Universities can’t afford to cut support staff

Great article Paul, I can’t understand arbitrary ratio setting of academic to professional staff. As you point out, it is important to create an efficient organisation and to ensure the university as a whole can provide the three core outputs of teaching, research and community engagement. I absolutely agree that the university needs to be fully aware of the repercussions of cutting staff, will it impact their core business? Are there other options available? Could some of the more mundane tasks be outsourced freeing up existing support staff to provide more value-adding support to the university? These questions can’t be answered with arbitrary ratios. Most, or all, universities want to grow, there seems to be lots of demand for higher learning globally and more and more talk about creating online teaching environments, cutting support staff arbitrarily could impact their plans to do so. All universities have a plan of where they want to get to, they also need to have a full understanding of what staff they need to reach their strategic goals.