Angry staff and students will protest course ‘cuts’ at the University of Technology Sydney tomorrow as it welcomes an estimated 20,000 prospective students and their parents to Open Day – the uni’s biggest annual enrolment promotion.

In the wake of UTS announcing it would suspend the intake for 130 courses for 2026, including the ‘axing’ of entire schools, staff from the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and students will hold a rally outside the main building, demanding an end to the ‘course cuts’.

On-duty staff, involved in Open Day activities and information booths, have been offered ‘de-escalation’ training, including on how to redirect and mollify students disappointed at being unable to take some courses.

Dr Sarah Attfield, the president of the NTEU UTS branch said she was in “complete shock” when she first saw the list of suspended courses, despite UTS’s assurances they would not automatically be discontinued.

“I actually felt quite sick, to be honest with you, when I first saw the list because I thought it just seems ridiculous,” she said.

“It’s hard to imagine that suspensions wouldn’t lead to a plan or proposal to discontinue the courses. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but it seems unlikely.”

Paddy Gibson, an NTEU member who is involved in organising the protest, said Saturday’s rally aimed to put pressure on the university to reverse its decision to suspend courses.

“The university knows that there’s a growing level of anger and distress out there, and we’re gonna try and express that tomorrow, build on that, hopefully get some good coverage, and also engage with parents and students and others, who are coming saying we want them at UTS,“ he said.

“We really want to find ways to keep building that pressure and to expose the damage that it’s doing. Cutting public health, cutting teaching, cutting international studies, all of these things have got massive social implications.”

Gibson said protesters would be holding a bake sale outside Open Day, with the mock target of raising the $100 million the university claims it needs to cut from the operating budget.

To prepare for the possibility of disgruntled parents and future students, UTS last week sent out an email offering de-escalation training to all staff.

We feel as though we have been misled by the false pretence that we would not be impacted by the suspension of courses, within our degree.

Attfield told Central News some staff had concerns about the response from the public and that sentiment had been expressed to the university.

“And so, it [de-escalation training] may be as a bit of a result of those conversations, but then it was a bit out of the blue again with no kind of consultation, which is quite typical, it seems.”

Of the 130 courses suspended, the largest “cut” was to the Faculty of Design and Society (FDS), with 53 courses, followed by Faculty of Health with 33. On Thursday a letter signed by over 150 academics and staff from FDS was sent to vice chancellor Andrew Parfitt urging the university Council to reverse the course suspensions, which were rushed in in anticipation of Open Day, and citing the lack of consultation, the knock-on damage to other courses and the poor transparency by university management.

A petition calling to ‘Unpause the pause’, which questions the university’s justifications for the likely closure of International Studies, Education and Health, has been circulating throughout the university too.

And, the decision to suspend several courses in education and public health has come under fire amid a statewide teacher shortage. It prompted NSW Skills and Tertiary Education Minister Steve Whan to contact the vice chancellor and ask for UTS to reconsider education course suspensions, The Australian Financial Review reported on Wednesday.

Second year public health student Amir Farrag said the health courses were vital to the broader community.

“We’ve barely come off the back of the worst public health crisis in our lifetimes, and the response from UTS is to suspend the very degree that is most vital to protecting communities and building a healthier and more resilient future,” Farrag said during a speech at an NTEU rally last week.

UTS paid consultancy firm KPMG $4.8 million to draw up an Overview of Operational Sustainability report to determine where to cut the $100 million from the budget, in order to help pay back a $300 million loan taken out by the university.

The contract, which has been seen by Central News, revealed  one of the responsibilities of KPMG was to create a spreadsheet containing “courses and subjects proposed to be discontinued”. Staff have criticised the university’s adoption of a cuts model based on business conditions rather than academic value. On Tuesday, a senior manager suggested the cuts may have been based in part on alignment with NSW government education policy, rather than the university’s claim of too-low numbers in particular courses, a source told Central News.

Another student, Sarah Tu’itahi, in her final year of a Bachelor of Public Health, said: “We’re supposed to be consulted before any of these decisions are made and we haven’t been consulted… it’s all being done through KPMG.

“We feel as though we have been misled by the false pretence that we would not be impacted by the suspension of courses, within our degree. This is a personal attack on our autonomy to make informed decisions about our own education.

“Considering this is a business in (the university’s) eyes, we are consumers and deserve full transparency of the product. Show us the report and just a warning: we understand statistics.”

Main image by Ned Stevens.