Many universities have financial problems which have forced them to make redundancies. A few have and will close departments and campuses.

A larger scale financial failure in which a university is unable to make the monthly payroll or pay creditors and needs to call in an jnsolvency practitioner would only happen if it couldn’t persaude a single stakeholder (DfE, research council, local council, neighbouring university, bank) to make a short-term loan.

If it helps to work through scenarios, in every case in the last 30 years where an FE college has run out of cash for the monthly payroll, there’s been an available short-term lender. Loans come with increasingly stringent conditions but have allowed time for the redundancies, department downsizing, campus closures, property fire sales and mergers needed to bring spending back within incoming cashflows.

These might cover continued access to facilities, equipment, laboratories, collections and other resources used for the research, much of which may have been funded by the funding body.

There might be provision for maintenance of continuity of employment, scholarships and PhD candidature at the new institution.

There should be a process for deciding who owns intellectual property and who gets credit for grants and publications when projects are moved between institutions.

The numbers don’t lie, Scientific, as against pseudo-science, Research is costly, very costly, buildings and labs, the supporting infrastructure and the specialist teams required to keep them running can cost millions. A building I know only too well cost ~£55M to construct, uses ~£1.5M+ in electricity a year and produces some very important technological advances, some that HMG has deployed ‘in-the-field’ to protect lives has saved far more than the whole edifice cost, yet that University is dependent on ‘overseas’ (CCP) money to keep the labs and teaching spaces open, along with the income from ‘useless (taught) degree’s’ that produce Costa barista graduates.

Many post 1992 ‘Universities’ have diluted the ‘University educated’ brand, some are failing faster than older Universities, and we have a ‘real world skills’ and research funding shortage, how this may play out will come down to the Bliar intent of 50%+ attending, and being saddled with debt and a useless degree, continuing verses redefining a University enabled graduate skill set that only those bright enough to attend using stricter admissions criteria situation. Which unfortunately will favour those with wealth to back them and their earlier private education as against state school education where teaching to the lowest common denominator is now the norm. Something I saw and fought far too often without success as a school governor.