In admirable optimism, ANU Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell mentions work on a 20-year plan to take the university to its centenary. Cynics warn “ANU to 100” could be mistaken as a count-down for days she might have left in the job if regulator TEQSA finds ANU Council and management have not complied with performance standards. But what can you expect from cynics.
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ATEC isn’t officially up-and-at-em, but the Parliamentary Budget Office advises the Commission’s intended budget from ’23-’24 – ’27-’28 is $906m. Plus there are continuing Accord costs of $146m.
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Vice-Chancellors worried where their next $1m will come from might wonder what the government’s Expert Committee on University Governance will suggest on ways to set pay. There’s a clue in Education Minister Jason Clare’s Tuesday speech at an Australian Financial Review event. He mentioned an idea from the University Chancellors Council which suggested the Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal get involved. They are well placed to make their case. The chancellors provide secretariat support for the governance committee.
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Monash U demonstrates admirable press release productivity, announcing with tech partners that they will build “Australia’s first higher education AI supercomputer.” Presumably this is to remind anybody who forgot the university’s publicity for the $60m project, in June.
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Education Minister Jason Clare flags consultation on ways to “modernise and strengthen” Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency powers. Mr Clare mentions “better tools” for it to intervene in the public interest and to respond to “systemic risks,” as well as issues at individual universities. Now where could such ideas have come from?
How about from the Agency’s submission to the Senate inquiry into university governance (not the one now, the one before the election). TEQSA proposed it having “explicit enforcement provisions including the power to require information and obtain warrants” and for “sector-wide risk monitoring and early intervention.” FC looks forward to a TEQSA Good Practise Note on raiding chancelleries.
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The Australian Skills Quality Authority corporate plan includes considering delegation of some of ASQA’s functions to providers. It follows the course-accreditation pilot for TAFEs. Is this a trend? Private dual-sector providers will hope so. In March, the Independent Higher Education Association suggested that organisations regulated by ASQA and TEQSA should be able to choose the latter.
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The (interim) Australian Tertiary Education Commission is in the market for an assistant secretary in its student profiles branch to work on needs based and growth funding. However the role is in the DoE, which is in-line with a July announcement that “the ongoing Commission structure,” has staffing and resources in the department. FC must be missing something that explains how ATEC is independent. As Minister Clare said last August, “I hear what people are saying about it needing to be necessarily independent of government and there’s work going on to make sure that that’s represented.”
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The feds fund courses for nurses who want to work in aged care. Providers of “specialist mentoring and training” through to mid-2027 are, industry organisation, Ageing Australia, Australian College of Nursing, the SA branch of the Nursing and Midwifery Federation, Charles Darwin U and Uni Sunshine Coast.
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There are 50 or so fewer joint degrees that include International Studies at UTS on offer for first semester next year. They are on hold until a staff restructure is settled and it will be very bad indeed for Australian awareness of the Asia-Pacific if they are not renewed. Liam Prince from the Australian Consortium for 'In-Country' Indonesian Studies says 50-70 UTS students in the program spend a year in Asia compared to the 20 or so other universities that each send students for a single semester. It sends, he says, a bad signal right when the Commonwealth is trying to scale up study on and in the region.
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When science lobbies lament the national R&D spend is O.2% of GDP lower than the all-OECD figure, what somehow gets missed is that all of government outlays increased 50% 2018-25, to $15bn. The Department of Industry chief economist unit has gone through the budget tables to find another $1.1bn goes on science research and innovation, that does not meet the OECD’s definition of R&D; such as the nearly $300m that GeoScience Australia has this year.
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The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering has $15m from the feds to allocate 3,000 AUKUS scholarships. Perhaps universities need help filling the 4,000 course places for four years the government is funding in submarine-related degrees.
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Monash U announces new “student consultation guidelines” which “reinforce our commitment to clarity, provide greater confidence in our processes and appropriately acknowledges the contributions of our staff.” According to the university, the Federal Court has “clarified a long-standing ambiguity in our Enterprise Agreement regarding student consultation.”
Anybody interested in what this actually means should read Justice Snaden’s recent judgement in National Tertiary Education Union v Monash University HERE . The issue, was whether the university should separately pay casual academics for scheduled office hours for student consultations separate to tutorials. MU said It shouldn’t. The court found it should. The university’s commitment to clarity has not yet extended to publicly announcing how much it owes how many people.
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The National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme announces applications open in October for researchers who want to use “national supercomputing resources,” the ANU based, National Computational Infrastructure and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, a JV of the four WA public universities and CSIRO.