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The Sword of Damocles
Nov. 26th, 2020 08:26 pmAustralian Universities, for many years, have relied on the dime of overseas student income to supplement the increasingly meagre public funding. Managers of such institutions have had an easy job in that regard, and have lived it up to "ridiculous" levels. But whilst management studies teach the need to make contingencies, the university managers did not, and when COVID-19 hit, suddenly the sector was plunged into a financial crisis. Did they turn around to find new income streams? Not really. The strategy was to put a freeze on capital works, and sack staff, especially at the undergratuate level. As part of a research professional services group we have able to make a good argument that our roles were less affected, and our workloads had not changed, all of which was true. Despite this, the sword of Damocles has swung a little closer, and our group has been identified for some cuts. I am not at liberty to reveal too much in a public post but I feel that I can say the following; that a team that provides multi-disciplinary onboarding support for researcher tools has been targetted to be "disestablished".
It is a curious situation as management praises the team for the importance of their role and suggests that other parts of the University could take up their positions, without identifying which part or when. Apart from the very human cost of sacking hard-working and valuable people, the decision doesn't make organisational sense. Is the University prepared to experience the loss of researcher output, and therefore funding, which must inevitably follow? And even if the university does, through other departments and faculties, take up the roles there will still be a loss of the multidisciplinary advantages and an increase in administrative costs. And if the University instead outsources the service they will experience a loss of latent knowledge as a third-party will not be as well-informed of the specific contextual knowledge. I am left with the disappointing conclusion that the team has been targeted because of their causal staff, an administratively easier target. It certainly doesn't look good to sack low-level workers when the Vice-Chancellor is provided a $7.1 million dollar mansion with thirty rooms.
For what it's worth on my own education agendas, there has been some progress. This week I finished my third MOOC in as many months, this time for Econometrics, albeit an introductory course; I'll take up the more serious one soon. The final weeks involved multiple independent variable regression analysis, where my own interest is in the more complex multiple dependent variable regression analysis, which seems to have greater public policy potential. Today I also attended a short seminar run by the University of Auckland explaining the content and application process for their graduate degree in psychology; as I've already applied etc, it wasn't anything new. Finally, I have spent some time brushing up on HPC implementations of R and Octave in particular for training courses I am conducting next week, and in particular, delving into some basic alternative tools which are often more adaptable (but lower level) such as bc and datamash. All in good fun, I assure you.
It is a curious situation as management praises the team for the importance of their role and suggests that other parts of the University could take up their positions, without identifying which part or when. Apart from the very human cost of sacking hard-working and valuable people, the decision doesn't make organisational sense. Is the University prepared to experience the loss of researcher output, and therefore funding, which must inevitably follow? And even if the university does, through other departments and faculties, take up the roles there will still be a loss of the multidisciplinary advantages and an increase in administrative costs. And if the University instead outsources the service they will experience a loss of latent knowledge as a third-party will not be as well-informed of the specific contextual knowledge. I am left with the disappointing conclusion that the team has been targeted because of their causal staff, an administratively easier target. It certainly doesn't look good to sack low-level workers when the Vice-Chancellor is provided a $7.1 million dollar mansion with thirty rooms.
For what it's worth on my own education agendas, there has been some progress. This week I finished my third MOOC in as many months, this time for Econometrics, albeit an introductory course; I'll take up the more serious one soon. The final weeks involved multiple independent variable regression analysis, where my own interest is in the more complex multiple dependent variable regression analysis, which seems to have greater public policy potential. Today I also attended a short seminar run by the University of Auckland explaining the content and application process for their graduate degree in psychology; as I've already applied etc, it wasn't anything new. Finally, I have spent some time brushing up on HPC implementations of R and Octave in particular for training courses I am conducting next week, and in particular, delving into some basic alternative tools which are often more adaptable (but lower level) such as bc and datamash. All in good fun, I assure you.
