Thank you again for all your overwhelming support. Students have pitched tents outside of Templeman library - despite the freezing wind! We helped a bit, but chickened out of sleeping in the tents!

Despite a 2 week delay in sending out guidelines to write counterproposals, EG has only agreed to 1 week of extension to consultations (deadline 7 March), effectively restricting consultations to 3 weeks instead of 2.

Staff at risk of redundancy are also still waiting for a 1, 2-page max document that should detail per-subject rationale for closure. We were promised it one week ago.

Every time we request data or explanations we are met with variants of the same response: ‘we can provide it, but we don’t want you to waste time working on it because it is not about that’ (e.g. when we asked for module load and student/staff ratios). When we asked to see the projections of savings and/or opportunity for growth engendered by closing our courses we were explicitly told that there is no such calculation at course level. Except that we are expected, in our counterproposals, to meet these undefined and uncalculated savings targets, which is clearly an impossible task. EG insists that this is a meaningful consultation, and that they hope that this is an opportunity to have a conversation [sic], however we wonder how putting 58 people at risk of redundancy and asking them to come up with reasonable and sound counterproposals in effectively less than 30 days, without being allowed to question the top level decisions can be considered ‘an opportunity to have a conversation’.

Meanwhile our wonderful students have pitched their tents in front of the library - if you are around please pop by to congratulate them and support their efforts. THEY are the University and they are clearly showing EG that the University does not want this. EG claims Kent2030 is all about becoming a student-centric university, so how about they start listening to the students?