The University of Newcastle is on its knees. Senior management is deep into a change process that will decimate our region's only university. This change affects current students, future students, and the community at large. It is reminiscent of the major structural change in 2006 but, this time, without a clear rationale or the common sense of a general round of voluntary redundancies.
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Three vice-chancellors, and numerous other highly paid senior executives, have worked to unnecessarily "streamline" our high-performing, highly efficient public institution in the past nine years to the brink of change-induced dysfunction. Management claim they are only working within the parameters provided. Stating they are only effecting the change that council is insisting on. Who's telling the truth? We have no idea.
What we do know though is that students at all levels are no longer precious and respected, but are seen as clients, sources of income to be processed as profitably and quickly as possible. For example, the recent "course optimisation" managed to eliminate approximately 20 per cent of courses and leave students heavily constrained for choice. More students in fewer courses makes for greater revenues, less need for academics, and a bigger surplus all round.
Academic staff are corralled into improving their "productivity". They are increasingly measured in terms of grant income and the number of "research" publications, regardless of their value to society and seemingly motivated by rankings and marketing opportunities.
Professional and teaching staff are being required to do more for less, and with less resources. The work of many becomes the work of fewer who are paid less. Yet the workload remains.
It is sad, but successive managements seem to have forgotten the very features that made the university and its staff valuable: professionalism, scholarship, considered work, stability, passion for education ,research, creativity and diversity. Instead, all this has been traded away for the empty rhetoric of marketing and the market. Worse, rather than bringing staff along and developing them in preparation for a new direction, management seek to dismiss them at will and then look to replace them with less experienced, cheaper staff - all at the expense of students, the community, and the value a university should be bringing to society.
Motherhood statements about "student experience", "agility", "excellence", "engagement", "sustainability", assurances that the "staff are our most valuable asset" and that "we are all in this together" ring cynically hollow during a change that devalues the staff, its students and the worth of the university.
We would hope university management genuinely cares for its staff and students and stands with them when required - protecting them and providing authentic leadership when the situation demands. This management and council have done nothing of the sort, proposing to discard staff with no regard to the institution beyond the immediate perceived need to increase the surplus at all costs.
One of the more aggravating factors in all of this is a claimed "financial crisis", the "core operating deficit". The notion of core operating income and expenditure is a fabrication of university managements as it attempts to behave like a corporation, building surpluses as if they were profits. Universities are much more than corporate playthings to be used by people striving to achieve KPIs and bonuses.
The audited financial reports for the university are clear - our university, unlike most others, is in a powerful financial position. To say the university is in financial dire straits is blatantly wrong.
Management speak of the widening "jaws" between operational expenditure and revenue as its rationale for downsizing, while at the same time omitting to include revenue from investments and expenditures not related to teaching and research. The "jaw" will get wider as management unravels its "business" by denigrating the "business" of education and research. Even if we are to believe the core deficit issue, where is the tangible strategy and vision to increase income, not just slash expenditure? There have been plenty of unevidenced justifications for the changes. Chasing the market and increasing opportunity are among them. This is all part of the same management-speak of the past decade which has seemingly got us nowhere?
The federal government doesn't want to intervene. It sees, as Minister Birmingham put it some time ago, universities as rivers of gold. And, on one level, it could be said to be true. Our university has generated a surplus of approximately $48 million per annum over the past 10 years and holds almost $600 million in investments. On the other hand, that money doesn't get spent where it was intended. Instead, large sums of money get squirrelled away only to be spent on unnecessary redundancies, paying cash for grandiose buildings, and, of course, outrageous executive salaries which are well in excess of our own prime minister.
So what can be done?
A new vision that truly values education and research for more than the dollars they bring is essential. That only comes from strong leadership. Leadership with vision beyond the next and nearest shiny fad - including the next role at another institution. Leadership with the strength to come out against the mismanagement of our higher education institutions. Leadership that understands what a university is meant to be and recognises the value that our staff generate beyond the dollars they earn, the contribution they make to our region's students and their futures.
A return to the core values of what a university is meant to be; a return to meaningful education, to allowing research to flower for its own sake, and a respect for students and staff. These things have been, for too long, buried under corporate-speak, raging metrification, and misguided micro-management.
It's our university. Our community can help support this vision. We call on university management to return to promoting true academic values so current students, future students, industry, and our community receive the rich, fruitful experience they expect and deserve.