[IMCnetwork] Your support needed for IMC & ANU pol sci

[Nick Cheesman]

Dear IMC listserv

I’m writing to you on an important and urgent matter.

As you will likely be aware, the Australian National University management have decided that many academic and administrative staff are surplus to their requirements.

Currently, the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS), which includes the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIR), is facing a proposal to reduce staff by 52 positions. This number includes five faculty in SPIR. Of these, eight lecturers and senior lecturers in IR have been told to re-apply for their positions. Out of them, two will lose their jobs. My colleague April Biccum, co-convenor of the Interpretation, Method and Critique (IMC) network, is among the eight.

Were April named as one of the surplus faculty, it would spell the end of the IMC. With it the end of the IMC would go everything for which we have worked over the last nine years. Our undergraduate and graduate courses would disappear, along with the network, which is jointly hosted between SPIR and the Department of Political and Social Change.

Even were April not among those declared surplus, the proposed changes threaten the viability of our network. The IMC does not receive any ongoing financial support from the ANU and therefore it has no funding to be cut, but it has relied on administrative support for room bookings, website updates and communications assistance. We were advised earlier in the year that we no longer have web support. We have since had to update the website and maintain the listserv ourselves, on top of our existing workloads. Further cuts would weaken our ability to continue doing what is in effect unpaid service work on top of our many other responsibilities.

Looking broader, the proposed cuts would diminish the ANU's prestige as a preeminent institution for study of politics and IR. The proposal includes designs to merge SPIR’s three undergraduate degree offerings into one, combining political science, IR and public policy in a single degree. Though it acknowledges that the School has “maintained viable student enrolments” for the three degrees, it justifies the merger on grounds that after staff are reduced there will not be enough instructors. This change would jeopardise our undergraduate methods instruction. It would make the ANU a much less attractive place for undergraduates to study, since SPIR is unique in Australia in having this range of degree offerings.

In addition, management is proposing to cut research support staff, which would undermine our ability to win competitive grants, collaborate nationally and internationally, and further increase workloads of remaining faculty. Combined with the rolling of sociology, demography and criminology into a single school and the closure of decades-old esteemed centres, including the Humanities Research Centre, the proposed changes would, as renowned historian Professor Frank Bongiorno told a town hall meeting organised by faculty on July 15, reduce the ANU from its status as a world-class research institution in the humanities and social sciences to a middling vocational training university of little national and no international importance.

For these reasons your support is needed.

If you are not at the ANU or otherwise directly affected, please write an email to express your concern about the proposed changes to political science and IR. Please ask the University Executive to work with staff to raise revenue and move the ANU forward, not backward. Please send the email to:

Professor Genevieve Bell, Vice Chancellor <vc at anu.edu.au<mailto:vc at anu.edu.au>>
Professor Bronwyn Parry, Dean, College of Arts & Social Sciences <Bronwyn.Parry at anu.edu.au<mailto:Bronwyn.Parry at anu.edu.au>>
Ms Emily Fisk, Manager, Organisational Change <org.change at anu.edu.au<mailto:org.change at anu.edu.au>>

Please do this by July 24 if possible, and by the end of the month at the latest.

If you are a member of staff or a student, please attend events like the CASS People’s Town Hall, and events organised by the National Tertiary Education Union, to show solidarity with affected staff and express concerns about the effects of these proposed changes on our University. Please join the union if you are not a member. If you are academic staff your right to express your opinion about the ANU management is protected under the Enterprise Agreement (para. 20.2.3). If you are professional staff please note that you do not have this protection.

You can read the CASS Change Management Plan here: https://d1zkbwgd2iyy9p.cloudfront.net/files/2025-07/CASS%20Organisational%20Change%20Proposal%20-%2003%20July%202025.pdf

You can keep up to date with the situation at the ANU via the OurANU substack, which has been set up by faculty in response to the proposed changes across the University: https://ouranu.substack.com/

You can forward this email to anyone or any mail list that you think ought to receive it.

Thank you for your support
Nick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/imcnetwork/attachments/20250716/fa595184/attachment.html>