BY DAVID BOYD & DANIEL OOI
SYDNEY — The University of New South Wales University Council has announced plans to merge the Faculty of Life Science and the Faculty of Science and Technology, a move which has staff and students worried about the future of their courses and jobs.
The council claims the merger will "improve science's long-term viability at the university" but has kept the details sketchy.
"Restructuring" at UNSW has become a management buzzword used to disguise course closures and staff redundancies — as happened in a restructure of the science faculty itself three years ago.
Vice-chancellor John Niland claims the restructure will more effectively allocate resources, pointing out that subjects in the school of geography classes are run for as few as four people, while first-year classes in the school of physics remain chronically over-crowded.
The restructure would "solve" this problem by abolishing the geography school entirely.
The decision was taken with little input from academics, staff or students. Relevant unions were invited to "discussion forums" only after most decisions had been finalised behind closed doors.
Student representative bodies and the National Tertiary Education Union have opposed the "rationalisations", arguing they dumb down the university, hindering its ability to produce innovative and broad-reaching research and scholarship.
UNSW's anti-corporate activist group, Students Campaigning Against Multinationals, has said it will campaign against the merger.