Adelaide’s university merger: built for business, not students

The University of Adelaide and University of South Australia will be folded into a single mega-institution next year: Adelaide University, projected to be the largest in the country. For years, the state Labor government and senior university managers have sold this as a leap towards “global competitiveness” and a “top-100” ranking. But behind the glossy rebrand, a corporate giant is being built on cuts, restructuring and the degradation of education.

The chaos already engulfing students and staff has been widely reported. Enrolments are a mess, degree structures have changed without warning, and many staff still have no clarity about their future roles. Deloitte, the consultancy overseeing the merger, has pushed to slash 3,000 course offerings at both universities. Hours and in-person components are being stripped from many subjects, while staff are being worked into the ground as management attempts to build a new university on top of their existing workloads.

But the administrative meltdown is not the core problem. It is a symptom. The merger is a significant step in the ongoing corporatisation of higher education, in which universities are run according to market logic rather than on the basis of teaching and research quality.

Management has announced that lectures will be replaced with “asynchronous digital activities”. They boast that the new institution will “deliver online education to more students than any other Australian university”. Students who struggled through online learning during and after the COVID pandemic know exactly what this means: lower engagement, and what the National Tertiary Education Union has warned will be the “death of campus life”.

Alongside this, the merger will introduce trimesters—opposed by 83 percent of staff—which compress teaching into shorter blocks, intensify workloads and, as at the University of New South Wales, pave the way for course cuts and job losses. Trimesters fit neatly with the broader shift to generic, common-core subjects and “stackable”, modular degrees designed to minimise contact time, recycle content and allow management to teach more students with fewer staff.

These changes are not about improving education. They entrench a market-driven model that has already produced sector-wide casualisation, chronic overwork and wage theft, including the University of Adelaide’s admission that it underpaid over 800 casual staff by $1.25 million. Rather than addressing these crises, the merger exacerbates them.

Worse, Adelaide University offers a bleak preview of Labor’s national agenda for higher education. Education Minister Jason Clare insists that qualifications must be “quicker and cheaper”. University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Bill Shorten has promised to “break the tyranny of the three-year degree”. Despite overtures to “access” and “equity”, Labor’s direction is clear: reshape universities to serve Australian capitalism—especially the technology and national security industries. In Clare’s words, higher education is “rocket fuel for the economy”.

At Adelaide University, staff working overtime to design courses have reported being told to ensure they have little continuity so they can be chopped into “micro-credentials”. Lectures—sorry, “asynchronous digital activities”—may be broken into smaller segments that can be watched in any order, presumably to fit Gen Z attention spans. The real purpose is obvious: maximise profits and the number of fee-paying consumers. This is the “modular future” Shorten champions.

The merged university also aligns neatly with Labor’s military priorities. Adelaide University’s recently announced partnership with Saab, whose parent company supplies components to the F-35 fighter jets used in Israel’s war on Gaza, is just the latest example of universities deepening ties with the war industry. Every degree is to be “industry-aligned”, including compulsory “work-integrated learning”.

Whether or not this corporate behemoth succeeds on its own terms remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: Adelaide University’s priorities serve the interests of profit, not students and staff.