TO THE VICE-CHANCELLOR, RMIT UNIVERSITY We wish to register our support for the Maths and Statistics staff threatened with redundancy. As you know there is a crisis threatening the mathematics skill base in Australian universities. A recently released report on the state of the skills crisis in mathematics and statistics has found that the number of students and lecturers in this discipline across Australian universities is at a critical low. RMIT\'s intention to make up to 25% of academic staff in the Mathematics & Statistics discipline redundant this year will exacerbate this crisis. At this point, three academic staff members in the Mathematics & Statistics discipline have been targeted for redundancy, and unless you intervene in this process, they may be facing termination of their employment at RMIT University within a matter of weeks. Collectively, these three highly respected staff members have more than 80 years of experience in teaching and research in the discipline. Furthermore, the School is planning more redundancies this year. It would not only be a major loss to RMIT if any one of these redundancies was to proceed, but a loss to the profession as a whole, across Australia. We are calling on you as Vice Chancellor to immediately halt the redundancy process for these staff in the School of Mathematics & Geospatial Sciences, and for RMIT as a leading institution in the Technological Sciences to ensure that the university allocates adequate funding to halt the erosion of the maths skills base.

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