The University of Canberra will press ahead with a plan to merge five faculties into two, a process the vice-chancellor says will be possible without forced redundancies.
Bill Shorten said there would be a health and science faculty and a business, law, arts, education and technology faculty under the proposed restructure of the university.
"I want to liberate resources from bureaucracy and just put it into teaching and research. So we've got a change proposal where we'll talk to our staff about going from five faculties to two," Mr Shorten said.
"Everything we teach here will still be taught. Everything we research here will still be researched.
"But rather than having five separate structures, we think that we can free up resources currently going to bureaucracy which will go into teaching, research, learning and the engagement between us and the rest of Canberra."
The university would still keep its 12 schools under the proposed changes, the vice-chancellor said.
Mr Shorten addressed the university's staff on Monday morning and said after the meeting morale and enrolments were up and the finances had stabilised.
"The reality is that when you've got five faculties, you've duplicated five of everything at the top end. This will invariably mean fewer senior managers and that'll free up resources for teaching and for learning and for research," he said.
"The core of our university is that we teach degrees and we do research. We have eight research centres, there'll still be eight research centres.
"We offer 27 different professions and disciplines, there'll still be 27 of that. What we're doing is changing some of the back office resources and moving them closer to the delivery of education and research."
Mr Shorten said the change amounted to "evolution not revolution" and could be achieved through natural attrition and staff redeployment rather than a fresh round of forced job cuts.
"So you either change a little every day or you change a lot one day in a year and the latter approach to change is far more of a dislocation for students, for staff and for the community," he said.
The University of Canberra earlier this year proposed to staff merging its five faculties into either two or three or similar sizes.
"We've done a survey of other comparable sized universities. We've probably had more faculties than most universities our size had," Mr Shorten said on Monday.
The university expects the faculty merger would be completed by January 1, 2027.
National Tertiary Education Union ACT division secretary Lachlan Clohesy said the changes would not be a surprise to staff, who had already been part of discussion and consultation.
"The major concern that often arises in change processes is around potential job cuts. We're pleased there's a commitment to no forced redundancies and we'll be holding the university to that," Dr Clohesy said.
