Over the past few days, ACU administration has run a series of hour-long town-hall sessions over Teams to allow staff to pose questions about the draft academic change plan. The three sessions were led by Provost Meg Stuart and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise Abid Khan. The Provost acknowledged explicitly that the Vice-Chancellor himself chose not to attend the meetings and had delegated the task to herself and the DVCRE. She also acknowledged that she herself had no role in the drafting of the change plan, which makes one wonder why she was chosen to lead the sessions. Several new details emerged in these sessions that our supporters would be interested to learn. We will share three points related to 1) the university’s finances, 2) the academic rationale for the plan, and 3) the personal cost it represents.

Finances: The Provost conceded that the projected $38m deficit for 2023 includes the expense of $8m incurred from severance payments made due to a professional staff change plan in the first half of the year. That is, the financial justification for the current job cuts is partly due to the cost of the job cuts already made earlier this year (roughly 80 positions). Given that the current three change plans across the university that are being entertained call for twice as many jobs to be cut (c.150-170), that suggests the cost of the severance payments for the new change plans could be on the order of $16m or more. The Provost noted that the administration did have an estimate of the cost for the current three change plans, but she did not share the figure. She also claimed that the cost of the new severance payments was already factored in to the projected $38m deficit, which would mean that the cost of these job cuts is being used as part of the justification for making these very cuts. The Provost, however, was apparently misinformed. ACU's CFO later clarified that the $38m projected deficit does not include the severance payments for the three current change plans. This suggests that the Provost does not have an adequate grasp of the university’s financial situation and its relation to the current academic change plan. It also suggests that if the current three change plans go ahead, the $38m deficit will swell significantly.

Academic rationale: The Provost and DVCRE clarified that the academic change plan is only partially an attempt to address a financial crisis. It is also an attempt to redirect funds to other academic disciplines. The areas that were specifically mentioned were IT, law, and business. ACU currently performs poorly in research in these areas, which is viewed as an accreditation risk by the administration. To address the poor research performance in these areas, savings from the proposed change plan will be redirected to them to support new initiatives, with the specifics to be determined by the dean of the relevant faculty. That is, high-performing humanities scholars are being penalised for the poor performance of other areas of the university. During the meeting the DVCRE was also asked to name a single specific example of excellent humanities research at ACU that he valued and intended to continue supporting. He failed to name a single example.

Personal cost: It is imperative to bear in mind the drastic personal cost the draft change plan represents, which became only more apparent in the town-hall sessions. A staff member who moved across the world only a year ago to take up a continuing-position in what was at the time said to be an exciting new research unit still in a growth phase, and who now finds himself among the positions slated for elimination, asked the Provost why any academic would ever trust ACU’s employment contracts in the future. In response, the Provost stated that the university had to be ‘agile’  to respond to external challenges and is within its rights to dismiss staff in the manner proposed. This is, she said, merely ‘the nature of working in higher education’. This response fails to recognise the degree of disruption and suffering this proposal imposes upon the affected staff. It also arguably fails to reckon seriously with the question of whether any future prospective staff members will feel themselves able to trust the university’s commitment to them.

It is always easier to present criticisms than solutions, so in conclusion we will pass along a question posed in one of the hall sessions by an anonymous staff member, which went unanswered by the administration:

'Rather than seeing large numbers of historians at ACU as a problem to be fixed by retrenching staff, we should be using it as a strength to gain market advantage. Over the past decade or so the number of historians at Australian universities have been declining through a mix of natural attrition and hiring freezes. As a consequence, major Go8 universities such as Monash, Melbourne, UWA and Queensland have skeleton History staff, unable to meet student demand for HDR supervision. ACU is therefore uniquely placed to capitalize on the short-sightedness of other universities to attract undergraduate and postgraduate students to learn and research History at ACU.’

Let us hope that the administration recognises the significant capital they currently posses in their staff expertise in the areas that are proposed to be cut and that it finds a way to leverage it to meet the challenges of the present, rather than severely curtailing one of its greatest strengths.