Universities across the country are rolling out savage job cuts.
Macquarie Uni has just announced 75 sackings that will slash the courses on offer in Arts as well as Science and Engineering. Degrees in archaeology, music and ancient languages will disappear, with sociology and ancient history also decimated.
Majors in politics, gender studies, criminology and psychological studies will also be cut, along with Masters degrees in electronics engineering, ancient history and some areas of IT.
There have now been 1000 jobs cut at universities in NSW in the last year.
University of Wollongong has already sacked 91 academic staff with another 181 jobs threatened.
New details of the cuts planned at UTS have also surfaced, with university management planning to cut $363 million over the next four years.
Outrageously, uni management has brought in KPMG to work out how to cut costs. It has paid the consulting firm $4.7 million so far over four months for advice on course cuts and which staff to sack.
Three hundred NTEU members joined a union meeting to hear a briefing on the KPMG report.
KPMG has drawn up a spreadsheet detailing what courses to keep, and what “current and future state teaching capacity” is needed to run them.
Its decisions are based on cutting subjects and courses that don’t make the university money. Staff are also on the chopping block if their research is not making money for the university, with the “key input” determining staff cuts said to be “academic staff members that are not meeting research expectations”.
This would breach the NTEU’s Enterprise Agreement by imposing redundancies based on arbitrary performance metrics—and the union is set to lodge a dispute against management.
The university council was told there will be big job cuts over the next year. As many as 400 jobs could go.
Yet despite the claimed urgency to make cuts, the university budget shows that UTS is already on track to return to surplus in 2028. These attacks would simply deliver this two years earlier—at the cost of further decimating teaching and students’ education.
This shows how the corporate mindset at universities is out of control. Staff and students need to build a fightback to stop the cuts and demand that universities focus on quality teaching and learning—not the drive for profit.
