Fuck the VCs - Students Oppose Dewar's Agenda

A university-wide restructure proposed by La Trobe Vice-Chancellor John Dewar is a savage attack on students and staff. The COVID-19 pandemic and a purported financial deficit is being used as an excuse to usher in aggressive cuts to staff and education. We oppose these cuts and the logic behind them. Staff and students are in the midst of building a campaign capable of fighting these attacks, and we need as many students mobilising as possible to win.

What’s happening?

In an all-staff briefing on Wednesday, 14 July, Dewar announced a massive restructure at La Trobe. It would oversee 200 staff redundancies, the closure of 290 current vacancies, and major restructures including Molecular Science’s disestablishment and its merger into the School of Life Sciences. The restructure will then force staff to reapply for new positions that are more casualised and less secure, with reduced hours and decreased pay.

Dewar has a long history of cuts and restructures. In 2009, Dewar helped implement the University of Melbourne's hated “Melbourne Model” which reduced 96 undergraduate courses to six degrees, cut 220 jobs, and saw the ratio of student to staff class numbers skyrocket. In a 2014 restructure at La Trobe that aimed to plug a concocted $65 million “budget hole”, saw Dewar cut 350 jobs and reduce 15 schools to 11. And just last year, during the current cycle of cuts, Dewar worked with the NTEU leadership to manufacture and then force staff to accept the Jobs Protection Framework (JPF), an unruly deal which saw staff take 10% pay cuts (alongside 20% increased productivity quotas) and offered no job protection guarantees beyond the 12-month period

So it's no surprise La Trobe heads a sector-wide attack on universities, with UWA, Adelaide, and RMIT facing equally egregious staff cuts, course reductions, and a move towards online learning. In combination with the current offensive, last year Dewar cut 239 full-time jobs, scrapped Indonesian and would have done so with Greek and Hindu, too, if not for community-led campaigns to save them (albeit in reduced forms), and permanently moved the entire BA course online in regional areas.

Dewar has even been awarded for his efforts, appointed as the recently elected chair of Universities Australia. As the peak body represents the business interests of the sector it no doubt hopes his attacks will become a model for other universities to replicate if passed unopposed.

Dewar’s rationale for these changes rests on an expected loss of revenue caused by the pandemic and subsequent decrease of international students – the accepted “financial reality” – and the need to future-proof the university in a changing world.

This “financial reality” is inaccurate. Last year, staff were shocked by a report by the Age proclaimed that “La Trobe University is at risk of going broke in a matter of weeks”. Dewar was forced to concede that La Trobe, “is not at risk of going broke”, and indeed, sits within “the top 30% of Australia’s top 2000 companies for revenue”. This did not halt Dewar urging staff to take voluntary wage cuts.

Let’s not forget that universities are some of the most profitable and richest corporations in Australia. They represent large blocks of capital. As the 2020 Annual Report clearly shows, La Trobe dug up $60 million for building upgrades, as well as $45 million for redundancies. Hidden, too, are $533 million worth of “accumulated funds”, i.e., profits held from previous years which could sustain their reported $51.4m deficit for just over a decade.

The coalition government’s ongoing funding cuts to tertiary education should not be let off lightly either, as it spent last year bailing out big business in a context that saw Australia’s 31 billionaires increase their wealth by $85 billion. But the Vice-Chancellors who are carrying these attacks out are doing so voluntarily, with their own interests in increasing profits at the cost of staff and student conditions. After all, a 20% pay cut still has Dewar earning more than the Australian PM, Scott Morrison.

Dewar himself has outrightly acknowledged his use of covid to hasten restructure plans he had long before the pandemic. In a recent interview published by ZDNet, Dewar declared, “[a] lot of the things that we are now doing, with [sic] things that we were planning to do before COVID came, it's just that we're now doing that much faster than we … thought we would need to”.

What now?

La Trobe is setting a dangerous precedent for universities by having some of the worst cuts and restructures in the state. The severe cuts on staff affect not only the lives and working conditions of staff, but will have a devastating effect on the quality of education received by students. Staff and students need to organise to fight these attacks. Now, before the University Change Proposal has been accepted, is our best chance.

The National Union of Students has called a nationwide Week of Action against university cuts in August, which provides students at La Trobe an important opportunity to fight back against the Vice-Chancellor. The week of action will consist of protests against cuts happening on a campus by campus basis, kicking off on the 11th of August with a student protest against the opening of the Menzies Institute at Melbourne University, a right-wing think tank funded by the Liberal Party that represents a broader move towards further corporatisation of universities. Students at La Trobe are organising an action of our own to take place during this week of action, as linking up with these struggles happening across the country gives us a greater chance of winning gains on our own campus.

Staff and Students at La Trobe need to mobilise and join other students fighting cuts at their own universities. As La Trobe has experienced some of the worst attacks, we need to build a mass campaign that can challenge not only the University Change Proposal but any other restructures that may come after it. John Dewar’s position as chair of Universities Australia makes it especially important to oppose these attacks, as what happens at our own university will likely be replicated at other universities around the country.

We all need to get involved in this fight for student’s education and staff conditions. The next organising meeting will be on the 29th of July with an action planned for the 2nd of August.

Follow La Trobe Students Against Uni Cuts on Facebook for updates on the campaign.