Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Courtney Sloane. Despite the Coalition’s promises to the contrary prior to the 2013 Federal Election, the 2014-15 Federal Budget presented some of the most dramatic changes to higher education in over a generation. It also laid a blue print for a fundamentally different approach to social investment and welfare. Public spending in many traditional areas has been slashed and community organisations, charities, families and individuals are scrambling to fill the void. While these changes will affect most people in some way or other, casual workers at Australian universities will face particularly challenging circumstances. More...

By Paul Clifton. Crossbench senators with an ear to popular opinion could become even less co-operative when university cuts come before them, with new polling showing the Coalition’s changes are poison in voter-land. Extensive automated phone polling across 23 federal electorates taking in all states has found cuts in federal funding and changes to allow increased fees, higher loan charges, and access to limited federal funding by non-university course providers, have not gone over well with households. Sixty-nine per cent of those polled said they opposed “significant increases in fees” and 65 per cent said they opposed a 20 per cent funding cut. More...

By Paul Clifton. I was very fortunate to be invited to attend and to present my research on academic casualisation in Australia at the 41st Annual Conference on Collective Bargaining in Higher Education, hosted by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions (NCSCBHEP) at City University New York in April. The NCSCBHEP is a joint labour and management centre focussed on the study and promotion of collective bargaining as a means for advancing the working conditions of staff in higher education in the US. More...

By Jeannie Rea. Australia and New Zealand’s research quality assessment policies have come under scrutiny in the latest edition of Nature. In her article “The limits of excellence”, Annabel McGilvray explores the issues caught up in cycles of research quality evaluation.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v511/n7510_supp/full/511S64a.html

McGilvray focuses upon the 'gaming' embarked upon by universities to lift their research profile - from the churn of research centres relocating from one university to another, to the reclassification of staff out of academic roles. More...