It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Ulster University is the author of its own misfortune, though that will be no comfort to the 450 people whose careers are about to be cut short by the management’s decision to chop the workforce.

The university’s obsession with growth, driven by an inferiority complex caused by sibling rivalry with Queen’s, has left it with massive debts and a hole in its income through the collapse in international student numbers.

Ulster, the love child of a sectarian government, has a habit of over-stretching itself.

I was there in the late 1970s when it was trying to establish itself in a bog on the outskirts of Coleraine. Even then it was neglecting its Magee campus in Derry.

Tom Collins: Broke Ulster University has nobody to blame but itself

Aoife Moore: In what other job can you publicly fail for years and still get a pay rise?

In the 1980s, on a civil service whim, it was forced into an arranged marriage with the Ulster Polytechnic more than 50 miles away.

In those pre-internet days, communications were clunky and the two institutions retained their own way of doing things. Inefficiency was built in from the start.

Then there was the folly of Springvale in the 1990s, when there was an attempt to piggyback on the peace........

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