Act against the cutbacks at Copenhagen Business School
Copenhagen Business School (CBS) has been ranked by Eduniversal as the world’s best universal business school. It has, Eduniveral noted, strong global influence putting it ahead of the London Business School and Harvard Business School. CBS’s “Business and Society” strategy, which has sought to strengthen CBS as a “business university” with a multidisciplinary research portfolio and research-led teaching, is bearing fruit.
This success story may well be coming to an abrupt end.
CBS’s senior management team has announced major expenditure cutbacks. Up to 70-80 staff (about ten per cent of CBS academic employees) will be laid off from February 2015 onwards.
The commitment to a “business university” appears to have been forgotten. The cutbacks are being imposed disproportionately on those interdisciplinary departments that consider the relationships between business and politics, society and culture. The ones most successful in attracting external research funding are particularly hard hit.
Please support calls for the CBS senior management team to reaffirm its commitment to the concept of a “business university” and the multidisciplinary approaches upon which this rests. The budget cuts and the ways in which they are being imposed should be reconsidered.
We also ask you to support the calls for the Danish government to increase the basic research funding for CBS to make its focus on research and research-led teaching more sustainable. Despite the many successes, the basic research funding for CBS still remains lower than that given to all other Danish universities.