Sydney University: deregulation by stealth
Just before Christmas, staff of the University of Sydney received an email announcing massive cutbacks to the university’s degree structure. The so-called Strategic Plan for 2016-2020 has been described as “traumatic” by its architect, vice-chancellor Michael Spence.
Spence claims that students are bewildered by the number of study options. His own surveys actually find that students think the university needs to improve the limited content and diversity of units of study.
Yet under the restructure, the current number of undergraduate degree options will plummet from 122 to 20. The Sydney College of the Arts, which offers large studio spaces, will be shut down and sold off, forcing visual arts students onto the main campus with no resources.
This anti-student restructure follows the failure of Christopher Pyne’s university fee deregulation to pass the Senate. The attempt to legislate $100,000 degrees was supported by most vice-chancellors, including Spence – who would have received an opportunity to increase his $1 million annual salary.
But without federal fee deregulation, universities across the country are now looking for ways to drive up the price of degrees.
The worst proposal in this regard is a plan to introduce a generic, four-year “philosophy” degree that will gradually replace the current three-year arts and science bachelors. This will add an extra 33 percent to the cost of an undergraduate degree and reduce student intake.
But then, anyone wanting specific skills will need to enrol in a subsequent postgraduate degree. Universities are already free to charge as much as they like in this area.
The restructure has rightly been called “deregulation through the back door”.
Andrew West, a former member of the university senate, said management wants to strengthen the hand of the corporate sector within public education.
“If you look at the people who’ve been appointed, not elected, to the senate, almost all of them come from the world of Sydney banking and corporate elite”, he told Fairfax Media in January.
Despite the university generating an additional $115 million in 2015, its bosses have declared a need to “reduce the burden of administration” – managerial speak for job losses. With 16 faculties being merged into just six, hundreds of staff face the sack or pay cuts of up to $20,000 a year.
One worker and activist with the National Tertiary Education Union spoke of increasing work discipline and surveillance as a result of this merging. “The student centre has been effectively turned into an Orwellian-style call centre where staff performance is monitored on large screens”, Jane (not her real name), who lost her long term job in another faculty, told Red Flag.
“Degrees are referred to as products. It’s quite literally a degree factory unfolding before our very eyes.”
Like the Liberals’ attempts to deregulate higher education in 2014-15, this restructure can be stopped by mass action on the part of students and staff.
Activists in the Sydney University Education Action Group (EAG) are fighting hard to stop all course cuts, four-year degrees, staff cuts and faculty mergers.
The EAG has called a rally for Wednesday, 16 March, on Camperdown campus.
