“Academics must teach more, research more, and take on more administrative load, as professional staff are once again being treated as disposable,” the NTEU’s Virginie Masson tells staff

The way VC Peter Høj presented the message of more savings to come went down well with the campus branch of the National Tertiary Education Union. Dr Masson, VP acknowledges his “transparency and forthcoming speech at an open meeting (CMM July 9). And she refers to the “inevitable structural change” brought by COVID-19.

But she isn’t happy with what has followed as management gets into the details.

For a start, she suggests the announced on-line briefings, “are not conducive to providing a means for staff to provide considered feedback.”

Of which they will have a bunch.

Dr Masson points to conflicting advice on teaching, “teach more, research more, followed by teach face-to-face, teach online. Which advice takes precedent depends entirely on the document being circulated.”

And she argues management wants more teaching from staff, with the same, or increased, expectations of research output.

As to faculty mergers, with Arts and Professions expected to management’s first pic, “those on the ground know how different these faculties operate and how difficult a centralised approach would be. It also ignores the fact that as it stands, areas with high students’ numbers find it difficult to provide adequate support”

And there is the state of university administration in the aftermath of last year’s voluntary redundancies, when 119 of the 157 people who left were professional staff (CMM February 18). “While senior management may have congratulated themselves in cutting costs of administrative services, they in effect just pushed the work onto academics, who despite their best efforts, would never be as efficient as their professional colleagues in running the business.”