A message from the Dean at the College of Arts and Social Sciences

The ANU is one of Australia’s most cherished higher education institutions, beloved in Canberra, across the nation, and by its expansive alumni base internationally. Indeed, it was its unrivalled reputation as Australia’s preeminent centre of expertise in the social sciences and humanities that first attracted me here from London in 2022 to take up the role of Dean of the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. While operating deficits at ANU began before the pandemic, little could I have known that the University would soon be facing the worst financial crisis of its existence, an identified $250 million operational deficit.

It is not uncommon when faced with such an existential threat to seek to locate blame. However, the sheer scale and breadth of the crisis that simultaneously confronts so many higher education institutions across Australia and internationally, provides compelling evidence that the conditions for contraction are surely not all of our own making.

Returning the University, and my College, to a position of financial sustainability in this challenging financial climate is a demanding task, but one that can, and should, be approached creatively. Every senior leader in higher education has a responsibility to regularly review their operations, to assess which areas of teaching and research are flourishing, or not, and what potential areas of future growth might be. They should also be helping their constituent disciplines to evolve so they are ready to face emerging challenges, be operating efficiently, and able to meet the changing needs of their student bodies and external stakeholders.

In generating the current change proposal for the College I have sought to do all of these things. Over the past five months I have met regularly with the Directors and Heads of School in the College to assess how we might contract some areas of our operations to bring us into budget, but also how we might together identify areas of future potential growth. This has required us to make some very difficult decisions about how to parse out necessary cuts.

Many institutions who are facing similar financial difficulties have elected to cut whole disciplines to reach the target. I elected not to go down that route as I am of the view that all of CASS’s current disciplines are genuinely world leading – a belief substantiated by our leading position in the world’s excellence rankings. Rather, I sought to identify how we could re-organise our current operations to retain, and indeed build that excellence, even in a time of contraction.

As a consequence, CASS will retain all of its current disciplines, none are being disestablished as part of this proposed change. Students already enrolled in courses will be able to complete them. Some loss of positions is, very regrettably, necessary to reach financial sustainability but these have been distributed as equitably as possible across all units, such that most will experience the loss of only one or two positions each.

But with change also comes significant opportunity. In thinking about how to face the future we have developed proposals to create two new multidisciplinary Schools and to significantly expand the remit of two others into new areas of potential growth. The first of these will bring our strengths in visual arts, music, design, heritage and museum studies, art history and theory, and creative research together into a dynamic, future-focused School of Creative and Cultural Practice.  The proposal is not a reduction in ambition for the creative arts at ANU. Rather, it is a statement of intent: to invest in creative disciplines in a way that reflects how they are evolving and how students, communities, and industries engage with them today – that is to say in ways that are increasingly collaborative, interdisciplinary, and publicly engaged.

The legacies of the School of Music and the School of Art & Design will continue and be embedded in a curriculum designed to meet the changing needs of our students after graduation. We will continue to support performance and flagship ensembles like the ANU Orchestra and the ANU Jazz Orchestra, and, with a more flexible curriculum, enable even more students to get involved.

Similarly, the new School of Social Foundations and Futures will bring together the cognate disciplines of Sociology, Criminology and Demography, providing, as the names suggests, a foundational world-leading education in social science that will equip students to address the pressing social challenges that Australia and the world will face in the future. We have also identified exciting new areas of future growth for the School of Philosophy in Applied Ethics, and for the School of History in Biographical Studies, including Indigenous Biography, family history and digital history.

So while times are tough at present, I am confident that these enhanced offerings will provide essential platforms for the future sustainment of the College. CASS is a much beloved institution, and it is both my responsibility, and my honour, to chart a path for its recovery out of these difficult waters. I would encourage everyone to read the proposal for change in full here. I hope that the spirit of my intent is clear: to move forward through this phase of contraction in the most positive way that we can – to restructure, but to do so creatively and in ways that see the College set fair for the future.

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This article first appeared in The Canberra Times.