Late Thursday Monash VC Sharon Pickering announced an “ongoing community policing presence,” on the Clayton campus “to ensure the safety of students and staff, and the wider community”. Professor Pickering stated the university “respects and will defend all those that peacefully protest, and are willing not only to exercise their own freedom of speech but recognise and indeed embrace the freedom of speech of those with whom they hold deep disagreement.” However, “language used in some recent social media posts, chants and slogans does not engage the principles of academic freedom. That language must be judged according to the limits of the principle of freedom of speech.” Professor Pickering did not mention what language she was referring to – perhaps she thought everybody understood. The University has a dedicated webpage, “Updates for our community: Impacts of the Middle East conflict.”
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The Coalition wants the Senate Education and Employment References Committee to inquire “into antisemitism on university campuses.” If the Government and Greens knock it back, they won’t be able to claim pressure of work; the Committee has nothing else on.
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Want to know why university student recruitment campaigns all look the same? Paula Baron and Sylvia McCormack analysed 42 Australian universities strategic plans on how graduate “employability” was embedded in strategic priorities and how it was characterised. They found, “empirical evidence of the way in which Australian universities universally and uniformly adopted a particular model of employability, simultaneously claiming its distinctiveness.” Full report in FC this week.
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Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil announces warns specific “education providers” about “non-genuine or exploitative recruitment practices” which could lead to their being banned. Plus skills regulator ASQA has “more than 150 serious matters under investigation.” Plus international students must have nearly $30,000 in savings, up from $24,500, to qualify for a visa. This strikes some as unfair to genuine students, as distinct from people who want a student visa as cover for working full-time, which may not bother Minister O’Neil at all. The market for her message is voters who erroneously assume that international students create housing shortages and are all migrants not students. “We are significantly reducing migration levels – we are in the middle of the biggest drop in migration numbers in Australia’s history, outside of war or pandemic,” she says.
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UniSuper is up and at ‘em, with member services scheduled to return to normal access yesterday. It ends over a week when the fund’s 615,000 members could not access their $124bn online. From the start, UniSuper told members that their money was safe and the problem was with support provider Google Cloud Services.
It turns out Google deleted UniSuper’s “subscription” – at two “geographies,” the duplication was meant to be a “protection against outage and loss.” Fortunately UniSuper had a third backup with another provider. As to what went wrong, there was “an inadvertent misconfiguration” in setting up UniSuper , which Google says is a first.
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Jason Clare’s announcement of funding for teaching, nurses and social work students on prac placements was well received last week, admittedly excepting everybody whose pracs aren’t covered. It certainly gave Mr Clare something to announce again if there is not much new in the Budget, on Tuesday. But why not just make State Governments pay people on pracs in the public sector? One reason is the States would demand the Commonwealth fund them. Another is it would not be legal. The Fair Work Ombudsman states that placements are an opportunity for students to “apply the theory and skills they learned while studying in a professional workplace.” But because they are not employees, they are not entitled to pay. There’s a university variation to this which occasionally comes up – that postgrads with research scholarships are staff of their university and thus should be covered by enterprise agreements. In 2019, Workcover Queensland used the argument to try to charge universities workers comp insurance but the State’s universities demurred, with their industry lobby arguing that PGs are studying for a qualification, not working for pay.
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Health Minister Mark Butler announces a “national health and medical research strategy.” Not that there is one, just that there will be and that it could include better aligning the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Medical Research Future Fund. This follows a year of consultation on ways to do it (Campus Morning Mail, 5 June 2023) summarised by the Minister’s department, written up well, HERE (DoE and the ARC should poach Health’s writers).
What will happen, is what was going to happen from the start; combined administration of the NHMRC and MRFF with their distinct missions intact.
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The Australian Research Council announces $22.5m for 50 Early Career Industry Fellowships, with a pretty good success rate (given it’s the ARC), of 27 per cent. RMIT and Uni Sydney lead with seven awards each, followed by Uni Adelaide with six and Flinders and UNSW with four each. Plus there is $25m for 20 Mid-Career Industry Fellowships, with 23 per cent success. FC’s fave is from Jinman Kim (Uni Sydney) who plans to use AI to prepare presentations for multidisciplinary team meetings in hospitals. “MDTs improve outcomes, but they are time and resource intensive with complex data preparation, integration, presentation and then summarisation,” is the pitch. Leaving more time for people to get on with the office politics.
The ARC also announces eight Industry Laureates, sharing $27m in five-year fellowships (in FC Appointments, Achievements this week).
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Apparently not anticipating much in the Budget, the Australian Academy of Science announces it is working on a ten year plan to “assess the capability of Australia’s science system, its ability to compete and collaborate globally, and its contribution to the nation’s economy, security, health and quality of life.” Members of the panel advising on the project include, former chief scientist Ian Chubb, QUT VC and ARC Act reviewer Margaret Sheil and newly head of the Technology Council of Australia, Kate Pounder. The plan is due early next year.
