Macquarie Uni students demand action on education

By CHRISTINE LAI

Macquarie students held a rally opposing the corporatisation of higher education, protesting course cuts and restructures that have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis on Wednesday afternoon.

Austerity measures on staff and students have been implemented across many universities since the Covid-19 pandemic, including course cuts, layoffs of casual academics, increased workloads and the entire removal of degrees and faculties in a bid to recover lost revenue.

Last year, Macquarie University introduced “change proposals” which were set to remove 90 full-time academic positions in addition to the 350 ‘voluntary’ redundancies of both academic and professional staff from 2020. A report by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2022,  found that Macquarie University has the worst number of students-to-staff ratio, with 69.6 students per teaching staff member. This ratio is more than double what it was prior to COVID-19, at 1:31.

Incoming National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) branch president Nick Harrigan shared Macquarie Students Against Uni Cuts’ (MSAUC) “fury over what university management has done over the past few years”, referencing the relentless cuts and restructures that have occurred which has involved mass staff redundancies, and a major ‘spill and fill’ operation that has resulted in remaining staff fighting for newly created and lower paid positions.

“At the moment, management are damaging the institution, they’re damaging staff, they’re damaging students and they’re harming our ability to provide that quality education that students deserve,” Harrigan said.

Harrigan spoke about the cuts unveiled by management in Australia since the removal of free tertiary education under the Whitlam government.

A look back to free university education 

“Thirty-five years ago Australia had free undergraduate and graduate education. Now, I’ve seen the state of our education erode to the point where you pay about $45 000 for a three-year Arts degree,” Harrigan said.

The wave of restructures that have hit Macquarie Uni began with the abolition of the faculty of human sciences and since then, has seen curriculum reforms across departments including halving the number of majors in the faculty of Arts and “seeing departments going from offering 25 classes to 8,” Harrigan added.

Course cuts across campuses

UNSW Education Collective member Gina Elias declared that the cuts were “nothing new” and condemned UNSW for recording the highest number of staff cuts in the country where there were 726 fewer full-time jobs in 2021 than the year prior.

The NSW Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA) faculty at UNSW released plans to ‘streamline’ 13 bachelors programs into 5 degrees, effectively “meaning numerous course cuts, more sackings and a degradation of working conditions for staff,” Elias said.

She insisted on student activism to be greater across campuses and for “more people to make it untenable for the cuts to go ahead.” “In order to restore courses and cut staff we need to make their [management] life a living hell,” Elias said, reflecting on the recent USyd strikes where staff picketed across campus to declare the university shut down.

School of Engineering Professor and NTEU member Steven Hansen explained his first-hand experience with the cuts at Macquarie Uni where his former colleagues in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department were no longer working there as the “department no longer exists.” Hansen was previously in the Geology department but after the ‘spill and fill’, was forced to move into the school of engineering.

“There were students who couldn’t even finish their degrees because there weren’t enough classes for them to meet their degree requirements,” Hansen said.

Staff cuts further deteriorates education system

MSAUC activist Amy Lamont decried the more than 450 permanent and professional staff who had been sacked, in addition to the casual staff who “never got their contracts renewed”, and asserted it was an indictment on the current state of the tertiary system.

“When staff are sacked, it’s not as if the work suddenly disappears,” Lamont said, echoing the ‘student learning conditions are staff working conditions’ line.

MSAUC activist Aaron Douglas described his first-semester experience at Macquarie University as one where tutors were unable to provide written feedback to their students due to “appalling staff to student ratios” where 2 to 3 tutors were allocated to mark over a hundred students each. He condemned university management including Macquarie Uni Vice-Chancellor Bruce Dowton who “pockets more than $1 million” annually yet led the charge in cutting up to 82 academic staff to “safeguard $25 million of profit during the COVID-19 crisis.”

Education activists demanded the staff-to-student ratio to return to what it was prior to Covid-19, no more cuts to courses and the hiring of more staff to take the burden off current overworked professional staff.

The students marched to The Chancellery before yelling “show me what hypocrisy looks like” while pointing to the building.