Where art thou: the disappearing act of the arts in Australian universities
By Anushka Vineet
After years of political attack, the arts are bearing the brunt of rampant cost-cutting within Australia’s university sector - and it’s not just students who will pay the price, writes ANU undergrad Anushka Vineet.
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Two or three times a year, university students must make a crucial decision.
Dramatic as it sounds, this choice can make or break the next 18 weeks of your life: it governs your state of mind and has the power to send you into a state of despair and govern the amount of time spent at your uni bar. We’re talking about subject selection.
But a more pressing issue is facing students each time this process rolls around. There are fewer and fewer options available - and it’s especially true for students of Arts and Humanities courses. But why?
Over the last decade, mainstream political discourse has worked to diminish the importance of the arts. These courses have been thrown into a direct contest with their peers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) - with questions of prestige, employability, and earning potential dominating the debate. These false comparisons have positioned arts subjects to bear the brunt of widespread cuts facing an increasingly challenged tertiary education sector - leaving students blind-sided and fed up.
My argument is not that the arts are somehow more valuable than the sciences: it is that they exist symbiotically, and are equally important in society. The problem is that in Australia, the pendulum has swung so far towards the STEM subjects that the arts are increasingly underfunded and undervalued.
At the Australian National University (ANU), the university’s Renew ANU plan to reduce spending by $250 million disproportionately affects arts degrees. Outrage is growing amongst students and staff as we face down a threat to our School of Music that could see it shut down and reduced from a conservatory to an academic program. University centres like the Humanities Research Centre are also set to be impacted, with the Australian National Dictionary Centre having only been temporarily saved after an anonymous donor stepped in with two years of funding.
This problem is not unique to ANU. It has been reported that almost half of Australian universities have partaken in drastic restructures that particularly target the Arts and humanities. Macquarie University has been accused by their faculty of “hollowing out” the arts, with some faculties being halved, while the University of Tasmania has proposed a restructure in which 13 faculty members will be made redundant.
Such diminishing of the arts to a second-rate discipline in Australian society is infuriating, ignoring the fact that the skills that you can learn from the arts extend further than the coursework. In a world of smoothed edges and mass-produced curation, it’s creativity that makes us inherently human.
On a personal level, if it had not been for my prior experiences with the arts, I would not be who I am today. The arts govern my experiences, shape my interactions with the world, and have impacted the way that I view myself in the society that I inhabit.
For all the years I’ve spent slogging through the Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB) syllabus, my piano teachers have taught me more than how to play a killer sonata. I learnt the value of self-discipline, discovered that “practice makes perfect” is real, and most importantly, found my musicality, which is my inner creative spirit. Creativity is needed to think outside the box and is vital for solving real-world problems.
As a child, I always loved to read. This was to the extent that my year 5 teacher set me a challenge: to read 100 books in one year. However, when I entered my ATAR years and took Literature ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank), I discovered that my passion for YA Novels, like The 5th Wave, did not align with the syllabus reading list of Frankenstein. However, my year 12 literature class changed how I view the power of literature as an art form.
In one particularly impactful assignment, writing a poem about a landscape image in the style of the Romantics taught me the power of English within the arts. It may not have been my best work, and ChatGPT may have been able to write a better one, but the thought process and ideation behind the piece were the real education. Intrinsic thinking, self-expression, and the power of words were my main takeaways from the assignment, and I learnt that English is not just for communication. Words, texts, and stories are a form of artwork: they stimulate critical thinking, they question the world that we inhabit, and they evoke joy.
With all the negative discourse surrounding universities and their funding, there is growing cynicism in the student bodies that the fundamental purpose of universities has been neglected. Universities are meant to educate the future generations, equipping them with skills and knowledge to navigate and to better the world. However, this purpose is neglected in the aim of extorting money out of students and appeasing stakeholders. And it is disappointing how being a money-making machine is now their forte.
So let this be a callout to university executives: the arts are NOT an old-world discipline of lesser importance. In a world where we are increasingly scared of AI’s ability to replace the human mind, it has never been more important to use the power of the arts to further our critical thinking skills, create a nuanced understanding of the communities that we live in, and fuel self-reflection for our own betterment.
If we stop giving voice to the arts in our higher education institutions, it becomes a reflection on society that these skills are not valued.
About the author
Anushka Vineet
Anushka is a Ngunnawal-based university student studying a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and Bachelor of International Relations at the Australian National University. With a passion for social justice and human rights, after her studies, she hopes to work in the international law sector, advocating for human rights law reform. Currently, she writes for her university student publication, ANU Observer, which she absolutely adores!
For more from Anushka, you can follow her on Instagram at @nush1004 or read her work in The ANU Observer.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s been heartbreaking watching my faculty completely breakdown at Monash University. We pay 4x more than STEM students in fees and yet the faculty has run all of my law and politics classes in a set of portable sheds in a car park at the back of the campus in 2025. Most of the faculty staff have either been made redundant or have left for international postings, and class sizes have quadrupled in the last 2 years, coinciding with a reduction in contact teaching time.
Reading, analysis and writing is so important as a child. It’s heartbreaking that when you become an adult, it’s not ‘lucrative’ enough for our schools to take these skills seriously. I lost quite a bit of hope when I realised my University was just a money making machine and not a place to learn.
It might be worthwhile digging in for a deeper look at where the strategic information about which courses Universities choose to invest in is really coming from. Someone is making these decisions to shift away. It is often assumed to be politically motivated, but what underlying data is being used to model, project and anticipate future demand in higher education in Australia? It's very likely a predictive growth model based on past and projected advertised career and employment data. Look at what is happening with the increasing number of fully online career-focused degrees in higher education. If you are on social media and seeing any advertisements for 'X University Online' in Australia, for an online Master's degree that is going to "level up your career", you need to find out for yourself at the moment, if you are enrolling in the actual University, or their external parternship side-quest owned and powered by big for-profit employment data. This seems like a fundamental pattern and shift in Australian higher education that is not always being made transparent to students at enrolment. This means that Arts and Humanities degrees may be devalued strategically in higher education less as careers, because they are generally not as likely to be advertised on large employment websites or be present in that kind of data.