Before I finished for the festive break there was a report in the Times Higher Education on the current situation at Nottingham University.

Staff at the University of Nottingham fear that planned course closures and changes to staff-student ratios could damage the university’s international standing and create “impossible” workloads.

The university is planning to consolidate the number of faculties from five to three and reduce the number of courses that are delivered at the university by suspending recruitment on 42 courses. Of course the challenge in suspending recruitment is that restarting recruitment might be challenging, and probably impossible to do quickly.

The University of Nottingham is not alone in facing a financial crisis and equally is not alone in cutting courses and reducing staff numbers.

What is also consistent for most universities in this predicament is that they are facing it alone. Though there has been ample talk about collaboration and sharing, it is one of those things that is probably easy to talk about and more difficult to actually do. Part of the challenge is how universities are inconsistent in their approaches to managing themselves, which then makes it even more challenging to work together or collaborate.

Making those changes to be more aligned, is probably not even on the agenda, as the next crisis loads on the existing crisis. Sitting outside the turmoil, you might think it is easy to offer solutions, the reality is that there is so much unknowns in that crisis, that any solution may become the next problem.

We need to remind ourselves that collaboration and sharing within higher education isn’t the problem we need to solve, it is in fact a solution (and not the only solution) to a (probably not well defined) problem. We need to be clear about the problem, define that problem, and then we can start thinking about possible solutions, one of which may be collaboration and sharing.