Five-day teaching ban at ANU
By David Gosling
CANBERRA — The campaign to stop 33 sackings in the Australian National University arts faculty escalated last week when staff in the National Tertiary Education and Industry Union held a five-day teaching ban in arts faculty courses and a 48-hour, campus-wide strike.
During the strike, the union had pickets at all entrances to the campus. Students from the Education Action Group (EAG) helped to staff the pickets and also organised a picket of the Manning Clark lecture theatre complex.
The strike was the latest action in a campaign by staff and students aimed at stopping the arts faculty restructuring plan. The plan proposes cutting 32.7 posts (21% of faculty staff), abolishing the classics department, halving the teaching staff of modern European languages and savagely cutting several other departments.
University management says the restructuring is necessary to pay for the faculty's "deficit" — an internal debt created by arbitrarily assigning certain costs to faculties.
At the same time, management is channelling money into an "Endowment for Excellence" fund controlled by the vice-chancellor, and spending $5.5 million on a new building for the master of business administration program.
The strength of the campaign against the cuts, combined with the release of the Karmel report, which found that the university is "top heavy", has caused panic in the administration. Two pro-vice-chancellors have left the university, and the vice-chancellor, Deane Terrell, has hired a public relations expert.
On the eve of the strike, Terrell offered to establish a three-person committee to re-examine the financial basis of the restructuring plan, and said that if the arts faculty pledged not to accrue more "debt", the staff cuts might be deferred.
EAG activist and Resistance member Will Williams told Green Left, "The strikes and pickets have been a big success. We need to maintain the momentum and not let the current holiday demobilise the campaign".