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From December 19, the University of Adelaide and UniSA will merge to become Adelaide University by the beginning of next year.
The new super-sized university will cater to 70,000 students and 11,000 staff, making it one of the largest higher education institutions in the nation.
But as the two-year process of merging two universities into one mega outfit comes to a head, UniSA Student Association president Oliver Shephard-Bayly said staff and students, especially in the Arts, were facing changes to their degrees.
“Students are trying to work out whether they can complete their degree, whether it will take them longer and where they’ll be able to complete their majors and minors.”
Students are also facing uncertainty around where courses will be delivered across the campuses and how much face-to-face delivery will be provided.
The National Tertiary Education Union SA secretary Dr Andrew Miller said communication over course integration was “clear as mud”.
“The timetabling that’s come out for 2026 has left a lot of people very distressed,” he said. “There are people that have run courses in their foundational university for many years that have found, without consultation, have vanished from sight.”
He said part of the problem had been a lack of time to deliver the merger and that has placed pressure on staff as they build “a new university while maintaining business as usual.”
“The union doesn’t believe there’s been enough time. Our understanding is there’s something in the order of 1,700 different systems that have to be integrated that’ll affect people differently depending on which system they land on,” Dr Miller said.
An Adelaide University spokesperson said it had been meeting all substantial scheduled milestones.
“Both foundation universities have acknowledged the additional workload this has placed on some staff and have established processes and supports,” the spokesperson said.
It said it released a draft timetable to academic staff who were asked to “review and identify any actions required to inform the final timetable”.
“This was a preliminary timetable for a very large transitional activity, the purpose was staff engagement to identify and capture any issues,” the spokesperson said.
The university has established a dedicated Student Transition Support team to work through individual enquiries.