And the Thelonius Award for terrific timing goes to … Murdoch University! Yesterday it announced a $100m gift from WA philanthropist Ted Powell, for “a complete rebuild” of the vet school. It follows last week’s State Government announcement that by year end it will have a prop to merge the state’s universities (ex Edith Cowan, which has a pass). A few years back, when mergers were last were mentioned, then underperforming Murdoch was widely considered in the gun to be taken over by UWA. Way harder to make the case now.
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Just in at the no well-intentioned deed goes unpunished desk. The imminent Adelaide University will be co-named Tirkangkaku, “place of learning” in the Kaurna language of the Adelaide plains) with cultural consent from a community organisation (FC July 24). But the National Indigenous Times reports another Kaurna group says nobody asked them and the name is grammatically incorrect. Adelaide U is working on an artwork to include the indigenous name on livery so this needs sorting out sharpish -what with AU starting in the new year.
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Uni Wollongong announces another cut to its cuts, with reduced job losses in research and innovation as part of the universities overall Operations portfolio, on those mentioned in March. Back then 155-185 FTE positions were targeted, down to 85-118 now, reducing savings by around $5, to a maximum of $26m.
Proposed changes include,
- four operating units, covering graduate research and culture, services, partnerships and platforms
- a dean position for governance and oversight
- combining faculty support and central funding, “for cohesive end to end case management”
- Innovation and commercial contracts stay in the portfolio
The proposal is open for a fortnight with the final plan due in the last week of August.
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UNSW has received $2.5m for a “world-first” cognitive economics lab. The money is from investor Bill Manos, to research how people make saving, investing or purchasing decisions. Apparently, “the work aims to understand the limits of human cognition and reasoning processes,” but FC is too thick to understand the methodologies, as described, to be used.
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Sarah Henderson is busy as the Opposition shadow-shadow education spokesperson. The Liberal Senator for Victoria had the job before the election but was dropped by new Coalition leader Sussan Ley – Tasmanian Senator Jonathon Duniam got the gig. But this has not stopped Senator Henderson helping out. Last week she proposed an amendment of her own to the Government’s $16bn bill cutting HELP study debt. She called for capping the indexation rate at either 3% or a lower CPI. With the Coalition waiving the Government’s Bill through, it went nowhere.
She also spoke loudly in support of the Government’s Bill imposing a code on gender-based violence on higher education providers. The Coalition supported it, but Senator Henderson took the opportunity to take a swipe at regulator TEQSA, “which has a number of existing powers which it did not use as it should have.”
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Perhaps upsetting interest-groups is a Productivity Commission KPI. It did it this week when it raised extending the “fair dealing” exception to train large language models on Australian copyright content. Cue outrage from creatives whose general view is they should be paid for their work. Many researchers, however, stayed silent, perhaps because they are used to for-profit publishers locking their research papers behind paywalls. CAUL, the local research libraries lobby is negotiating new contracts with four of the big five publishers – perhaps it could suggest all ANZ research papers be open access for AI? It’s not as if it is going to cost academic authors money.
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Western Sydney U has the Indian Government’s nod to open a campus in Uttar Pradesh state. It will teach WSU courses in business analytics, marketing, data science, sustainability, and innovation and follows the university’s Indonesian campus that opened last year.
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Robyn Denholm and colleagues running the Strategic Examination of Research and Development published a paper in May which rather read like they had already made up their minds on what SERD would say; that research and development is a matter for the big three, government, big biz and the science establishment.
Still, they asked anybody interested to respond and received 500 submissions, as well as meeting 600 “stakeholders.” And now they have published 390 papers, individuals and organisations agreed to make public.
"Aha! cynics say "information overkill with dissenting views on big issues buried in blather!" Maybe or more likely not – anybody interested can ask their AI to report what is actually there and it will be hard for the panel to ignore diverse arguments. There is safety in cynicism for hacks – assuming the worst makes credible copy; but this might actually be an inquiry where the results are not known in advance.
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The Australian Human Rights Commission survey on campus racism is in the field next week. All staff and students will be invited via their .edu accounts.
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The University of Sydney reports 119 complaints of sexual misconduct, on campus or related to it, last year. “There are proportionally more complaints (relative to disclosures) than in previous years, reflecting an increase in the number of complaints made by bystanders and we hope increased trust and confidence in our processes.” Management adds “there is more to do” and that it has already put in place “many” measures in the yet to pass parliament bill for an HE code to prevent and respond to gender-based violence.