My professional life has been marked by almost continuous periods of chaos and change induced by organisational restructures. For my own recollection moreso than trying to map out anything notably historic, my career thus far has seen:

  • 2013-2015: first years post-PhD, casual and fixed term teaching contracts, with employment uncertainty and variability from year to year
  • 2016-2018: first years on a continuing contract, in hindsight the only years of stability but finding my feet properly in the academic world. First PhD students of my own commence. Complicated by reforms of professional staff organisation, centralising school staff to the faculty.
  • 2019-2021: amidst curriculum overhauls across all engineering programs, we hit the COVID years, teaching reforms by necessity, and (some) staff departures. Further organisational change, centralising faculty staff to central units
  • 2022-2023: ostensibly for efficiency, five faculties reduced to three (e.g., engineering and sciences merged), and five engineering schools reduced to three (e.g., mechanical and electrical engineering merged) bringing line management changes and other wide-reaching restructures
  • 2024-2025: ostensibly for “bigger is better”, merger between University of Adelaide and UniSA announced, with incomprehensibly massive processes executed to launch a new University in 2026

Against the backdrop of changes at school, faculty, and University levels, academics have kept up admirably with their teaching and research commitments and ambitions. Most of our courses have never been better in their content and pedagogy. We have learned how to balance flexibility for students with engagement.

I pride myself in my ability to live with uncertainty and adapt to change, but I look with envy at my older colleagues who had a period of far greater stability through the 2000s and early 2010s. Critically reviewing my performance as an academic, it is hard not to conclude that the changing environment has limited my ability to build a strong research track record. But I’ve also chosen various roles that put me in places that are most affected by the changes. (Stepping up to be Director of Learning and Teaching in our school at the beginning of 2020 was ill-fated.)

To be effective academics, we need time to plan, reflect, and revise our approaches. We need headspace to continually broaden our perspectives, lest we get stuck in a single research track that leads to a rut or dead end. Organisational change does not foster time and space in this manner.

And yet, stagnation is unhealthy. Silos can lead to inequities, inefficiencies, and barriers to building critical mass. In the right context and with the right strategies, centralisation can bring true benefits. One example of this is a more robust staffing profile. With school-level staff, processes can be bottlenecked by a single staff member and organisational knowledge can be lost easily when staff move on.

Another benefit of centralisation is scale. As a school, we were limited to infrastructure projects that were modest in scale. As a faculty, far more impactful infrastructure projects have been undertaken, with excellent new facilities renovated or built from scratch.

When we talk about centralised and decentralised models, there is a level of relatively involved. Now that have three engineering schools, is that the “correct” number? If centralising to a larger faculty was a good thing, why not go further? Organisations of different scales and scopes will naturally have different answers to these questions. More importantly, the time and place of when these questions are asked, and who is answering them, has as much influence on the result. The right question is “from where we are placed now, would a level up or down the centralisation scale help us?”
We shouldn’t get hung up on the theoretical questions but more the practical ramifications of change.

The next question to ask is “how much will a change affect us operationally?”. Power brokers want to effect change because it improves their CV and (I suspect) because they truly believe that their change is necessary for the long term health and performance of their unit. Sometimes they are right, other times the idea is good and the timing or execution is wrong, and yet other times the idea itself is misguided.

[I wrote this in February 2025 and just stumbled across the draft notes in October the same year. I’m hitting post so I can clear it, perhaps I should have written a proper conclusion though…]