Up to 150 staff and students rallied at UTS on 12 March against plans for cuts to jobs and courses.
Since the end of last year, universities across Australia have been threatening sweeping cuts, using the Labor Government’s proposed international student caps as justification.
The University of Wollongong has already cut 91 full-time jobs and is planning another round of cuts. University of Canberra says it will slash 191 jobs this year. Managements at UTS and ANU are also leading the charge.
UTS management has proposed $100 million worth of cuts, claiming that it is “vital” they return to a budget surplus by 2027. Around 500 jobs are under threat.
The corporate logic driving cuts at UTS is a dire threat to public interest learning and research. Academics who are not bringing in external funding (such as partnering with corporations) and courses with less than 80 people are on the chopping block.
Their plan also involves reducing the number of subjects offered, decreasing casual staff hours and restructuring faculties. They plan to merge the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences with the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building to create a new “Faculty of Creative Industries”.
Members of the staff union the NTEU joined the protest demanding that not a single job be cut.
Professor James Goodman addressed the rally, connecting these cuts to the corporate mindset of UTS management: “Behind all of this is the concern about UTS’s credit rating, this notion that we can’t run a deficit because we have to maintain our rating with these unaccountable credit rating agencies.
“There’s plenty of other universities that don’t have the credit rating that UTS has, and they manage perfectly.
“There are many, many alternatives available. We have to force back the demand that this come out of staffing.”
ANU cuts
At ANU, the NTEU estimates that 638 full-time equivalent jobs are threatened, 12 per cent of the current ANU workforce. In October, ANU announced that it aimed to make cuts of $250 million by 2026 in response to a deficit, including $100 million worth of cuts to staff jobs and salaries.
Simultaneously, ANU is profoundly restructuring courses, reducing the majors available to students. The College of Health and Medicine has been amalgamated into the College of Science, cutting 50 administrative jobs, and the Fenner School of Environment is being incorporated into the new College of “Systems and Society”, alongside cybernetics, engineering and computer science.
Students have reported that the human rights major, the geography major, and the film studies major have all fallen victim to the cuts.
Some tutorials have doubled in size, while others are held only half as frequently as before. Some lectures are now entirely online, while others have been combined with their tutorials to form three-hour “lectorials”. All of these changes significantly affect the experience of staff and students for the worse.
When the cuts were first announced, over 400 staff and students marched to the ANU Chancelry, demanding that jobs and pay be protected, and rejecting the Vice-Chancellor’s proposal for staff to give up their 2.6 per cent pay rise scheduled for that year.
In an all-staff ballot the following month, 89 per cent of the 4700 votes cast rejected this pay cut. However, since then the NTEU has been negotiating with management on a voluntary redundancy scheme, capitulating to the Vice-Chancellor’s claims that job cuts are necessary.
The NTEU instead been campaigning for a vote of no confidence in management, pointing to the financial mismanagement and deficits that existed at ANU even before the international student caps were announced.
The deeper cause of the problem is the increasing corporatisation of Australian universities. In 1989, 80 per cent of the funding for higher education came from the federal government. Today, it is only 35 per cent.
Increases in government funding are now often tied to a focus on the military, like the ANU Nuclear Systems Engineering major, funded by the Department of Defence to create a workforce for the AUKUS nuclear submarine program.
Universities have become increasingly dependent on international student fees. This makes them vulnerable to the government’s effort to cut international student numbers. Instead of covering the extra cost for the loss of student fees, the government is forcing staff and students to pay through cuts to jobs and courses.
To stop these cuts, students and staff must mount a coordinated and militant fightback.
In 2012, when USyd announced that 340 staff jobs would be cut, hundreds protested. Through student strikes and occupations, half of the academic jobs were saved. In 2016, when the Sydney College of the Arts was closed, a 65-day occupation saved half of the jobs threatened to be cut. This is the kind of response necessary to save jobs again.
By Jacob Starling
