On Wednesday the 12th of February, Cardiff University Students’ Union hosted a town hall in which the vice-chancellor Wendy Larner gave a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session with students. Held in response to the release—or more accurately, leak—of Academic Futures, the meeting was aimed at resolving student anxieties in response to the drastic cuts outlined in the said policy document. The atmosphere was one of tension and dissatisfaction from the get-go. Prof Larner entered the room to a hush, as if a disturbance had wafted through the doors, and rose to the desk in the speaking well of the Sir Stanley Lewis lecture theatre without any clapping. After making a joke about being from New Zealand and not Australia, which received an equally stoic response, she began a presentation outlining the executive board’s motives for enacting academic futures.
I need not outline the specifics of the proposals—they have been repeated and reproduced enough already—but Prof Larner did make some comments and arguments which have not been so prominent in discourse over the changes. For example, Larner characterised the campus as “having no heart” and argued that the campus is “too sprawling”. This, she said, was to be resolved by the cuts proposed in academic futures. She also outlined how money saved through the proposed actions would be used to improve student halls, which she described as “needing attention”—perhaps there is common ground! Larner was also keen to contextualise the changes within a situation of financial difficulty caused by a reduction in the number of international students, due both to the restriction of visas by Westminster and the growth of competent academia in the Far East. This, Larner argued, was to be resolved by new ways of learning, including an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary learning and a diversification of income streams. These proposals are to form the basis of the university’s “mission 2035”.
Larner presented the changes in Academic Futures as being in keeping with, rather than deviating from, the history of Cardiff University. Characterising the proposals as “progressive”, Larner drew parallels in her presentation between Academic Futures and the history of The University of South Wales and Monmouthshire (predecessor of Cardiff University)—the latter having had an undeniably progressive agenda. By contrast, Professor Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, at a protest outside the Science building on the same day, spoke of Academic Futures as a disruption to the history of the university, emphasising the central place his subject, Ancient History, had held since the founding of Cardiff’s predecessor institution.
After speaking over her time— more than the 25–30 minutes initially allotted to her—Larner then began a question-and-answer session, with a mixture of pre-proposed questions, introduced by SU president Madison Hutchinson, and questions from the audience asked and answered in groups of three. With the majority of the audience seemingly being made up of students who are most likely to be affected by the changes, the questions mostly focused on the impact of Academic Futures, and Larner gave competent—although not especially surprising—answers. When asked about her own salary, it appeared momentarily that the easy rhetoric of her answers was about to give way.
However, after characterising discussion of vice-chancellor salaries as a “trope”, she returned to her previous ease. It was in this tone that she assured the room of her commitment to Welsh culture and allayed concerns that the university’s endeavours in Kazakhstan (of all places!) would not divert funds away from students in Wales. As soon as the allotted time was up, Professor Larner made a brisk exit through a proximate door, as the SU president spoke to those in the room, presumably to keep the assembly inside and avoid Larner being heckled or confronted on her way out. Then the meeting ended without any tangible sense of resolution to the issues which had caused it to be hosted in the first place.