Australian universities are stuck in a ¡°horrible halfway house¡± between public expectations that they teach the full spectrum of disciplines and government expectations that they make do with ¡°stretched¡± funding, a Canberra forum has heard.

Politicians will ultimately have to boost funding or carry the can for allowing subject choice to erode, according to Universities Australia (UA) chair Carolyn Evans.

Evans said administrators drew community outrage whenever they jettisoned courses. ¡°Universities are teaching many, many subjects that are not economically viable, but we can¡¯t teach an infinite number of them,¡± she told the National Press Club.

¡°To have a conservatorium-style teaching programme is completely financially unviable under the current structure. Many of us still commit to doing it, through gritted teeth, but we know the pressure that puts on other parts of the university.¡±

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The pressure included the ¡°unfairness¡± of unequal teaching loads, because subjects with low enrolments were kept afloat by cross-subsidies from more fancied disciplines.

¡°People who always argue ¡®you have to keep teaching my subject, regardless of how few people are in it¡¯, forget their colleague down the corridor who is teaching an overcrowded classroom because of the resourcing,¡± Evans said.

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Australian course cuts and suspensions have moved beyond familiar target areas, such as foreign languages and creative arts, to mainstream vocational fields such as education, geography, business and public health. Worst affected are institutions in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, where seven of the 12 public universities finished 2024 in deficit. Nine of the 12 have taken recent measures to cut staff or courses or both.

Some proposals risk stripping students of fundamental knowledge or aspirations of mastery. Macquarie University, which has almost halved its suite of foreign languages, no longer expects students to achieve fluency. The University of Technology Sydney has suspended intakes for the mathematicss and physics majors in its science degree.

This is happening amid plunging interest in some disciplines, particularly humanities fields. The Press Club heard that between 2010 and 2023, enrolments had declined 23 per cent in political science and policy, 30 per cent in philosophy and religious studies, 33 per cent in studies of human society and 40 per cent in language and literature.

Evans said universities needed to be responsive to shifts in student interest. ¡°I¡¯m a great believer in the humanities but it can¡¯t just be whatever our staff in humanities happen to want to teach in whatever subjects at whatever time.¡±

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Lawmakers also needed to be explicit about the subjects they wanted taught, she said. ¡°Sooner or later, government¡¯s going to have to say¡­¡®this is important to us, and we will pay for it¡¯, or ¡®it¡¯s not important for us [and] we won¡¯t pay for it. It is not individual university A, B or C¡¯s fault. This is a policy decision by the government.¡±

Evans said UA had asked the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec) to take responsibility for identifying the ¡°critical¡± subjects to be taught in each region ¨C but not by all the universities in each region ¨C and for sanctioning a shared approach to teaching such subjects with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which ¡°doesn¡¯t like rivals getting together¡±.

Education minister Jason Clare has singled out languages as subjects that are ¡°spread thinly¡± across universities. ¡°It¡¯s open to¡­Atec to get universities together and, say, make one university the home for one language,¡± he told a recent Sydney conference.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com