La Trobe University uses pandemic as an excuse for cuts

La Trobe University Vice-Chancellor, John Dewar, wants to use the pandemic and a purported financial deficit to impose a new round of cuts on students and staff as part of a university-wide restructure. But he is facing determined resistance.

La Trobe management’s plan is part of a sector-wide pattern, with UWA, Adelaide, and RMIT facing equally savage staff cuts, course reductions, and shifts to online learning. Last year, Dewar cut 239 full-time jobs, scrapped Indonesian language teaching (and would have scrapped Greek and Hindi too if not for community-led campaigns to save them) and permanently moved the entire Bachelor of Arts course online in regional areas.

In an all-staff briefing on 14 July, Dewar announced a further 200 staff redundancies, the closure of 290 current vacancies, and major restructures including the shutting of the School of Molecular Science and its merger into the School of Life Sciences. And while the proposal announced 300 “new roles”, the “spill and fill” method being used to fill them will likely see staff rehired on contracts with reduced hours, decreased pay and worse conditions.

Dewar has a long history of cuts and restructures. In 2009 while employed at Melbourne University, he helped implement the notorious “Melbourne Model”, which reduced 96 undergraduate courses to six degrees, cut 220 jobs, and saw the staff to student ratio skyrocket. In 2014 as La Trobe Vice Chancellor, he cut 350 jobs and reduced 15 schools to 11 as part of a restructure aimed at plugging a concocted $65 million “budget hole”. And just last year, during the current cycle of cuts, Dewar worked in tandem with the National Tertiary Education Union leadership to manufacture and then force staff to accept the Jobs Protection Framework, a deal which cut staff pay by 10 percent (along with a 20 percent increase in productivity quotas) and offered no job protection beyond a year.

As the recently elected chair of Universities Australia, the peak body representing the sector, Dewar’s latest proposed restructure may well become a model for other universities to replicate if implemented successfully.

Dewar’s rationale for the cuts is an expected revenue loss caused by the pandemic, decreased international students and the need to “future-proof” the university. But this is a fabrication to justify cuts.

Last year, after the Age reported that, “La Trobe University is at risk of going broke in a matter of weeks”, Dewar rushed to clarify that the university was “not at risk of going broke”. In fact, he said, it sits within “the top 30 percent of Australia’s top 2,000 companies for revenue”. This U-turn was not about assuring staff—he continued to urge them to take voluntary wage cuts as part of the Jobs Protection Framework—but about placating anxious investors and prospective students.

La Trobe has plenty of money. It’s 2020 Annual Report shows $45 million spent on redundancies and a hidden $533 million worth of “accumulated funds”, i.e., profits held from previous years which could sustain their reported $51.4m deficit for just over a decade.

And La Trobe, as with all universities, spends extortionate amounts of money on marketing and advertising—recall its vapid “All Kinds of Clever” campaign—as part of a competitive, profit-driven industry designed to lure customers. In a 2017 report, The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency estimated a sector-wide $622 million was spent on promotional campaigns.

So the cuts aren’t about saving money or adjusting to the pandemic: they are about restructuring the university to make more money, and ensuring it is a profitable business for years to come. The pandemic provided Dewar with an opportunity, one he openly acknowledged in a recent ZDNet interview when he said “[a] lot of the things that we are now doing, with [sic] things that we were planning to do before COVID came, it’s just that we’re now doing that much faster than we...thought we would need to, or we might have been able to beforehand”.

The Coalition government’s funding cuts to tertiary education deserve scorn. The government spent last year bailing out big business in a context which saw Australia’s 31 billionaires increase their wealth by $85 billion. But VCs and upper university management are cynically using these attacks to push through pre-planned restructures.

A campaign among students and staff is building. La Trobe Students Against Uni Cuts, a student-led activist group, will participate in the National Union of Students’ week of action, beginning on Wednesday 11 August. La Trobe students stand in solidarity with other campaigns that oppose university management austerity measures and draw strength from victories won through past struggles. These campaigns, past and present, show the potential for a democratic, de-corporatised tertiary system. But it won’t come without a fight.