The National Tertiary Education Union has condemned the University of Canberra’s decision to spend $15m to recruit ten new researchers given its recent budget cuts to languages and the introduction of paid parking.
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UC will spend $3 million a year over the next five years recruiting ten ''high performing'' researchers in five specialist areas - governance, environment, communication, education and health - in an attempt to break into world rankings by 2018.
But the union’s ACT Divisional Secretary, Stephen Darwin said it was staggering management would commit “such a significant amount of money after only a month ago claiming it was forced due to budget pressures to cut all UC languages programs, sack seven academics and introduce costly pay parking for staff and students”.
The NTEU did not believe any scheme to attract elite researchers would work.
“The experience of elite recruitment schemes like that proposed by UC management is that it attracts researchers in the twilight of their careers, leaving little lasting benefit to the institution, aside from being temporarily bumped up a few places on largely illusory university league tables.”
Mr Darwin said the scheme would “drain resources that could have been used to support promising early career academics – the researchers of the future”.
The union was also increasingly concerned that “preoccupations with university branding may be triumphing over building the broad capacity and capability of the university” – pointing to the Brumbies sponsorship deal and the construction of club facilities at the UC campus which the union estimated would cost the university many millions.
“Being a few places up an artificial university league table or on the front of football jerseys should not be more important than building and sustaining the core activities of the university,” Mr Darwin said.
