As you’ve no doubt seen on the ABC or Sydney Morning Herald, UTS is going for round two. Which seems kind of unnecessary considering they seem to be making up the rules, rounds, and rewrites. Needless to say, I did not think I would be writing another article so soon. But I think we all deserve to have someone sift through the legally airtight jargon so we’re able to know, what is going on?
To make the long story short, UTS has revealed its ultimate goal: standardising.
The long-standing benefit of tertiary education has been the ability to specialise your study towards a specific niche. It’s no secret that UTS is lacking in its elective options, especially when compared to our neighbour, USYD. As a result, UTS degrees are majorly limited in their ability to provide specialised education and training. Now, UTS plans to make our degrees even less specialised, generalising subjects to overlap as much as they possibly can between degrees, in a bid to save money.
For example, UTS’ Bachelor of Cybersecurity and Bachelor of Computer Science already take the same core subjects, have almost the same course structure, and share the same elective pool. Their only real differences come into the degree with the CompSci majors and Cybersec submajors, and the fact that CompSci makes you do math. So, all the subjects run can be used for two courses – killing two birds with one stone by making the degrees so similar. The math subjects? They overlap with the mandatory math subjects the Bachelor of Engineering students have to take.
This is the philosophy now for all degrees, which is perhaps best exemplified in the multiple faculty mergers.
We knew about the faculty mergers between DAB (Design, Architecture and Building) and FASS (Arts and Social Sciences), as well as the slaughter of the School of International Studies. What we didn’t know about, was the newly announced proposed merger of the Faculty of Law, Faculty of Business, and Transdisciplinary Schools. This standardisation will take 6 faculties and 24 schools to 5 faculties and 15 schools.
The university is proposing this merger along with discontinuing 167 courses and 1101 subjects. They are qualifying their choices for the course and subject chopping block with reasons such as enrollments of less than 50 students. A number that is extremely reasonable for electives and specialisations. UTS is proposing discontinuing 31% of the 3,543 subjects currently on offer. Nearly a third of subjects are proposed to be cut. The hardest hit? The Science and Health faculties, with a 50% and 46% reduction respectively.
Apart from being morbidly ironic to an International Studies student who was reassured by peers that the mergers and cuts were only affecting the ‘useless degrees’, it’s hard to see any positives from this proposal.
For staff, this will be an incredible blow, firing many and rattling the working conditions of those lucky enough to survive The Reaping. Beyond the refusal to renew any fixed-term contracts, and the likely firing of most casual staff, UTS is calling for ‘voluntary redundancies’, which feels almost as insulting as telling anxious staff to start a tea ritual or do their laundry.
After all of this, we have to ask: what value is this educational massacre bringing to students? The immediate effect, I predict, is an incredible blow to the already fragile reputation UTS has built up over the last couple months. Cutting health and sciences this round, after education in the last, during nation-wide teacher and healthcare provider shortages? A damning move.
We are solidifying our position as a university that promises more than it can provide, remaining a second-tier education provider. A proposal in these documents exemplifies this embarrassment rather incredibly: a plan to “collaborate” to have our International Studies students learn their major languages at the neighbouring University of Sydney. Offloading our students to an entirely different university. Showing that UTS cannot even serve its own students better than other universities can. The sheer uncertainty of these proposals that slash and cut at student choice, when combined with the degree standardisation, stands to drive away prospective students.
We can turn ourselves blue, holding our breaths for this administration to listen to the pleas of staff and students, but the unfortunate feeling of helplessness is inescapable. Even though this is still, allegedly, a ‘proposal’, the damage to the image of UTS has been done, cementing within the walls of our beloved tower a reputation as a shaky and unreliable institution.
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