Australian academics are being squeezed from all sides, facing ever-intensifying bureaucratic expectations around research output, coupled with increased teaching commitments and mounting administrative duties. These demands are occurring in an environment where most academics are still employed under traditional arrangements whereby, notionally, 40 per cent of their workload is allocated to research, 40 per cent to teaching and the final 20 per cent to service or administration. Such figures are no longer - and perhaps never were - a realistic representation of average workloads. This paper discusses how Australian academics in the discipline of English have been working within and around the 40/40/20 model, as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their workload. Discussion here is built on interviews with English academics, but the same concerns are applicable across the tertiary sector because employment conditions tend to be standardised at the institutional level rather than at a disciplinary level.
As part of a study investigating research productivity of sociology PhD students in Australia, an application to the federal government's Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) aimed to establish a baseline count of completed sociology doctorates by university. It was anticipated that university totals might be different from PhD completions within the main sociology teaching units. The government data furnished by this inquiry have proved to be problematic in several ways. The gaps in the data may be explained by the fact that universities report sociology PhDs to DESE in more generic rather than discipline-specific Field of Education (FoE) codes or as PhDs in other disciplines. DESE has either not required or been able to enforce consistent reporting. This raises questions about the time and cost value of these annual compliance efforts. It also limits the value of these data to researchers in charting current and potential future trends.
The COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian government's response, and longer-term influences within Australia's higher education sector, provided the background and rationale for this study in an Australian public university. From a context of how Antipodean University (AU) dealt with the revenue crisis, this paper describes how a sample of staff were affected through job loss or redeployment. It describes reported experiences of 77 AU staff, who either departed AU or who transferred to other jobs within AU, and who provided narratives describing their leaving/redeployment experiences. Respondents had been academic and professional staff, and most of those leaving did so in December 2020. An inductive reflexive thematic analysis of online survey responses revealed six themes: Relevant features of the external environment, AU's organisational culture and values, Parties involved with respondents' leaving experience, Leaving/redeployment processes encountered, Respondent's personal agency, and Past/present condition in/directly attributed to changed employment status, with 25 subthemes.
We discuss developments in higher education in Australia through the lens of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon the provision of education and training in the discipline of psychology. Since its inception in universities after World War II, psychology educators in Australia have continually dealt with different, often conflicting, goals and with different methods and institutions in the regulation, accreditation, and process of the education of psychologists. These include the goals of training in practice, training in science, the administration of organisations and the concepts of profit and 'value' pulling teachers and students in different directions, and in the employment of graduates in multiple roles with different expectations held by the public and government. The impact of COVID-19 since 2020, rapid developments in technology, and the likely continuing changes in the sector that ensue, can be viewed as sources of magnification of the difficulties. Implications are drawn from the case study of psychology in Australia to highlight similarities and differences with psychological education in other countries and serve to illuminate possible futures for higher education in Australia and abroad.
With the Australian international borders closed to international students due to the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Australian universities have experienced unanticipated financial losses. At the same time, many international students who would have chosen to study in Australia instead chose to enrol in universities in the US, UK and other countries where the borders opened earlier. The long-term effects of this are unknown, but with borders finally now open again, Australia will need to re-establish itself as a destination of choice for international students. An opportunity to establish a prestigious international scholarship program may be created by the recent sale of the universities' collective investment in IDP Education Pty Ltd. The income generated by this sale could create a source of funding for an international scholarship program which would create goodwill and help to diminish the reputation of Australian international education as predominantly revenue-driven.
