Back in 2022 Canadian philanthropists Geoff and Anna Cumming kicked the Doherty Institute tin at Uni Melbourne with a $250m (yes 250 and six zeros) donation for medical research. Last week the grateful university made Mr Cumming an honorary fellow, “in recognition of his and his wife’s gift.” So why no thanks specifically to Ms Cumming?
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The Medical Research Future Fund requests that chief investigators report “success and impact” of work it funds. The survey was sent to CIs (heaven forfend taxpayers see what is being asked about how their money is spent) but the fund’s 2023 performance indicators may indicate what is asked. Most of the nine require hard numbers and specific outcomes. Ones to watch include the “five commercialisation pathway indicators,” if the Department of Health and Aged Care ever lets us read the results.
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The Federal Government, excellent independent David Pocock and Greens have combined in the Senate to create a Select Committee, “to inquire into and report on the opportunities and impacts for Australia arising out of the uptake of AI technologies.” The brief does not explicitly include research, education and training but is broad enough to allow for submissions by the usual lobbies.
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The dispute between Drew Pavlou and the University of Queensland is over. Mr Pavlou’s court case is dropped, the university makes no admission of liability and kicks in $120 000 for scholarships. The bases of the case started in 2019 when Mr Pavlou was a student at the university and a fierce critic of its links to the Chinese state. A university inquiry found nine acts of serious misconduct in Mr Pavlou’s activism and while the Uni Queensland Senate overruled all but two of the inquiry’s findings, he was still penalised with a course suspension. He responded by turning to the law. But while he did not win in the Queensland Supreme Court Mr Pavlou had previously triumphed in the court of public opinion, where he criticised the university’s record on protecting free speech, its relations with the government of the People’s Republic of China and its dependence on Chinese student fees. In July 2020 Mr Pavlou campaign was sympathetically covered by 60 Minutes. “which,” Campus Morning Mail commented at the time, “could have been worse for the university, but it is hard to see how.”
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The Australian Skills Quality Authority has had a win in court against “an entity” that advertised VET courses through recognition of prior leaning without identifying a registered training organisation that would issue a statement of attainment. The authority continues to investigate the organisation, now trading as ASQANET – which seems a sure way to encourage the regulator’s attention.
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The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security has reviewed the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act (2018) – its recommendations include a win for universities. The Act requires any person “or entity” that “engages with the Australian political landscape on behalf of a foreign state or principal” to register. A “transparency notice” under the Act has only applied to a university once and then not for long – the University of Sydney Confucius Institute was assessed as a foreign government related entity for a month in 2021 before governance changes got it off the hook. But universities and lobby groups submitted to the Committee that definitions in the Act are “vague and confusing” and bring a compliance burden.
While the committee does not propose handing over HE issues under the Act to the Universities Foreign Interference Taskforce, it does recommend that after any amendments to the Act, “university and HE stakeholders” meet with government to find ways “to ease the regulatory burden” in complying.
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Charles Darwin U’s march towards a Northern Territory med school diverts attention from the existing medical training program there. That is run by Flinders U, which has largely kept quiet about CDU’s methodical campaign to pinch its patch. But former CDU staffer Don Fuller, who worked on creating the Flinders program there, has come out against a local med school, suggesting there is no room for two in the Territory. “Given the presence of a high quality and highly performing medical school already in position, a more difficult and doomed project cannot be imagined,” he writes in local NT media. Unless of course CDU VC Scott Bowman thinks his proposed med school should replace Flinders’ NT presence.
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Murdoch U announces a new allowance for Indigenous staff to compensate for “cultural load,” the “often unseen” work they do, beyond the scope of their employment, to “provide cultural education and guidance to non-Indigenous colleagues, Murdoch claims the allowance, up to $8,900, is a university system first. (Sharlene Leroy-Dyer sets out Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment provisions in university enterprise agreements HERE.)
