First Minister John Swinney admits he is “deeply troubled” by the scale of the job losses announced at Dundee University as it attempts to plug a £35 million deficit.
Interim principal Shane O’Neill revealed to stunned staff on Tuesday around 632 full-time equivalent posts could be axed in a bid to save the institution.
The total number of people who could lose their job could be much higher once part-time roles are accounted for.
Speaking to The Courier on Wednesday, the first minister said: “I’m obviously deeply troubled by the scale of job losses that are being talked about. Deeply troubled by them.
“We need to work with the funding council interrogating all of that information to make sure we can get to a sustainable position.”
Mr Swinney said the government will “consider” whether more money needs to be made available to the troubled institution.
Dundee University has already been given access to £15 million of lifeline emergency funding, but there have been calls for greater support.
The first minister said: “The University of Dundee is a pre-eminent institution in Scotland.
“It has such a formidable track record in so many areas of research and academic activity and I want to make sure that thrives in the years to come.
‘Government will stay very close to this’
“So the government will stay very close with this. We’ve already said in the budget statement that financial support would be available to the funding council to help in what I consider to be the acute circumstances that the University of Dundee faces and we’ll continue to make that very direct engagement with the funding council to make sure we are able to secure the future of the University of Dundee.
“Something acutely destabilising has happened at the University of Dundee and we’ll have to understand what that’s all about.”
Education secretary Jenny Gilruth told the parliament’s education committee that there was “potential” for further support.
But she said minister were awaiting advice on exactly what support they could provide because of the way universities are constituted.
Underfunding
Mr O’Neill said in an interview with The Courier on Tuesday that the institution could have bounced back from the errors made by management, including poor financial controls.
But he explained the structural funding issues in the sector made that impossible.
Analysis suggests there has been a 22% real-terms cut to Scottish student funding since 2013-14.
Mr O’Neill said: “We aren’t given sufficient money to deliver on the kind of teaching for Scottish students that we deliver or the research that we do.
“We have to compensate for that through other means, primarily through international tuition fees.
“So this has been a sector wide problem for quite a while, and I think, some of the institution specific reasons for the crisis we’re in, we would be able to bounce back more easily if those problems of structural underfunding weren’t there in the first place.”
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