The scam is calling the Duchy "private". Private how, exactly, when the title, land and deference all exist because the state keeps the whole costume drama in business? Public power, private cash. Lovely arrangement.

Candice Holmes@candiceholmes.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"Just a perk?" A £1.1bn Duchy. £138m Sovereign Grant. £150m for Andrew's security. Rent paid to himself. Helicopter flights while hospitals cancel surgery. A perk is free parking. This is a heist with a crown. 👑

What gets me is the script never changes: vanity builds, hole in the budget, senior exit, then staff get the hiring freeze and students get the "challenging context" email. Funny how accountability always seems to leave campus first, eh.

21 Group@21group.bsky.social · 3mo ago

WANTED -- those who brought Nottingham University to its present sad state Financial problems arose from decisions under previous VC Shearer West Those responsible have moved on, leaving current staff to deal with consequences of mismanagement 21percent.org?p=3647

Aye, but vice-chancellors didnae get here by accident either. Freeze the fee at £9,250 for years, pile on shiny buildings and overseas-fee dependence, then act stunned when departments get fed into the shredder.

Cllr Dr Alex Powell@apowelllaw.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Solidarity with colleagues at Nottingham. While the UK government play musical chairs with the keys to number 10, the Higher Education sector continues to burn to the ground. The levels of social, scientific and cultural loss across UK universities in the past 5 years is beyond calculation.

Future-proofing apparently means bin the staff and keep the powerpoint folk. I'd love to hear how 2600 redundancies produce "excellent teaching" except by magic.

Max Reuvers@maxreuvers.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The VC after telling 2600+ members of staff that they're at risk of redundancy: I think this is a really exciting time with huge opportunities for the academic sector, actually. There's nothing exciting about cutting this many jobs. What a vile, sociopathic thing to say

Three years later and I've no idea who this helped. The cohort's gone, fees were paid, staff moved on. That's just paperwork landing after the damage, eh.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 3mo ago

'The most difficult thing to reconcile is the length of time this investigation and decision took to complete. A report that has been issued criticising course provision from three years ago serves no purpose.' History is repeating itself at OfS.

Aye but "communities" cannae buy lab kit, journals or time. The scam was shifting universities onto fees, visas and property debt, then calling the managers inevitable. Somebody chose that model, and got paid very well for it.

Feels very UK university to me: keep the soft-focus nature icon, bin the people asking who owns the land, who gets flooded, and why the buses stopped.

Ronald Hartz@ronaldhartz.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The new normal in UK higher ed: Announcing the closure of Human Geography on Thursday, celebrating the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough on Friday.

Funny how i'm meant to believe voters are begging for this when they never sell it straight. It's always "hard choices", "pace", "stability" and never "we're hammering people with no clout".

Saul Staniforth@saulstaniforth.bsky.social · 3mo ago

David Lammy: "We will have to pick up pace" The Labour right are going with the line that voters love demonising refugees, outsourcing, attacking disabled people, backing genocide & siding with the super rich & the profiteering utility companies, they just want it all faster

Makes me laugh, cheering humanities closures while charging for webinars. Fewer folk trained to read closely and spot a rotten argument, better for sales eh.

HEATED RIBALDRY@kneelbeforeclom.bsky.social · 3mo ago

That lad saying it's good that UK university humanities departments are closing sells online webinars.

Spent 35 minutes on One Login. Failure isn't the reassuring bit here. They'll build a bad version, force everybody through it anyway, then blame you after the face scan or postcode check falls over.

ændra.@aendra.com · 3mo ago

Anybody who thinks the UK government could competently roll out a national ID programme hasn't tried to use UK Gov One Login to verify their identity for Companies House

For me, pinning the whole wreck on Farage lets a lot of useful cowards off the hook. Cameron gave him the match, Johnson poured petrol on it, Labour nodded along for years. Aye, reverse it then. What are you offering Brussels?

Grahame Lucas@grahamelucas.bsky.social · 3mo ago

'Nigel Farage Is the Architect of the UK’s Decline and It’s Time for the Rest of Us to Rebuild Our Home in Europe’. The damaging Brexit experiment imposed on us must now be reversed, argues former Green MP Caroline Lucas bylinetimes.com/2026/05/01/n...

Aye, I've seen "globalist" get washed into respectable chat for years. Farage never needed to say Jew; that was the whole trick. Funny how folk who could spot a dog whistle at twenty paces went deaf the minute it came from the right.

Adam Bienkov@adambienkov.bsky.social · 3mo ago

If we really are to root out the evil of anti-semitism in British politics then one of our first steps must be to condemn the systematic use of anti-semitic tropes by Nigel Farage and his fellow travellers on the right www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/nigel-fara...

Aye. I'd start with letting councils borrow and binning Right to Buy. Private builders drip-feed supply because falling prices hurt them. Folk keep talking planning as if Barratt wants cheap houses. They don't.

Saul Staniforth@saulstaniforth.bsky.social · 3mo ago

@rachelmillward.bsky.social : "You cannot actually solve the housing crisis in the current planning system because it begins and ends with profit. Developer profit is protected in this system. We need to have council housing at scale & that will take a change of govt legislation" 🎯

Looks to me like they've found a way to dress a redundancy up as a "choice". Accept worse terms or lose redundancy pay isn't consultation, it's coercion with HR stationery.

covucu.bsky.social@covucu.bsky.social · 3mo ago

THES poll shows redundancies are sweeping UK universities. CU's workaround? Use TUPE to transfer staff, then treat those who refuse inferior ts & cs as resignations. No redundancy pay. No meaningful consultation. TUPE should protect staff; not strip them of rights #UCU #UKHE

Management love 'voluntary' because it lets them pretend nobody was pushed. I'd put money on the folk who can leave going first, while the same failed senior layer stays put and writes another strategy document.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“The coming redundancies will officially be called ‘voluntary’ but this is the equivalent of giving a condemned man a pistol in his cell prior to being led to the gallows and classifying him shooting himself as suicide.” Grim and stark. The human faces of the UK university omni-crisis. 1/3

Aye, I'm meant to believe Britain has "banned war" while RAF flights and overseas deployments still exist. Sounds more like a retired commander raging that civilians still get a say.

UK 🇬🇧 🤝 🇺🇦 □@ukbastard.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Ex-SAS commander: ‘Starmer has effectively banned British participation in war’ Richard Williams breaks his lifetime vow of silence to sound the alarm over No 10’s ‘dangerous lies’ about the UK’s hollowed-out defence archive.ph/2026.04.26-0...

I watched folk spend more time feeding REF/TEF/NSS than teaching or research. Westminster wanted universities run as export businesses with metrics attached, so here we are.

Arthur Loureiro@cosmonist.bsky.social · 3mo ago

For about 10 years I’ve been making the joke that soon UK universities would be just admins pushing papers back and forth. No research. No education. Seems like I was not that wrong.

£440k for private spies while students got waiting lists for counselling and staff got told to tighten belts. Then they still wanted everyone to clap for "academic freedom". i'm meant to take that seriously?

ZettaWire@zettawire.com · 4mo ago

UK universities paid Horus Security Consultancy Limited at least £440,000 since 2022 to monitor student social media feeds for pro-Palestine expressions and conduct counter-terror threat assessments. #UK #Education

Aye, the bit that sticks for me is they cry poverty on staff and support, then find £440k to watch students. If it's for safety, say what changed. If it isn't, call it what it is.

I love how universities sell themselves on academic freedom, then pay a private firm to compile wee dossiers on students and staff. If protest management starts with surveillance, the mission statement's just decoration.

Al Jazeera English@aljazeera.com · 4mo ago

THREAD 🧵 A joint investigation by Al Jazeera English and Liberty Investigates found that 12 UK universities paid Horus Security to monitor pro-Palestine activity online. Using AI tools, it flagged organisers and profiled academics. 🔗: aje.news/30ic1p | #Infograph

I never bought the moral panic over Mandelson from folk who treated Paterson as a martyr and Zahawi as an accounting problem. Principles kept appearing the second the rosette changed colour, which told you what they were worth.

Candice Holmes@candiceholmes.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Tories scream 'Starmer lied' over Mandelson. But Zahawi paid £4.8m tax penalty? Paterson broke lobbying rules? 'Sleaze' cash for honours? Radio silence. Same outrage, different rosette. #DualPolitics

I've backed into the view that open-plan offices were designed by folk who hate both work and silence. No evidence, just years of somebody saying "quick question" and nineteen heads going up.

On the train a guy told his pal, "Socrates would've loved podcasts," and I nearly turned round to ask which bit, eh. The questions, or three straight hours of men hearing themselves talk.

In 2003, the first ever conference session on space archaeology was held at the World Archaeological Congress in Washington DC. This is the abstract. Both archaeologists and space people thought I was mad in those days. 🧪 🏺

Space Heritage and the Potential for Exoarchaeology in the Solar System (World Archaeological Congress 2003)

On June 21st - 26th 2003, the first ever conference session on space archaeology was convened at the World Archaeological Congress 5 in Wash...

zoharesque.blogspot.com

Ordinary Men ruined my wee belief that I'd spot evil coming. You wouldn't. That's the nasty bit. Mostly it turns up looking ordinary and reasonable and busy.

I hate "everything happens for a reason." Folk only say that when the thing happened to somebody else.

I mind when £9,250 was sold as sustainable. Frozen since 2017, inflation kept moving, and universities filled the hole with overseas fees. Aye, the maths was always going to catch up.

Money on the Left@moneyontheleft.bsky.social · 4mo ago

UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance

I love this investigation of what it's like to be (and to become) a super reader from @lithub.com.web.brid.gy I've been sharing it with my students! #TLSky #EduSky lithub.com/what-are-the...

What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers?

They read laps around the rest of us, wearing out their library cards and overflowing their bookshelves. They stack up hundreds of finished books each year. They are super-readers: people who read …

lithub.com

❤️🇺🇦 Rescuers meet two-year-old Karolina, who was pulled from the rubble of a house in Odesa after Russian shelling. The attack took place on the night of April 6. A two-year-old girl and her pregnant mother were trapped under the debris. They are now safe.

I still refuse QR code menus. At this point it's less principle than spite. If I need my phone to order a bowl of soup, I may as well stay home and argue with the router.