The review of the School of Culture, History and Language, which commenced in 2013, was an opaque process. It began with a shambolic retreat in which academic staff were invited to come up with ‘blue sky’ thinking about how the School could become great. The event was run by a paid external consultant who had apparently no knowledge of universities and thought that all problems could be solved by scribbling platitudes on butchers’ paper.
In the months that followed, working parties were formed to address various aspects of the School’s mandate, but there was no systematic attempt to examine the School’s financial strengths and weaknesses and to build on the former while addressing the latter. Instead, the College management announced that the School was not viable in its current form and would need to be dramatically restructured. There were occasional announcements that some activity or other was an essential part of the School’s future or that some other activity was a liability, but the figures on which these claims were based, if they were released at all, showed tendentious accounting that was clearly designed to demonstrate non-viability rather than to reflect the real situation. The overall financial figures relating to the School’s performance and the performance of its different components were never revealed.
It was widely believed in the School that costs associated with the appointment of a new Director from overseas, together with the School’s financial contribution to support four distinguished fellowships known as Laureates constituted a significant part of the School’s problems. One back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested that these two factors accounted for almost the whole of the School’s financial deficit.
In the course of 2015, it began to appear that the College management saw staff cuts, rather than just restructuring, as the only way to achieve viability for the School. Cuts would enable the School’s share of the National Institutes Grant (NIG formerly known as the block grant) to be spread over a smaller number of academics. The NIG is in effect a subsidy which enables parts of ANU to avoid some of the financial pressures of the general funding system which counts numbers of students, value of research grants etc. There were two elements to this plan. One was not to renew any fixed term contracts, the other to find a way of disposing of continuing staff. An unconfirmed leak from the Dean’s office indicated that the plan was to reduce the number of continuing academics in the School from 60 to 40. Around 8 academics left in this early stage of the review under various arrangements (including retirement and non-renewal of contracts), but the culling plan needed another twelve.
In late 2015 (might have been early 2016), the Dean issued a plan which basically involved cutting all small languages from the curriculum. This plan would have destroyed ANU’s reputation as a place for studying Asian language and would have undermined its expertise on countries other than China and Japan. The plan generated a huge backlash. The smaller languages had devoted followers and students mobilized publicly. A Language Diversity group undertook a concerted campaign to have the decision reversed. The Dean then largely backed down, instead endorsing a plan that was said to give the small languages time to establish their viability by teaching online and expanding their markets.
Around this time, the College management announced that the financial position of the School was in such crisis that they would take over financial supervision, meaning that no School funds could be spent without their direct authorisation. In effect, the School director lost his authority to manage the School. In early 2016, the Dean announced that the director was stepping down in order to spend more time on research. Very few staff attended the School reception held to thank him for his work as Director.
The focus then shifted to identifying non-language staff to be cut. The Dean produced a template that divided the School into departments of approximately equal size and which proposed a savage culling of mid-career researchers. Under this plan, one professor would have been removed, but the other 11 victims would have come from levels C and D (Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor). There was a strong reaction against this plan, too, and the Dean retreated, promising a process driven by (unspecified) criteria, rather than by an abstract template.
University rules permit staff to be made redundant, but only after a fairly complicated process. The Dean therefore announced an alternative route: CHL would be wound up, a new school would be created embodying the vision that had (allegedly) been articulated earlier in the review process, and around 40 staff would be transferred administratively into that new school. Those not transferred would become redundant by virtue of the disappearance of CHL. The Dean would thereby avoid the slow and difficult process of individual redundancy determinations.
The College administration then appointed a ‘Deliberative Committee’ to recommend on which staff should be transferred to the new school and which should not. This committee consisted of the Acting Director, three of the four Laureates (one Laureate refused to take part), two academic staff who held College positions as associate deans, and a couple of non-CHL academics. The formal instructions to the DC were to apply criteria in order to determine who was the best fit with the future plans of the School. These plans, however, were so vague as to give the Deliberative Committee little practical guidance. The committee was given access to the CVs of all CHL academics, each of whom could also submit a one-page statement. Members of the Deliberative Committee were assured that they would automatically transfer to the new school.
Members of the Deliberative Committee were sworn to secrecy and there was deliberately no official written record of the discussions. In the subsequent discussion of the DC’s recommendations, outsiders perceived that some members inadvertently dropped hints about the proceedings. It is hard to be sure how seriously to take these hints, but they suggest that in addition to considering the CVs and one-page statements the committee listened to unsubstantiated gossip from individual committee members which portrayed some staff positively and others negatively.
It appears that the final report of the committee was drafted by the committee chair and was not shown to all other members before it was passed to the Dean. The Dean then summoned each of the potentially affected CHL academics individually and pronounced their fate. It appears that in each case the Dean told the person that they had accepted the recommendation of the DC (which may not always have been the case). A senior university HR representative was present at each meeting and those who were not to be transferred to the new School were invited to make an appointment at which they were presented with information on the university’s redundancy procedures. The twelve staff members were subsequently informed that they had failed to meet the required standards of performance in terms of teaching, research and service. In fact, those targeted included some of the strongest researchers and most enthusiastic teachers in the School.
The twelve academics identified for removal included four professors and two former or current Future Fellows (the FF is a prestigious mid-career fellowship awarded by the Australian Research Council). There was no obvious pattern in the selection, but it was noted that Southeast Asian Studies and History were especially severely hit. Some of those dismissed were perceived to have had enemies on the Deliberative Committee.
The fallout from the cull is another story, but there are a few things to mention:
- In the end, only one of the twelve was forced through the whole redundancy process. All the others either left for new jobs or reached some accommodation with the university.
- No new School was ever created; this would have been a complex administrative process. The talk of transfers to a new school appears to have been a ruse to mislead the victimised staff that they were not protected by the usual procedures for redundancy.
- All PhD students in CHL were offered funded extensions of program and visa extension fees in compensation for the disruption caused by the review process. These extensions merely covered the extent of the disruption for CHL’s PhD students, and many students have fell through the cracks.
- CHL continues to have difficulty meeting its teaching obligations because of the loss of staff.
- The Dean was not reappointed on the expiry of their term. And remaining staff are encouraged to move forward and not to look back.
