Student activists at La Trobe University have begun a campaign against a proposal to slash funding to the Humanities and Social Sciences faculty.
About 150 students and staff protested at the university’s Bundoora campus in Melbourne’s northern suburbs on July 31. Students marched to the administration building where security guards wrestled with a protester and locked the students out.
Undeterred, students marched to the office of Humanities and Social Science dean Tim Murray where they were also locked out but occupied the corridor outside the office.
In a sneaky move, the university announced the cuts on June 20 while the students were on holidays.
If the university gets away with the cuts, 500 humanities and social sciences subjects, representing about 50-60% of the faculty’s subjects, will be gone. This would amount to job losses of about 45 full-time staff. The university has flagged that art history, Indonesian studies, gender, sexuality and diversity studies, spirituality and religion, and linguistics courses will be abolished.
Staff cuts are also planned for Chinese, Japanese and Spanish courses. The number of humanities and social science majors will be cut from 29 to 13.
The university has justified the cuts using corporate arguments, telling staff that other universities such as Deakin and Melbourne offered fewer subjects but had raised their “market share” in humanities.
Ironically, after La Trobe announced that its gender, sexuality and diversity studies course would be abolished, Melbourne University has announced that it will re-establish a similar course.
Students and staff have been meeting jointly and separately to plan a campaign. The next actions include a protest outside the university council meeting on August 13 and a protest at La Trobe University open day on August 26.
The university has so far refused to meet with students to discuss the cuts. Many students who are in the middle of courses that the university plans to abolish are not sure if they will be able to complete their courses.