Both students and staff deserve better than this

There are so many things that are objectionable about the redundancies in the Life Sciences department that one hardly knows where to begin. The staff being made redundant have had their teaching achievements ignored and their research talked down. Undergraduates have been repeatedly assured that their courses will not be impacted despite the overwhelming evidence that the quality of teaching will decrease and the courses that they want to do will no longer be available. Masters students have paid for a service that they will not receive to the standard that they expected when they forked over their cash and finally PhD students have been thrown into chaos with little or no information given to them. Even the academics who have survived feel insecure; if this is how the department treats the aforementioned groups, why should any of the survivors be treated differently in future?

This aggressive focus on the Plant and Microbial Science (PMS) unit can be called unfair for any of a number of reasons. Most prominent among these would have to be the highly disruptive move from the Wye campus which has taken place over the past six years. But include an opaque use of statistics and a questionable vision of the future relevance of research areas and suddenly dissolving the PMS and Cell Biology and Functional Genomics units becomes indefensible.

But rather than attempting to inadequately summarise the debate in this column, we would like to recognise something intensely positive blooming in this deeply saddening time. It is often supposed that there is some sort of barrier between the students and the staff, and that neither is appreciated by the other. But this week, the divide has been crossed. Students new and old have come out to express their appreciation for those members of staff who dedicated their time to ensuring that they got a top-quality education, and whose careers are now at risk.

Maggie Dallman, the Head of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, unwittingly gave us an insight into the crux of the matter during the public meeting held this week. She suggested that if Imperial took money away from accommodation and gym funding to invest in teaching, then students would again complain. But this is not the case. There is a near pathological inability to recognise that students do care about their teaching and some staff do care about their students ñ although perversely, these are the first to go.