In October 2024, students and staff at Dundee university received the shock announcement that the institution was crippled by a financial deficit of over £30m. The future looked very uncertain for everyone, and staff were told to expect massive job cuts.
After more than four months of staff uncertainty while the university’s ‘executive group’ (UEG – another term for the senior management team) worked on a ‘recovery plan’ – in ‘cooperation’ with creditors and accounting monopoly Ernst & Young – management announced its intention of moving forward with ‘Plan A’.
Striking staff force retreat and investigation
This would require forced redundancy of more than 700 full-time-equivalent staff posts, which managers claimed was the only way of avoiding total closure. Dundee’s University and College Union (UCU) branch responded by calling a three-week strike, which brought public attention and scrutiny to the situation and forced the UEG to change tack.
It then proposed to make 300 voluntary redundancies as a first step towards its cost-cutting goals, while refusing to rule out compulsory redundancies at a future date.
Even as this proposal was outlined, however, 20 staff members found themselves facing compulsory redundancy, provoking a further one-week strike by UCU members. At the time of writing, despite having been balloted, neither Unite nor Unison had taken any action.
Even acting alone, the lecturers’ strikes proved pivotal in pushing for an outside investigation into the circumstances that had brought the university to such dire straits. The ‘Investigation into financial oversight and decision making at the University of Dundee’, also known as the Gillies report, was published on 19 June.
Professor Pamela Gillies concluded that the university’s financial collapse had not been caused by any deed or misdeed by faculty members (who are nevertheless being asked to pay the price), but was a result of the top-down corporate nature of university management (some of whom are paid ten times the average salary of the university staff), their rash spending, lack of accountability and general recklessness in pursuit of personal gain.
This was all exacerbated by the collapse of the lucrative ‘international market’ for students, on which so many universities have become reliant in recent decades. A drastic (but not unpredicted) reduction in international student numbers, particularly those hailing from Nigeria, China and India, who are charged exorbitant fees, began to hit hard from January 2024.
The report vindicated the striking staff, commending them for their solidarity and discipline. Strike action was undoubtedly a major factor in forcing the UEG to back away from its initial plans for immediate mass lay-offs.
The strikes and subsequent report pushed the Scottish administration into action. It agreed a £40m funding package for the university over two years, and all threat of compulsory redundancy has been lifted (although 300 job cuts are still planned). (Dundee university to receive a further £40m support, BBC News, 24 June 2025)
None of those who have reaped dividends from the commodification of the education system will be asked to pay back their ill-gotten gains. One or two members of senior management will be named, shamed and blamed, but the wider issue of what has been done to our universities across the board will remain unresolved.
Dundee may have been saved (for now), but there is every chance that other universities are in similar straits and will end up going to the wall – unless public sentiment, working-class activism and/or national interest dictate that they are ‘too big to fail’, in which case the taxpayer will once again be forced to step in and pick up the bill for the mess left by private interests.
Parlous state of British higher education
The state of higher education across Britain shows that the marketised, debt and speculation driven model introduced by the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is now sinking, and taking many of our universities down with it.
They were able to get away with charging exorbitant international student fees so long as a degree from a British university was seen as something worth paying for, bringing advantages in the job markets back in the students’ homelands. Now that countries like China have built up their own higher educational institutions to internationally-respected levels, however, this source of income is bound to dry up.
In the meantime, however, the English language has been a factor that attracted students, to the great benefit of British universities from whom government funding has been gradually withdrawn since 1981, leaving them dependent on student fees and research grants.
The fact that the British government, in support of its multinationals that feel threatened by competition from Chinese business, engages in endless anti-China rhetoric and discrimination is also no doubt a factor in driving Chinese students elsewhere. If Chinese students applying to British universities have fallen by 37 percent, those applying to Australian universities has increased by 18 percent. There has also been an increase in Chinese students applying to Irish universities.
And so an entirely predictable crisis has arrived, and the workers employed in Britain’s higher education institutions find that they may be forced to pay the price for the disastrous privatisation policies of governments and senior managers – all of whom have been acting not in the interests of students or society generally, but on behalf of the privateers who have been milking the system for everything they could get.
Ultimately, this private-interest-focused, capitalist model of higher education has led many universities to the brink of financial ruin, reducing academic and ethical standards in the process.
It is clear that while education ought to be a public good available to all, leading to the development of both individuals and society as a whole, under the present system it is no such thing. For as long as capitalism remains in place, workers and teachers alike will continue to face uncertainty, struggle and debt in their bid to access or provide this essential service.
What’s more, while our education system continues to have its lifeblood sucked by the vampires of finance capital, Britain will continue to fall further and further behind world leaders like China in its ability to produce scientists and engineers, in its ability to generate industrial and technical innovations, and even in its ability to produce the kind of skilled workers needed to maintain a modern industrial base.
