A 60-year-old music school is among the?areas?set to be?hit?hard in the latest round of job-shedding by the Australian National University (ANU).

The ANU School of Music will be relegated to ¡°programme¡± status within a new School of Creative and Cultural Practice, under a planned restructure of the university¡¯s College of Arts and Social Sciences (Cass).

Seven positions focused on performance, composition, theory and musicology will be disestablished in a ¡°strategic reprofiling of academic staffing¡± to accentuate ¡°core strengths¡± in music production, technology, Indigenous music and ¡°music and well-being¡±.

They will be among a net 57 job losses from Cass, with 63 positions slated for disestablishment ¨C through a combination of redundancies, scheduled retirements and non-filling of vacant roles ¨C in areas including anthropology, criminology, gender studies, German, linguistics, literature, international relations and sociology.

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Six new posts will be created and 56 jobs will be ¡°realigned¡±. The 51-year-old Humanities Research Centre, 37-year-old Australian National Dictionary Centre and 19-year-old Centre for European Studies will all go.

The overhaul is the latest in a series of rolling restructures aimed at saving A$250 million (?120 million) from ANU¡¯s recurrent expenditure bill, including A$100 million in salaries. The changes to Cass will produce net savings of around A$10 million, according to an 82-page ¡°organisational change proposal¡±.

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The university said staff would be consulted before final decisions were taken. ¡°We¡¯ll¡­reshape the final plans based on this feedback,¡± said vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell.

¡°These are¡­difficult but necessary conversations. We have spent a lot of time talking to staff across campus about what the possible future state of their local areas could look like.¡±

Former ANU School of Music head Peter Tregear said the proposal to jettison positions in performance, composition and musicology constituted a ¡°significant emptying out¡± of ¡°discipline-specific historical, technical and cultural expertise¡±.

¡°[It is] a loss of capacity to develop and exercise ways to think in and about music,¡± Tregear said. ¡°It¡¯s sad indeed to see a school which started with such fanfare 60 years ago now end in such a whimper.¡±

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The proposals follow a move by Macquarie University, another institution where humanities programmes are being cut, to prioritise ¡°cultural proficiency¡± over fluency in its foreign language courses. ?

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) says ANU has already lost more staff than required to meet its savings targets. Data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency show that the university¡¯s headcount declined by almost 800 over the year to March 2025, the union says. Since then, administrators have approved 175 applications for redundancy and proposed another 100 job cuts.

¡°This week¡¯s proposed cuts will mean that ANU [has] lost more than 1,000 people under this vice-chancellor,¡± said the NTEU¡¯s Australian Capital Territory (ACT) secretary, Lachlan Clohesy. ¡°There is no continuing financial rationale for job cuts.¡±

ANU disputes the NTEU claims, saying the restructures have so far claimed 210 positions.

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The university has come under intense criticism from ACT senator David Pocock and is subject to ¡°live compliance processes¡± by the higher education regulator Teqsa, according to the , which reported that education minister Jason Clare had urged Canberra politicians to refer their concerns about ANU to the regulator.

The NTEU¡¯s ANU branch president, Millan Pintos-Lopez, said restructuring should stop while the university was under investigation ¨C ¡°particularly an investigation publicly encouraged by the education minister¡±.

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com