The authors would like to acknowledge that the Australian National University is located on stolen Aboriginal land, the land of the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri people. We acknowledge their elders past and present and also acknowledge that land on which the university is located has traditionally been, and continues to be, an ongoing site of Indigenous care, custodianship, and resistance. Always was, always will be.

On the afternoon of October 2 2024, staff at the Australian National University (ANU) received a cryptic email from Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell. The message read:

Good afternoon colleagues,

I’d like to invite you to an all-staff address tomorrow morning at 9.30am on Zoom. For those unable to attend, a recording will be made available afterwards.
Please register here: [zoom link to register]

Thank you,
Genevieve
Vice-Chancellor and President

With less than 24 hours’ notice, staff logged into a one-way Zoom webinar in which an announcement was made: the University was operating at an unsustainable deficit and thus would be implementing a series of drastic expenditure-saving activities under the banner of “Renew ANU.” The vice-chancellor, flanked by a team of senior executives including the provost, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, and chief people officer, outlined their proposal to claw back $250 million of annual expenditure by 1 January 2026. 

These savings were to be made up of a $150 million reduction in non-salary expenditure and $100 million in ongoing salary cuts. That is, the equivalent of 638 full-time equivalent positions—roughly one in seven staff—would be made redundant within fourteen months. The webinar lasted thirty-six minutes with no opportunity for questions. 

This message set the tone for the period of so-called “change management” to come. Despite reports from independent financial analysts that the university was in a “strong financial position” with a AA+ credit rating, management nevertheless insisted that these aggressive cuts were necessary. Staff efforts to request transparency regarding financial data used to justify decision making were met with vague responses. We were invited to consult on change management plans that we had not seen yet. 

We were kept waiting for months for details on rumoured mergers and redundancies and then given minimal notice to attend town hall meetings, where we witnessed senior executives speak to charts and tables for forty-five minutes, leaving less than fifteen minutes for staff to ask questions. We received emails warning us not to speak to the media and to report any students protesting the proposed cuts, contributing to a culture of fear and intimidation. 

In the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS), staff finally received details on the change proposal in early July, nine months after they had been originally flagged. The proposed restructure laid out a $9.5 million cut to the college—the largest budget cut across all academic work areas of the university. The cuts affect almost every discipline in the college: politics, international relations, anthropology, sociology, demography, criminology, policy research, history, philosophy, gender studies, literature, linguistics, languages, lexicography, music and art. They include the disestablishment of major research centres, such as the Humanities Research Centre, Centre for European Studies and the Australian National Dictionary Centre. 

They also affect dozens of professional staff who perform vital functions in student services, outreach and fundraising, IT services, and whose expertise and institutional knowledge are fundamental to the basic functioning of the college. In the sterile language of Renew ANU, these were not people whose futures and livelihoods were at stake but positions that were now “surplus to operations” and could thus be “disestablished.” 

Protesting against these damaging cuts and the insulting display of consultation theatre, staff organised their own event: a CASS People’s Town Hall. This forum took place on the ANU campus, located on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri People in the suburb of Acton, Canberra. It gave staff the opportunity to voice the impacts of the proposed cuts on their work and personal lives, to articulate the value of the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and to finally be given a chance to provide their genuine “feedback” to management. 

Over 160 staff attended the event, spilling out of the lecture theatre and into the hallway. They held signs and banners reading “We are people not positions” and “Humanities make us human.”

Here we collate some of the statements made by staff and students who spoke out at the CASS People’s Town Hall event. In publishing these statements, our aim is to shed light on the devastating impacts of these cuts and the hostility of management’s tactics, especially their use of so-called “spill and fill” redundancy pools. 

These statements give a human face to the people whose names and positions have disappeared in organizational charts. They speak to the attacks on arts, humanities, and social sciences occurring across the sector and provide a platform to hear the voices of those directly affected, including junior staff, individuals with disabilities, and employees who lead Indigenous knowledge programs. 

There are two common meanings of the term “consultation”: a) formal discussion; b) the act of enlisting an expert to obtain advice. In our experience of change management ANU, neither forms are present. There is no discussion or dialogue, rather we receive invitations to attend events labelled as town halls but which in practice are opportunities for management to speak at staff ad nauseum, with the bare minimum amount of time allotted for staff to raise concerns in return. 

We are experiencing a disconnect in the feedback loop, like a suggestion box that feeds into a void.

Our comments and suggestions are never transparently dealt with, so the system cannot evolve in meaningful ways. The loop of dialogue that management would have us believe is key to the development of change is broken. Rather, the one type of consultation we do see is corporate consultation, in which our leadership outsources decision-making to the tune of millions of dollars to supposed experts from consulting firms such as the Nous Group. 

These changes are then ruthlessly applied to “transform” the institution without considering the experiences of the people who are still inside.

The CASS People’s Town Hall worked to hear these voices of people from within the college and achieved a space of catharsis and commiseration for the group. In this way the forum achieved the missing part of the equation that other town halls have failed to attain: to speak, listen, and feel. While stakeholders from industry and government attended and showed their support, there was no sign of members of the University Executive in the audience.

The “Renew ANU” process being forced through at the ANU does not exist in a vacuum. It is representative of problems in universities across Australia. Some of these, such as the “failed” Job-Ready Graduates (JRG) package, affect the humanities, arts and social sciences specifically. Others, such as the use of extortionist consulting firms to provide opaque justifications for institutional restructures, affect all disciplines. 

We hope that the unprecedented media, political and public attention to the many cruelties, failures, illogicalities and injustices of “Renew ANU” can serve as an impetus for much-needed sector-wide change.

Staff with concerns regarding the psychosocial harm caused by Renew ANU are encouraged to share their experience with the WHS regulator Comcare.