Fishing in the Bay

Last year the Umiversity of Melbourne undertook a benchmarking study comparing its faculties with equivalent faculties across the other Go8 universities. One faculty stood out as clearly the best in the country - the Arts faculty - see HERE.

Many people are aware that the Arts Faculty is having its funding severely cut, as part of the VC’s restructuring of the University. They are currently going through a round of voluntary redundancies and very few have been taken up. They are about to start the process of forced redundancies, which will be delayed a few days since the NTEU have formally lodged a dispute.

Why would you cut the only clearly superior faculty at your University? The reason is money. Not enough overseas asian students enrol in Philosophy and Australian History. Now maybe the University does need to cut down the cross-subsidy to “low value” courses - though I would have thought that the whole reason for the overseas student trade was to finance the things we value. But what I am really angry about is the marketing gurus’ name for the process of funding cuts and forced redundancies.

What else would you call it other than the Arts Revival Plan?

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