Angela Daly describes the role of unions in responding to the recent fiasco at the University of Dundee, and their power to shape alternative systems of university governance.

It has been a wild six months at the University of Dundee. Until autumn 2024, university management reassured staff and students that despite ‘pressures’ on the UK university sector due to inflation and changes to international student visas, and in contrast to the crisis then unfolding up at the University of Aberdeen, our financial position was relatively good. Then in November the (now former) Principal Iain Gillespie announced that, no, the finances were not good at all, and instead the University of Dundee had a colossal £20-25 million deficit. The figure now being quoted is £35 million. How the financial position can change so suddenly is the mystery at the heart of the saga. After his announcement, Gillespie resigned, and various other senior managers have also tendered their resignations. Wendy Alexander, Vice Principal International, left soon before the deficit announcement to take up a peerage. Professor Lisanne Gibson, Vice Principal of Research, is moving to Northumbria University. Professor Blair Grubb, Vice Principal of Education, will retire in July. The University Secretary, Dr Jim McGeorge, is “on leave”.

Not much more was heard until February 2025, when staff in a few University research centres received notice that we were at risk of redundancy. I am among them. This was soon followed in March with another announcement from University management that 632 full-time equivalent staff would be made compulsorily redundant as part of a so-called ‘Recovery Plan’. It was later clarified on 31 March that this would equate to more than 700 people losing their jobs.

Union Power and Union Vigilance

Management claimed that UCU’s action was ‘premature’ as at its beginning ‘only’ the redundancies in research centres had commenced. But during the period of our action management announced the full 632 FTE redundancies and other wrecking measures to university activity in research and teaching. Our action in UCU, far from being premature, precipitated a political intervention in the unfolding crisis which resulted in Dundee’s interim Principal, acting Chair of Court and interim Finance Director being hauled before the Scottish Parliament’s Education Committee for an explosive session on 19 March 2025.

The admissions that the session heard about financial mismanagement raised at least as many questions as they answered. However, the cross-party consensus on the enormous scale of the problems at Dundee, the unacceptability of the numbers of proposed compulsory redundancies, and the need for intervention were all made clear. Immediate outcomes included a funding line for the University from the Scottish Government via the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) to tide us over till September, an independent investigation sponsored by the SFC into what went wrong, and more Education Committee sessions involving other members of senior management from 2024, including former Principal Gillespie. We in the campus unions will be pleased to see these steps unfold. We will remain vigilant to ensure that both our university leadership and the SFC and Scottish Government work with us on a genuine recovery, including in the new multistakeholder ‘taskforce’ which the Government has just announced.

The University of Dundee is currently in the worst financial situation of any university in the UK. The utterly dire situation our management has caused is not the fault of staff and students, and it should not be us that suffers – in terms of staff redundancies, knock-on negative effects on our students’ teaching and learning, or the city of Dundee which counts the University as one of its biggest employers, and a key player in its cultural, economic and social life.

For the UCU branch, then, this was no ‘ordinary’ strike, but action for the very existence of our university and for Dundee more broadly. Politicians who visited our pickets included Cabinet Secretary for Education Jenny Gilruth who came to see us after meeting management about the crisis, and we are continuing to lobby MSPs and MPs from across the political parties, within and outwith Dundee. While still ‘on the table’, the Scottish Government has said that 700+ severances is an unacceptable number. In any event, university management has so far been unable to secure commercial loans to cover any redundancy payments – whether statutory or voluntary – so the Scottish Government via the SFC remains its only financier. And as the old saying goes, “he who pays the piper calls the tune”.

Another University of Dundee is Possible

In the face of this adversity, the university unions have been thriving. UCU membership has surged. In the absence of open and transparent management, unions have been taking the lead to inform the community as best as we can about what is happening. We are confronting the political and economic aspects of the crisis and formulating alternatives to rescue the institution. Hybrid ‘town halls’ hosted by all three unions are bringing together staff, union members or not, to discuss and listen, while management remains distant. Every day we hear that union-sceptical staff have come round to us and have appreciated unions’ genuine, longstanding and ongoing commitment to the university’s survival and future flourishing. As our power and profile increase, we in the unions have also experienced a backlash from management, which has attempted to impede our activities, in particular our attempts to communicate to and with staff in the University’s constituent schools and divisions. We view this as a sign of management’s weakness and that our approach, not theirs, is gaining legitimacy and authority.

While the situation at Dundee is particularly acute, we also see our crisis as symptomatic of broader trends in managerialism and diminishing democratic governance in higher education in Scotland and the UK more widely. Authoritarian managerialism has failed now for the second time at Dundee. Two consecutive Principals have resigned due to financial issues. The previous Principal, Andrew Atherton, resigned in 2019 after a 10-month tenure due to a dispute with the University over rent payments for his residence in University House. That house is now on the market as part of Dundee’s fire sale of property and assets. The University Executive Group of Vice-Principals and other ‘top’ executives is a shadow of its former self, in severely diminished form. The oversight body, University Court, also saw its Chair, Amanda Millar, resign earlier this year, amid speculation that the Court had not properly held the Executive to account.

Further evidence of the drive for a new approach has been the election of Maggie Chapman, Scottish Green MSP and Scottish Left Review deputy convenor, to the position of Rector. Elected by the matriculated student body, the Rector can sit on University Court and represent student interests. Ms Chapman has been a strong and outspoken critic of the University of Dundee management, and has pledged to ask difficult and challenging questions about the institution’s running. This will be a welcome change from what seems to have been a largely compliant Court in a period where such a watchdog should have been biting as well as barking.

This crisis has raised broader questions about the kind of education that universities like Dundee ought to provide. The initial ‘Recovery Plan’ that presented staff with the prospect of 700+ redundancies identified ‘professional’ education as an area that the university should focus on as part of its recovery, along with diminishing research activity at the university, particularly that which was ‘unfunded’, i.e. not funded from external grants. In disciplines like the humanities where external funding is scarce, much research is funded by no more than academics’ salaries, and in practice often takes place after hours or on weekends due to high teaching workloads. Nonetheless, such ‘unfunded’ research enriches the teaching we offer, as we can draw on our research insights to share up-to-date and at times cutting edge knowledge. Given external research funding is often driven by market logics, unfunded research can often be more innovative and daring. Without this research, the vision of education at the ‘recovered’ University of Dundee is rather bleak, with non-‘professional’ disciplines sidelined, the research-teaching nexus diminished, and explorative un-marketised research discarded.

The Scottish Government is stepping in, but bigger change is needed. The structural failures that our situation exposed must also be addressed. The tinpot authoritarianism from university management — in our own institution and elsewhere — is a microcosm of broader shifts in our politics and society towards top-down governing with a decreasing role for dissenting and critical voices. The groupthink this produces exacerbates the problem. Senior managers were telling us There Is No Alternative to the 700 job cuts with neither money nor political support to make the cuts. A more democratic approach is part of the solution, involving more input from staff and student bodies, including unions, and fewer executives parachuting in for short tenures with limited stake in the university and its wider community. The University of Dundee is the canary in the coalmine. Unlike the coal mines, it must be reborn as a genuinely sustainable, democratic and community-embedded education institution. Another University of Dundee is possible and we are fighting for it!

Angela Daly is a Professor of Law and Technology at the University of Dundee and member of the Dundee UCU branch committee.