The new interim head of Australian National University (ANU) has attempted to quell fears about widespread cuts as restructure plans emerge elsewhere.

ANU ruled out involuntary redundancies a day after the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) proposed the abolition of more than 130 academic jobs. Lachlan Clohesy, divisional secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), said he hoped UTS leadership was “taking note” of developments at ANU, where interim vice-chancellor Rebekah Brown promised to avoid forced retrenchments for at least 15 months.

Former ANU vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell had pledged to end forced redundancies, excluding the 140 jobs already proposed for removal at the time. This helped fuel a wave of protests that culminated in Bell’s removal from the top job on 11 September.

Brown also revealed that ANU would defer proposals to prune or scrap some of the institution’s most cherished elements, notably its music school, whose future – and that of many “other discipline areas” – will now be outlined in a new university strategy next year.

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Brown said the music school would remain an “important and intrinsic” part of ANU, and committed to a “co-design process” for the new strategy. She said ANU still needed to be “mindful” of its spending and further “realignments” were inevitable in some areas, particularly professional services. But changes to the “academic architecture…may be very minor in some places, more significant in others and nothing at all in some areas”.

A day earlier, UTS confirmed a proposal to close its School of International Studies and Education, with “some” of its programmes to survive elsewhere. The university also aims to close two other schools – Public Health, and Professional Practice and Leadership – amid plans to simplify the academic structure and scrap 167 courses and 1,101 subjects.

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UTS had already suspended intakes in many of these courses, and said 42 per cent of the targeted subjects had attracted no enrolments last year. It said the proposals had been forced by changes in federal funding, restrictions on international enrolments and the “longstanding impacts” of Covid-19.

“With policy constraints limiting both domestic and international student revenue growth, our main source of operating revenue, we have been faced with difficult choices to reduce our costs,” said vice-chancellor Andrew Parfitt.

The NTEU’s New South Wales secretary, Vince Caughley, said the proposals were “choices, not necessities. UTS recorded record income in 2024, staff costs are lower in real terms than in 2019, and their own modelling shows the university would return to surplus by 2029 without cuts.

“The vice-chancellor and his executives are inflicting turmoil on staff simply to bring that surplus forward by two years, all while blowing A$93 million [£45 million] on consultants in the last three years. UTS has become the poster child for why governance reform in our universities is urgently needed.”

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Staff are particularly aggrieved that UTS paid consultants KPMG about A$5 million for advice on its restructure. In May, Parfitt told Times Higher Education that the restructure would deliver around A$380 million in savings. “I think a level of investment to actually get that right is not an unreasonable thing to do,” he said.

ANU, which has been criticised over its spending on consultants Nous Group, has vowed to keep its policy development in-house from now on. “I’m not using consultants,” Brown told staff. “Where possible, we’ll be using our own ANU talent to help research, test [and] model ideas.

“We’re going to use ANU people to create ANU opportunities. There will be moments we need to use consultants. But my aim is, if we have the expertise, we’ll be using ours first.”

Brown also announced that an “anonymous donor” had stepped in with a “very generous philanthropic gift” to keep the Australian National Dictionary afloat for at least another two years pending “alternative, long-term funding”.

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The shuttering of the dictionary, which has tracked the evolution of Australian English for decades, was among the most change proposals at ANU.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com