The Australian Universities Accord emphasise the importance of community-university partnerships for the future of research in Australia. For organisations, certain assumptions about academic employment necessarily underpin community-university partnerships. As the university sector contracts, the author observes that community-university partnerships are increasingly at risk due to casualisation, fixed-term contracts and waves of redundancies. Sitting at the coalface, the author sounds the alarm about the implications this has not only for higher education but from the perspective of partner organisations. 

This article affirms the value of social sciences and the humanities for the social research that so often underpins community-university partnerships and asserts the importance of stable employment for university-based academic and professional staff to sustain the wider imperatives of university engagement.