Veeeeeeery much agreed! I'm actually at King's, so I'm well acquainted with what has been going on there. The shutting down of that chair is very publicized, but in some ways not even the most egregious of the cuts that the administration there wants to make.
At one point earlier this year there was a proposal to make every faculty member in the School of Arts and Humanities reapply for their jobs, a proposal which was defeated by the union. But apparently the same tactic was pushed through in the Biology Department there, where they made the faculty reapply and basically "sell themselves" by making their research and teaching sound tailored to the administration's ideas of what was "marketable." The whole thing was a farce because in the space of this restructuring there were fewer job spaces made available than there were faculty originally employed, so those who couldn't make themselves "saleable" enough ended up loosing their jobs anyway.
The whole thing is an absolute nightmare, hence the need for people both inside and outside academia to speak out and speak out loudly.
At one point earlier this year there was a proposal to make every faculty member in the School of Arts and Humanities reapply for their jobs, a proposal which was defeated by the union. But apparently the same tactic was pushed through in the Biology Department there, where they made the faculty reapply and basically "sell themselves" by making their research and teaching sound tailored to the administration's ideas of what was "marketable." The whole thing was a farce because in the space of this restructuring there were fewer job spaces made available than there were faculty originally employed, so those who couldn't make themselves "saleable" enough ended up loosing their jobs anyway.
The whole thing is an absolute nightmare, hence the need for people both inside and outside academia to speak out and speak out loudly.
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