Up to eight schools face a cost-reducing restructure in a six month process Vice Chancellor Amit Chakma says

Professor Chakma fronted ABC radio in Perth Wednesday as uproar continues over staff cuts that will effectively end teaching and research in anthropology and sociology (CMM July 12 and 14).

The vice chancellor told Nadia Mitsopoulos this was necessary to address a decline in enrolments since 2012. “The key criteria is student demand, unfortunately the programmes in question have not been able to attract a large number of students,” he said.

Professor Chakma indicated most of the university’s 21 schools will make staff savings through attrition and early retirement, but up to seven or eight, face “a formal restructuring process” over six months.  However, he declined to identify them, saying, “it would be irresponsible of me to announce on the ABC the schools we are looking at.”

The VC says the university still needs to make $40m of his original $70m savings target, (CMM September 28 2020) and “we cannot deal with these sorts of problems when 70 per cent of our budget is tied to salaries, without impacting people.”

Garry Carnegie (RMIT) and James Guthrie (Macquarie U) had a close look at UWA finances in CMM last year (October 28 2020).