Published Tuesday, 23 June 2009
The university's ruling senate announced the plan as it set itself the challenge of becoming one of the world's top 100 universities over the next five years.
A total of 103 staff will be offered voluntary severance packages.
Cuts are being made across all 20 schools in the university, but will mean the end of German as an honours degree subject.
The lecturers' union, the University and College Union, opposes the cuts and lobbied members of the senate when they gathered for their meeting.
The union said the plan was to get rid of the targeted staff by Christmas and that it was a move which would cause major disruption to teaching at Queen's.
It said: "The whole ethos of the plan is concentration on international research at the expense of teaching and research on local issues. This is not popular with the politicians who are our paymasters."
The cuts of 103 are being made from an initial potential list of almost 300 and following consultation with unions.
The university Vice Chancellor, Professor Peter Gregson, said the academic plan agreed by the senate built on an earlier assessment exercise which identified where the university could compete globally.
"To deliver our potential we need to have the right people, doing the right things; that's what this plan is about," he said.
He added: "All 20 of our academic schools have been involved in putting this plan together, and together we have identified where we need to invest.
"Balancing competing priorities is difficult and we have faced hard choices. But the process has been thorough."
He said the plan was designed to be cost-neutral, with investment in priority areas being resourced through savings elsewhere.
Addressing specific changes, the Vice-Chancellor said: "Although we will no longer be offering a joint honours degree in German, Queen's students who wish to learn the language will be able to do so in our state-of-the-art Language Centre in the new Library at Queen's.
"In other areas - geography, archaeology and palaeoecology, politics, international studies and philosophy, electronic, electrical engineering and computer science, mathematics and physics - we will be refocusing our activities and introducing new programmes which meet current and future student demand."
Up in arms
Northern Ireland politicians were up in arms about the job cuts.
SDLP Employment and Learning spokesman Alex Attwood called for a suspension of the redundancy plans, claiming Queen's was using the wrong funding figures.
"Queen's have made decisions based upon the Higher Education Minister and his finding proposals for English universities.
"This is no basis for a decision about universities in Northern Ireland, not least because the Employment and Learning Minister informed the Assembly yesterday that our funding mechanisms and funding choices are different from those made in England."
Alliance Party MLA Anna Lo said: "While I can see why the university wants to make efficiencies, these job cuts will have a serious impact on local education.
"What sort of message does it send out that a leading local university and research centre is planning to shed over 100 jobs?"
Sinn Fein MLA Sue Ramsey said many questions remained to be answered.
Her main concern was that Queen's developed programmes with student welfare and education at its core "with research taking a close second place, not the other way around".