Having created the Accord, Mary O’Kane now gets to work implementing it, being appointed Interim Chief Commissioner of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, starting July 1. Education Minister Jason Clare announced she will be joined by Accord colleagues Barney Glover (now heading Jobs and Skills Australia) and Larissa Behrendt (UTS) – election permitting. Shadow Education Minister Sarah Henderson announced Wednesday that if the Coalition is elected, ATEC will not happen. Which rather made her criticism of appointing Professor Glover a “potential conflict of interest,” redundant.
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Adelaide U (the new one) releases its recruitment campaign all over, including bus stop AdShells in inner-city Sydney.
“Launch You: go higher with world-class research at Australia’s newest university” is the pitch. The TVC, with young people launching themselves into the air and flying to Adelaide is, like most corporate campaigns for universities, interchangeable with pretty much every other university in the country.
Who knows how many people in Redfern will enquire/apply/enrol, although FC suspects that when locals there think of taking to the skies Adelaide is not a top destination.
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The Albanese Government is funding “practical solutions to drive women’s economic security and equality.” Uni Sydney’s Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work leads the $5m project, with Uni Melbourne and UTS participating. Apparently the project will, “build a rigorous research evidence base to ensure that government has the data-driven insights it needs to deliver change toward gender equality.” That certainly seems what Minister for a bunch of stuff, including women, Katy Gallagher, hopes. “It is so exciting to think about what important research this Centre will undertake and how the Centre’s research pillars align with the priority that our government,” she said at its launch, last August. Senator Gallagher added in the funding announcement Tuesday, “the University of Sydney was selected following a competitive grant process.” How could anybody think anything else?
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ANU COO Jonathan Churchill has a concern with the campus branch of the National Tertiary Education Union’ member ballot on confidence or otherwise in Chancellor Julie Bishop and VC Genevieve Bell. It is that the “vote” (although why he puts it in quotes is not apparent) will create “white noise of confusion and angst.” But he adds, “I remain optimistic that the NTEU will engage with us constructively.” Maybe, maybe not – it could well depend on what management explains next about “steps on our journey to financial sustainability.”
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The Federal and NSW governments are kicking in $9.8m to train more VET teachers, but only in the public system. The money will go to recruiting “skilled professionals from high- demand industries” and “supporting them” to complete a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment, the mandatory voced teaching qualification. So far the State’s “paid to learn” programme has placed 267 new teachers in TAFE. Good-O, but while the Brunige’s review of NSW VET in December 2023 recommended more full-time teachers, it acknowledged half at TAFE are employed part-time or as casuals, due to the funding model that ties employment to time-limited/insecure contracts.
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The National Health and Medical Research Council cracked $1bn grant funding last year, awarding $1.05bn – up 25% over ten years. There were fewer, but larger grants, over the decade – 1,090 shared $780m in 2014; while 740 split last year’s $1bn plus.
So far this year, the biggest swags go to the usual suspects that make the most applications. Uni Melbourne leads with 47 for a success rate of 20% ahead of Monash U with 36 grants. Followers are Uni Sydney, 27 (10%), Uni Queensland, 24 (14%), UNSW, 20 (12%) and Walter and Eliza Hall 14 (32%). All up they won 168 of the 240 awards.
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The National Tertiary Education Union has slides for classroom use, encouraging students to register to vote. “We are in dire need of a government that is serious about governance reform, committed to reversing the disastrous ‘Job Ready Graduates’ cuts, understands the value of independent public research, and manages international education fairly,” is the union message. The comrades make no mention of who students should vote for to fix things – but FC suspects it isn’t the Coalition.
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Postgraduate enrolments in history are down 45% since 2016. It’s a knock-on outcome of the Job Ready Graduates fees increase according to Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar from the Australian Historical Association in a brief for the Royal Historical Society. Plus, “the intense messaging from government about its low esteem for the study of history has translated into administrative cuts to history departments as well as a deepening of public disrespect for the discipline.” While enrolments in the Group of Eight are “remarkably buoyant,” enrolments for history have suffered in more regional or lower socio-economic institutions. “This means that more of the traditional cohort for history—women, Indigenous, and poorer students—are now missing out.”
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Monash U Business School management sets out 12 “principles for creating classrooms” of “the civility and respect for each other” kind. “We have all witnessed the divisiveness in our wider community that has, at times, spilled into our classrooms. To stem this, we must recognise that safety and inclusion form the bedrock of a thriving learning community,” Robert Brooks, (Deputy Dean, Education) and Nicola Charwat (Associate Dean, Teaching and Learning) write. Observers suggest unless HR picks up the pace on sessional contracts, advice will not be needed because in the absence of teaching staff, classrooms will be empty.
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The Australian Association of University Professors has demarcation issues with university managements that allow non-academics to deal with student misconduct. “Such a proposal would see academic expertise removed from the academic integrity process, meaning that unqualified staff would be making decisions about a student’s academic progress, ultimately undermining the whole process,” the AAUP announces.
Good-O but Jason Lodge, who knows a bit, quite a big bit about this wrote last year, “emerging evidence suggests that misconduct investigation processes that rely heavily or solely on unit/subject coordinators might not be the best way to manage increasingly complex misconduct cases. … The evidence suggests that centralised approaches … can be more effective and consistent. In these examples, the investigation of possible misconduct is carried out by specialists who are experts in and employed specifically to conduct these kinds of investigations and manage misconduct processes.”
Perhaps the Professors have not caught up with many learning designers, experts still classed as “professional staff” under the higher education work classification model, designed a generation ago, before e-learning science existed.
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TEQSA now recovers all costs (the feds, as the agency reminds, make them do it) but at least they did not jack up charges for application and compliance this year. The Agency also sets out what it will have to recover for everything other than applications, $7.9m – a big outlay is $1.36m fort all-provider risk reviews. A bigger is the $3.5m TEQSA spends on related “executive and corporate functions.” As to who pays what, there is a formula which splits a proportion of cost across all providers plus a charge calculated by student numbers. To which Australian Independent Higher Education Australia responds that the fair thing to do would be to allocate all costs according to enrolments. AIHEA wants this to be an election issue, warning the existing arrangements are an “undue financial burden on independent and smaller providers, forcing them to raise tuition fees and increasing student debt.” No harm in asking.
