History is a discipline in serious decline in Australasia, raising concerns for the future.
A new paper by UQ’s Associate Professor Martin Crotty and University of Adelaide’s Associate Professor Paul Sendziuk examines changes to the staffing profiles of history departments in Australian universities between 2016 and 2022 and sounds the alarm, finding that history staff had declined by 8% in Australia and 4.6% in New Zealand over the period.
Enrolments declined even more sharply over this period, with a 22.9% reduction in history student enrolments between 2016-22.
History reached peak popularity when baby-boomers signed up for higher education in the 1960s and 70s in both Australia and New Zealand, but has trended downwards ever since.
This side of the Tasman, the cuts have been exclusively in Go8 universities, while positions in non-sandstone universities in Australia actually rose by 4.5 FTE roles.
The only silver lining for historians was the change in gender balance, with more women proportionally employed and the imbalance of gender representation in senior roles erased between 2016-22. There was also an increase in Indigenous and Maori staff during this period.
“Even as universities and student numbers continue to grow, the number of Australian historians has been in near constant decline for over thirty years, a fall which has become steeper over the last six years with the effects of the COVID pandemic and changes to university fee schedules,” the authors write.
“Falling student numbers mean that staff numbers are likely to decline further, and the fall in student numbers will have to be made up before any improvement in staffing is a realistic prospect.
“More research is needed to contextualise these numbers, and to provide further insight into why History has declined so sharply in Australian and New Zealand universities, but particularly Australian ones.”
