Launching the good ship ‘opportunity’

The only ‘opportunity’ I am seeing being pursued as a result of covid is shedding staff, many of whom have decades of good service, and are valued employees. But we are not working for businesses, Martin. We con’t need to constantly innovate and change. Good research needs stability of employment and facilities. So does teaching. There are no great ‘revenue streams’ waiting to be be discovered in the middle of a global covid crisis. Only smaller ones, in areas like health and logistics. The ‘long overdue removal of duplication in professional service provision between centre and the academic heartlands’ you refer to will result in more centralised services, understaffed, with less real jobs. We want decentralised professional services, putting names to faces and face-to-face. These were present only 10 years ago. But they have already been cut back, not least at Griffith. A socially just transformation of Australian universities should put the staff centrally, continuing to employ them [because they are good, and hard working], while fighting to reclaim the public university from councils, boards, and executives that treat the rank and file as expendable employees of a near-corporation. For that we need the federal government on board, and it is not.