On May 2, 200 students and staff rallied at the Carseldine campus of the Queensland University of Technology to demand that vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake's foreshadowed closure of the QUT humanities and human services school be withdrawn.
Speakers at the rally criticised QUT's justification for closing the school — that the school is "unprofitable" and that QUT is "seeking to meet the market".
"The school is supposedly $200,000 in debt, yet the VC spent almost $60,000 in overseas travel alone in 2005", said student Menessia Nagie.
A leaflet distributed by Students for Social Justice (SSJ) also pointed out that according to its 2005 annual report, QUT made a $44.6 million profit — enough to cover the humanities school debt more than 200 times over.
Many students are angry that they only became aware of the proposed closure through a April 23 Brisbane Courier Mail article. "This has been underhanded, done in secrecy, without any student consultation or input", Nagie told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly.
QUT has already stopped taking mid-semester enrolments and is trying to exclude humanities courses from the QUT handbook that is distributed to year 12 students across Australia.
"It's humanities that analyses and is critical of the corporate system, and that's why they want to shut it down", Rob Nicholas from SST told the rally, echoing placards that read "Humanity needs humanities".
"We all know that privatisation, neoliberalism and restructuring means cuts, cuts, cuts", Nicholas pointed out.
While Coaldrake has argued humanities students could go to other universities such as the University of Queensland or Griffith Uni, those universities are also cutting their arts faculties.
Nagie said: "I work with people who are discriminated against and marginalised — and now QUT is doing the same thing to us. This campus is a community. Human services workers and students care for and about people — we don't want our uni to just become about money."
A protest rally will be held at the Kelvin Grove Amphitheatre on May 10 at 1pm to build solidarity on that campus. A QUT-wide rally will be held on May 11 at 1pm, at the U Block on the Gardens Point campus, which houses the offices of the QUT administration. For more information, phone Ness on 0410 905 584.