Academics slam $21 million uni restructure as jobs are slashed

Claire Halliday

Dozens of academics are fighting to hold on to their employment with the University of Wollongong (UOW) as the regional institution enters the next phase of a restructure designed to recoup lost revenue from declining international student enrolments.

UOW has been one of the nation’s first universities to announce wide-reaching job cuts in response to the federal government’s decision to tighten visas for international students. 

The uni’s restructure plan is now finalised, with confirmation that 91.6 full-time equivalent academic positions will be made redundant to free up $21 million a year in operational costs.

Following the end of the restructure’s phase one, UOW has identified two-thirds of the cuts through voluntary redundancies.

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UOW’s management says the cuts are necessary to ensure the organisation remains viable after recent changes to international visa processing led to a 50 per cent drop in international enrolments.

But academics, students and the union claim the university has other avenues to offset the losses and that the cuts will diminish the university’s reputation and its course offering.

Languages including Japanese and Mandarin, as well as science and technology studies and cultural studies, were abolished after being deemed unviable.

The decisions will see staff within six unidentified disciplines enter what the university describes as an expression of interest phase, where they will be forced to compete with each other for the remaining positions at the university.

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“Now it is absolutely the Hunger Games,” says Associate Professor Shoshana Dreyfus.

“It is absolutely pitting people against each other.”

Although the professor from the School of Linguistics and Social Inquiry agreed to a voluntary redundancy, Dreyfus says the term is misleading.

“There is almost nothing about this that is voluntary. We are not waiting around to leave the university. The experience is pretty awful. I’m now calling it forced voluntary redundancy.”

Linguistics was originally set to be one of the disciplines facing abolishment as part of the overhaul, with Dreyfus saying that it was only advocacy from herself and her colleagues that saved it.

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“In our department of languages and linguistics, most of us are gone,” she says, adding that the department of around a dozen staff has now been reduced to less than five.

Further cuts ahead

In December 2024, the federal government replaced its Ministerial Direction 107, which meant international student enrolments were limited to 60,000 fewer students in 2023-324 than the previous year.

But UOW acting vice-chancellor John Dewar says the damage had already made its mark.

“The damage that was done by the previous way of processing visas was very deep and will take two or three years for the university to recover,” says Dewar.

“The financial challenges facing the whole sector will remain very significant for the foreseeable future.”

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Claire Halliday has an extensive career as a full-time writer - across book publishing, copywriting, podcasting and feature journalism - for more than 25 years. She lives in Melbourne with children, two border collies and a grumpy Burmese cat. Contact: claire.halliday[at]educationdaily.au