With Indigenous enrolments still way below population parity (representing 2.08 per cent of students) Universities Australia reports on member strategies in 2022, including:
- Almost all universities have “formal written strategies” for Indigenous student recruitment. Indigenous enrolments in Bachelor degrees have grown by an average of 7.3 per cent per year from 2008-21, while PG coursework enrolments have grown 9.7 per cent PA.
- While institutions acknowledge support for Indigenous students is a shared responsibility, there is a “disproportionate level of reliance upon DVC and PVC Indigenous portfolios for leadership”;
- Attracting and retaining Indigenous staff remains a challenge: half point to “a culturally safe environment,” some mention a staff pipeline;
- staff targets: more than half respondents mentioned population parity as a target. Nearly half responses defined this by their local community;
- promotion: “most universities did not identify a specific, documented pathway specific to Indigenous staff”; and
- three quarters of universities provide cultural safety training to staff, have offered it or are planning to.
UA states that following the qualitative approach for 2022 the ’23 report will be based on, “a more detailed quantitative instrument.”
as Elsevier sticks its bib in
The for-profit journal giant Elsevier wants to create a big-data platform and portal for Indigenous Research and got in touch with Universities Australia – which responded nothing-doing.
UA warns the proposal, “creates a monopoly on valuable indigenous knowledge.”
In its reply, seen by Future Campus, UA supports the principal but announced that Indigenous peoples, “should be the custodians of their research and data.”
Given which, UA advised, it would have helped if Elsevier had got in touch with the DVC/PVC Indigenous committee at the start.
