There may be a perception among academic staff that professional staff are remote from academic activities (Wallace and Marchant, 2011), however, recent research demonstrates that professional staff, across a range of roles and seniority levels, are interested and engaged in supporting positive student learning outcomes (Graham, 2012, 2013a,…

Government funding cuts have provided a new impetus to Australian universities to re-examine their value proposition and corporate focus. While the sector has gone through waves of change in recent times, institutions are now scrambling for their place in a highly competitive market. Institutions explore new revenue opportunities and digital…

The pressure to publish or perish or, more recently, to be visible or vanish, marginalises a culture of critical reading and reflection that has historically been the province of book reviews. Today, book reviews are roundly rejected by academic bureaucrats as unimportant, easy to write and hence, easy to get published, mere summaries, uncritical…

This paper examines the effectiveness of a programme of weekly meetings between sessional staff and the unit coordinator of a large first-year class at an Australian university. Interviews with sessional staff indicate that, in addition to training and targeted professional development initiatives, management initiatives that promote engagement…

Censorship, says Australian political theorist John Keane (1991), can "echo within us, take up residence within ourselves, spying on us, a private amanuensis who reminds us never to go too far... It makes us zip our lips, tremble and think twice" (p. 39). It can also make us sick. The author states that this is her argument here: that,…

Without a direct measure of learning, universities and lecturers do not have reliable evidence of changes, past or present, in the academic merit of a unit. By using grade data to develop a variable called Academic Merit, all university units were measured for their percentages of academic merit over one semester at an Australian…

Academics today face an array of challenges to their enthusiasm, including teaching students from diverse backgrounds with wavering levels of engagement with their studies. Furthermore, reform to the tertiary education sector has seen the corporatisation of universities with management increasingly measuring academic outcomes in respect of both…

The author states that in earlier pieces (O'Neill, 2002, 2010, 2012), he chewed on and tried to digest newspaper advertisements made by universities. Byproducts did not come out smelling like roses: universities are scarcely able to present themselves without boasting, crass displays of salesmanship, and brazen invocations of virtue. This…

This paper examines the impact of the minerals boom to date on the demand for higher education in Central Queensland, and the sustainability of higher education providers in high economic growth environments. Several datasets were used to examine changes in the demand for higher education among specific student groups within the region, the…

Many interacting factors contribute to a student's choice of a university. This study takes a systems perspective of the choice and develops a Bayesian Network to represent and quantify these factors and their interactions. The systems model is illustrated through a small study of traditional school leavers in Australia, and highlights…

The regulatory scope of Human Research Ethics Committees can be problematic for a variety of reasons. Some scholars have argued the ethics approval process, for example, is antithetical to certain disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, while others are willing to give it qualified support. This article uses a case study to cast the…

Australian policy relating to knowledge exchange has never been well articulated, notwithstanding that the nexus between knowledge, engagement and higher education in Australia has been on the national agenda for several decades (Grattan Institute, 2013). In universities, this policy deficit is reflected in a lack of project management and…

Increasingly, universities in developed countries are engaging in transnational education. Responsibilities and opportunities to exercise management and leadership in the provision of transnational education depend on the organisational model adopted and whether the academics involved are on home or international campuses. Models range from…

In many higher education systems around the world increasing retention is vital if institutions are to produce the number of graduates identified through government projections to meet industry needs. Taking Australia as an example, the analysis uses results from a large-scale survey of undergraduate students to review rates and rationales for…

This paper scrutinises the escalating salaries of US college and university presidents (vice-chancellors, or rectors, as they might be known in other parts of the world). Some research suggests that presidential pay is largely correlated with factors that have little or nothing to do with performance and may, therefore, overstate the benefit that…