Murdoch Uni slashes job security in student services, hits rankings doldrums

Murdoch University will shake up more than 100 professional positions across four student service areas in a shock move following a year of academic upheaval.

Offices of quality and enhancement, education and equity, international, as well as student and library services will be hit by the “employee change proposal” that effectively makes staff reapply for newly created positions, while potentially demoting others and sending some packing.

Murdoch University’s student services are also being crippled by staff restructures.Credit: Aja Styles

Quality and enhancement, which oversees education quality and compliance, as well as curriculum management and enhancement, will lose three positions but create seven in ‘compliance and risk’.

The move to increase compliance and risk officers appears to be a direct response to a recent audit by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, which found Murdoch “breached their own policies” over student admissions after whistleblowers exposed that many international students did not have the required English language skills.

The re-registration of the university as a TEQSA provider has been limited to four years rather than the usual seven.

The university’s education and equity division helps deliver services to those with disabilities and the changes will directly affect 18 positions.

A complete shake-up of the international office will impact 13 positions, while student and library services, which handle student engagement, enrolments and graduation, will feel massive changes with about 60 staff affected.

“Roles will be refreshed, with the flexibility to allow for ebbs and flows in requirements and resources to meet the current and future needs of Murdoch University,” a leaked slideshow revealed.

“Some roles are being removed, while other roles will have a change in portfolio, responsibilities, title, or reporting line. Some level of disruption will likely occur during the transition period.

“There may be short-term disruption to student service support.”

For one law student, who recently spoke to WAtoday on the provision of anonymity, signs of the shakeup had already taken effect as he was shocked at how badly Murdoch handled student welfare after he transferred from another WA university.

“What the degree will be worth at the end of the day is really concerning me.”

Murdoch law student

He said he spent hours trying to chase up which units had transferred over from his previous uni and would form part of his degree.

He also saw clerkships to the Federal Court offered to the first applicants to email back, which he said was wholly unfair for those with jobs who did not necessarily monitor their student emails around the clock.

The student said complaints got bounced back by Murdoch’s student services with no clear direction or details about whom to specifically raise his issues with, beyond the mention of the university’s lacklustre and hard to navigate website.

“All this money I’m paying now and what the degree will be worth at the end of the day is really concerning me, and what it also means for school-leavers,” he said.

A Murdoch University spokesperson said the impacts to staff in the four service directorates were still only proposals, with impacted employees being asked to provide feedback and express interest in prospective roles.

“Some existing roles have been identified at risk of redundancy, however it is our number one priority to redeploy as many staff as possible,” they said.

“As yet, no employees have been made redundant as part of this process.

“We are genuinely consulting about the changes with all impacted employees and have allowed additional time to ensure we capture all employee feedback through this period.”

They said staff who did not find a suitable role through redeployment would be offered a redundancy package commensurate with their role and time at Murdoch. They would have access to a range of free and confidential support through the university’s employee assistance program.

Those re-deployed at a lower classification will maintain their previous salary for 12 months in accordance with the Enterprise Agreement, while a number of fixed term roles have also been proposed to become continuous as part of this process.

Murdoch’s rankings

The latest restructure comes in the wake of Murdoch cementing its position as Western Australia’s worst-performing public higher education institute for research, teaching and impact, according to Times Higher Education’s latest rankings.

Not only did it remain behind Edith Cowan University for a second year running, it fell behind ECU in the sub-category of young universities (under 50 years), coming last in WA for the first time this year.

Times Higher Education’s WA young university rankings (under 50 years).

Until 2017, Murdoch was considered the top young WA university but that honour now goes to Curtin University.

ECU Vice-Chancellor Professor Steve Chapman welcomed ECU’s climb in research rankings during such a difficult time in higher education, brought on by the pandemic.

“We’re a dynamic young university with a growing international reputation for world-class research and it’s pleasing to see this continues to be recognised in the THE rankings,” he said.

“Now more than ever, the impact of ECU’s translational research matters.”

Overall, Murdoch remained in the 501-600th percentile in the THE rankings, behind ECU in the 401-500th percentile globally, with Curtin weathering a slight drop on last year’s performance to drop to 251-300th place.

The rankings come after a year of hundreds of jobs cuts and reductions to academics’ research capabilities in WA.

Curtin was estimated to have axed 656 total jobs, according to headcounts supplied to the Australian Charities and Not-For-Profit Commission, which was about 10 per cent of its workforce during 2020.

ECU conversely invested $16 million into research and staff in 2020.

The University of Western Australia delayed major cuts until June this year, when it announced it would be pursuing $40 million in jobs and school restructures.

It is seeking to axe significant fields of study and research in social and molecular sciences despite the university acknowledging there were “areas of high research performance” in the school of social sciences.

UWA’s education and research restructures were not reflected in this year’s rankings, with it improving its poll WA position by moving up seven places to 132nd spot on last year’s 139th position in THE’s global rankings.

Unlike Murdoch, which ruthlessly reduced its sciences – made up of chemistry, physics, maths and statistics – from fully fledged degrees to first-year or teaching units for other degrees late last year, with up to 200 academic jobs estimated to have been slashed across the campus.

Engineering also suffered under in its “STEM everywhere” strategy, as well as significant cuts to the arts and humanities.

A Murdoch University spokesperson said the university was engaging in world-leading translational research and making important discoveries, such as discovering new ways to identify and monitor long COVID and developing new treatments for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Times Higher Education’s overall rankings for WA public universities.

And it looked to a number of rankings used to measure the performance, reputation and achievements of universities around the world, with the most recent rankings yet to factor in recent appointments and research outputs, they said.

“We acknowledge that the latest THE results are not where we want to be,” the spokesperson said.

“However, we have a clear plan to improve our rankings results through a range of initiatives including the recruitment of high calibre academics and researchers, changing our curriculum and how we teach, stronger industry connections to ensure our students our job ready, and investing in infrastructure in learning and teaching and research.

“We are confident these will drive improvements in the coming years.”

It argued that it had already seen some improvement in the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) rankings, which placed Murdoch in the 500-600 band – up from 700-800 in 2019.

Fairer measure of research success

Rankings, which rely heavily on research, have always been considered the drawcard for international students to Australia, with a lot of prominence being put on Shanghai’s Jiao Tong rankings, also known as ARWU.

But with Australia’s borders remaining closed the focus has been shifting to retaining and increasing domestic student intake.

“The rankings are also widely used by faculty to inform career decisions by university leaders to help set strategic priorities and by governments to help monitor policy,” according to the THE website.

“Why? Because the THE rankings are based on one of the richest databases of university performance in the world.”

But Flinders University ecologist Professor Corey Bradshaw and his colleagues have developed a ready-made app, called the Epsilon Index, to assess individuals’ research performance, which they say is fairer.

“There’s no straightforward process to compare the relative strengths of researchers in disparate disciplines – some just tend to have fewer citations than others,” he said.

“Then there’s gender. Research publications for women might dip during maternity leave for instance, affecting perceived performance, even though their ability – and their research – is no less brilliant.

“Women also tend not to be offered the same opportunities as men even today, so they are unfairly ranked against men for most existing metrics.

“The Epsilon Index is a new way to reduce systemic biases in assessing researcher quality via citations by providing career-stage, gender, and opportunity corrections to citation-based performance metrics.”

The app was tested using a sample of 480 global researchers with Google Scholar profiles, stratified evenly into eight disciplines (archaeology, chemistry, ecology, evolution and development, geology, microbiology, ophthalmology, palaeontology), three career stages (early-, mid-, late-career), and two genders.

Flinders University’s simple method to scale its ε’index across disciplines with variable citation trends to enable fairer comparison of researchers in different areas.

It then provided an ε-index using a ranking algorithm that could be standardised across disciplines, corrected for career breaks, and provided a sample-specific threshold that could determine whether individual performance was greater or less than expected relative to the other researchers in a sample.

Flinders professor Justine Smith, who has been deemed a “superstar of STEM”, hopes the ε-index will make a difference to how women in science are perceived.

“More accurately assessing the contribution of women to the sciences and celebrating their successes is pivotal to encouraging future generations of girls into the sciences,” she said.

“The ε-index gives fairer and greater visibility to women’s achievements, and that it does so across a range of disciplines makes it especially beneficial.”

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