University of Sydney prepares to shed staff

Another large Australian university is asking its employees to consider ceding their jobs as it confronts the loss of about one-third of its incoming international students.

The University of Sydney has given staff and unions 10 days to provide feedback on its proposal to put a voluntary redundancy programme in place. If the plan proceeds, employees will be asked to formally express interest in relinquishing their jobs.

Vice-chancellor Michael Spence said he expected the process to be finished in November, with departing employees gone by Christmas or early next year.

In an email to staff, Dr Spence said the university’s earlier projections had been based on an expectation that the pandemic would be a “one-off event”. Administrators were now working on the assumption that earnings from next year’s international student intake would be 35 per cent lower than modelling had suggested.

He said “non-salary” savings options – such as reduced spending on infrastructure, research equipment, travel and new recruits – had been exhausted. “This has been an effective short-term fix for 2020 but has required us to suspend important investments in teaching and research and constrained some of our day-to-day operations,” Dr Spence said.

“If we are to continue to flourish as a world-class institution, the financial austerity measures we have lived with this year are not sustainable in the longer term.”

Sydney has arguably been Australia’s most aggressive recruiter of international students. Its latest institutional accounts show that its income from this source rose by 20 per cent in 2019 to about A$1.06 billion (£585 million), leapfrogging its revenue from the federal government.

Like Macquarie University, Sydney has not put a figure on the number of staff it hopes to remove. Internal emails last month triggered claims that as many as 3,000 jobs could be at risk.

Nearby UNSW Sydney plans to make the equivalent of 493 full-time jobs redundant, with up to 500 positions to go at the University of Technology Sydney. The University of New England has revealed plans to jettison 200 jobs, while Charles Sturt University intends to remove between 100 and 110 positions.

In Victoria, the University of Melbourne plans to make about 450 positions redundant, with 300 jobs to go at Deakin University and 355 at RMIT University. Monash University has announced 277 voluntary redundancies and La Trobe University reportedly plans to cut some 190 staff on top of about 240 who have already gone.

Such figures are thought to be dwarfed by the losses of casual and fixed-term staff. On 28 August, police were called on to Sydney’s campus to dispel a student protest against the cuts, which was deemed in breach of social distancing rules. Student newspaper Honi Soit reported that at least 10 protesters had been fined or arrested.

Dr Spence said he and fellow university executives had agreed to cut their salaries by 20 per cent this year to help mitigate the downturn in earnings. He was Australia’s highest paid vice-chancellor in 2019, earning more than A$1.6 million.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com