These included statements by the Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor and President of the Academic Board on routine matters; policy changes; reports from Senate committees; bequests and donations; and an update on current legal matters. There was also an update on planning for the fundraising campaign. The St Lucia Campus Master Plan was again discussed, along a presentation by the Provost on university global rankings - their history, what they look at, their significance, and how UQ performs.
The V-C updated members on the implementation of ESS in Finance & HR. I neminded Senate that one of Senate's committees had identified the desirability of the professional services transformation having a coordinated and aligned approach across functions, overseen by a single, effective transformation governance committee. I referred to anecdotal feedback and my own observations that the inconsistency of approach is troubling professional staff. Whereas the Finance & HR process had been consultative almost to the point of death-by-consultation, other changes in areas like ITS, OH&S, P&F, Research Administration, and External Engagement have had varying degrees of consultation, some of which have been virtually non-existent or undertaken only grudingly.
The Vice-Chancellor gave no response.
I went on to contrast the relative openness and transparency of the changes leading to reduction in staff numbers in the ESS Finance & HR functions to the almost invisible reductions occurring as a result of the Execption-Based Recruitment Strategy for professional staff - known colloquially as the 'chill' - not quite a freeze. I said that I had been shown figures for the period September 2016 (when it started) to end-January 2017 that showed reductions of the order of 3-4% in FTE, yet there had been no indication of how long the strategy would be in place and whether there was a target number that management wanted to reach. I went on to say that some Faculties and Institutes are trying to place themselves in the middle of the range in terms of the percentage FTE reduction they have achieved, for fear of being accused of not doing enough. Accordingly, nobody wants to be the Faculty or Institute with the least reduction in FTE, resulting in a race to the bottom.
The Vice-Chancellor responded by repeating what he had said at the last meeting, that it is good practice to review any vacancy for its need and that the stragegy might help staff who lose jobs in Finance & HR (hard to see how if the work is in a different function and redeployees only have 5 weeks to apply for anything that happens to be approved to be filled during that time - I'd love to see how many actually get a redeployment as a result of the chill). He went on to say that the strategy wasn't working anyway because the numbers were not dropping. He undertook to bring figures to the next Senate meeting. The figures I've seen are official UQ ones.
