@adamsteer @jimbob When you centralised things it normally comes with a "cost-recovery" bite. For 51 years the school/department has let there be access to a "machine" that almost every research project requires. Other schools/departments used this "machine" when it was idle or once or twice when they found out. It was covered by the "research infrastructure fee" (40-50% of the research grant now) and was regularly used in teaching. The leadership changes and the "machine" is centralised with a cost-recovery model attached. Now it has to be paid for on top of the research infrastructure fee, but the school/department will pay for two years transition. The researchers get invoices with zero cost so they can "plan for the future." The "machine" which was highly used is now idle. The researchers turn to AI to get the results, which are never verified. The researchers who snuck in now have a brick wall to deal with that they need to pay. The university as a whole suffers. The students (while terrible) are not the problem, the management is. Oh, you teach mathematics to a group of students who were told that they could study science with the lowest level of high school mathematics, you must be a terrible teacher as these evaluations are so low. No, you can not change the course to be more relevant and have domain specific examples, teach the dry theory! Your evaluations are getting worse, you must be a really terrible teacher. Mind you the government is to blame as well.