Henry L.
LaTrobe University has recently announced massive cutbacks in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The severity of the cuts is best demonstrated by a few stark statistics. From a current list of 913 available subjects, 500 will be cut, 29 possible major streams to be merged into 13, the elimination of 5 entire areas of study, including the acclaimed and progressive department of Gender, Sexuality and Diversity.
The most harrowing detail of all is the fact that 45 full time staff within the department will lose their jobs. Students and staff have commenced a fight, which began with a hundreds strong rally on campus, augmented by a 25 strong occupation of the meeting of the university board which finalised the cuts on Monday the 18th of June. As well, various events and protests were staged in the last week and many more planned for the foreseeable future.
LaTrobe has a reputation as one of the top Australian universities in this field, and by embarking on such severe cuts in an area like this, they are demonstrating that their motive, and the motive of the broader tertiary education system, is not to provide a solid, broad education, but instead to turn a profit and provide degrees in areas that prove most profitable to the capitalist class.
Viewed in connection with the attempted destruction of the TAFE system, the LaTrobe cuts can be seen as a test case before a widespread concerted attempt to further reconstruct our ‘education’ system into one that simply provides students with the bare tools to become efficient cogs in the capitalist system, without spending money on the kind of subjects that promote knowledge of the world and relations between its people. Vanguard will be providing further analysis of the cuts at La Trobe in the coming months.
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