I knew my highly appreciated colleague Suzie had decided to take voluntary redundancy. And I knew one of the biologists had also quit; she wanted to seek her fortunes further south. And I knew that the management of the School was chasing three more redundancies. To us, that looked like a bloodbath, and it also didn’t seem to add up with the financial information we had. We had compiled a big document that detailed all that, and made sure that both the people making the final decisions about how the University would effect the budget cuts, and the union, received it. And then we could do nothing but wait. And then suddenly there was a message from the Head of School. He called a meeting.
In the meeting, which was also attended by the Dean, he told us that we had been correct and that no further redundancies were needed. We could all keep our jobs! And that was good news. But we were angry about how this whole process had played out. Several of us made that very clear.
After that meeting, we had another small meeting without management. This was quite a big moment! And I had to do a bit of recalibration. I never expected the job losses would be as bad as management had made it sound, but I didn’t expect no further redundancies at all either. I had already made partial peace with losing my job! And now that peace went out of the window again.
I may very well not stay in academia until my retirement, but it would be foolish to quit my job while my arms weren’t functioning properly, we were in the middle of the pandemic, and BREXIT was looming. So I was going to stay! So soon this blog will be back to reporting on frantic distance learning in the new semester!
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