De Montfort University Employee Reviews about "blame culture"

Pros

Ambitious, Challenging, Global, Local, pension

Cons

Blame culture, risk averse, slow,

Pros

Academic colleagues and adminstrators go the extra mile for students, but never being recognised for this. Descent environment for struggling students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Autonomy, you can spend the entire summer doing whatever you want (most staff don't turn up between May-September), no one knows or cares about research so you can work on whatever you like. This place is great for family planning, if you would like just to turn up for few hours of teaching during term, but if you would like to carry on with you research, you are rather switch institution quickly.

Cons

Small city, local university. Not much to do there. Not externally recognised in terms of research, which makes it extra difficult when it comes to winning research grants. Management has pure blame culture which generates a bureaucratic nightmare, everything that can be done to make academics miserable is done. Disgruntled senior academic staff members (most of them don't have PhD's or hold DMU 'PhDs' or from a similarly ranked institution) can make for a toxic environment for both staff members and students. Management are overly focused on 'measuring' success rather than creating conditions that allow staff to deliver imaginative and original education that the students deserve. New staff seem to be under a lot of pressure, older staff coast along without providing any support or mentoring. If you are coming from a Russell Group University, you will loose motivation quickly ! Academic staff retention is terrible, most of VC2020 posts have been vacated 2-3 times in a period of 3 years! If you don't have the right connections inside the University or follow a specific 'agenda', you will be neglected pretty soon, as people aligned to the senior management are rapidly promoted (without a reasonable justification)!

Pros

Nice academic staff, good service for students

Cons

Very chaotic institution with poor senior management; There’s a blame culture within the institution; No opportunity to progress if you are not a friend/relative of a senior manager