THE University of Newcastle (UON) will push ahead with its plans to build School of Creative Industries facilities at its new Honeysuckle campus, despite cutting or suspending several of the school's degrees.
As reported this week, UON announced on Monday it would consolidate or discontinue 530 subjects, eight undergraduate degrees and 14 postgraduate degrees from 2021.
This includes cutting the Bachelor of Creative Industries, which the Herald reported in July, the double degree in creative industries and innovation and entrepreneurship and the Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours).
UON will also suspend four postgraduate programs due to low student numbers - the Graduate Certificate in Creative Industries, the Master of Creative Industries, the Graduate Certificate in Digital Media and the Master of Digital Media.
A spokeswoman for UON said the changes did not affect its plans for the first building of its Honeysuckle city campus, which will house an Integrated Innovation Network (I2N) Hub and additional facilities for the School of Creative Industries. It is expected to be completed by mid next year.
"Students will occupy the building from semester two in 2021, exploring, learning and discovering their professional creative skills," she said.
"As advances in communication technology redefine industrial needs, the demand for visionaries and skilled designers is projected to grow and expand.
"Our programs including those in Honeysuckle will encourage students to design and develop creative, innovative and persuasive strategies to communicate ideas, information and visual stimuli to a wide range of audiences.
"At Honeysuckle city campus we'll support degrees for students to create visual material across a variety of visual formats and channels including broadcast, web, film, television, advertising, publishing, and engagement with these industries."
The spokeswoman said the school "will redesign and refine additional course offerings" in 2021 with the aim to "commence enrolments to these programs from 2022".
The spokeswoman said students partway through discontinued degrees will be able to complete their studies.
The cutting of the one-year Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) degree follows the discontinuation of the three-year Bachelor of Fine Arts from 2017. At the time, UON said this would be replaced with creative industries.
The spokeswoman said just six students studied fine arts (honours) this year. She said students wanting to study fine arts could choose it as their honours project in a Bachelor of Visual Communication Design (Honours).
National Tertiary Education Union Newcastle branch president Dan Conway said UON was spending millions on the building "presumptively to be used for School of Creative Industries programs and courses that have been substantially cut", at the same time as shedding staff to save $35 million in recurrent savings.
"The NTEU realises and understands that fast tracked funding has been made available by the NSW government for the project in the light of the COVID crisis, and that the project is consistent with the university's strategic plan," he said.
"That said, to be building flashy new buildings in the CBD while sacking staff is a very bad look, and the reasons for undertaking the development at such a devastating time for many staff have not been well communicated.
"The NTEU would have hoped that the university could have saved money by delaying expenditure on this development and ... saved at least some staff positions."
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