It doesn’t look like USQ is only responding to student enrollment. Wikipedia says that USQ has 26174 students and 1396 staff. If that means academic staff, then it would be a student-to-faculty ratio of about 19. Even if they just allocated faculty based on FTE students, amateurish though that would be, they wouldn’t have an honest case to destroy the math department.

No, it rather looks like that they were a priori hostile to mathematics, or at best, that they want to cut based on majors only. A special intellectual defense of mathematics is more than necessary in this case: An animus against specific subjects is an unaccountable way to run a university, and so is “get majors or get the ax, service be damned”. Although as you say, they do not apply the latter principle across the board.

I have slightly more precise data now. At USQ, the number of EFTSL (equivalent full time student loads) enrolled in level 2 and 3 and masters courses (i.e. upper division) is currently 20, but is slowly growing; it lies on the borderline of USQ’s own “efficiency criteria”, although other departments with similar levels of enrollment have been designated as “initatives” and thus allowed to survive. At the same time, the number of EFTSL enrolled in service courses is 440. One reason the Australian numbers are lower than US numbers are that in Australia it is possible to complete a science major without ever taking a course from the maths department; for various reasons, mostly having to do with the way departments are funded, there is an incentive for science and engineering departments to do their maths courses in-house.

The number of FTE staff at USQ is about 16, so the total staff:student ratio is about 28 (the national average in Australia is about 20, and the international average about 15-16, I believe).

For comparison, at UCLA we have about 700-800 maths majors, out of a student body of about 25000. At the service teaching level, last quarter we taught 2500 students in 23 courses.

Well, these are pretty low numbers compared to UC Davis, which has roughly the same number of undergraduates. We have about 300 math majors. That’s fairly high and our program is fairly expansive, but we could be quite strict and still have more than 100 majors. Our total enrollment in service courses is more than 4000 each quarter. I don’t know if your 400 means total service course enrollment or instead a service enrollment which is equivalent to 400 full-time students. Even if it is the latter, that is still less than half of what we have; students typically take four courses at once.

I got this data by trotting downstairs. I imagine that your contacts would be happy to supply you with equivalent data for UCLA, and perhaps all of UC and even Cal State. It could be useful to compare California to Australia.

Of course I’m against the Kevorkian solution to the problem of low math enrollment. But if the math service enrollment at USQ is only 400 student-courses (as opposed to full-time student equivalents), then I would agree that there is a problem that needs to be solved.

Having more data would definitely help, though it is hard to obtain. Currently, USQ has the equivalent of about 20 full time mathematics students enrolling each year, and the department teaches about 400 students a year in service teaching; the total size of the student body is about 26,000. I don’t have much data for comparison: the international survey at

http://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/documents/publications/stats/InternationalComparison.pdf

shows that internationally, about 1% of all students at universities specialise in maths or statistics, whereas in Australia it is 0% after rounding – not exactly an informative statistic, there. (I am looking for better data, though.)

Dear Tez: Thanks for the suggestions! Actually, Peter and Cheryl already signed the online petition, and Cheryl was extremely helpful (in her role on the executive committee of the IMU) in getting the IMU to lend their support. More generally, the response from the national and international mathematical community has been very strong.

However I have been told (unconfirmed) that these two mathematicians are also both ex-Toowoombanians, and since they are quite senior perhaps you should try to enlist their help:

Peter Cameron
http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~pjc/

Cheryl Praeger
http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/portal_memberdata/praeger

The whole story is so outrageous that it isn’t clear what they are trying to accomplish by gutting mathematics at USQ. This passage suggests that the mathematics department has fallen victim to bad mathematics! That would be ironic if it were the real explanation, but it’s difficult to believe that it’s as simple as that. Of course it is difficult to discern their motives if they are secretive. Or, whether or not they are secretive, it is difficult to interpret illogical motives. Even so, motive has been a weak link in the story.

Okay, they do keep repeating that they are responding to student demand. The radio interview suggests the view that if the math department is “just” teaching a lot of service courses, then it isn’t a serious department, that it would need a lot of math majors specifically in order to justify its current size. Of course I think that that’s ridiculous. I also do not trust their conclusion that there are few math majors at USQ — a comparison could be useful perhaps. But can that at least be taken as their sincere view?