After the strike, what future for the University of Dundee?
Monday 19th of October saw a mass picket on the Perth Road outside the University of Dundee’s tower block. Students, trades unionists and the local community came together to show their support for those UCU members going into their fifth week of strike action.
The crisis at the University of Dundee (UoD) has been long-running and has seen intermittent media coverage. The backdrop to the current strike action is years of mismanagement at the institution, overlapping with the general difficulties faced by the UK’s higher education sector.
This was followed by a decision by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) to stall the latest payment of public funding, given the funds that the university now holds in the bank.
Local MSP Heather Anderson and North East MSP Maggie Chapman took this announcement as a signal to call for a halt to the university management’s insistence on pushing forward with compulsory redundancies. This call was followed by the STUC’s Roz Foyer demanding that action is taken to address the situation.
It is apparent that UoD is still being discussed in circles away from its campus - but back on the picket line, as strikers enter their final week of planned action, the focus is on the reality of people’s lives. UoD’s approach to voluntary redundancy and the constant threat of compulsory job losses means that staff face extremely difficult decisions.
Difficulties will also be faced on campus as a result of culling services. The National has recently illustrated the dangers of running an institution with sustained student numbers that UoD hopes to maintain, but without adequate student support.
Outwith campus there are impacts too, Living Rent’s Dundee branch illustrating the impact on the city’s housing provision of the increasing the number of purpose built student accommodation.
And Dundee Trades Union Council has highlighted in a letter to the First Minister that ‘the University has seen many hundreds of jobs go in the last couple of years. In total, more than were lost when the city’s Michelin tyre factory closed, or the combined total when its Timex and NCR factories closed. The University jobs lost represent a third of the original workforce, from what was the city’s third largest employer’.
So what now? October saw the departure of interim Principal Nigel Seaton. His enthusiasm for reshaping the university has won him few friends locally. Professor Seaton is widely seen as having followed dysfunctional pattern established by previous principals Ian Gillespie and Shane O’Neil.
Some have suggested that the introduction of yet another principal, Angela Scott, offers an opportunity to halt the compulsory redundancies and establish a different relationship with the unions. It is certainly the case that a new management culture is needed at the University of Dundee.
In a city where meaningful employment is hard to find, and where the role of trades unions needs more than lip-service from politicians and those that manage public bodies, the active ruling out of compulsory redundancies at the University of Dundee would be a positive starting point for Angela Scott.
Published 19 October 2026
