Bad financial management at Kings College London means VC Rick Trainor is firing 120 scientists

This article, by Bruce Alberts, Marc W. Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus, should be read by everyone. They observe that ” . . . little has been done to reform the system, primarily because it continues to benefit more established and hence more influential scientists”. I’d be more impressed by the senior people at Kings if they spent time trying to improve the system rather than firing people because their research is not sufficiently expensive. 10 June 2014 Progress on the cull, according to an anonymous correspondent “The omnishambles that is KCL management 1) We were told we would receive our orange (at risk) or green letters (not at risk, this time) on Thursday PM 5th June as HR said that it’s not good to get bad news on a Friday! 2) We all got a letter on Friday that we would not be receiving our letters until Monday, so we all had a tense weekend 3) I finally got my letter on Monday, in my case it was “green” however a number of staff who work very hard at KCL doing teaching and research are “orange”, un bloody believable As you can imagine the moral at King’s has dropped through the floor” 18 June 2014 Dorothy Bishop has written about the Trainor problem. Her post ends “One feels that if KCL were falling behind in a boat race, they’d respond by throwing out some of the rowers”. The students’ petition can be found on the #KCLHealthSOS site. There is a reply to the petition, from Profe...
Source: DC's goodscience - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Academia assessment HEFCE management bollocks managerialism metrics Rick Trainor science UUK Anne Greenough bibliometrics Karen O’Brien Robert Lechler Shitij Kapur Simon Howell Universities UK vice-chancellors Source Type: blogs