Universities such as mine are making poor decisions, and we’re not allowed to know why

I’m an academic at the University of Technology Sydney. I teach and research in history, giving lectures and tutorials, marking essays, writing books and producing podcasts for students and teachers. I work with many wonderful, passionate colleagues and I love my job.

As a professor, I am keenly aware of the immense privilege of my position. I have a secure income and a platform. But with that position also comes seniority, expertise and a responsibility to speak out on important issues.

I’ve been in the tertiary education system for 20 years and have seen gradual, steady decline in government investment across the sector, accompanied by perverse and destructive interventions such as the recent Jobs Ready Graduate program.

According to the Productivity Commission, Australia has the second-lowest public expenditure on tertiary education institutions in the OECD after Britain. This has resulted in an endless chase for dollars (international students and “the next big thing”) rather than thinking about what an educated Australia should look like in five, 10 or 50 years’ time.

It has also led to a growing and unfettered managerialism in universities, where their purpose has become less about education for the public good and more about the budget bottom line to make up for government shortfalls. Hundreds of planned job cuts have already been announced this year at the University of Wollongong, ANU and now UTS, where staff are reporting high levels of distress.

Meanwhile, who’s left to pay for this contraction of public education? Us: the public. Our children and grandchildren.

Nowhere has this been more obvious than at UTS. This month, the university announced it was “pausing” 2026 enrolments in more than 100 courses. Barring a major about-face (which I desperately hope for), the entire programs of teacher education and international studies look like they’ll be abandoned.

This is happening during a national teacher shortage – and at a time when questions around social cohesion, extremism and xenophobia are as pressing as they’ve ever been.

The argument from the university is that enrolment numbers have been declining over several years in the affected courses, but this rationale is problematic for two reasons.

First, by their own logic, several teacher education programs haven’t been in decline. Secondary education has grown by more than 40 per cent each year for the past two years. Two primary education degrees, one of them launched only this year, were also predicted to increase in 2026. Did I mention we’re experiencing a critical teacher shortage?

Meanwhile, cutting the bachelor of international studies will damage the degree programs they combine with, such as law, health and communications, where the opportunity for substantial international experience (a year abroad) and intensive language studies are a point of distinction to enrol at UTS.

Secondly – and this argument is about social licence – should university managers have the authority to decide what sort of education citizens should have access to? Which metric determines the value of policy experts and economists who have international experience? Nurse practitioners and midwives who are multilingual? Or, you know, foreign correspondents who can speak Chinese?

UTS was established by a piece of NSW state legislation in 1989 that outlines the university’s “principal functions”, including “the provision of courses of study or instruction across a range of fields, and the carrying out of research, to meet the needs of the community”. I’d argue that the areas being abandoned are critically needed by the community the university was principally established to serve. (In addition to teacher education and international studies, enrolments for degrees in public health and science have also been “paused”.)

This is the real myopia. Training teachers doesn’t need to make commercial sense to be valuable. Neither does international language learning or public health. (Remember COVID-19, anyone?) Vacating these critically important areas diminishes not only the brand of UTS but the state it was designed to benefit.

What research has been done into the broader social, cultural and educational impact on our shared knowledge capacity of these proposed cuts? The answer is that we simply don’t know.

Worryingly, staff requests for documentation and data have been blocked, and we have been pushed into a time-consuming and obfuscating process of GIPA (freedom of information) requests to ascertain the work being done by highly paid private consultants who have already cost more than $5 million of taxpayers’ money to provide advice to UTS. Documents come back redacted like they’re dealing with issues of national security. Staff and the public can’t even access the UTS Council minutes where these decisions have been discussed.

Staff aren’t against exercising financial responsibility – far from it. Many staff at UTS are experts in finance and some teach subjects on this very topic. We’re also not against “change”. We understand challenges arise that demand a response. But we do expect rationales for change to be transparent and open to informed debate.

According to our employment, I’m not supposed to say anything publicly that brings UTS into disrepute. I’m not doing that. I’m trying to defend the institution I’ve devoted 15 years of my professional life to – and the community the institution was constructed to serve.

Dr Anna Clark is a professor of history at the University of Technology Sydney. She is the creator of the award-winning Hey History! podcast and the author of Making Australian History.

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