Hundreds of jobs on the line at UC

September 7th 2011 by Sebastian Boyle

Hundreds of academic, general, and technical staff positions at the University of Canterbury may be lost over the next three years as a result of budget shortfalls.

The news came last week after an internal University document forecasting the University's finances over the next ten years was leaked to the Tertiary Education Union.

The document suggested that as many as 350 positions, or 18 percent of current university positions, would be cut.

In a message to staff on Thursday, Vice-Chancellor Dr. Rod Carr said there were no plans to "make reductions of the magnitude suggested", but a 13 percent drop in student numbers meant "some redundancies are inevitable".

Speaking to The Press, Dr. Carr said the proposal in the document had been revised by a new budget that might reduce cuts to 275 jobs.

Speaking to Canta, he said the University is still considering how it might adapt to the post-earthquake environment, but it expected the "vast majority" of the 2000 courses and nearly 60 degrees or awards it currently offered would continue to be offered into 2012 and beyond.

"Our focus will continue to be on student learning outcomes and ensuring that quality staffing, facilities and programmes will continue to be a hallmark of UC," he said.

In response a question as to whether particular positions had already been identified as "inevitable redundancies", Dr. Carr said the University Council had asked the senior management team to "prepare a range of scenarios".

"The University's senior management team has been working hard to identify solutions that will minimise adverse impacts on the university, its staff, and students," he said.

The University was also holding regular meetings with the Tertiary Education Commission and the Tertiary Education Minister to ensure they had an in-depth understanding of the University's position.

UCSA President Kohan McNab said that while the UCSA believes modelling worst case scenarios is prudent, "so that the University is not blind to possible effects on our university" as a result of a likely drop in student numbers next year, the UCSA has a long history of opposing any staffing cuts it believes will compromise student access to the quality of education they enrolled for.

"We are preparing to once again play this watchdog role in the coming months, in order to keep students informed," he said.

In a message to staff last month, Dr. Carr said the budgetary challenges facing the University came from a number of areas, and are likely to be in the order of $12 - $18 million.

"Some of these challenges are earthquake-related, others are issues the senior management team has previously identified such as the impact of Government-imposed fee caps on our ability to recover costs, the need to ensure the effective use of teaching time by looking at small enrolled taught courses and the number of students each academic staff member teaches, the overheads we carry in underutilised built infrastructure, the costs we incur in relatively low value manual transactional activity that can be reduced, eliminated or automated through change in work practices."

The final budget, which will determine the number of jobs to go, will be determined in November after consultation with the University's Academic Board. Possibilities for student input will come via UCSA consultation.