It began – as the cliché goes – with a list on a napkin. Associate Professor Inger Mewburn, director of research training at ANU and founder of blog The Thesis Whisperer, was lunching with a colleague when the discussion turned to ...
More »The pushback against overseas students
International education is facing an uncertain future. In unprecedented ways, study destination nations around the globe are addressing the community impact of tuition-fee-paying international students. Whether it be Theresa May’s policy of counting all overseas students as migrants, Donald Trump ...
More »An empire of scraps: the university research model
The way university research is measured and rewarded needs to change. Helen Razer has called these times an Age of False Enlightenment, in which our leaders regularly make claims to know what they do not know. We might dub it ...
More »Academics collectively outraged by Trump’s climate apathy
The Australian university community has coalesced to tongue-lash United States President Donald Trump, following his announcement that the US will withdraw from the Paris Agreement, commonly known as the Paris climate accord. Signed by almost 200 UN climate body-member countries ...
More »IRU says demand-driven uni system working
On the fifth anniversary of the demand-driven university quota system, introduced by Julia Gillard’s Labor government, there are mixed feelings about its efficacy. On the one hand, Conor King, executive director of the Innovative Research Universities (IRU), claims it’s a ...
More »Leadership, now that’s a good idea
Higher education management seems to have moved away from the basic idea of helping students successfully complete their courses. I gave a little speech the other day on leadership in higher education. Much of it was pretty standard stuff until ...
More »Been there done that… and it did not really work
Twenty years ago when Campus Review was started, I had just returned to the tertiary sector in New Zealand after a time as a secondary school principal, a time of unprecedented change in school administration. I got back just in ...
More »End of the line
Columnist Richard Hil takes a look at what can happen if academics are pushed too far by endless change and mounting regulation After years of complaining bitterly about excessive workloads, stress, over-regulation, diminished status and poor pay compared to workers ...
More »When adjustment is the only way forward
These days, an ever-important concept in the lexicon of the Prime Minister is the term “structural adjustment”. She often alludes to the structural adjustment that is required for the nation as it comes to grips with the government putting a ...
More »A group of our own
How do Australia’s universities experience the changes that are sweeping through the higher education sector? Differently, no doubt. Despite a common university mission of teaching, research and service, it is a diverse sector with a variety of institutional histories, geographies ...
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