About half the 107 academics at Queen's University Belfast who were told they were surplus to requirements last year have accepted severance packages or redeployment or had their cases successfully reviewed.
Many of the others have so far declined to take part in the process.
Early last summer a senior academic management group charged with examining the university's future structures, chaired by the new Vice-Chancellor, Prof George Bain, put forward proposals for the voluntary severance or early retirement of the academics considered "research-inactive".
The university hoped to recruit 110 new staff in an effort to push up Queens' performance in the UK five-yearly Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), on which much university funding depends. The next RAE will be in 2001.
In August more than 100 professors and lecturers signed an open letter protesting that many people who had played an active role in the university during the difficult years of the Northern conflict were being asked to leave.
They stressed that their work involved not only research, but teaching and administration.
Since then just over 30 academics have accepted a voluntary severance or early-retirement package; 18 have been told after a "second-stage review" of their research performance that they can stay on; and eight have been redeployed in areas like administration and adult education.
About 30 have not engaged with the "restructuring" process.
The academics targeted for redundancy last summer were told that offers of enhanced early-retirement or severance packages would be void unless they were taken up by the end of this month.
Prof Bain said yesterday that both legislation and good practice demanded that those in this situation would be consulted and interviewed within the next few weeks. "We'll be making plans in April where we go from here."
He had always made clear he would "do everything possible to avoid compulsory redundancy" other than for those in four departments due to close. Even in these some academics will be kept on for several years to teach students finishing their degrees.
Three of the four departments due to close as part of the restructuring - geology, Italian and Semitic studies - will take on no first-year students next September.
The fourth, statistics and operational research, is effectively being merged with mathematics and will offer no dedicated degrees in the future.
The university has also faced problems in its attempts to recruit high-calibre professors and lecturers with top-class research records.
English, one of the departments criticised by the academic management group for being "research-inactive", has advertised four lecturers' posts but has been able to fill only one. In civil engineering, the positions of professor, senior lecturer and lecturer were advertised, but only a lecturer was appointed.
Prof Bain rejected a charge by Dr Paul Hudson, branch secretary of the academics' union, the Association of University Teachers, that "the steam had gone out" of the university's restructuring plans.
He said they were waiting until the March deadline expired and would then announce their plans.