By Ryan Bourke.
#BREAKING
The ANU College of Health and Medicine will be disestablished while several other colleges and schools will merge as part of sweeping new cuts announced this morning.
ANU will disestablish the College of Health and Medicine as part of a new cost-cutting plan announced to staff by Vice Chancellor Genevieve Bell this morning. Other changes announced include a plan to restructure all but two of the Colleges in a bid to save $250 million by 2025.
It is currently unclear how many jobs will be lost as a result of the changes. A follow-up email from Bell said, “all attempts are being made to minimise the number of redundancies; however, some job losses will be unavoidable.”
In a slide from the meeting shown to the Observer, it was announced that the John Curtain Medical School will be moved to the College of Science, which will then be renamed the ANU College of Science and Medicine (CMS).
Law, public policy, governance, and epidemiology will also be merged into a newly minted ANU College of Law Governance and Policy. This College will comprise the Crawford School of Public Policy, School of Regulation and Governance, School of Law, and National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health.
A third restructure will also occur with the schools of engineering, computing, cybernetics, and the Fenner School of Environment merging into a new ANU College of Systems and Society.
The ANU College of Asia and the Pacific will also evolve to encompass the Coral Bell School, the Australian Centre on China in the World, and the School of Culture, History, and Language.
The College of Business and Economics, as well as the College of Arts and Social Sciences, will remain unchanged.
Above: The new changes will include the axing of medicine and the merging of several other schools into several restructured colleges.
The changes will bring about approximately $100 million in salary expense savings by 2026. ANU has run successive operating deficits of almost $400 million since 2020.
Observer understands that many staff were anticipating drastic cuts in the wake of the recently announced cap on international students, which in August prompted Bell to warn of “external headwinds” affecting the higher education sector at large. In that same August statement, Bell warned that “unlike many of our counterparts, we are still balancing a large cumulative operating deficit.”
“[We]are considering how we pay down our debt when our growth modelling has not been realised and we spend more money each week than we bring in.”
As the nature of these considerations became clear this morning in a call with over 3000 staff, faculty were told “We will need to do less but do it better.”
We committed to Council to deliver a $250 million reduction in our cost base by the end of 2025″.
Speaking to Observer, one staff member said they “knew cuts were on the way”, but described what was announced this morning as “truly devastating for ANU and its staff.”
The changes will begin coming into effect on January 1 2025.
More to come.
