A year ago, Imperial College London made redundant 21 staff from its medicine faculty, in order to deal with projected budget deficits. Now the university wants similar cost-cutting measures in its life sciences department, and says 14 staff positions are at risk of redundancy in plant sciences and cell biology.
But students are trying to stop the restructuring plan – perhaps emboldened by protests on tuition fees and, earlier in the year, on the UK’s science budget as a whole. They say that Imperial hasn’t considered the impact its cuts will have on teaching. Hundreds of staff and students attended an explanatory meeting on 8 December, when plants were symbolically laid outside to mourn the sections being cut (pictured).
On Wednesday 15 December, the students will protest again and ask the university’s highest educational body, its College Senate, to freeze the redundancies until a teaching review – currently expected after the restructuring – is completed.
The proposals, which staff were consulted on from July, are made on considerations of research competitiveness and financial performance (such as citations per head and research income per head). They aim to halt the Life Sciences department’s predicted 2010/11 deficit of around £1.5 million, a press officer explained in July. Two sections, Plant & Microbial Sciences, and Cell Biology & Functional Genomics, are to be scrapped in favour of a new ‘Integrative Cell Biology’ section.
Critics have already charged, as the Times Higher Education reported in October, that Imperial used the wrong metrics to identify which sections to scrap in the first place. Now a paper that students will deliver to the College Senate says that those being made redundant account for 25% of the undergraduate teaching hours for biology and biochemistry – meaning that the department will suffer as a whole.
“There will be no significant changes to courses in life sciences this academic year, nor to the breadth and depth of degrees offered in the longer term,” an Imperial spokesperson said.
Imperial College’s student union has links to all the documents here.