Should s/he stay, or should s/he go? – an application of AI in assessment of staff ‘value’ in UK HEIs

by Willy Survive

Recent years have witnessed widespread changes in HEI academic staffing levels, with individual institutions adopting a variety of protocols to implement re-structuring and retrenchment. In all cases (as reviewed by Yu & Me, 2020), the criteria employed in deciding staff fates were arrived at entirely subjectively, with scant consideration given to non-fiscal outcomes. Inevitably, therefore, there has been great variation seen in the scale and severity of staff changes, in the extent of the precipitated UCU activity, and in the mental well-being of the academics who survived the culls. In the work reported here we sought to rectify this deficiency through the development of a machine learning tool, RoboChop, which utilises fuzzy logic in combination with random number generation to compute academics’ fates given numeric and Boolean inputs derived from their service history. Details for 5,280 recently affected staff were used in training, and those for a further 1,023 were used for cross-validation. A range of inputs were explored spanning the individuals’ current pedagogical activities, their current and projected research incomes, and their levels of compliance with the whimsical diktats of their university’s senior leadership. Academic fates were initially categorised as ‘early retirement’, ‘voluntary severance’, ‘redeployment’, ‘redundancy’, or ‘stay-in-post-and-just-work-a-lot-harder’, but it was subsequently determined that success in prediction was greatly improved with the inclusion of the additional categories, ‘really early retirement’, ‘involuntary severance’, ‘deferred redundancy’, ‘unbelievably-somehow-below-the-radar-and-so-safe’, and ‘well-safe-and-marked-for-promotion’. It is interesting to note, however, that the latter two categories were required only to ensure correct classification of the senior academics tasked with implementing the restructuring, and the self-serving, obsequious little shits who did their bidding.

Professor Willy Survive is a long-suffering academic who can still remember when the parasitic beast that we now know as University Central Administration was as yet a rather small and generally benign creature; when students quite literally read for a degree; and when staff-student liaison meant something very different. After retiring from his post as Director of Diversity and Inclusion in Playtime Activities at St. Hilda’s Primary in Nether Wallop in Hampshire (one of the newer universities), he moved slowly northward, and now lives in a disused Highways England salt repository in a lay-by on the M62. He keeps an Angora rabbit for company and owns a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

First published in the Journal of Imaginary Research, Volume 7, 2022, attributed to David Barlow.