The University of Tasmania is proposing to cut more than a dozen academic jobs as it tried to future-proof its arts and society subjects in the wake of declining student numbers and financial pressures. The move has upset staff and students and shocked one of Tasmania’s biggest employers: Tourism.
00:00Undergraduate student Allie Brown is studying psychological science at the University of Tasmania.
00:10She feels the state's only university is devaluing and deprioritising the Arts and Humanities faculties.
00:16You feel a bit outer, for sure, like doing a Humanities degree because the Uni doesn't care about it.
00:22And UTAS isn't known for it.
00:26The University has released a restructure proposal for its Arts and Society subjects in response to workload issues, financial challenges and declining student numbers.
00:36It is vitally important that our priority remains delivering compelling and exciting and meaningful courses for our students, but we need to do that at a scale that we can afford.
00:45It includes merging Humanities and Social Sciences into a single school and changes to Arts faculties.
00:52Policing and emergency management and social work would move from social sciences to health.
00:57Some tourism study options are being phased out, leaving students to study a Bachelor of Business specialising in tourism and hospitality management.
01:06That worries the industry's peak body.
01:08Why can't we have a world class university that's teaching cutting edge tourism specialties, but also doing research that the world and the nation needs?
01:19The University wants to cut about 13 staff positions through targeted and voluntary redundancies.
01:25There'll be job losses for teaching staff in subjects including policing, history, languages, gender studies and tourism.
01:32What we'll do losing that is lose a very valuable skill.
01:36These people have expertise in things like Antarctic tourism, which is an emerging area.
01:43The University of Tasmania will now carry out four weeks of consultation with staff about the proposed changes.
01:50But the National Tertiary Education Union isn't convinced that process will be genuine.
01:55That, as usual, will be a fake consultation where it's a tick-box exercise that they go through to reach, I suppose, endorse predetermined outcomes.
02:08The University says there'll be a variety of ways staff can engage in the consultation.
02:13Thank you very much for speaking such as facebook.org
