Just off the Manawatu Standard: Massey to take knife to sciences, prompting concern over staff redundancies and courses being dropped.
Staff are being offered voluntary retirement or redundancy, with a sweetener package offering long-serving staff up to 16 weeks’ extra pay.
But if enough staff do not take up the offer, a series of “staffing reviews” would take place next year, Prof Anderson said.
I assume this is more than sending political messages to the capital. Staff in other divisions of the university are also affected.
As an outsider, it is difficult to judge the full scale and intentions of this, but there appears to be moves to reduce some of the courses that are perceived to be duplicating effort (e.g. Information Science will apparently only be given at the Albany campus), or perceived to be less useful.
Perhaps staff at Massey might comment to present a more complete picture?
As an insider it’s also hard to gauge scale and intent. :)
There have been big changes at Massey, partly because of demographic factors. Student numbers have struggled to stabilise at PN, while numbers have grown rapidly at Albany. But this growth has been in Business and Information Sciences, not Sciences. The other swings are internal- some courses have become a lot less popular, some have become more popular. Universities everywhere I think, are reluctant to drop struggling programmes (usually a feeling of hope and optimism pervades operational decisions). I suspect things are at a point where some hard decisions are being contemplated.
I understand, but I’m not sure of the veracity of this, that many labs have needed to be upgraded to meet current health-and-safety regulations (as opposed to the regs of the 70s and 80s) and this has been an expensive ‘hit’.