“We have people really doing it tough”: Dr Liz Allen. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
Staff and students’ reactions to the first round of job cuts at the Australian National University have been mixed, as the institution attempts to reduce spending by $250 million.
The campus is between semesters, with a handful of staff and students currently on-site, however a tutor and researcher in the school of computing who wished to remain anonymous said he was starting to see the effects.
“What I have noticed is you’re stretched a bit more thin, just because there’s less funds. So previously, if there were two tutors to something, there’s just one now. I guess that’s part of being financially or fiscally responsible. But you can, I guess, sort of feel it, and because I don’t take courses here, I’m just doing research, I’m not sure if the students feel it, but I feel like they might,” he said.
Some staff have said students will be the ones who suffer from the cuts. ANU senior lecturer Dr Liz Allen said the cuts were already forcing the quality of education at the institution into decline.
“We’re being instructed to minimise the marking as much as possible, in order to be able to just get courses done. The idea that we just get courses done flies in the face of what a degree from the ANU means. We’re at a point now where morale is absolutely rock-bottom. Absenteeism and illness is skyrocketing, the worst it’s ever been. We have people really doing it tough,” she said.
Those students still on campus appeared largely unaware of the cuts, with one student saying he hadn’t heard about them at all, while the student association did not respond to a request for comment.
University of Melbourne postgraduate student Sid D’Souza, who was visiting the ANU campus, said he had seen similar austerity programs affect his school, but didn’t notice a decline in the quality of education.
“It was mainly due to job uncertainty with regards to tutoring; they were kept on a casual contract. There’s no job security … I think that’s the main thing I’ve seen – I wasn’t too sure about the number of jobs being cut or anything like that. It was just the people who were already employed were seeking greater security.”
Job uncertainty is one of the key grievances being raised by the National Tertiary Education Union, which has been especially critical of ANU’s vice-chancellor, Genevieve Bell.
It has also been raised by the Australia Institute, which has been advocating for major reforms in the education sector. Dr Allen claimed issues relating to job insecurity and communication weren’t being handled well.
“[The] new leadership is not willing to listen to staff concerns. And so we have this brutal disconnect between what’s happening on the ground … those sorts of things are not being observed, or even understood by leadership,” she said.
“Come down from the tower and understand what these cuts mean for us, not just now, but what they will mean for the future of the ANU. It is troubling to me that the governance at ANU is so dire.”
