to be on the list. We’re going to lose them.”
According to the table of planned dismissals and voluntary retirements that’s been published, Arts and BSS are going to suffer less than Health and SciTech. Would you like to comment?
“I can quite understand why you ask, because that’s what it looks like when you take a quick glance at the table. But as shown in the other table, the cuts have been distributed in relation to the turnover at our main academic areas. And each individual management team has been asked to find out how to make cuts in their particular area. One of the things Arts and BSS have decided to do is reduce the number of part-time staff. So if you add these part-timers to the tenured staff who are going to be fired at Arts and BSS, you get a fairer picture of what’s going to happen.”
Everyone’s asking whether it stops here. Will there be more redundancies in the next couple of years?”
“These redundancies are needed to put us back on a safe financial platform. And as you know, we’ve put a buffer in place to allow for future fluctuations so we can manage possible bumps in the road ahead. But nobody can give the kind of guarantee you’re looking for. Nobody can predict the future, and unforeseen events might occur in the world around us that could have major consequences for the university. What we’re doing now is to establish a good foundation with a view to preventing major cuts from being necessary again.”