Strike ballot at King’s College London over proposed job cuts

Is Kings College copying Queen Mary University of London? I have put together a lot of information on my website (including 20 items published in the Times Higher Education) over the 2012 restruction at QMUL. http://fanis.fisio.cinvestav.mx/styled-4/styled-7/styled-13/index.html Beware what happens when academics no longer control university governance. Financial managers see students primarily as an income source. It is not uncommon for detached managers to think that anyone can teach students as what they are being taught does not affect their balance sheets. Have a look at what happened to Cell Biology teaching after I was sacked in a similar exercise and judge for yourselves. http://fanismissirlis.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/sbcscellbiology/ Naturally, I have signed the petition in hope there are still some reasonable voices within Kings College that can help prevent further disaster. There is urgent need to rething UK Higher Education policy. https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/rick-trainor-stop-kcl-health-school-redundancies

Using grant income as a proxy for staff quality indicates that KCL has completely lost any sense of the purpose of an academic institution. As Fergus Millar noted a while back, people are now doing research in order to get funding, when they should be seeking funding in order to do research. This is not good for research or researchers. It just encourages people to rush into applying for grants, as expensive as possible, regardless of whether they have a good idea, and regardless of whether they have time to do the research properly. We should be rewarding research which delivers good value for money, not research which simply generates grant income. See http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/why-does-so-much-research-go-unpublished.html

My own further reactions: my blog: Rick Trainor receives an annual remuneration of £321,000. He should be asked to return every single pound he has received from this institution for the damage he is inflicting upon Kings College and its students. twitter: #academicvalues lost: managers @KingsCollegeLon debate colour of redundancy letter What colour for Rosalind Franklin? Green chains to hell… David Colquhoun's Improbable Science blog: An institution is as strong as its constituents are. The reason that the UK has become hostile to science and scientists is simple. It has taken away their institutions and handed them to profiteers. Many of the traditional freedoms – required for any university to serve its purpose – are now serving a small cast to make their small fortunes, on the back of students and academics. Their sufferring has not been brought to light, perhaps because Journalists are also facing their own managers and legal supervisors.