Your editorial on the university funding crisis (11 February) rang painfully true from inside a crumbling old campus building opposite a shiny but soulless new campus expansion. We have known this crisis was coming for years. While staff numbers have been cut in administration and teaching, and funding available to staff and postgraduate researchers reduced, class sizes have simultaneously exploded and campus experiences have been hollowed out, including removing fieldwork teaching and scrapping essays for undergraduates in my own humanities department.
The university has been whitewashing its tomb, with millions spent on new campus buildings while budgets are being cut to the bone. The story has been the same everywhere, and vice-chancellors and ministers who have overseen this crisis will face no consequences for what they’ve done to a sector that was once genuinely world-leading.
