These people are a charming, lynch worthy bunch. In claiming they are short of cash, the managerial dunderheads at the University of Technology Sydney thought it prudent to throw A$4.8 million at the tax consultants KPMG to design what it calls the Operational Sustainability Initiative (OSI). The linking of these three words alone suggests that something sinister and inhumane is afoot, a program closer to an assassination or disposal program than a sensible readjustment. Indeed, the OSI became the subject of a “notice to give information” in June from Safework NSW, accusing the university of “wilful and negligent mismanagement” of the restructuring undertaking “despite full knowledge that the process is causing significant psychological harm to staff, including documented instances of suicidal ideation, anxiety, and depression.”
The university, as reported in The Australian Financial Review in May, was hoping to give a savage pruning to the institution’s budget to the value of A$100 million. This initially involved the sacking of 400 staff members, a proposal cooked up even as five senior UTS executives travelled to the United States on an alumni trip worth A$140,000. That financially minded paper also wondered why UTS ended up using KPMG “instead of its own staff to design this plan” in an adventurously asinine contract stuffed with such terms as “leveraging solutions”, “acceleration of value”, and “decision trees”. (Meaningless terms suggest a mind without meaning.) KPMG crows in convoluted ecstasy about a “six-layer framework for target operating model design”. No wonder the technocrats were so wooed by it all.
The suggested program from the firm was ordinary and, as with most products arising from such an organisation, prosaic. It could have just as easily been done by clumsy butchers with a plagiarised MBA. KPMG produced spreadsheets dealing with courses and subjects that might be offered in future, which ones deserved to be confined to oblivion and what areas of research warranted interest as opposed to those that did not. Just to confirm the firm’s almost awe-inspiring lack of expertise, it was also called upon to examine “current and future state teaching capacity”.
Part of the tool kit of advice developed by KPMG to staff most likely heading for the chop developed into a ragbag of nonsense and piffle: to stay mentally sound, best wash delicates with your hands. Try to take up baking, because that is what a disturbed mind awaiting imminent suffering needs. Keep a gratitude journal. Make sure to brush and floss your teeth, because you obviously did not do that before a consultancy firm hired by a university told you to do.
There is every reason to suppose that ChatGPT could have come up with the same, risible nonsense, saving the shameful creeps in management some cash. But sound reasoning is not a prerequisite to those rising up the greasy towers of technocracy in learning institutions, let alone any other institution. Incompetence is often essential, while talent and ethical worth are impediments best done away with.
The vice-chancellor of the university is very much short of parfit, though sports the name Andrew Parfitt. He is adamant that no decisions have been made on job losses or the discontinuing of any courses which, knowing the pattern of university practices, is precisely the opposite of what will happen. “The temporary suspension is aimed at prospective new students for 2026.” This is the sort of shoddy reasoning we have come to expect from the vice-chancellorship and any number of university proconsuls and viceroys that suck the lifeblood out of education. Ella Haid, spokesperson of the UTS Students Association General Councillor and Stop the Cuts UTS, is hard to fault in her assessment on this: “We should be clear that management is doing this because they’re pursuing a hefty financial surplus. They’ve no interest in seeking student or staff consultation on this major restructure.”
The response from UTS to reports, notably by the ABC, was one of dastardly fudging, oily manoeuvring and sickly denial. Rather than admitting to blunder, organisational insensitivity, and being outed, it attacked the national broadcaster for its reporting in a statement. “We are disappointed that the ABC reported that these comprehensive support initiatives were only rolled out as a result of their reporting.”
The reports, claimed the university, had ignored context. “By focusing on just six dot points from a single article on an external wellbeing hub comprising extensive, differentiated resources, the ABC chose to portray this as being representative of the tone, intent and totality of support provided to UTS employees.”
The parasitic problems associated with university management have become critically colossal. Being unable to exist without attachment to the authentic university, that pulsing, thriving organism of cerebration sustained by students and research, the leadership of such bodies continues to make decisions that harm academic staff and any chance of a rich learning experience for students. (A survey from the National Tertiary Education Union of 380 respondents from UTS found that 35% had experienced high levels of psychological distress from the OSI endeavour.)
That harm is then justified through cringeworthy programs of “wellbeing” and assistance, their very existence intended to exonerate the misdeeds of culprits who shamelessly engender an environment of emotional and intellectual terrorism. They create the bullets, use them, and drag out the psychological bandaging to conceal the wounds.
Should courage ever be mustered by cowed academics and the atomised student body, the cosmos of the vice-chancellor and those complicit in sustaining it can finally be terminated with little sorrow and much relish.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
