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University of Helsinki To Lay Off a Thousand People (yle.fi)
jones_supa writes: University of Helsinki, the place where Linus Torvalds got his degree as well, will reduce staff by 980 people, with 570 being laid off by the end of 2017. In addition, the university will reorganize and incorporate certain divisions including continuing education. Professors, teachers and researchers are criticizing the cuts, which coincide with the university's administrative and educational overhaul. The staff cuts reflect the government's drastic funding cuts to education, which plays one part in the effort of trying to help the difficult economic situation of today's Finland. The university estimates that of the 980 positions, terminations during this coming spring will account for 570 positions. Of the employees to be made redundant, 75 are teaching and research staff and 495 other staff. The rest of the cuts will be spread over the coming years.
It sounds like most of the cuts don't affect the people who are fulfilling the core mission of the university, the ones who teach, do research and advise the students. US universities have hired so many administrators that they need more administrators just to keep track of all the administratoring they do. When there are budget cuts, it's administrators who draw up the cost-cutting plans, so it turns out as one would expect. At least in the US, universities can just keep raising tuition. In Finland that is impossible.
Unlike most western countries, at least they understand that these non productive jobs are part of the problem. They need to cut these jobs and cut the taxes used top pay for them. This will allow for extra demand and new jobs in productive fields that service that demand. NZ dis the same thing long ago, with gigantic cuts. Make work jobs like park rangers were cut from 20,000 to literally single digit numbers. They have had a massive economic turn around.
In 2015 Finland accepted 15,000 more asylum seekers at a cost of EU 15,000 per head. That works out to EU 225 million *more* in 2015 due to some legitimate asylum seekers mixed in with a lot of opportunistic economic migrants:
http://sputniknews.com/europe/...
Imagine if a portion of that money had gone to existing citizens instead - and the asylum seekers kept closer to their point of origin while receiving the other portion for their care - it's cheaper to help them closer to their point of origin, like in a neighboring country.
Too bad the politicians and bureaucrats in the West always consider their own citizens and tax payers last when deciding where to spend money taken from those very same tax payers.
What is happening at the lower ends of society?
Why is the EU allowing itself to be flooded with people with few or no skills that will need long term generational support if it cant even look after its own best and brightest?
If a nation is so 'poor' why accept more poor people in who will need funds from a government who cant their own fund higher education?
Time for some national interest and ensuring educational funding is placed above EU policy.
Finland was able to keep the Soviet Union out, time to look after its own funding again and stop wasting limited funds on the EU's rapid population growth projects.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Organizational downsizing and layoffs are inevitable. The difference is that these people get to keep their national pensions, will receive at least 700EUR/mo in basic allowance even if they're not qualified for unemployment insurance, and if they are, as they are likely to be, up to 85% of their normal pay for up to a year while they try to find a replacement job. Then there is the normal array of services, should any of them run into real difficulty. It's much more manageable than what you'd get in a third world hellhole like Arkansas.
Troll smarter, not harder next time.
Actually, Syria has a lot of Russian and Soviet weaponry. So does Iraq.
Strictly speaking, we didn't cause ISIS, we entered the country in a war, and then left it before we should have, but ISIS was created and abetted by those who have funded it and given it support.
Certainly the occupation of Iraq and the Syrian Civil War have given ISIS an opportunity to prosper, but you needed people willing to be ISIS for that to happen. It doesn't just happen automatically when you invade a country or when you leave it. We could have left in complete disorder and there didn't have to be an ISIS at the end of it. Let's put blame where blame belongs. The US and Soviet/Russian governments provided opportunities for ISIS, but ISIS is nothing without sympathizers in those countries and in the greater Muslim world who support them.
University of Helsinki, my heart cries.
In the US we have witnessed the rise of the "Administrative University".
The Administrative University exists without classes, without research, without service to anyone or anything.
The Administrative University has a state appointed Board of Regents, a President (The Champion of the Board of Regents), Vice Presidents, Vice Vice Presidents, Superior Lawyers, Middle Layers, Submissive Layers, Patent Office Administrative Staff, Provosts, Vice Provosts, Deans.
The Administrative University exists to feed itself.
Teachers? NO.
Classes? NO.
Research? NO.
The Administrative University exists for itself and nothing else because it syphons money from the State and Federal Governments.
The Administrative University exists to uphold the lifestyles of the Board of Regents and Their Champion, The University President.
The Administrative Staff are the human shields to endure the slings and arrows of sexual lawsuits and felony complaints against The
Champion of the Board of Regents, The University President.
Example: The University of Alaska
Ha ha
This would never happen to an institution owned by the benevolent government of a nice, progressive country with constitutional protections for earning a living wage. Oh, wait...
The problem is that our government is far from benevolent. This is the most hard-line capitalistic government during the entire history of the Republic of Finland. This government has made it its mission to completely dismantle every remnant of the welfare state and turn Finland into a tax haven for the rich. The "difficult economic situation" is merely a pretext.
I'm veering off on an off-topic tangent, but the fact is that almost all economists, when asked by the press, have stated that the measures taken by the current government only worsen ad prolong the situation.
Lemon curry???
You clearly do not understand the context or the background to this, so allow me to explain why this is relevant. Firstly, the university of Helsinki is THE university here. Sure, we have a few other major ones and they're decent, but we're a nation of 5,4 million people, the university of Helsinki is the bedrock and pinnacle of our much praised educational system. Gutting it means they're making a huge dent in the higher education of the entire country. Secondly, the cuts are nationwide, they're cutting across the board from higher education, the university of Helsinki is just getting the hardest hit as it is the biggest.
But most importantly, this is about much more than the simple cuts themselves. This is about politicians fucking us over in every way imaginable and betraying their own principles on which they ran for the parliament in a record time. We had elections last year, and one of the biggest promises made by the winning centre-right coalition was that no matter how tough cuts they'd have to make, they'd stay off the education. Our current prime minister and minister of treasury even posed in twitter pictures with students with cards saying 'no cuts'.
35 days. It took 35 days from the elections to them start suggesting cuts. Then they introduced tuition fees for exchange students coming from outside the Union. Now, this raised concern since the worry was that once the concept of tuition fees has been introduced, the next step would be to start suggesting everyone should pay them. This is a major deal as universities have always been free to attend to for those who have the grades to get in. Without free universities, we likely wouldn't have risen from a fairly backwater nation that suffered a civil war and the 2nd world war to a first world post-industrialized welfare state in less than a century. Without free higher education it's likely we would never have produced people such as Torvalds, companies such as Nokia and Rovio etc. Free higher education is at the very core of what this nation is supposed to be built on, which is why it is in our constitution:
When they announced the cuts they promised they would never expand the tuition fees. Yet, unsurprisingly, one MP just proposed that today: the introduction of nationwide tuition fees and simultaneous cutting of student benefits. At the same time they cut the amount of corporate taxes MORE than they cut universities (the total combined cuts to education are about 600 million euros). They're literally trying to wipe their ass on the constitution that we have, pissing on a fundamental cornerstone of well being in our country, and lying through their teeth while doing so. They say they have to do these cuts to save the economy. But destroying the basis for all intellectual capital in this country is not going to do anything else than destroy the economy in the long term. But they do not seem to care. And to make matters worse, the universities appear to have given up any sort of resistance to this and are allowing this all top happen with very little protest.
In my life so far, never have I been so angry and sad at the same time, nor have I EVER felt this betrayed and fucked over by our elected representatives. They're a fucking national disgrac
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead