The decision by Sheffield Hallam University to ask for redundancies is cynical - Jayne Dowle

Dr James Fenwick, UCU (The University and College Union) communications officer, and an associate professor in the department of culture and media at Sheffield Hallam, criticised the timing of the announcement, coming just before Christmas.

"They know staff are going away at this point and won't have the opportunity to seek advice from the union. It has left staff in a very troubled, anxious, depressed, stressed place," he said. The UCU represents around half of the affected staff at the university.

My heart goes out to every academic affected. I have been a guest lecturer at Sheffield Hallam, and know that staff invest their time and dedication over and above in their students. To have their dedication returned by a wholesale threat to their jobs and livelihoods shows just how little their work is valued by those in charge of the budgets and management.

I taught media and journalism part-time for some years at another Yorkshire university very similar in many respects to Sheffield Hallam. A decade ago, it was the Christmas holidays that broke me. I resigned in January, overwhelmed by the amount of work I was expected to complete in the fortnight we had away from campus.

I simply could not find the hours to mark hundreds of student submissions. Following the change in the university funding model and the hike in tuition fees in 2010 to £9,000, my class sizes had risen exponentially.

In an attempt to balance the books familiar to many other universities, recruitment had extended overseas; we found ourselves teaching many students from China and Eastern European countries who arrived in the UK without even a basic command of English.

I felt so sorry for these bewildered 18-year-olds, dropped in the middle of Yorkshire. My colleagues and I would attempt to teach them how to structure a news story or write a press release, to be met with looks of incomprehension.

Meanwhile, other students, expecting top-level teaching and personal attention for their nine grand a year, would become bored and frustrated.

To say it was an uphill battle is an understatement. I began to develop deep moral qualms about being unable to deliver quality teaching under such conditions. And then, as I said, that Christmas broke me.

I was one of the lucky ones too, because I had ‘tenure’. A senior lecturer, I had a proper contract with holiday pay and pension contributions. Hundreds of academic staff in universities are working to an hourly rate of around £20, with maybe a short-term contract, but zero security. In return, they will be expected to hold at least a Masters’ qualification and be working towards a PhD.

Effectively, lecturers and senior lecturers are frontline staff, dealing directly with students every working day. If you have teenagers or young adults in your family, imagine about 100 of them demanding your attention constantly, emailing at all times of day or night, putting in complaints if you don’t respond quickly enough.

Often expected to take on other duties as well as teaching, over the decade since I have left higher education, the position of these clever, inquisitive and inspiring professionals has become increasingly untenable.

Meanwhile, university bosses - and believe me, this is true - avoid student contact as far as humanly possible and spend their working days chairing meetings and panels, and doing their own research if possible. All for hefty salaries which even put the earnings of the Prime Minister into the shade.

The average package of a UK vice-chancellor is valued at £269,000, according to research by the Hepi (Higher Education Policy Institute) think tank, dwarfing the £164,951 salary of the Prime Minister. Hepi found that the typical university needs to recruit 30 undergraduate students paying maximum fees just to cover the costs of the top job.

And then people wonder why university lecturers go on strike, putting the education and futures of young people at risk.

So far, there has been pretty much radio silence from the government on addressing the clear catastrophe that university funding has become.