De Montfort University is in freefall under the leadership of Vice-Chancellor Professor Katie Normington. Yesterday it was announced that the University Registrar and the Head of Human ߣߣ��Ƶ are both resigning. These departures come after years of institutional damage that staff, the Professoriate and students can no longer ignore. The University has no independent governor and has a captured Board of Govenors. Since Normington arrived in 2021 the pattern has been relentless: redundancy after redundancy, year after year. Research-active academics have been systematically removed and replaced with cheaper practitioners, leaving many modules led by staff with no real subject expertise. The University has also adopted a block teaching model that compresses a year’s worth of learning into a few weeks. It is a cheap, low-quality experience that is a total con. It destroys the community and social side of university life that a proper year-long course provides and leaves students short-changed. Word-of-mouth from student to student and family to family is the lifeblood of recruitment in a community like Leicester. Gut the research culture, dilute teaching quality and the reputation collapses. Student numbers follow. That outcome was foreseeable. The Professoriate explained this to the Chair of the Board who is not an academic, but he retorted he knew better than professors who collectively have hundreds of years of teaching experience. Latest figures show DMU with approximately 20,500–23,000 students at its Leicester campus and more than 41,000 in total once transnational education students are included. Yet the University refuses to give even the Professoriate or UCU the real student numbers or the real accounts. Those published numbers are more than enough for the current staffing levels. National HESA staff-to-student ratios are amply met at DMU—these stats are online for anyone to check. Yet management continues to push for staff to carry double the national average HESA cost-code staff-to-student ratios. At the same time the remaining academic staff are already stretched beyond capacity trying to cover the work. Any fall in student numbers is simply a correction back towards a sustainable size civic university. The non-civic parts of the university in Dubai and London need to be axed. Compare this with Oxford University, which teaches through intensive one-to-one tutorials and carries vastly higher maintenance costs for its massive historic campus. Oxford also has 50% of its staff as full professors meaning its costs are tenfold that of DMU where the professoriate has been reduced to 25 professors. DMU faces no equivalent pressures. The claim that further large-scale redundancies are essential is therefore a total exaggeration. The real purpose of the annual redundancy programmes is to send fear through the University. Normington knows she has to go. The threat of job losses is the instrument she uses to keep staff silent and compliant while she remains in post against the wishes of staff and students. While frontline academic capacity is cut, the Vice-Chancellor has been travelling to Dubai, China, Cambodia, the USA and many other destinations — always in flat-bed seats in business class, collecting air miles and staying in five-star hotels, accompanied by a team whose duties apparently include holding her coffee cup. Other DMU PVCs have been riding the same gravy train. In the last year alone more than a million pounds has been spent hiring new management, alongside around 100 new appointments. All the management hired were less qualified than internal staff who applied. Meanwhile the Dubai and London operations are losing millions and need closing as soon as possible. The contrast is stark: redundancy programmes for research staff, lavish executive travel, a growing managerial layer, and loss-making overseas operations that continue to drain resources. The Professoriate has recorded multiple votes of no confidence. Four times the academic body has made its position clear. A unanimous professor has formally called for Normington to resign. The Board of Governors, widely regarded inside the institution as captured, has refused to act. There is no effective independent governor. There is no meaningful regulator with the capacity to intervene. As a higher-education charity, DMU is answerable only to the Office for Students — an understaffed body unable to cope with the complex legal and governance issues now on display. In any other sector, Companies House or shareholders would already be involved and would have removed the CEO. In universities, the same conduct can continue largely unchecked. The Head of Human ߣߣ��Ƶ now leaving was the same senior officer who, according to contemporary reports, invoked Prevent terrorism legislation in an attempt to shut down legitimate debate at a UCU meeting. That episode crystallised a culture in which dissent is treated as a security risk rather than a professional responsibility. So much for free speech in a rule of law country. This is not ordinary restructuring. It looks increasingly like a dishonest redundancy campaign used to mask deeper questions of capability and priorities. Research income, teaching quality and the long-term viability of the University have been sacrificed while managerial spend and executive travel have continued. The staff who have lived through successive redundancy cycles, the Professoriate that has voted no confidence, and the students whose education depends on a functioning research culture and a genuine university experience deserve better than continued denial. The question is no longer whether change is required. It is how much further the damage will be allowed to run in a system that lacks both independent oversight and real accountability. A fish rots from the head.

The De Montfort University Professoriate — the body representing the University’s senior teaching and research staff — has formally declared that it has no confidence in Vice-Chancellor Professor Katie Normington. At a meeting held on Friday 23 May the professors passed a unanimous motion of no confidence in response to the University’s redundancy plans, which threaten to leave hundreds of teaching staff without jobs. The Vice-Chancellor was formally notified of the motion on 29 May. More than a year later the situation has only deteriorated. Relations between Normington and the Professoriate, and with large parts of the wider staff body, have collapsed into a total breakdown. Many staff now refuse to be in the same room with her. She remains in post and refuses to go. There is no one left who is both willing and able to hold her to account. The Professoriate called on Normington to “consider your position” . It also demanded an open and transparent approach to the University’s finances and an inclusive model of decision-making. None of those demands has been met. Instead the gap between the Vice-Chancellor and the academic community has widened into open rupture. That rupture is reinforced by the record of those charged with oversight. Ian Squires has repeatedly failed to have Normington investigated. Instead he has publicly described everything she does as amazing. Yet Normington arrived with no background in business, had never previously served as a Vice-Chancellor, and has been learning the role on the job with disastrous results. The refusal to subject her performance to proper scrutiny, while offering unqualified public praise, has only deepened the sense that normal accountability mechanisms have been suspended. Two further matters already in the public domain compound the problem. First, DMU faces a £42 million lawsuit connected to its Dubai operations. Litigation on that scale raises serious questions about financial oversight, risk management and the quality of decision-making at the highest levels. Second, media reports have documented the misuse of Prevent legislation in an attempt to restrict legitimate debate within the University, including at a UCU meeting. When counter-terrorism powers are invoked to shut down internal discussion, the message to staff is unmistakable: challenge will be met with institutional force rather than argument. A unanimous no-confidence motion that is now more than a year old, a complete breakdown of relations with the Professoriate and much of the staff, the Vice-Chancellor’s refusal to stand down, the failure of key figures to investigate or critically assess her performance, a multi-million-pound overseas lawsuit, and the reported misuse of Prevent powers paint a picture of an institution whose senior leadership is no longer trusted by its own academic community and is subject to no effective internal check. A university cannot function when its most senior academic staff have withdrawn confidence, when ordinary colleagues will not share a room with the Vice-Chancellor, and when those responsible for oversight appear unwilling or unable to act. The motion of 23 May made that withdrawal public. The year that has followed has made the consequences plain. What happens next will show whether anyone at Board level is prepared to restore accountability, or whether the breakdown will simply be allowed to continue. In the end the University is reduced to humouring a Vice-Chancellor many can no longer stand the sight of — a cat that purrs not from contentment, but from fear.

The Vice Chancellor needs to do the right thing and resign since she lacks the business skills to recruit students. Leicester and Loughborough have run out of seats because they have so many students while while Fat Cats on the DMU executive have failed to workout how to recruit when market conditions change.

De Montfort Professoriate letter: "On 2 September 2025, Katie Normington sent a message to all staff welcoming them backfrom their summer vacations. While the VC’s missives are commonplace andcharacteristically out of kilter with reality, this latest email took matters into the bounds not just of fiction, but of a disturbing parallel world that has no bearing on reality. The email begins by citing, once again, Katherine May’s ‘Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times’, which seems to have provided inspiration and something of an ideological vehicle for the VC in her relentless undermining of all that was once good about the institution she purportedly leads. With no apparent sense of irony or self awareness, she tells staff that ‘many had spoken (to her) about the helplessness of this piece in setting out what was to come’. It is presented as some kind of validation. This book was a gift for the VC, because it not only provided a vehicle for the brutal cuts that she was to impose, but it also, in her mind, served as a kind of metaphor for restructuring and for the need for organisations like DMU to ‘winter’. And, of course, it was both far from original and, perhaps, taken out of context and almost certainly used in a way the author did not intend. One would suspect that the author, once an academic herself (a creative writer), would be horrified that her work was being utilised in this way, and perhaps it’s a question worth asking her. Nevertheless, the VC has stuck with it, though it is likely that the author, coming from a Humanities background, would shudder at the thought that their art has been used to justify the sacking of committed and hard working colleagues, some of whom were on maternity leave when they were made redundant. We then discover that the VC is pleased that the university community has shown ‘resilience, ‘professionalism and commitment’ in the face of adversity. Four votes of no confidence should not, of course, be permitted to derail the fantasy that staff are anything other than on board with it all. But while she may be blissfully unaware, or unable to grasp reality, the fact is that she leads an institution that is characterised by a culture of fear in which staff are cowed and unwilling to speak out. Their silence is not, as the VC assumes, approval - but the manifestation of a deeply embedded culture of fear in which they do not dare raise their head above the parapet for fear of being punished. Perhaps the most deluded, and heartless, part of the missive is the suggestion that only a small number of redundancies have been made. This, naturally, means the small number that have stuck it out to the end and have faced, or will face, compulsory redundancy. There is no mention of those who were forced out in a process that was, put simply, inhumane. That sentence alone tells the reader everything they need to know about how our institution is led. The missive then goes on to provide a list of ‘successes’, few of which stand up to scrutiny. Block teaching, for example, inevitably features as the innovation that has been a success, despite the compelling evidence to the contrary. Just because it has been imposed does not mean it is a success, but this is also revealing - anything that has been implemented is, from her perspective, regarded as a success. It matters not whether it has worked. The seven new research institutes, also cited as a success, have already been hollowed out and several renowned research centres closed. DMU is close to the bottom of every league table in the country, with no apparent strategy to address this. And, of course, despite even more compelling evidence, she insists upon using the term ‘empowering’ when the vast majority of staff could hardly feel less empowered. They know that the executive have caused this crisis, and most, even if they only dare whisper it in the corridor because they fear saying it more openly, are desperate for change. But one thing is clear - there is no trust, only fear. Staff themselves have ‘wintered’, hunkering down until the nightmare is over and quietly quitting, finding solace not in the work and in the institution they once loved, but in their own thoughts and survival strategies. That she mentions a new ‘five year plan’ is not the only similarity with collapsing regimes - ‘We will reinvent ourselves with the new five year plan!’ - but a clear signal that she and the university’s executive are out of ideas. They have no plan, and are unlikely to deliver anything other than more of the same in the future. Only the same tired rhetoric, claiming success where there is none, and a tendency to become ever more authoritarian in the face of any opposition.These are the hallmarks of failing states, governments, regimes or institutions. There is, naturally, no mention of the millions wasted on vanity projects in Dubai or London, or that an apparently unaccountable executive are squandering money, sometimes on unnecessary overseas trips, that is not theirs to squander. No mention either of the grievances of students or the deliberate disinvestment in, and sabotage of, courses that are recruiting students while investing in those that are not. To conclude, the VC’s latest missive is so far detached from reality that it has to be dismissed as a fictional (and desperate) attempt to create a reality that simply does not exist. It is the world as she wishes it to be, not as it really is. But such a strategy only works if those being deceived believe it. They do not. And that detachment has now become so stark that it’s almost impossible to do anything other than laugh, though it’s far from amusing. It is time to put an end to this dangerous fantasy, one that threatens not only the livelihoods of every employee of the university, but the institution itself. The staff at DMU need to realise that they are being conned, and that this con trick, which has already deprived the institution of any credibility, will deprive them of their jobs and their families of stability. Even those who publicly support her know this to be true. Our VC does not just patronise, gaslight and insult the intelligence of the university’s staff, she demeans the position she, inexplicably, still holds."

Every single email from the VC is a claim from how that she is empowering everyone. It not clear how stealing jobs and giving students crummy block teaching is empowering.

Apparently her resignation is being negoitated, not before time.

Normington is totally unsuited for leadership and does not know how to acknowledge mistakes and engage staff and be transparent about massive errors she has made while learning on the job. She would not have lasted 2 months as a CEO in the private sector and would not last five minutes in Europe where universities have proper regulators.

TPS gave them a 20 million pound windfall and the university has nearly 200 million in cash reserves from having the worst staff student ratio in the country. The vice chancellor has not been democratic, has stayed 6 years when these roles ought ot be no more than 3 years, and has had a unanimous no confidence vote from the professoriate and not other post 1992 is making redundancies in perpetuity. There is more money than every in the system and the sector is thriving despite some incompetent VCs claiming the opporsite. It i s not the job of a public tax exempt charity such as De Montfort to subsidise the education of millionaires in Dubai while loosing millions and millions year after year in Dubai.