Honi Soit
FIRST PRINTED 1929
WEEK 9, SEMESTER 2, 2021
IN THIS EDITION
Fair Work Ombudsman DESTROYS uni MAXIM SHANAHAN / P. 4
Barriers to uni for public school students CLAIRE OLLIVAIN / P. 13
T
here is an unspoken sense of solidarity between former public school kids at USyd. We’ve spent much of our lives in sweltering non-air-conditioned demountables, with stories of our peers’ teen pregnancies and playground brawls during lunch break; we openly flouted school uniform rules with no punishment and lived in blissful ignorance of Latin, the inter-school rivalry of debating tournaments, and ‘Model UN’ (a phenomenon I doubt I will ever understand) only to have it dawn on us when we entered university how disparately wealthy other people our age could be.
Graduations CANCELLED! JEFFREY KHOO & SHANIA O’BRIEN / P. 5
How to corporatise a university DEAUNDRE ESPEJO, MAXIM SHANAHAN, JEFFREY KHOO / P. 8
T
he past 18 months in Australian higher education has seen destructive funding cuts, 40,000 job losses and revelations of widespread underpayment of casual staff. In this feature, Honi traces how we got to this low point in four parts: corporatised university governance; privatisation of funding; cost-cutting and efficiency measures; and underreporting of the true levels of casualisation.
The
corporate
capture
of
Australian university governing bodies – generally known as councils or senates – has resulted in leadership bodies unable to guide universities through crises; unwilling to defend the interests of staff, students and their own institutions; and severely lacking in the skills necessary to govern a university. Appointees to university councils are overwhelmingly drawn from the
corporate sector, excluding those from non-commercial backgrounds and, more importantly, those with ‘industry experience’ in higher education and academia. The principle of university selfgovernance has been steadily eroded through decades of government policy choices and the selfperpetuating cycle of corporate governance.
Annandale’s witch houses ALICE TRENOWETHCRESWELL / P. 17 The Annandale Witches Houses come alive as dusk begins to fall. On the northern end of Johnson Street, the row of gothic manors sit high atop an imposing stone wall, looking down like Shakespeare’s crones on passers-by.
USyd’s hidden herd...of cows MARLOW HURST / P. 18
