The vice-chancellor and the executive board of the University of Leicester are facing a vote of no confidence following the university’s announcement that it was looking to cut 60 posts with 145 staff at risk of redundancy to secure its long-term future.
According to the BBC, vice-chancellor Nishan Canagarajah said the university needed to "cease activity in a limited number of areas" over the next few months in order to build on its "key strengths" and "invest in people and infrastructure". David Harvie, who works in the university's business department and is part of the union, said staff are already overstretched and redundancies will make that worse.
He said, "Staff at Leicester University were already facing a triple workload crisis. A year ago we had unsustainable workloads. Then the pandemic came along - the university leadership responded by abandoning more than 160 casual staff - there was no reduction in work, there was more work and that work was shunted on to the remaining staff. We will be contesting these redundancies in every way that we can."
