The University’s governing body, the Regent House, is to vote on whether to implement changes to the procedures for dismissing academic staff. The 3,800-strong body will be balloted on changes including the denial of the protection of academic freedom to non-academic staff, such as librarians and language teaching officers, and the removal of lecturers’ right to appeal to the Septemviri, an appeal court made up of senior academics, when facing dismissal.

Proponents of the changes to the University’s statutes suggest that they are necessary in order to bring the University into line with recent changes to employment law, and also to make the University’s procedures for removing academic staff from office more efficient.

At present, the Regent House must agree on proposals to make individuals redundant; the proposed changes would remove this obligation. Supporters claim that this move would be beneficial for the University, claiming that the Regent House should be responsible for overall strategy, rather than for deciding on the employment of individual staff members.

At present, grievance and dispute procedures, said one academic, “can drag on for many months”; the new proposals would speed things up.

Claims by the University that the removal of lecturers’ rights to appeal to the Septemviri or the University Tribunal is legally necessary, however, have been refuted by critics. During the discussion, the Deputy University Advocate claimed that he was “quite unaware of any structural or procedural or legal deficiencies in these courts that would justify the current proposals”.

The proposals have been criticised by large numbers of academic staff, who have described the changes to the statutes as “significant assault on the safeguards that exist to protect academic freedoms”.

In a discussion of the report recommending the changes, critics of the proposed changes claimed that they would make it easier for the University to close unprofitable Departments and suspend courses, making attempts such as the ones to close the Department of Architecture in 2004, and to suspend the undergraduate teaching of Portuguese in 2007, more likely to succeed.

The changes will also, it is claimed, make it easier for the University to dismiss members of academic staff whose views and research areas run contrary to accepted academic thinking. Critics of the proposals have suggested that the work of many of the University’s most famous scholars, such as Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, would have been prejudiced by the plans.