Warwick University vice-chancellor says certainty is needed over EU citizens’ rights to avoid exodus of staff at all levels

British universities face “a moment of great trauma” in the next few weeks unless the government makes clear its post-Brexit plans for EU residents in the UK, a leading vice-chancellor has warned.

Prof Stuart Croft of Warwick University said in an interview with the Guardian that the possibility of no deal being struck to exit the EU was “utterly bizarre”, and that institutions needed certainty over residency rights by the end of the year to avoid seeing staff at all levels deciding to leave.

“A lot of organisations – not just universities – feel that there will be a moment when either some form of deal is likely or no deal is likely. And at the ‘no deal is likely’ moment – it could be in December, it could be four weeks away – then people will start to make some big decisions about their futures,” Croft said.

“For all of us in different organisations, that could be really, really uncomfortable. And four weeks is really not a very long time. We absolutely need a deal.

“I cannot imagine how it has happened that a vote to leave has been turned into a possibility of a vote to leave with no agreement, no plan for the future.”

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Exiting the EU without a deal would be “a moment of really great trauma potentially for us as individuals and also for our institutions”, Croft said.

Warwick currently employs around 800 staff from the rest of the EU, out of 6,500 staff in total, and Croft said it was not just professors and senior researchers whose departure would harm the university.

“We have lots of people – we want them all to stay – people who work in all parts of the organisation. We have illustrious professors doing important things, and we have people who work in catering, and they are all really important.

“The whole idea that organisations like ours can be rent apart in this sort of way is utterly bizarre, and actually quite mendacious,” Croft said.

Croft’s blunt warning comes as universities across the UK are reluctantly drawing up plans to cope with the UK’s eventual exit from the EU, although many say they are unable to adequately look ahead because of the lack of detail coming from the government.

Warwick, along with many other British universities, is providing legal advice to EU staff who are able to apply for British citizenship in order to stay with their homes and families – but Croft said that route was itself fraught.

“This is one of the things I find the most painful of all. We have a number of staff who have a number of different nationalities. They are quite happy working here with those nationalities.

“And I’m really uncomfortable with being part of a project, saying to them: ‘You may be Italian but actually now you need to become British.’ That’s a very unhappy place to be,” he said.

Croft and his fellow vice-chancellors – along with other members of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities and the Universities UK lobbying group – have held a series of talks with ministers since the referendum last year, but say they have received little in response.

“There’s always politeness and engagement, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Nothing is done with it. In a sense there has been no fundamental progress in 18 months on these big questions. There have been lots of details, but the big core issues have yet to be resolved,” Croft said.

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The Russell Group lists the issue of EU nationals as its number one priority for a post-Brexit deal, saying the 25,000 staff employed at its universities are “indispensable to our world-class institutions”.

“We value them highly and want them to stay, but they urgently need solid guarantees about their future,” the group said in a briefing last week.

The single point of progress since the Brexit vote has been a guarantee by the chancellor, Philip Hammond, that university research funding underpinned by the EU would be replaced by funding from the British government.

“That was a massive shot in the arm,” said Croft, who argues that a similar guarantee is required in other areas such as the funding of Erasmus, the European student exchange programme.