Senior staff members at Greenwich University are understood to have been suspended after a restructure of the university’s architecture department.
Three senior staff members within the School of Design have reportedly been suspended with immediate effect. The suspensions come after the university warned staff that it planned to make 319 redundancies in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Greenwich Business School.
According to Architects’ Journal, sources say the suspensions are thought to be related to staff participation in protests against the redundancies.
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Speaking to Architects’ Journal, a former Greenwich tutor said: “The working assumption among staff is that this is linked to opposition to the restructure and concerns over resourcing and student experience.”
“There is deep anxiety that the scale of redundancies will significantly weaken teaching capacity, push workloads on to fewer people, and erode course quality, especially in design studios.”
A document sent to the faculty in April laid out the university’s intention to replace 151 hourly-paid lecturers with 50 teaching posts, many of them part time, equating to only 17 full-time posts.
The architecture department was expected to face some of the worst reductions in staff numbers, with 50 of the 70 teaching staff set to be made redundant.
A letter sent to senior management, signed by over 30 architecture staff members, criticised the plans as “hugely damaging to the faculty and its students,” claiming the redundancies would lead to a 40 per cent decrease in student teaching time.
Speaking to Research Professional News, a spokesperson for Greenwich University said the “largest group of staff affected are hourly paid lecturers (HPL), who are employed on fixed-term contracts due to end in August”. They added that many HPLs work “a relatively small number of hours per year for us,” and “to use the headcount is misleading and creates a picture that is inaccurate.”
The spokesperson further noted that the hours worked by the 151 laid-off HPLs would equate to around 30 full-time staff members.
Greenwich University has been contacted for comment.
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