U Tas Chancellor Alison Watkins joins the Qantas Board. After years of enduring Sandy Bay community activists, she is just the woman the airline will want when shareholders arc up at the AGM.
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Jason Clare will introduce the ATEC bill to the House in the last sitting week of the year – which means it has three days to pass both chambers for the Commission to commence. Easy peasy in the Reps where the government has the numbers. As for the Senate, presumably the Scrutiny of Bills Committee will not be interested, what with “a Bill for an act to boss universities around” not meeting its focus on individual rights, liberties and obligations and the rule of law. Given there is no telling what the Greens will do, it might be down to the Coalition. Before the election, former Education Shadow Sarah Henderson said she would cancel the agency in office but she isn’t. Successor Julian Leeser did not reply to FC by deadline.
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There was joy in snarly media the other month when the Times Higher research ranking scored the imminent Adelaide U at a global 176. It suited critics of the co-creation, who argued that Uni South Australia would drag down research-strong Uni Adelaide once they were one. But it turns out the Times team made a coding error which is now corrected. Adelaide U’s notional score is now 133rd in the world. This is more in-line with the QS ranking of Adelaide U at global 88th and will surely cheer up marketers at the new U. An underpinning assumption of its co-creation is that a combination of the two will create a strong global research ranking which will attract more international students. We will soon start to see if it is so.
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Jobs and Skills Australia digs into government data to report graduates’ pay and career progression. Entertaining it is not, and obvious at a top level it is, “higher education leads to strong labour market outcomes across a diverse range of careers” – who would have thunk it! But there is less a mine than an open-cut quarry of stats for HE student recruiters and course developers to use. Want to know why people pile into coursework masters in business? They earn $54,000 a year more than those with UG bized degrees.
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As Monash U plans its new Kuala Lumpur campus, a learned reader reports from the archives where they found news in what was then the (Melbourne) Herald of the university admitting its first fee-paying internationals. It was in June 1986 and there were six of them, paying $6,200 a year for a Bachelor of Economics. The story added Uni Melbourne was thinking about it, but at La Trobe U council had voted nothing doing.
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Among all the outrage over VC pay, no one ever complains about Peter Chun’s package, perhaps because just about everybody in HE wants him to really do his best. Mr Chun is CEO of UniSuper, with a package of $1.75m – 540,000 of the elusive spondulicks more than what Uni Sydney’s Mark Scott made last year. And the comrades do not publicly object; the National Tertiary Education Union’s Victorian state secretary Sarah Robert is on the fund’s remuneration committee. But dial down the outrageometer on the $148,000 UniSuper pays her as a union rep on its board– it goes straight to the NTEU.
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Imminently exiting architects of the new Adelaide U Peter Høj and David Lloyd appeared before the Senate committee inquiry on university governance Monday, playing straight (the straightest) of bats in response to questions about consultants and what the first VC of Adelaide University will be paid. The only slips were a couple of mentions of a “merger.” It is, as is universally understood, a “co-creation.”
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ANU Interim VC Rebekah Brown says a priority is “redevelopment of the overseas student attraction strategy.” It should be. In a new analysis of Group of Eight international enrolments Franks Larkins (Uni Melbourne) reports that ANU has lagged in the lucrative coursework PG market. While the all-Eight increase 2023-24 was 17%, (UNSW grew by 55%, no less), ANU had a 0.9% lift.
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Curtin U announces a free online course on “the wartime leadership, vision and enduring influence on modern Australia” of Prime Minister John Curtin. Brilliantly timed to appeal to another local Labor leader, Premier Roger Cook, who has a team working on a possible merger of three of the state’s public universities. But that should not stop the one that is already exempt, Edith Cowan U doing the same, about the WA feminist icon for whom it is named.
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The ever-energetic NTEU opens a new front in its campaign for higher education domination. “Class sizes are emerging as a cornerstone of the university funding crisis. We want to hear how it is affecting you” is the message. By which they mean “fair workloads.” There are surveys for professional staff and academics. FC looks forward to the results being quoted by sympathetic Senators.
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Uni Sydney announces “considerable progress” in implementing the recommendations of the Hodgkinson Review, which “provided us with expert guidance on how our policies and procedures can ensure we foster a safe working and learning environment while upholding our values of academic freedom and freedom of speech.”
This was a big part of management’s response to last year’s Gaza protests. But one proposal that is not progressing is the civility rule, making speakers “responsible for ensuring that the meaning of the words and phrases used by them was clear to the audience being addressed.” FC was anticipating ours of obfuscatory entertainment as people argued about who heard what and what was said, or meant. But it is not happening. VC Mark Scott told staff Tuesday, “rather we will invest in initiatives that embed principles of respectful discourse and collegiality.”
It contrasts with Emma Johnston’s approach when she took over as VC at Uni Melbourne early this year, issuing a VC Regulation, specifying where campus protests cannot occur, what is not allowed and listing penalties for staff and students who breach it. And she meant it; two students have been expelled.
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New Ministerial Direction 115 is in place as of this morning, replacing 111 as the way the Government sets international student quotas. Institutions who stick to their allocation will have a higher visa priority. This, says Assistant Minister for International Education Julian Hill, will allocate processing resources “on an equitable basis.”