University of Manchester to Dump 400 to Clear £30m Debt. (March 20,
2007)|
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News & Views item - March 2007 |
University of Manchester to Dump 400 to Clear £30m Debt. (March 20,
2007)
The University of Manchester has amassed a £30m debt in the course of the merger between the Victoria Manchester University and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (Umist) in 2004.
The matter is of local Australian interest if it is remembered that Glyn Davis' immediate predecessor as the vice-chancellor of The University of Melbourne was Alan Gilbert who was invited to assume the President/Vice-Chancellorship of the combined universities in Manchester.
The Guardian reports:
A letter sent to all staff on March 2 by the university's president and vice-chancellor Alan Gilbert explained the background to the debt and the need for job cuts.
A third of the debt was predicted following the merger of the two universities, and another £10m was due to a deliberate decision to move further into the red to build up the new university's research base. The remaining £10m can be attributed to the 10 per cent rise in the payroll following national wage settlements between 2005 and 2006 and the doubling of energy costs, he explained.
Professor Gilbert said the decision to transform a "very good university into a world leader" was "always going to involve genuine, effective 're-profiling', not just spectacular growth."
He said: "So while we continue to recruit researchers, scholars, teachers and support staff, and invest in those already here, we must also find ways to enable other colleagues, less comfortable with Manchester's ambitious 'step change' agenda, to leave the university voluntarily and with dignity."
The vice-chancellor promised there would be no compulsory redundancies.
A university spokesman confirmed 400 jobs were to go across the board and he denied that the university was secretly hoping that lecturers would step forward.
Manchester was against a recruitment moratorium because it was committed to identifying and attracting "virtuoso" appointments, he said.
The long-winded explanation may be summed up by, "we invite the dead wood to push off".
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Taken from Newsweek's 2006 list of "Top 100 Global Universities" |
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| 1. Harvard University 2. Stanford University 3. Yale University 4. California Institute of Technology 5. University of California at Berkeley 6. University of Cambridge 7. Massachusetts Institute Technology 8. Oxford University 9. University of California at San Francisco 10. Columbia University 11. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor 12. University of California at Los Angeles 13. University of Pennsylvania 14. Duke University 15. Princeton University 16. Tokyo University 17. Imperial College London 18. University of Toronto 19. Cornell University 20. University of Chicago 21. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich 22. University of Washington at Seattle 23. University of California at San Diego 24. Johns Hopkins University 25. University College London 26. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne 27. University Texas at Austin 28. University of Wisconsin at Madison 29. Kyoto University |
30. University of Minnesota Twin Cities 31. University of British Columbia 32. University of Geneva 33. Washington University in St. Louis 34. London School of Economics 35. Northwestern University 36. National University of Singapore 37. University of Pittsburgh 38. Australian National University 39. New York University 40. Pennsylvania State University 41. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 42. McGill University 43. Ecole Polytechnique 44. University of Basel 45. University of Maryland 46. University of Zurich 47. University of Edinburgh 48. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign 49. University of Bristol 50. University of Sydney 51. University of Colorado at Boulder 52. Utrecht University 53. University of Melbourne 54. University of Southern California 55. University of Alberta 56. Brown University 57. Osaka University 58. University of Manchester |
Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranks Manchester, 50; ANU, 54; Melbourne, 78; Sydney, 102-150
Newsweek explains: "We evaluated schools on some of the measures used in well-known rankings published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Times of London Higher Education Survey. Fifty percent of the score came from equal parts of three measures used by Shanghai Jiao Tong: the number of highly-cited researchers in various academic fields, the number of articles published in Nature and Science, and the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices. Another 40 percent of the score came from equal parts of four measures used by the Times: the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of international students, citations per faculty member (using ISI data), and the ratio of faculty to students. The final 10 percent came from library holdings (number of volumes)."
Click here to see the full list of 100.
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