‘Hippy heartland’ university scraps creative arts degrees

The university that services the epicentre of Australia’s Aquarius movement has pulled the plug on its creative arts programmes, in the latest blow to humanities Down Under.

Southern Cross University (SCU) has announced that it will teach out its bachelor’s degrees in art and design, contemporary music and digital media, with no new intakes from 2025.

The university said demand for creative arts courses had declined and only about 1 per cent of its 19,100 current students were enrolled in the affected programmes. 

SCU’s catchment includes the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, a mecca for city escapees seeking more creative lifestyles. It was the heartland of Australia’s 1970s hippy movement and retains much of that flavour, while a conservatorium in Lismore – home to one of the university’s original campuses – has spawned a flourishing music scene.

Vice-chancellor Tyrone Carlin said creative arts education had been “really important to the Northern Rivers”, but the “compounding dwindling of demand” had made the courses unviable in a regional institution.

“These degrees were foundational to the university in its infancy [but] they’ve just become incredibly small over time,” he said. “We’ve tried everything – scholarships and sponsorships and all sorts of things to try and get people excited, but for whatever reason it just…hasn’t worked.”

Professor Carlin said loss of revenue due to the federal government’s international education crackdown had reduced the opportunities to cross-subsidise cash-strapped programmes. SCU was also over its domestic enrolment quota, which meant it received no teaching subsidies for some students.

Fee income alone was not enough in programmes with “a few dozen” students and “real fragmentation” in the curriculum. “You’ll find yourself delivering quite a lot of units where you’ve got very, very small enrolments. It becomes really…difficult to manage under those circumstances. In effect, we’re not receiving funding adequate to cover the cost of teaching.”

The Covid-era hikes to humanities fees and publicity over A$50,000 (£25,300) arts degrees had not helped demand, particularly in a labour market offering solid employment prospects and healthy starting salaries to graduates in skill-shortage areas of health and education.

Nick Harrigan, the National Tertiary Education Union branch president at Macquarie University, said the federal government’s failure to reverse the humanities fee hikes had “put pressure” on arts enrolments. “You’ve got to give up the deposit for a house do an arts degree,” he said. “That’s really softened the market.”

Macquarie’s arts faculty is severely restricting casual appointments next year and considering other cost-saving measures, including scrapping units and cutting back on marking. Dr Harrigan said the equivalent of about 100 full-time teaching jobs were under threat, affecting perhaps 300 casual staff.

He said Australia’s “anti-intellectualism” and “resentment of the silly academic” had made it “cost-free to kick an arts academic. That’s probably true of universities in general, but it’s particularly true of people like lecturers in art. It’s not like you’re attacking a venerated national symbol.”

Macquarie professor Michelle Arrow, president of the Australian Historical Association, tweeted that the 2020 funding changes were “decimating humanities and arts in the regions”. But Stefan Solomon, a senior lecturer in media studies, said it seemed “fairly disingenuous” to claim that the fee hikes had reduced demand for creative arts. “Research shows price signalling has had negligible effect on choice of degrees post-2021,” he tweeted.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com