The Lahore High Court’s decision on 11 February not to release from custody the American official involved in the fatal shooting on 27 January of two Pakistanis in Lahore – despite very heavy US pressure to release him because it claims he has diplomatic immunity – demonstrates once again how limited is Washington’s leverage […]
Category Archives: Higher Education and Research
Julia Gillard will today announce the launch of the My University Website. Following on from the positive response from the public to the My School web site, the My University web site was inevitable. Parents are delighted with the accessibility of the information, the simplicity of the data, the ease with which comparisons can be […]
A couple of weeks ago, I read in a magazine that successful Mad Men actress January Jones was told by her ex-boyfriend Ashton Kutcher (now married to the impossibly youthful Demi Moore – do try to keep up) that she would never make it as an actress. Last week, I heard on the radio that […]
The federal government have released their discussion paper on performance funding for universities: http://www.deewr.gov.au/HigherEducation/Documents/HIEDPerformanceFunding.pdf Overall, it raises lots of pertinent questions and had it not been released just before Christmas Eve to a change weary sector, it might have provided the opportunity for the sector to have genunine input into how teaching perfromance is measured […]
There’s a lot of talk about ‘alternative’ entry to university at the moment. Debate in this area always makes me smile, particularly when arguments about it are presented as if they are new. The federal government agenda in relation to widening participation in higher education has led to some excited commentary about moving away from […]
What will Australian universities look like in 20 years? I was asked this recently after giving a keynote address at a conference, during which I outlined the federal government agenda in relation to higher education. It’s a difficult question to answer but I thought I’d give it a whirl as most people reading […]
I am woman, hear me roar. A conference last week on the future of the academic profession had, according to the associated website, 20 speakers, only 4 of whom were female. I would have gone, but as I prepared to register and read through the line up, I became so irritated that I decided to […]
The federal government has released the discussion paper that will underpin the arrangements for funding for universities for the immediate future. Mission-Based Compacts for Universities: a Framework for Discussion (http://www.deewr.gov.au/HigherEducation/Pages/Compacts.aspx) The arrangements that result from compact agreements will have far reaching effects on individual institutions and on the Australian higher education sector as a […]
I have been at two national forums on student engagement in the last 3 weeks – one here in Melbourne and one in New Zealand. I’ve been talking about student engagement for about 3 years now and was just beginning to give up hope that it would ever catch on. But catch on it appears […]
Deakin University will be making a submission to this inquiry. In preparing the submission it seems that the Senate may not have the full picture of where rural and regional students go to attend university. The Terms of Reference are restricted to: ‘equitable access to secondary and post-secondary education opportunities to students from rural and […]