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…

Universities live in interesting times. For instance, government policies in Australia are allowing for more deregulation of the student market while overseas universities are entering the Australian domestic market. In an environment of increasing uncertainty, sound strategic planning is important. Processes including benchmarking, environmental…

Government policies designed to redress social inequality are often evaluated by qualitative methods, which prevents the establishment of a causal relationship between policy objectives and outcomes. Social programmes to broaden participation in higher education have been a feature of government policy in Europe, the US and Australia during the…

In Australia, the Excellence in Research (ERA) exercise, first conducted in 2008 and continuing relatively unchanged in 2012, determines the level of research funding made available to Australian universities. However, the use of journal rankings as part of ERA is argued to be problematic (Cooper & Poletti 2011). Through a survey of academics in a…

From the inception of post-Colombo Plan international education in Australia, three broad research emphases have been evident: the student as student, as migrant and most recently, as victim. The victim role plays easily into preconceived notions, helping to sustain an exploiter and exploited framework in which deeper issues remain unaddressed.…

Increasingly universities are becoming commercial enterprises and their core activities of teaching and research subject to business imperatives. This paper reviews the research costing methodologies of 17 Australian universities. Tension between Competition Law and Competitive Neutrality exists which could be resolved through improved costing and…

"The Dawkins era is over," Commonwealth Education Minister Julie Bishop told a Perth audience in late July 2007. This turning point in Australian higher education is not being driven by a decisive legislative change; the rapid abandonment of the old in favour of the new that everyone has seen before. It is as much the accidental result of policy…

Ever since the radical reforms of the Dawkins years of the late 1980s and early 1990s, change has been a constant for university administrators, as well as for university staff. In the earlier years, change was driven directly by Government, as witnessed by the huge expansion of student numbers, the introduction of tuition fees and the first real…

After nine years spent in opposition, it's still hard to know what Federal Labor intends by way of an economic policy platform. Kim Beazley still seems to believe that the prime purpose of opposition is to oppose. John Quiggin disagrees. Without a coherent and well-understood economic direction, he argues, Labor's sniping will continue to look…

Higher education research stands at a kind of half-way house. At present, it is highly directed by Government research priorities. Yet the Government's ambition is to create a much more deregulated system, with self-created winners and losers. Tom Clark suggests a different starting-point. All higher education institutions generate research, and…

The more immediate context of the events the author describes in this article is needed in order to identify the policy framework within which the Australian National University (ANU)-Canberra CAE (CCAE) merger was placed as a component of a wider public policy initiative undertaken by John Dawkins. There were four major components in that wider…

Describes the ways the engagement of indigenous Australian peoples with higher education have changed under the "mainstreaming" policies implemented by the administration of John Howard. Discusses reasons for and consequences of the decreasing enrollment of indigenous peoples in higher education in Australia. (SLD)

Assesses two recent Australian studies of diversity in higher education institutions, both financed by the Commonwealth Department of Education, Training, and Youth Affairs. Study results suggest significant diversity among universities in a number of areas, most of them closely associated with the history of the system. At the same time, state…

Examines distance teaching in Australian higher education, with particular reference to predictions made in the recent West Report ("Learning for Life"), arguing that discussion of technology and change in the universities must be framed in the context of the wider educational system, considering especially the government's construction of…

Compares findings of two reviews of higher education--the 1997 Dearing Report on the United Kingdom's system and the not-yet-released West Review of Australia's system. Argues that both reports illustrate the parallel changes in the systems in recent years and guarantee further radical shifts in the direction of higher education systems in the…