More course closures, more staff cuts, bullying and intimidation – but don’t panic. UTS has set up a ‘wellbeing hub’. Seriously.
As the crisis in higher education rolls on, catastrophe is becoming the order of the day. Thousands of university staff face the loss of their jobs, similar numbers of students will soon find their preferred course no longer exists, and the true scale of the sector’s mismanagement is becoming exposed for all to see.
This week yet another university, UTS, has announced massive job cuts (reportedly up to 10% of their total staff) while ‘suspending’ (aka closing down) over a hundred courses. As has become the dismal norm these days, affected members of staff have claimed that UTS engaged in little or no consultation, while spending a week or two denying that anything of the sort was in the wind. A ‘culture of fear’ is accused of inhibiting staff responses – a circumstance that is also becoming part of the dismal norm across the sector.
Every day, it seems, the list continues to lengthen. A similar set of numbers has also been announced at WSU, as they trim their workforce by around 13%. The chickens that our universities have ignored for years are now coming home to roost.
But wait, there’s more. The Senate inquiry into university governance got back into its stride this week. As a result, ANU is back in the headlines with their Chancellor, Julie Bishop, accused of bullying a distressed staff member of the University’s Council to the point where that staff member seriously considered suicide. These allegations appear to have been the final straw for the sector regulator, TEQSA, which announced today that it has opened an investigation into the university’s governing council, raising issues of compliance and competence.
Big names but no idea
At least the concerns about university governance have finally extended beyond the scrutiny of university executives and their salaries. Now there is the opportunity for a more focused and critical examination of the composition and competence of universities’ governing boards or councils – and the secretive insider cultures that have built up around some of them.
Successive federal governments have spent years harassing universities into reducing academics’ influence on these boards in favour of advice from business and industry. As Future Campus’ s Tim Winkler has put it – and he is no friend of those who attack the corporate university – there is now an established tradition of stacking university governing councils with people with ‘grand CVs but little experience of the workings of the HE sector’. And, given the evidence now becoming available through the Senate hearings, not that much in the way of relevant expertise, ideas, or respect for the universities’ fundamental alignment with the public good.
A view from the ivory tower
At the same time, the alienation of university management from the concerns of academic staff continues to hit new lows. This has been widely noted in the media reports around the waves of job cuts and course closures. No doubt Hannah Forsyth speaks for many in her blog, when she argued that any reform of the university sector is bound to fail while the current management class is in place. After all, she said, the ‘only people ignoring the urgent need for university reform are the people that are running them’.
UNSW DVC Merlin Crossley demonstrated this perfectly in his review of my book, Broken: Universities, politics and the public good, in which he argued that the system was merely ‘bent’, not broken. As he acknowledged, he has a very different perspective on this to mine. Indeed, as a senior university executive, his perspective inevitably reflects the privilege of that position. It appears to put him at a considerable distance from the difficulties faced by many of his more junior colleagues at the coal face – especially those in disciplines less fortunate than the biological sciences. Hence his extraordinary dismissal of the concerns of those unlucky disciplines that were ‘shrinking’ (not cut, of course, but declining as if through some form of natural selection). Notwithstanding that dismissal, he did say that he ‘admired’ those plucky souls who continued to struggle to maintain them nonetheless. Those folk, their careers dramatically interrupted if not ended, must be greatly comforted by knowing they have Merlin’s admiration.
I’m from HR and I’m here to help.
Nonetheless, this year’s award for Failing to Read the Room goes to the HR folks at UTS. Faced with something like 400 academic staff losing their jobs, they decided it would be a good idea to set up a ‘wellbeing hub’ to help them out. The ABC’s Conor Duffy reported that the advice offered to staff through this wellbeing hub included suggestions that they might use this period of free time to “do that task you’ve been dreading, like washing delicates, organising receipts for your taxes, or cleaning a bathroom”. You might ‘brush and floss your teeth every day’. Or ‘bake a dessert’.
Really? Something like ten per cent of the UTS workforce are losing their jobs, the courses they might have taught are being ‘suspended’, and almost every other university in country is cutting jobs in the same disciplines. For many of the 400, this will be the end of their career in higher education. And this is all the university can say to them!
The least that might be said, perhaps, is ‘Sorry’. Sorry for blindly pursuing the path of endless growth as their solution to chronic underfunding, sorry for failing to competently manage their budgets to ensure the institution’s survival into the future, sorry for failing to accept responsibility for providing viable career paths for their workforce, and sorry for failing to vigorously defend the idea and purpose of the university against decades of hostile government policy interventions.
A glimpse into the future
But that’s not going to happen.
A glimpse into what might happen can be found in the University of Sydney’s recent advertisement for a lecturer/senior lecturer in plant biology. The position is clearly focused on teaching and there is no mention of a research career. But there is, at the end, a chilling piece of information: ‘This is an 11-month appointment for the first three years, then a 9-month appointment thereafter’. Helpfully, they add as they recognise the inadequacy of this as the proper basis for a continuing career, ‘the candidate may supplement their salary for the additional months’.
How, one can only wonder. One might further wonder what happens to their superannuation, their annual leave loading, and the other hard-won benefits of continuing employment.
This is no way to build the future workforce. Rather, it appears designed to make the exploitation of teaching staff structural rather than merely contingent.
Tell someone who cares
So. What have we heard from Jason Clare through all of this?
On repealing the Job Ready Graduates legislation – that’s a problem for ATEC. On better regulation of university governance – that’s off to the Expert Advisory Council on University Governance. On job losses, course closures, excessive casualisation, operating deficits, the gutting of the future workforce, the hot mess at the ANU and the slow motion trainwreck the sector has become – hardly a word.
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