A FORMER vice-principal of the crisis-struck University of Dundee has told MSPs she faced being “frozen out” and attempts to buy her off after raising concerns about its financial trouble.

Baroness Wendy Alexander, a former Scottish Labour leader, offered the written evidence to Holyrood’s education committee as it examined the circumstances that left the university with a £35 million financial black hole and plans to axe hundreds of workers’ jobs to fill it. 

She was named in a recent investigation into the crisis by Professor Pamela Gillies as the only senior official to have challenged the university’s leadership over its finances amid a culture under then principal Iain Gillespie in which “dissent, or challenge, was routinely ‘shut down’.”

Baroness Alexander said that by September 2024, she had stated that she was “worried about the cash flow,” adding that, “within a month, I had been asked to leave.”

Describing how she “felt punished for speaking out,” she said she had chosen “not to be bought off” and had “declined the offer of overseas trips at the university’s expense to be followed by a generous settlement payment,” which she said “seemed unethical and morally wrong.”

Appearing in person before the committee, Professor Shane O’Neill, who resigned as interim principal  last week on the publication of Prof Gillies’ damning report, insisted that the financial problems had only “crystallised” last November.

Despite the report criticising him as part of the “triumvirate” that led the institution to disaster, he said: “Through the period covered by the report, I tried to do my very best for the university, in good conscience, and on the basis of the information that was available to me.

“Where I have been found wanting or fallen short, either personally or collectively, I am deeply and unreservedly sorry for that.”

Former chief finance officer Peter Fotheringham accepted that the university had “not been in a strong financial position” for “well over 10 years,” but in response to being asked when the situation started to give him sleepless nights, he said that had only happened “as late” as September 2024.

Joe FitzPatrick, the SNP MSP for Dundee City West, said: “Students, lecturers, staff — they will find that incredible that folk in your position have not realised how bad things were until that late. It is incredible.”

Mr Fotheringham, who left the university in October, answered: “I absolutely understand I could have done a lot better.”