Hallam bet big on London. Now it’s cutting jobs in Sheffield.

On a sunny afternoon earlier this week, I took a ThamesLink train out through suburban London to take a look at Sheffield Hallam’s new satellite campus in Brent Cross. There’s an impressive 14 storey grey building with huge glass windows and a bus stop right outside the door. As I walk further south, a handful of construction workers in bright orange high vis are coordinating diggers, cement mixers and scraping away at the dirt on the ground. CGI designs on the hoardings show how lovely the area will be during sunset, all golden light flowing over vast birch-filled green space, postgrads cycling home and lecturers filing out of seminars, satchels against their hips.

When former vice chancellor Chris Husbands announced in 2022 that the university would open a satellite campus in London, he described it as an opportunity “to raise the profile and impact of the city and the region more widely”. A university press release boasted that it aimed to attract 5,000 students by 2030 and quoted South Yorkshire mayor Oliver Coppard, who described the news as “really exciting” and said the scheme would project “a positive image of the city on a national stage”.

But for several staff members at Hallam, this building site is ground zero in a growing financial catastrophe that may end up costing them their jobs. On Tuesday, staff dialled into a video call, with the anodyne title of “March all staff event”. They were told that the university needed to make an astonishing £26.6 million of cost savings by August. Even in the midst of a bad patch for universities, this is bleak, coming on the back of two previous rounds of heavy cuts. Many believe it was the hubris of the earlier administration — epitomised by the not yet opened campus in London — that led them to this dark place. “Chris Husbands recklessly entered us into this contract we can’t get out of,” a social sciences lecturer seethes.

The logic, of course, is that once the campus is up and running it will start to make the money back, something slated to happen in September. But when we asked the university to confirm that will happen, they chose not to answer that question. This might be in part because, despite courses supposedly beginning in under six months, they have yet to find a partner to actually run it.

Just what is going on? Will Hallam be able to pull itself out of this financial nosedive? And what does Husbands himself have to say about the decisions made on his watch?