Text of petition:

I believe that the proposed severe cuts to mathematics, statistics, and computing at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) will do severe and permanent damage to the quality of education in maths and the sciences for USQ students, at a time when the need to support such education is both urgent and widely accepted in Australia at all levels. Service teaching alone, especially at reduced staff levels, cannot deliver the level of mathematics education that the students of USQ deserve. I urge the university administration to negotiate with the Department of Mathematics and Computing to find a compromise solution that will preserve the proven capability of this department to train students and teachers in the maths and sciences at the highest levels of quality.

Please sign this petition by leaving a comment at the very bottom of this web page stating your support for the text. It may be helpful if you include your name, title, and affiliation in your remarks.

For more information about the situation at USQ, as well as other ways in which you can help out, please see the main campaign page, as well as my editorial on this topic.

This online petition is part of a broader campaign that is also contacting the media and government officials for this cause. Your signing of this petition will help, not only in directly impressing upon USQ administrators, media, government officials, and others on the depth of support for mathematics, but also in encouraging those who will be impacted by these cuts to also speak out and to spread the word. Thanks in advance for your support, and please share the link to this petition to anyone else who may be interested. Mathematicians, scientists, engineers, journalists, students, administrators, Australians, non-Australians – all are more than welcome to sign. It is particularly vital to contact USQ students on this matter, as they have been largely excluded from the official consultation process by the USQ administration.

Any inquiries about this petition should be directed to Terence Tao, or left as a comment on the home page for this campaign. [In particular, if your comment does not first appear, it may have been caught by the automatic spam filters. - T.]

On 14 April, the last day of the consultation period set by the administration, the online petition was formally presented to the USQ administration and to local government officials. Since the petition has been a visible and public show of support for mathematics, statistics, and computing at USQ, we will continue to keep this petition active beyond this date as a demonstration of that ongoing support.

For the latest updates on the status of the campaign, see the end of my blog post on this topic.