SAVE OUR EDUCATION + SGM

save our education. JOIN JOIN THE THE FIGHT FIGHT BACK! BACK!

Last July, the Vice Chancellor Peter Høj announced a drastic proposal to reduce the current five faculties into just three by merging Arts with Professions and ECMS with Sciences. As things stand currently, the proposal will result in the axing of at least 96 staff. The real number of redundancies could be much higher, with management flagging another round of cuts in the future to sack academic staff by merging schools.

These cuts are a massive threat to our already dismal quality of education. Nowhere on campus will be left untouched by these attacks. Here are just a few examples. The University Library will lose five staff members, likely reducing face-to-face-to-face help and access to the collections you use for your studies. Six university counsellors will be sacked, adding more pressure onto already overstretched services so expect already excessive month-long waiting times to get even longer. In all the faculties, many of the frontline support staff who help with timetabling, study plans, enrolments etc. will be fired.

To justify these cuts, management claims that they are running out of money because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a pack of lies. At the end of last year, the uni announced an eye-watering surplus for 2021 of $194 million dollars. The Vice Chancellor, meanwhile, sits on a salary of around $900 thousand dollars. The pandemic is just a convenient excuse for cuts that have been on the agenda for a long time. A near carbon-copy of faculty mergers and job cuts was proposed back in 2016. Clearly, management have a long-term agenda of making our university as profitable as possible, at the expense of students and staff.

This dilemma of a corporate, money-obsessed management is not unique to Adelaide Uni. Universities across Australia and the world have for many years now tried to make our universities even more like soulless degree factories pumping out graduates at the cheapest cost for them but the highest human toll on our education and staff working conditions. It doesn’t matter to them if your casualised tutor is too overworked to respond to emails or if your degree looks like a glorified YouTube tutorial that uses pre-recorded four-year-old lectures.

If you want to know what the university management’s real priorities are, then look at the kind of appointees on their top leadership body, the University Council. Only five of the 15 councillors are even elected by students and staff. The rest have been handpicked from the ranks of Adelaide’s corporate and political elite. This includes several people with extensive ties to destructive industries like weapons companies and climate criminal fossil fuel giants currently destroying our planet.

Last year, student activists launched the No Adelaide University Cuts campaign group to resist management’s attacks. We did so with the clear conviction that the only proven way of defeating cuts is through defiance and protest. Students can take inspiration from the mass student and staff campaign that defeated the last proposal for faculty mergers and job cuts in 2016. University

management was pressured to back down in the face of overwhelming opposition from students, bad publicity and even threats that staff might go on strike. If we are going to defeat this new wave of attacks, then we need to build a similar mass campaign that makes putting these cuts through untenable for management. Our biggest campaign victory so far has been the dropping of all proposed cuts to the Maths Learning Centre (MLC). Through protesting, organising a petition that received almost 1000 signatures and taking a solidarity photo with staff, we were able to save both the amazing permanent staff at the MLC. Another win has been a drop in the total number of proposed job cuts from 130 to 96. These are both positive signs that the cuts are far from inevitable and that management is feeling serious pressure to not push ahead with a total war on education.

This year, we can look forward to an even bigger fightback against the cuts. During O-Week, the No Cuts campaign will be postering, leafleting and protesting to build more student opposition. Also, on the 24th March, the Student Representative Council will be hosting a Student General Meeting (SGM) to move motions expressing total opposition to the cuts and formally condemning the Vice Chancellor for even attempting to attack our education. Make sure that you at the SGM, ready to debate, hear speeches and vote on the motions. If you haven’t already, make sure that you like our pages on Facebook and Instagram and get in touch with us about getting more involved with the campaign.

WORDS BY JAMES WOOD, SRC EDUCATION OFFICER