Australian Administrators Fuck Music Education

Last week Australian National University announced that they will be making all of the staff in their music department reapply for their jobs resulting in cuts of over 10 academic staff (here’s the grim letter they sent to staff). This is on the basis that teaching music properly makes a loss, and is being done under the cover of reorganising the curriculum for the purposes of employability, replacing staff and one to one tuition with fancy eLearning facilities. You can see all of the most horrendous spin on this in a press conference they gave last week:

Marnie Hughes-Warrington, who is the foul managerialist on the right in that video apparently also oversaw 350 redundancies at Monash University too. Anyway, there’s been a brilliant massive backlash, and a few days ago the head of department who is behind these sackings, Adrian Walter, went on indefinite leave due to the pressure. Except it’s just been revealed today that he’s got a new job starting in September at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts – he’s clearly a massive wanker who’s essentially working as a management consultant to implement cuts which will devastate music teaching internationally. Anyway, if you want to support the students and staff fighting these sackings you can sign a petition here: http://www.communityrun.org/petitions/savetheanuschoolofmusic-1 and follow the campaign on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/AnuSchoolOfMusicSaveYourDegree