ifteen minutes before his university staff meeting, Dr Yaegan Doran received an email. It informed him that after nine years of teaching linguistics on fixed term contracts at the university, there was no work for him next semester. He still had to attend the meeting, at which his sacking was not mentioned. “It was pretty inhuman,” he says. Doran is one of thousands of highly trained, highly specialised casual and fixed term contract academics who face an uncertain future. Despite working at Sydney University consistently, Doran only ever worked on sessional contracts. He will get no redundancy. Right now, he’s applying for any university job he can. “But so far, there’s almost nothing on my horizon,” he says. Before the coronavirus pandemic thrust universities into financial crisis due to the drying up of international students on which they were financially dependent, academia was already a precarious employment market for many. Analysis by the National Tertiary Education Union suggests that just over one third of people at universities have secure, ongoing work – a figure which has been declining over years. “When I’m not worried about my job, I love my job,” says Doran. “Having said that, the constant thought in the back of my mind that I may not have a job in a little while does make it very difficult.” Now he is scrambling, putting feelers out far and wide, hoping something might bite. “But I know I’m one of a few thousand doing the same thing.” According to estimates by Universities Australia there are 21,000 full-time equivalent jobs poised to be cut from the university sector. In reality, say the NTEU, that is equivalent to around 30,000 academic, managerial and support staff. Modelling released by Universities Australia this month predicted losses to the sector of $16bn in the period up to 2023. In April, they warned that existing funding would not be enough to stop job losses. They have no access to jobkeeper. While mass job losses are happening across the broader economy, the roles being lost in the university sector involve particularly specific and specialised skills and knowledge. The shedding of this expertise base from the sector could have wider implications for the ability of Australia to meet its immediate economic, environmental and social challenges, universities’ capacity to serve the demands of returning students, and the future of intellectual life in Australia. Universities have survived, and expanded after, upheaval in the past. The scale and implications of this contraction, however, are different. The sector is simply larger now. Years of expansion means that the sector is critical to the economy, the country’s third-largest export industry. “Twenty-one thousand jobs in any context is an enormous number of jobs to go,” says Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch, director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. “Particularly when you think about the roles that universities play in communities and the snowball effect of the loss of that employer to a region.” Beyond employee headcount, the role of universities as engines of technological innovation, cultural introspection, and scientific discovery, argues Pietsch, has never been more critical. “To lose those people is a tragedy for a sector which we will need as we meet the twin challenges of the economic recovery from Covid and the effects of climate change,” she says. “We need them to play a crucial role, not only for helping us build that new world but also in making sense of the dramatic changes that I think we have to expect to see in our society.” ‘A lost generation of academics’ The people lost to the sector during this crisis, say those speaking to Guardian Australia, risk being lost for good. “The way that hiring in academia works is that you have to demonstrate ongoing teaching and research productivity,” says Dr Robert Boncardo, an NTEU branch committee member, and casuals network organiser at Sydney University. “A break of a year or two is a fatal blow for people. For us to be used as a financial buffer for the universities, I don’t think they fully understand the consequences of that.” Without casuals and sessional workers, who in many universities do the majority of the face-to-face teaching and marking work, it is predicted that these tasks will fall to permanent academics, who generally spend more time conducting research; research which boosts the university’s international rankings – key to attracting international students. Some express concern that there will be a rise in class numbers, a fall in student satisfaction, and consequently a decline in enrolment. Boncardo warns that cutting casual and sessional academics – typically early and mid-career academics – risks disrupting the pipeline for home-grown senior scientists, researchers, thinkers and writers of the future. “What’s going on in the sector at the moment risks a lost generation of academics, and the intellectual life of this country,” says Boncardo. “If [academics] do make it from one side of the crisis to another, it will be through luck of the networks they have,” says Boncardo. “If they’re citizens, if they can access welfare, if they have wealthy families who are able to have them at their place for the next two years while they don’t have any work in the sector. These are the people who may be able to get to the other side of the crisis. But there’ll be very obvious inequalities in the people who aren’t able to make it. Indigenous people, women, in particular, I think will be affected by this black hole that everyone is preparing to get sucked into next semester.” Dr Shima Shahbazi is preparing to get sucked into that black hole. Shahbazi came to Australia from Iran on a full scholarship to do her PhD in 2016, and has been teaching during and since. She loves teaching, and she does a lot of it. Last semester she took on 14 hours of weekly face-to-face teaching work – equivalent, she says, to over 40 hours work in total – as well as marking and a part-time job in a second hand book warehouse in order to prepare a war chest of savings. All this work means she hasn’t had much time to spend on her own research, which is critical to her future employment, so she tries to find time for it on the weekends. The majority of casual and part-time staff at universities are women. “I need to build a career, so I don’t say no to these things. That’s why I’m so overworked and tired,” she says. “I have to. I’m new to Australia. I’m on a temporary visa. I’m not even eligible to apply for permanent residency.” At the moment, she has no idea if she has any work next semester. Australia has invested in her education and that of other young academics. “They’ve spent so much money on us,” she says. Her research, which focuses on race, is critical for society at this moment of racial reckoning, she says, but her expertise is not being utilised. “We are their commodities and they’re not even using the commodities that they have produced.” “I don’t want to give up. But I feel like there is no choice for me here.” ‘Awful for intellectual life’ Losing her work during this crisis could mean the “the death of [her] intellectual life”, at least in Australia, and she does not feel she can return to Iran. But Shahbazi also fears for the long term impacts beyond her own career. Some of her best students are dropping out. She worries that universities in the future will be whiter, a place for “rich kids to come and buy a degree and get out without learning anything”. Yaegan Doran is a young, Australian, male and has no kids. He thinks he might just about ride out the crisis. But he is concerned about the kind of institutions he may return to if he does. “It’s awful for our intellectual life. It’s awful for our research. It’s particularly awful for a diversity of opinions. As soon as you start to have the bare minimum of researchers, the people you get are those who happen to be relatively homogenous,” he says. “When you employ more people you get more diversity of opinion, more discussion. One of the big things I’m worried about is that that will be lost. That you’ll only have people who don’t push the boundaries too hard, because if you want a job you don’t take any risks.” Boncardo fears that perspectives and individuals from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds within Australia will be absent. The ability to think and tell stories about Australia will be constrained. Ideas which originate in universities and irrigate through society, he says, “those will simply dry up”. ‘A new model from the ashes’ Elianor Gerrard, six months out from submitting her PhD, sits with a lot of tension. She came into her studies knowing that positions in academia are rare, competitive and unstable. Still, she had a plan to combine sessional academia with other work. Her research is in how to justly transition communities dependent on fossil fuel industries to the green economy. She has just taken on a large teaching load at her university, Queensland University of Technology, for next semester – not ideal, but she is taking what she can get while there is anything on offer. “Some naive part of me hopes that through this shock – which is disruptive and has very real consequences, including for me – some new model of university could rise out of the ashes. I don’t know what that looks like. It may look very different and may be more effective and better nurture and support young academics.” The pre-Covid system, with its reliance on international students for income, a highly casualised workforce for flexibility and a fixation on growth, while known to be unsustainable became the default setting for both sides of politics, says Pietsch. “It was like a very weak fabric, and Covid has pulled on the thread of it, and it’s collapsed in a way. It does raise questions about who universities are here to serve.” That’s a question that needs political will and public participation to answer, she says. “The stakes are so high. The terms of the social settlement are up for grabs – for a brief moment.”