Anthony Hayes, a third-year politics and history student and vice-president of the students’ union at La Trobe University, is standing up for his faculty.
La Trobe University proposes to cut the Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty beyond recognition to save $4.3 million.
The areas to be cut will be art history, gender sexuality and diversity, Indonesian, linguistics (undergraduate), spirtuality and religion.
Of the current 1200 subjects in the faculty, it is proposed that only 400 will be offered.
The proposed cuts will have a significant effect on my degree and on those who study in the future.
I chose La Trobe because of the faculty’s good reputation, in particular for its politics program and its staff.
La Trobe seemed the only viable option for a broad arts education that seemed content to do things a little bit differently.
I have been lucky enough to spend two-and-a-half years at La Trobe, where subject choice and quality teaching have been constant.
With the proposals under the Organisational Change Impact Statement that the university released on June 20, it allowed only a five-week consultation period.
But this was at a time when students had exams, then holidays and many students would still be unaware of the cuts and will have little or no time to have their voices heard.
The fact the university has taken this extraordinarily ill-conceived and shortsighted measure demonstrates a reluctance for rational discussion with its largest stakeholders, people most closely engaged with the faculty – the students.
It is disappointing that it appears the university is unable to understand that these cuts will have significant cultural implications.
It is also disappointing it appears unable to measure a faculty’s contribution to the institution as a whole in anything other than monetary terms.
