News Director Jeremy Pudney leaves Channel Nine in Adelaide to take up “an exciting opportunity” at Flinders U. “How exciting,?” FC asked and Flinders responded he is Media and Comms Director. Mr Pudney might find the pace a bit slower than breaking TV news; then again Flinders U is now the second brand by size in a newly two-university town and will need all the good news it can get.
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Law students at UTS and Uni Sydney can learn how AI works, which might help so the legal lunch LLMs eats is not theirs. Harvey AI (“for law firms, professional service providers and the Fortune 500”) announce its kit is available for students at both, “to engage directly with advanced legal AI tools as part of their education and training for professional practice.”
“We have a responsibility to prepare students not just for today’s legal practice, but for the profession they will want to lead in the future,” Sydney dean Fleur Johns says. At least, FC speculates, what will be left of it.
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The Senate Employment and Education Legislation Committee gave policy people not much of a Christmas present – a tight deadline for its inquiry into the Bill establishing the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC). It was announced on 27 November, with submissions due last Thursday. As of yesterday, just 40 individuals and organisations had made it and a bunch of them could have saved themselves time by expressing solidarity on one big issue – that ATEC as proposed is way too much a creature of the Department of Education, a statutory office when it should, as HE historian Julia Horne submitted, be a statutory authority.
Which is pretty much what Sarah Henderson warned before the last election would happen. The-then Coalition Education Shadow told the Universities Australia conference last February, “We see no compelling case to proceed with the ATEC because this is another layer of education bureaucracy at a significant cost,” she said.
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Charles Sturt U announce a JV campus in Sri Lanka, starting with courses in biz and early childhood ed. It will, “offer education opportunities, while bringing additional revenue to support the University’s core regional mission.” Never hurts to remind the voters of regional NSW what international ed is meant to do, although Bathurst and Wagga are not exactly over-run with foreign students.
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Universities Australia got the HE establishment’s position on the record in a submission to the very brief but very busy joint parliamentary committee inquiry on the government’s Combating Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism legislation. “Academic freedom does not extend to the promotion or endorsement of hate speech. However, universities are required to facilitate rigorous examination of complex, contested and, at times, divisive issues … The inclusion of a consistent academic and cultural defence in this provision would help ensure that academic teaching, research and debate done in good faith are not inadvertently captured,” is the UA essence. Perhaps this is intended to help if regulators come round for a chat. Education Minister Jason Clare has legislation coming for TEQSA to ensure universities enforce their codes of conduct, including to protect Jewish students. And to be sure they do he has also asked the Higher Education Standards Panel to review the system-wide thresholds, “to make sure that they are meeting the requirements they need to when it comes to antisemitism and racism more generally.”
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Adrian Barnett is publishing more and enjoying it less – so he is cutting back.
The QUT public health stats professor will halve the papers he publishes a year, to seven. Not that he will slack off; he is planning to double the time he works on each. “I will use that time to craft better papers, doing more background reading, more consultation with stakeholders and more model testing, and giving more consideration to what the results mean for public health in practice,” he writes in a new (ahem) article.
It’s his contribution to slowing “the runaway train wreck” of published papers, 1.7m indexed articles in ’24 compared to 1.2m in ’14. “It is now impossible for scientists to thoroughly read and peer review the literature. Without adequate scrutiny, the overall quality of research seems to be degrading,” he laments.
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The international Ed Feds have finally outlawed the great enrolment switcheroo. What has long happened is a student from overseas gets a visa to study at well-regarded Provider A. Once in Australia an education sales agent organises a transfer to lower cost Provider B, which also has a liberal attitude to attendance when so-called students are busy at work. The student is happy, the cheapo college is happy and the agent is happy getting a commission on the transfer, especially happy if they were paid to organise the first enrolment. But no longer. Assistant Minister for Education, Julian Hill has issued a Legislative Instrument for the National Code of Practice, governing commissions. From March, it forbids agents collecting a commission for an in-country change (unless the student is switching to the same course). It “removes the incentive for unscrupulous education agents to facilitate unnecessary or non-genuine transfers,” is the message.
Plus the Immigration Feds have increased the scrutiny of student visa applications from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan. All are now at level three, which requires more details of financial resources and better evidence that they intend to study.
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It looks like Universities Australia is practising its lines in case International student numbers returns as a live political issue – a parliamentary inquiry into skilled migration is already underway (a new one, the 2021 inquiry was so 2021).
UA submits the debate about international students should be de-politicised, with “predictable, competitive visa pathways for them plus “transparency, consultation and stability” in applying policy. It also explains we need international research students to meet a looming shortfall of 12,000 science PhDs. Problem is, it’s research universities that doing the looming. Frank Larkins (Uni Melbourne) warns that local doctoral research student numbers at Group of Eight universities were down 2.4% 2014-23 while internationals increased 14%.