According to a brief report in the Australian today, La Trobe and Victoria University are to shed up to 450 staff in both forced and voluntary redundancies, apparently in response to losses in their endowments. Melbourne University has also been laying off staff in the arts faculty, although this is more to do with their restructuring plan that intends to replace many traditional degrees with a much smaller number of broad-based degrees.
I was also recently informed that large numbers of staff cuts are likely to be imminent in Italian universities, as this article from Nature reports; the Berlusconi government has significantly reduced the funding allocated to both temporary and permanent research positions.
Filed under: Academic staff
[...] positions, it seems that the forced redundancies proposed by Victoria University (that we recently reported on here) are to be converted to voluntary redundancies, and possibly reduced in number, following pressure [...]