Aspiring to be world class: The case of Australian universities

Aspiring to be world class: The case of Australian universities. Jan Currie, Professor Emeritus, School of Education, Murdoch University, Western Australia. Thursday, September 27, 2012, 12noon--1:30pm, 768 Evans Hall (map).
Description: Aspiring to be “world class” universities, policy makers around the world have introduced research assessment exercises to help their universities gain higher rankings in world league tables. Australian policy makers have followed this global trend to try to increase their universities’ rankings in the top 100. This seminar looks at some of the strategies used to improve Australia’s research excellence and its international collaboration. It will discuss how globalization has altered the pace of these changes and caught academics in a complex interplay between global, national and local contexts, pushing and pulling them in different directions. As universities have become more integrated into the global knowledge economy, the working conditions of academics have altered substantially with greater competition and pressure to be more corporate, more accountable and more international. It discusses the changes that have occurred in Australia since the mid-1990s to reshape the higher education landscape and the impact it has had on academics’ working conditions.
Bio: Professor Emeritus Jan Currie (BA, Purdue, MA, UCLA, PhD, Chicago), School of Education, Murdoch University, Western Australia, has written extensively on the impact of globalization on universities (with Richard DeAngelis, Harry de Boer, Jeroen Huisman, and Claude Lacotte, Global Practices and University Responses, 2003; with Bev Thiele and Patricia Harris, Gendered Universities in Globalized Economies: Power, Careers and Sacrifices, 2002; and co-edited with Janice Newson, Universities and Globalization, 1998) She has also written on academic freedom (with Carole Pedersen and Ka-ho Mok, Academic Freedom in Hong Kong, 2006); on academic work (with Lesley Vidovich, The Changing Nature of Academic Work, In M. Tight, K. H. Mok, J. Huisman and C. C. Morphew (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Higher Education, 2009; and Globalization’s impact on the professoriate in Anglo-American universities, In A. Welch (Ed.) The Professors: Profile of a Profession, 2005); and on governance issues (with Lesley Vidovich, Governance networks: Interlocking directorships of corporate and non-profit boards, Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 2012; and Governance and trust in higher education, Studies in Higher Education, 2011).