UNIVERSITY of Newcastle Vice Chancellor Alex Zelinsky has ruled out broadly offering voluntary redundancies before progressing with the ongoing restructure.
The National Tertiary Education Union Newcastle branch has launched a petition opposing the restructure.
"We've been transparent right from the get go, since 2019 we've been signalling that we've had an issue with our expenses rising quicker than our revenue," Professor Zelinsky said, adding UON had held consultation.
He said "it's not true" there had been no assessment of how cutting 120 jobs would affect workload and research capability.
"By reducing the number of subjects we actually know what the workload is... we're trialling two workload models which will actually reflect what staff will do."
He said there may be opportunities for voluntary redundancies in certain areas, but "it won't be just voluntary redundancies across the whole university, those sorts of things have unintended consequences which then forces us to then rehire people".
