Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Corrupt foreigner Anton Muscatelli of human rights abusing Glasgow University is in trouble, vote of no confidence by staff, now courses facing axe













Dear All

Corrupt foreigner Anton Muscatelli of the human rights abusing Glasgow University is in trouble.

The money is running out!

Hooray!

Since the Scottish Government is unlikely to keep filling the ‘begging bowl’ to the same extent, panic has set in.

Wouldn’t have happened if they had employed better managers!

At Glasgow University there is a culture of cronyism that would make a banana republic blush, unfortunately rather than cream rising to the top, shit does.

Now, the human rights abusing has drawn up plans to scrap or merge a raft of courses.

Cutting is the last chance salon of people with no vision.

What the corrupt foreigner should have done was use George Laird radical thinking and done a deal with colleges to transfer entire departments, working in partnership, for a slimmer more modern university.

The proposals from Glasgow University include the merging of history, archaeology and classics.

Courses facing the axe include nursing, anthropology and social work.

And my personal favourite, a review of its high-profile Centre for Drugs Misuse Research headed by Neil McKeganey.

It is also said that the university is also considering cutting back its provision of evening and weekend classes.

I spent many happy years in those classes awake!

Egyptology with Bill Manley was excellent, totally useless for me as there are no pyramids in Glasgow.

But I have eaten several kebabs since!

The disastrous ‘white elephant’ that is the Dumfries campus is also getting scaled back.

Empire building requires leaders with vision.

Last year, we got a rare treat as Anton Muscatelli, the university principal, warned that the institution could run out of money by 2013 if they took no action to address cuts in public funding.

Now, the cherry, they are taking the wrong action.

And of course, the failing university is seeking to find significant savings through a voluntary severance scheme.

All non-academic departments such as estates, libraries, student support, human resources, finance and corporate communications will have to find cuts of between 11% and 15%.

Jobs losses!

A university mouthpiece said all the proposals would be subject to full consultation.

And then the senior management will go ahead anyway.

The mouth added:

“The sector currently faces unprecedented financial pressures and this university is responding in a planned and strategic way to the cuts in public funding. Our approach is twofold: to generate more income, and to pursue cost savings. After a senior management group review of all aspects of our work, the university court will consider a consultation being carried out into a number of academic areas ... identified within the context of the university meeting its strategic ambitions.”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Sorry, but I know these people, they don’t have “strategic ambitions”, they just copy other people, they are sheep.

Expect similar reports in the press from other academic institutions.

David Anderson, president of the Glasgow University branch of the UCU, said:

“We would question the motivation of the management group in seeking to consult on these particular areas while the university is trying to reduce staff numbers across the campus through a voluntary severance scheme. Any consultation process must be based on more than simple economic information and must engage with all academic staff in the university as well take on board the views of students and the wider community that the university serves. Union members have demonstrated their willingness to defend colleagues threatened with redundancy in the past and would be prepared to do so again should the management group attempt compulsory redundancies.”

Does sound like David has much faith in his employer ranked the 128th in the world.

Couldn’t make the top 100, how embarrassing!

And of course there will be an angry reaction from some of the course leaders and departments which are now under threat, their livelihood is about to be destroyed.

Staff at the Department of Adult and Continuing Education, which offers evening classes, said they believed they were now “fighting for survival”.

Lecturer Liam Kane said:

“The university seems to think of us as some kind of an entertainment programme that we run leisure classes. Their strategy appears to be all about nternationalisation, foreign students and research, but we are providing real education to real people in challenging subjects. The students we are teaching are the people who have been paying their taxes to pay for the university in the first place.”

Corrupt foreigner Anton Muscatelli Professor Muscatelli has been a consultant to the World Bank and the European Commission, and was a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Secretary of State for Scotland from 1998-2000. Since 2007, he has been an adviser to the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee on monetary policy, and in 2008 he was appointed to chair an independent expert group for the Calman Commission on Devolution.

It seems that the hype doesn’t match the actuality.

I wonder if he could run a burger van properly since he also failed to save the local uni ‘tuck shop’.

Glasgow University is paying the price of putting a corrupt foreigner in charge.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

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