Cardiff cuts: ‘They don’t grasp what university means for Wales’

Wales’ higher education landscape could be “devastated” by the large-scale cuts announced by Cardiff University, academics have warned.

Researchers have described the atmosphere at the institution as one of “shock” and “fear”, where “students have had to comfort their crying lecturers” as the impact of the savings programme is felt by staff.

Last week Cardiff announced that 400 academic full-time-equivalent roles are set to go and said that compulsory redundancies would be handed down “if absolutely necessary”. Courses in ancient history, modern languages and translation, music, nursing, and religion and theology are expected to be scrapped, with a 90-day consultation now under way.

“This is devastating for Wales, and it actually indicates a misunderstanding of the importance of higher education in Wales by the current university leadership, which just doesn’t seem to have appreciated what the university means for Wales,” said Joey Whitfield, a senior lecturer in Hispanic studies and chair of Cardiff’s University and College Union branch.

The city’s MPs – including Jo Stevens, the secretary of state for Wales – have released a statement outlining their “deep concern” about the move and its impact on the city and local economy.

Hundreds of members of UCU branches protested outside the Senedd on 4 February in an already-arranged protest over the funding crisis in higher education, amid warnings that the aggregate deficit across Wales’ universities could hit £70 million.

Christie Margrave, a lecturer in French at Cardiff, argued that the planned cuts placed the university in “direct contradiction” with Welsh government policy.

The Labour-led devolved administration announced a “Global Futures” plan in 2022 to “improve and promote modern foreign languages” by expanding the teaching of modern foreign languages in schools, but the cuts “directly contradict Wales’ international strategy, and undermine Cardiff’s role in supporting the linguistic diversity that is critical for the regional economy, for the teacher pipeline, and for our international partnerships”, she said. 

Cardiff is the only member of the prestigious Russell Group in Wales, Margrave pointed out, adding that “cutting languages, nursing and music from the only Russell Group university in Wales seriously risks damaging Wales’ presence within that powerful institute and Cardiff’s international reputation”. 

The university is the largest higher education provider in Wales, with over 32,000 students, with the next largest institution being the University of South Wales, at about 26,000 students. As the largest and most academically prestigious institution, it is host to a range of courses unavailable at any other university in Wales, including Portuguese and Japanese.

“If all of modern languages are cut here very soon, this could lead to the end of modern foreign language degrees in Wales,” Margrave added, with UCU claiming that the university is responsible for around 60 per cent of all higher education language tuition in Wales. “The Welsh capital city is essentially telling [language students] that they’re no longer welcome here,” Margrave said.

Meanwhile, while the university has tried to offer reassurance that the cuts will not interrupt the flow of nurses into the NHS, Ben Hannigan, a professor of mental health nursing, said this will be “impossible” should the cuts go ahead. 

The Royal College of Nursing has been vocal about the shortage of nurses in Wales, and warned that the decision has the potential to “threaten the pipeline of registered nurses into the largest health board in Wales”.

Nursing is not taught in isolation, Hannigan added, explaining that cutting the nursing department will affect courses throughout the wider School of Healthcare Science. “There’s not a neat nursing box that can be cleanly excised,” he said, adding that if nursing academics were cut, it would leave “jagged holes” for occupational therapy studies, physiotherapy and radiology, among other programmes.

The cuts at Cardiff come amid a particularly damning few weeks for the sector, with Swansea University also announcing staff cuts of £30 million last week, on top of 342 staff members who have left the university in the past year and a half.

“It’s a death by a thousand cuts,” Hannigan said.  

While Cardiff has promised to teach out courses to remaining students, Margrave warned that it was “inevitable” that optional modules will be “severely diminished” by staff redundancies, “so students might get to continue their degree, but it’s not going to be the degree that they applied to come and do”. 

Questions further hang over what will happen next to the university’s community engagement projects that are carried out by impacted departments, said Flint Dibble, a lecturer in Cardiff’s School of History, Archaeology and Religion. 

The school collaborates with cultural institutions including the National Museum Cardiff, but also undertakes community engagement programmes including its CAER Heritage Project, which engages the local community with one of the largest and most complex Iron Age site in Britain. While the future of these projects is unknown, Dibble said, “I can’t see how it would be good.” 

Whitfield compared the future of Cardiff University to an “airport bookshop”. 

He said: “What kind of bookshop would you want to go to: a large, sprawling bookshop, with lots of books…or do you want to go to the airport or motorway service bookshop, where you end up with only the bestsellers, and every bookshop looks identical? I think that’s the same sort of thing as what Cardiff’s ambition is.”

Announcing the cuts last week, Cardiff vice-chancellor Wendy Larner said the university’s financial situation – it reported a £31.2 million deficit for 2023-24 – meant that “it is no longer an option for us to continue as we are”.

She blamed declining international student applications and increasing costs for the institution’s predicament, but promised that the restructure would create “a slightly smaller university, refocused around our core and emerging strengths”, and acknowledging that the proposals “will cause a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety for those potentially impacted”.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com