Managing Multiple Crises in Higher Education Employment: The Case of Australia

Peter Waring

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-54509-2_10

Even prior to the global pandemic, it was argued that higher education employment in Australia had been pressured by rising forms of insecure academic work, declining public expenditure and growing managerialism and corporatisation. In Australia, University leaders largely responded to declining state investment in higher education by pursuing growth in full-fee-paying students—especially international students. While these efforts were successful in creating large alternative streams of revenue, they also formed a critical dependency on international students. This dependency was challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic that spread in transverse waves from China to all parts of the world and led to the almost immediate ligation of international student mobility. While numerous creative efforts were launched to continue to deliver learning and teaching to students caught behind travel restrictions, international student fee revenue contracted significantly while many Universities were forced to invest in mitigating the multiple impacts of the pandemic and provide financial relief to existing international students. The accumulative effect on Australian universities finances was deleterious, and triggered a need for University leaderships to respond. Their strategic choices with respect to employment matters are the subject of this chapter which seeks to explore and explain the rationales behind their divergent responses to common pressures. The chapter will also provide a critical appraisal of the success of these choices and identify lessons from this experience that may be applied to similar future crises. Finally the chapter also explores the post-COVID economic context for Universities and suggests that these conditions may once again create similar dependencies that rendered the sector vulnerable to ‘black-swan’ events such as the global pandemic.