On June 3rd 2025 my University announced a fresh round of layoffs and course cuts to save 15 million. You could be forgiven some confusion walking around a campus littered with brand new gleaming steel and glass buildings and the accompanying billions in debt.
It feels upsetting to have to state something so obvious, but the living core of a university — more than any building or space — is the people that inhabit it. They are the blood from which all else is given life. But to think of them only as a number or a population is to miss the most important piece; the institutional knowledge that they carry. To stretch the analogy, blood is meaningless if it’s the wrong type, if it lacks oxygen. Sure it might Keep you on your feet for mother hour or two but that’s still a death sentence, just delayed.
Institutional knowledge lives and breaths slowly; not as an animal but as a forest. A complex ecosystem in which the embodied experience of an individual can be shared and critiqued and metabolised by those who are younger parts of the ecology. While it may feel counter intuitive that the occupation of knowledge production be so sedate — given how the most important aspect is collating and communicating that knowledge — as anyone who’s tried to learn a new language, or to play an instrument knows, the skills and the outputs are very different things.
Business doesn’t operate this way. While there are obviously complexities that are beyond my expertise, there are in general inputs that need processing by skilled workers to produce outputs. The skills can be taught and certified; and one employee can, without enormous trouble, take the place of another.
To run a lab like this — and I imagine any other research endeavour — is to doom the project to a revolving door of postdocs who spend tens of thousands to set up new experiments, publish a paper or two after the 1-2 years it takes to get up and running, before moving on without passing anything on so the cycle can repeat. If they’re lucky, maybe the PhD students doing the tedious work will have a reliable CI (chief investigator, leads research groups) higher up the chain so they don’t waste 3+ years for nothing.
We’re already 90% of the way there, but that’s no reason to give up and roll over.
These attitudes have been decimating the arts for far longer than the sciences; but not even the disciplines — like quantum — that have significant public and industry investment, are safe. In fact the amount of investment means that universities are only going to bleed researchers to industry because when they don’t care to support them appropriately, why stay…
The university is the campus of beautiful new buildings built with 1.5 billion dollars of debt. The staff with decades — and potentially centuries — of collective experience are chips to be gambled away for 15 million in immediate returns. The course catalogue that consistently generates millions in profit is to be gutted because the profit margins can’t be squeezed further when the material requires face to face learning. The students are meat to be processed into accredited assets to be used in service of capital, while the university extracts every cent it can in the form of governmental subsidised debt, no risk required.
None of this is inevitable. Government could properly fund research and higher education. Higher education is one of Australia’s most important exports, and one of the only industries that represents what Australia could be without resource extraction or tourism. The NTEU is theoretically powerful in terms of the potential impact coordinated industry wide action could have. They could use that power to push for change. Till now they’ve been content to soften the blow with minor concessions on a case by case basis each time a new round of layoffs or bargaining are announced at another university. They’ll only fight if we make them.