Dear ANZSECS colleagues,
 
We write on behalf of the eighteenth-century studies cohort at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) to share some alarming news. 
 
Last Tuesday, ACU’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise) and Deputy Provost published a ‘change plan’ forecasting the imminent disestablishment of many of our and our colleagues’ jobs, in the IHSS and across the university. The proposed ‘restructure’ would cut 32 full-time equivalent academic positions, of which 29 are in humanities disciplines including history, philosophy and political science. Whether under immediate threat of redundancy or not, each of us is bound to be profoundly professionally diminished by a plan which seems to view humanities and social sciences research as an extravagant distraction from the real work of generating capital.
 
More details on the plan and its contexts are available here as well as from The Guardian and the ABC.  We write now to raise your awareness of the specific stakes of ACU’s decision for our community of eighteenth-century scholars. As many of you know, our period is unusually well-represented among the IHSS’s (and ACU’s wider) ranks of historians, literary scholars, and philosophers. This fact among others motivated us to convene last year’s David Nichol Smith Seminar in Fitzroy. Then and there, new and longstanding ANZSECS members participated in multidisciplinary and international discussions that showcased—among countless other things—our society’s distinctive affordances for refreshing the coordinates of eighteenth-century studies, not least from and at the intersections of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The cuts mooted by ACU’s DVCRE and Deputy Provost vividly presage an environment inhospitable to conversations like these.
 
Colleagues can share their views of ACU’s ‘change plan’ by writing to change@acu.edu.au (this is the official channel for feedback for ACU staff and the public).

You may also wish to write directly to Professor Zlatko Skrbis (Vice-Chancellor): zlatko.skrbis@acu.edu.au; Professor Abid Khan (DVCRE): abid.khan@acu.edu.au; and/or Professor Chris Lonsdale (Deputy Provost): chris.lonsdale@acu.edu.au.  Or cc your them to your email to change@acu.edu.au

 
Please consider writing in the coming week, as the consultation period for the proposal is very brief, closing on Sept 26th.  If you could share your sense of what ACU’s burgeoning eighteenth-century studies scene has achieved and promised, and of what stands to be lost, we’d be particularly grateful.
 
Please also circulate and consider adding your name to these petitions and letters:
 
1. Save the Humanities at ACU petition at Change.com
 
2. NTEU’s letter of protest and petition, addressed to the ACU’s Vice-Chancellor and Senate
 
3. An open letter circulated by the Program Director for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Megan Cassidy-Welch
 
Warmly,
 
Killian Quigley, Kate Fullagar, Kristie Flannery and Lisa O’Connell

Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU