Comments on: Was Melbourne Model stoush behind the Law dean’s departure?

By: rodbeecham

rodbeecham — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:02 +0000

I agree with you absolutely, Perspective. I would add what I’m sure you already know: that “world-class” anything is not going to be achieved in such circumstances, and that the commercial logic of funding what is already in demand means that nothing new will ever be attempted.

Now there’s an approach that has led to all the epoch-making breakthroughs of history!

http://www.rodbeecham.com.au.

By: perspective

perspective — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:46:58 +0000

While Deans have always had a difficult role to play, it is being made almost impossible under Glyn Davis. Deans are traditionally promoted from academic staff, and are likely to retain at least some trace of humanity, collegiality and sense that the university is about teaching/learning and research. What they are told from above is to get rid of good staff purely for ideological policies aimed at improving the budgets in order to pay the high salaries of the extra layers of administration. Other policies, not as widely known, also contribute to the targeting and elimination of good staff. Melbourne University has a policy to attain the top research status in Australia, in every department, and to achieve this they tell the Deans and the Deans press the department heads to eliminate staff that are not working on the ‘research strengths’ of the department. Obviously, the research strengths are going to be chosen by the heads of departments, and will include their own, and their close friends. They then target researchers who they don’t like, or who are not part of what they perceive as the department research strength. For example, staff who do research in a field that is equal in quality to any other in Australia are targeted - purely because they cannot be regarded as ‘better’ than the rest. What you end up, collectively, is a much smaller breadth of research fields (and expertise) across the campus, while at the same time many world leading researchers being forced out and heading overseas. The motto is ‘research narrow, teach broad’, i.e. the research fields are much narrower but the retained staff are expected to teach across a wide breadth of their particular discipline. Doesn’t make any sense really but only the department heads and above need to think about this, while contemplating their staff lists for the next victim. So, I applaud Professor Hathaway for having the humanity and the guts to get out. I hope he does well for the world.

By: Rod Beecham

Rod Beecham — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:10:12 +0000

One of the many damning aspects of this affair is the attempt - which I have no doubt will be successful - to introduce a(nother) highly expensive layer of senior management to the Law School. Since the Dawkins White Paper of 1989 there has been an explosion in highly paid senior management positions across the entire Australian tertiary sector, while teaching positions continue to be casualized. I will be publishing an op-ed piece on this in The Australian Financial Review shortly - probably on 16 November. The view of education at every level - early learning, primary, secondary, tertiary - reflected in Australian public policy, state and federal, seems to be that the people who actually work with students should be a hired labour-force serving the interests of an enormous, expensive and largely redundant bureaucracy.

By: Elizabeth Redman

Elizabeth Redman — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:30:26 +0000

Mothers do seem to be quite the influential figures in these cases. Former Dean of Arts at Melbourne Uni, Belinda Probert, resigned from that position after less than two years to spend more time caring for her elderly mother.

Of course, she’s now Deputy Vice-Chancellor at La Trobe.