Yesterday, our member Prof Mahesan Niranjan sent us a copy of an open letter that he sent to the Chair of Council. He asked us to circulate it to our members, and to urge them to circulate it to other members of the university community and beyond. He has given us permission to reproduce it here, so please find the text below, without further comment.

School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton

12 December 2017

Dr Gill Rider,
Chair of University Council.

An Open Letter on Recent Happenings

As I mentioned in an email last week, the University attracting media spotlight for the wrong reason concerns me greatly. I know that very high salaries paid to a small number of people at that top of organisations, which is a national problem, cannot be addressed by targeted attacks on a few individuals. I also know that it is usual to maintain “stiff upper lip” over salary paid to a colleague. Hence our own Vice Chancellor’s salary is not a topic I would comment on.

But there are more serious issues at stake that make me write this, and fundamental to what I write are two observations:

1. University is about scholarship. We are a community of scholars in the pursuit of discovering new knowledge and in its dissemination, both to the wider society and to the junior members who come to study here. We educate by stretching their minds. Our research is driven by intellectual curiosity. Scholarship being our core business, academic staff are our revenue generators.
2. In a research active university like ours, there is significant subsidy from teaching income to research. Research grants do not cover their full cost (FEC) and are subsidised from the block grant (QR) and student fees. To a certain extent this subsidy is justified because unless we engage in cutting edge research, we cannot educate students at the frontiers of knowledge. But universities have pushed this too far, paying for highly expensive research which ought to be funded either directly by the Government (e.g. MRC’s Laboratory for Molecular Biology) or by industry (e.g. Drug discovery research at GSK). When this subsidy to research is high, we cannot give our students the attention they deserve — and pay for — resulting in diminished quality of education.

I submit that drifting away from a recognition of the above two factors is what has caused the current unhealthy situation in which the Sector is attracting much media focus and public anger nationally, and we see much frustration and unhappiness among staff on our own campus.

Since my short tenure as Senate appointed member of University Council ended in August, I have no formal position to raise issues of concern directly with you. Hence this open appeal.

1. I ask Council to consider announcing that while the University will honour the present Vice Chancellor’s contract, in future appointments we will set a salary cap of £ 200,000 for this position and scale down other senior salaries similarly. Let us take the lead and set an example to the Sector and declare in our advertisement that we in Southampton do not take pursuit of financial reward to be an indicator of talent.
2. I ask Council to intervene and persuade management to reverse the decision to target Voluntary Severance on selected disciplines. If the primary problem we are trying to solve is a financial one, it makes better sense, in the first instance, to run a VS scheme campus-wide so the shock may be absorbed by the whole community. Should that not achieve the reduction necessary, we can scale down selected areas in line with demand for those subjects. But why do this over such short timescale? At the high level, in theory, we are running a ten-year plan with admirable long-term thinking, but in practice, at the implementation level, we are acting in haste, giving people just ten weeks to decide on a VS offer.
3. I ask Council to take a closer look at the subsidy between teaching and research. Are we engaged in expensive research in Highfield and other loss-making projects in faraway places? Is it fair that the financial burden of these — however prestigious they are — be borne by our students incurring long-term debt? Let us work towards closer integration between teaching and research so that expensive research in some areas is not subsidised by teaching income from others.
4. I ask Council to intervene and change the discourse on our campus, from one that continuously sees academic staff merely as salary costs, to one which sees us as revenue generators, achieving it through our scholarship. Shortly after the VS scheme was announced, I met three colleagues from one of the targeted areas. They were in shock. They had no idea that their subject area was financially weak. Over the years, they have had no information from which they could have worked it out and taken part in the planning process that could have re-built their areas. This is because much of the planning within Faculties happens with minimal transparency or consultation, which in turn is because staff do not feature in our discourse as revenue generators. An attitude change here would increase engagement to the benefit of us all.
5. I ask Council to persuade management to suspend the appraisal system which in its present form does not appear to be fit for purpose. Insistence on a sharply peaked distribution of quantified performance is the biggest demoralising factor on campus at present. I am aware several colleagues, including myself, are working hard to resist the thought “if after doing so much I am slapped with a 3/5 and declared mediocre, should I not do less next year?” I myself will not be reducing my efforts because I am driven by intellectual curiosity and my commitment to my students, but the offence I suffer serves no purpose. “It is a waste of time,” an appraiser agreed with me, “it is a waste of time,” that appraiser’s appraiser also agreed with me. “Why then are you guys doing it?” I asked. “Because that is what we are told to do,” say both! In a good university such as ours, lost productivity due to diminished morale may outweigh any gains from a badly designed system of performance management. Please, let us not take that risk.
6. I ask Council to create conditions in which the Ten Year Plan is owned by — and felt to be owned by — the entire University community, than as a top-down adventure imposed upon them. I myself am fully persuaded by the necessity of it and was supportive of it throughout its planning stages which overlapped with my tenure on Council. Across campus, I see very little awareness and buy-in from colleagues. Hence, I ask that the group working on its implementation be expanded with five colleagues elected by Senate to play a role in effective consultations, and to have a say in prioritising projects.

Dear Gill, at the start of this academic year, I emailed you and the Vice Chancellor with a photograph of an overcrowded class with my students stood at the back and seated on the aisles. You may recall that I ended that email with the comment: “Forgive me, I write because I care.” You were gracious in your reply, saying “Niranjan, I know you care.”

The effect of your acknowledgement was magical. My subject of Machine Learning is taught under testing conditions, with class size doubling, students admitted without sufficient scrutiny of their mathematical background and suggestions for improvement often rebuffed by middle management. Yet, I am pleased to say, I pulled it off, receiving a long applause at the end of the module, evaluation only slightly damaged (4.6/5, down from 4.8/5) and a student commenting: “One of the greatest and most stimulating module I had at University, in my 4 years.”

I do not say the above to blow my own trumpet. I hope it illustrates that our commitment to students and acknowledgement by university leaders of what we do well can be far more effective than top-down management and the neat “bell curve” of appraisal scores. The former is the best way to get the most out of the business of scholarship we are here for, and the latter is the way to kill it.

My position while making this plea remains exactly the same (“I write because I care”), and I very much hope your acknowledgement of it does not change either.

I also hope that sharing my thoughts openly with you and our University community might help shift the current mood on campus from one of anger to one of dialogue and debate, and that collegiality — a pillar of our strategy — is not perceived by the community as simply a catchphrase.

Yours Sincerely,

Mahesan Niranjan
Professor of Electronics and Computer Science

It’s been another busy week for the local branch, as you no doubt will have gathered by the number of emails dropping into your inbox.  We had our monthly branch executive meeting, as well as a more open meeting for reps and volunteers – running the national pensions campaign at the same time as trying to keep abreast of our considerable and ever-growing local issues is a huge ask, so we are grateful for every offer of help we receive.

We would have had an important meeting about facilities time on Monday, rescheduled from as long ago as August, but it was cancelled at only hours’ notice by management. “Facilities time” refers to the hours worked by union officials and volunteers on union business – including negotiation, casework, and representation – and the recompense for that work received by Faculties and Academic Units.  Given the huge increase in the amount of work we are now covering this meeting has been high on our priority list, but alas, we have not been offered a new date.

The Chief Operating Officer’s email of 4 December 2017

As members will know, on Monday we received a response to the questions we put to senior management on 22 November. While it contained little information that was not already in the public domain, it did contain a rather astonishing passage:

Thank you for your email of the 24^th November 2017 requesting the information you would like to see that supports our decision to offer a voluntary severance scheme to six areas of the University.

You have requested the information for the purposes of collective bargaining. I must emphasise that we have launched a targeted voluntary severance scheme and are not consulting with you about proposals to dismiss as redundant 20 or more employees. As such the University does not have a duty to provide the requested information and will not be providing minutes of meetings or details of meetings where decisions were taken. [our emphasis]

Keep this in mind. We will come back to it in a minute.

The Chair of Council’s email of 1 December 2017

As every employee, and anyone who listens to the news or reads the papers, will know, the Chair of Council sent an email to all staff on 1 December, saying that the Vice-Chancellor did not sit on the committee that awarded his pay in 2016 – in a statement that the University has since been forced to clarify in the national press.  We leave it to readers to decide whether or not the intent to mislead was deliberate, but we reproduce the text here, and ask our readers to note the verb tense (English – one of the departments under threat – teaches very useful critical reading skills). The email sets out a situation that is impossible: the Remuneration Committee as described could not have set, regularly reviewed, or agreed the Vice-Chancellor’s pay for 2016, since it has only been in existence since September 2017:

The Remuneration Committee followed a core principle of transparency around Sir Christopher’s pay. Therefore we simplified it to pay one overall figure, not the complex remuneration packages that others have of salary, bonus and various other allowances, including the usual 18% employer pension contribution, which get reported in different ways.

Our governance

We have rigorous and effective governance in place relating to Vice-Chancellor pay. His salary was benchmarked, set and is regularly reviewed and agreed by the University’s independently chaired Remuneration Committee, which reports to the University Council. The Vice-Chancellor is not a Member of the Remuneration Committee and he only attends by invitation to discuss other business. We have always been transparent about his pay, internally and externally. Members of the Remuneration Committee and Council are acutely conscious of the responsibility we have for ensuring appropriate remuneration, and are sensitive to the healthy public debate about remuneration levels, equality in wages, value for money, and reward for responsibility and performance.

The rest of the substance of the email was an attempt to justify the Vice-Chancellor’s salary, which has increased by 71% since 2009 and 30% since 2015 (£253K in 2008/9, £332K in 2014/15; £433K in 2016/17).  We find it curious that the rhetoric used to justify senior management pay always invokes the private sector (“But if we want a world-class leader, which we have in Sir Christopher, remuneration has to be set accordingly. During our search it became very clear that Vice-Chancellors in the USA, Asia and Australasia earn significantly more than in the UK”), while at the same time the rhetoric used to minimize increases in all other university workers’ pay invokes public sector pay restraint.

Responsibilities of senior management

At the bottom of Dr Rider’s email is a link to The University Council web pages which, if followed through, leads to the Statement of the Council’s Primary Responsibilities.  This is an interesting document.

Para 2.6 states that Council has a responsibility “to conduct its business in accordance with best practice in university corporate governance and with the principles of public life drawn up by the Committee on Standards in Public Life.”

Para 3.2 states:

• The President & Vice-Chancellor’s actions will be consistent with the principles of public life, known as the Nolan Principles, drawn up by the Committee on Standards in Public Life.

• The President & Vice-Chancellor will act at all times to further the best interests of the University, its staff and students, and will be mindful of the importance of preserving the University’s reputation.

Para 3.6 states, “Paragraph 3.2 above states that the President & Vice-Chancellor’s actions shall be in accordance with the principles of public life. Likewise, the actions of the Vice Presidents, the Chief Operating Officer and the Deans will be consistent with the principles of public life, known as the Nolan Principles, drawn up by the Committee on Standards in Public Life.”

The Nolan Principles

It is clear from the above that all members of Council and all members of the senior management of the University have a clear duty to abide by The Seven Principles of Public Life, known as the Nolan Principles.  These are:

1. Selflessness
Holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest.

2. Integrity
Holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. They should not act or take decisions in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.

3. Objectivity
Holders of public office must act and take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias.

4. Accountability
Holders of public office are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.

5. Openness
Holders of public office should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.

6. Honesty
Holders of public office should be truthful.

7. Leadership
Holders of public office should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs.

Some questions

We ask our readers to consider:

• whether the Chief Operating Officer’s email of 4 December 2017 demonstrates the fourth and fifth principles, accountability and openness, or whether it in fact, demonstrates the opposite, refusing to reveal information he is not legally obliged to reveal.
• whether the Chair of Council’s email of 1 December 2017 demonstrates that Council and senior management adhere to all of these principles: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership.
•  whether senior management’s behavior in relation to their employees in NETSCC, described in our blog on Tuesday, demonstrates the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh principles: objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership.
•  whether the Vice-President for Research’s unilateral decision to remove all gathering and use of data by central Professional Services teams from the oversight of the Ethics Committee demonstrates the second, third, fourth, fifth, and seventh principles: integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, and leadership.
• whether senior management’s inability to ensure that its appraisal system is fairly operated according to our negotiated agreement, and its longheld stance that it was not in contravention of that agreement, demonstrates the third, fourth, fifth, and seventh principles:  objectivity, accountability, openness, and leadership.
•  whether senior management’s continued endorsement of a discriminatory process of module evaluation, and the use of the data it produces in the evaluation of its employees’ performance demonstrates the third, fourth, and seventh principles: objectivity, accountability, and leadership.
• whether the institution’s woeful record on response to Freedom of Information requests  demonstrates the fourth, fifth, and seventh principles:  accountability, openness, and leadership.

Precedents for community action have been set at Birmingham and Bath, and our students are readying their own all-student vote on senior management’s plans for the future. The University – all of its members, students and staff – can, and should, demand better from our Council and our senior management.

It’s been a very busy couple of weeks at Southampton UCU HQ, for obvious reasons.  There is quite a chill about. We might even say, winter is coming.

We would have liked to have updated you on progress made in conversations with senior management, but that is not possible.

On 22 November, representatives from all three campus unions met with the Vice-Chancellor, the Chief Operating Officer, two of the three Directors of HR and the Head of Employee Relations.  We were joined by the Vice-President for Research.  The Vice-Chancellor left the meeting after half an hour.

At this meeting, a set of questions was put to senior management.  We repeated the questions five times, and were refused an answer each time. The Chief Operating Officer then told us that we should put the questions in writing.

This we did, in an email sent on 24 November. Since the information should have been readily to hand, we allowed 48 working hours for a response.  We were sent a holding message on 27 November, but we have not had any further communication from senior management on these issues.

As voted for unanimously at our EJNC on 15 November, we also asked again for the Voluntary Severance Scheme to be opened to all members of staff at the University. We further requested that the deadline for the Voluntary Severance Scheme be extended to 31 March 2018, which would allow staff to consider their positions in the new Faculty and School structure – the full details of which will not be known until mid-February.

Since we have had no response, we thought it would be acceptable to allow our members, if they so wished, to repeat the questions in their own communications with senior management.  You will find the text of the email below.

From: UCU U.
Sent: 24 November 2017 15:59
To: Vice-Chancellor
Cc: Dunn I.; Hollowbread S.C.; Ciarleglio A.; Bradley A.E.E.
Subject: Formal follow up to meeting on 22 November

Dear Sir Christopher

Further to the meeting held on 22 November 2017 with yourself, Ian Dunn and representatives from HR, the purpose of which was to provide “an opportunity for the unions to seek clarity on the proposals regarding the size and shape of the University as set out in the Vice-Chancellor’s All Staff Address on Monday 13 November”, we are formalising our questions about how the areas in which Voluntary Severance has been offered have been determined.  In the meeting, you requested that we write to you to formalise our inquiry.

Could you please provide us with the following for the purposes of collective bargaining:

1. The minutes of the meetings at which the selection of the six academic areas (Music, English, Chemistry, Law, Social Sciences and Tribology) was decided;
2. A record of the precise grounds on which the decisions were based for each of the six academic areas (Music, English, Chemistry, Law, Social Sciences and Tribology);
3. The statistical data to support these decisions for each of the six academic areas;
4. The date on which the minutes of these meetings were accepted;
5. Details of the targets set per Faculty and per academic unit, outside of the six academic areas identified, as part of these projects;

We believe that the university should already have the information requested, so we believe that it is reasonable to expect a response to the points raised above by 5pm Tuesday 28 November.

As explained above, UCU is requesting this information for the purposes of collective bargaining.  As we discussed in the meeting with you on Wednesday 22 November, we are also requesting that this information is circulated to staff in each of the six academic areas (Music, English, Chemistry, Law, Social Sciences and Tribology).  As you know, staff in these areas have been told that they have until 14 December 2017 to consider whether they would like to apply for the Voluntary Severance Scheme.  We believe that it is in the interest of these staff members, as well as the interest of University of Southampton, for staff to have all of the relevant information, so that they can make informed decisions about potential applications for Voluntary Severance.

As we mentioned, from feedback at our general meeting on 15 November, our members are concerned at the lack of engagement from University Management with its staff and the lack of transparency surrounding these proposals.  The sharing of the information requested in this letter, would be helpful to reassure our members that the University of Southampton is prepared to engage with openness and transparency about these proposals.

We would also like to re-state our request that the VS Scheme be opened up to all staff, and this was unanimously supported by UCU members at the meeting on 15 November.  In addition, we are requesting that University of Southampton considers extending the deadline for applications to the Voluntary Severance Scheme to 31 March 2018, to allow for decisions to be based on the full disclosure not only of the information requested above but also the detailed structure of the new Faculties.

We look forward to hearing from you with a response to this request, by 5pm on Tuesday 28 November 2017.

Southampton UCU Executive Committee

We hope you find this information, such as it is, useful.