It’s only Wednesday and already it’s been a rollercoaster of a week at Western Sydney University, with celebrations as staff cuts were averted turning into damage control as hackers wrote to students telling them their degrees had been revoked.
Western Sydney U has made cost cut targets and will not sack people as previously planned – a significant milestone in change management given the challenges that have emerged in HE this year.
However, late on Monday students and alumni raised the alarm online after receiving emails that appeared to be sent from a university account saying they had been excluded from further study at Western and their degrees had been revoked. A second email said the university had “once again fallen victim to a security breach,” and raised parking concerns.
This appears to be the latest in a line of significant data breaches at Western Sydney University, with hacking incidents in October last year and April 2025.
The University has again apologised for the latest breach and police are investigating.
On the other side of the coin, in relation to the change management, the university “has worked around-the-clock” to find non-salary savings, a university representative said. With voluntary redundancies, the university now has enough new jobs for professional staff displaced in its restructure. The announcement follows a commitment to no involuntary redundancies for academics.
The announcement follows five fraught months, starting with a widely unexpected announcement by Vice Chancellor George Williams at the end of April that the university faced a more than ten-fold increase in its projected 2026 deficit, to $79m and needed to reduce staff by up to 400 positions.
Professor Williams attributed the expected loss to Australian Government caps on international enrolments and locals “choosing to undertake fewer courses, no doubt due in many cases to cost-of-living pressures.”
However, by August it appeared operating cost cuts and 250 voluntary redundancies would meet the savings target.
National Tertiary Education Union branch president David Burchell welcomed management’s announcement. “After a year of stress, anxiety, fear and at times downright chaos, it imposes a much-needed framework of decency and sanity onto the university’s ‘reset process’ ”.
And he put it in the context of other bitter staff-cut disputes at neighbouring Macquarie U and UTS.
“This is the first time this year that a Vice-Chancellor, genuinely acknowledging the stress and anger the job cuts epidemic has caused in their communities, has agreed to take a meaningful step from the brink. Hopefully it’s a sign of saner times to come.”