AUS Tertiary Update

UCOL rescue package raises questions
In a move which appears at odds with the Government’s tertiary-education strategy, a rescue package for UCOL’s Diploma in Glass Design and Production involves the course being bailed out by local authorities and eventually taken over by a yet-to-be-set-up private training establishment (PTE). It is expected that the PTE will then run the course from the existing public facility at UCOL's Whanganui campus.
The rescue package, which was put together by Wanganui Mayor, Michael Laws, involves the City Council underwriting a shortfall of about $35,000 a year from City Endowment funds and a donation of around $85,000 a year worth of gas by Wanganui Gas until 2008.
The Wanganui Chronicle reports that the City Council, in association with the students and staff of UCOL is to seek ways to set up a private training establishment known as Whanganui School of Glass of which Mr Laws intends to ask the Prime Minister to be patron. The Chronicle says that the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) has indicated that it will assist the Council set up the PTE and gain the necessary TEC and New Zealand Qualifications Authority approvals.
Mr Laws is reported as saying that the agreement reached with UCOL ensured that Wanganui would continue to promote and provide educational programmes in hot, warm and cold glass, and that the city would become New Zealand’s only centre for glass excellence.
The Association of Staff in Tertiary Education (ASTE) has expressed concern at the future of the course, saying that the tertiary-education reforms were intended to stop valuable and strategically important programmes from being dropped where low enrolment numbers threatened their financial viability. A spokesperson said that this is exactly the type of situation where the Quality Reinvestment Fund could have been used to support the course. “If it not feasible for UCOL to run the course under current funding arrangements, it is hard to imagine that farming it out to a PTE would provide a satisfactory answer,” the spokesperson said. “Regional facilitation with the local community should have been aimed at ensuring the course continued to be run by UCOL.”
A spokesperson for the Minister for Tertiary Education referred to the TEC questions relating to whether the Government had been asked by UCOL for assistance and its reaction to the course being handed from a public to a private institution. At the time of publication, TEC was still formulating a response. Similarly, UCOL is yet to respond to a number of questions on the matter.

Also in Tertiary Update this week
1. Academic work may need to be reconceptualised
2. TEC hits the refresh button
3. Enrolments reach record level
4. NZVCC endorses women’s leadership programme
5. Reports reveal decline of key subjects
6. Harvard names first woman president
7. Aiming to cut cost of disputes
8. Getting to the butt of the matter

Academic work may need to be reconceptualised
Academic work is becoming more complex and specialised and may need to be “reconceptualised” as tertiary-education institutions in New Zealand struggle to find modes of operation to balance external expectations with traditional values of academic freedom and institutional autonomy, according to the recent OECD Thematic Review of Tertiary Education. The report also warns that the system needs to make a better assessment of the seriousness and political consequences of an aging staff profile and the existence of casual-employment agreements.
In its section on Human Resource Management, the report says that, within the broader direction provided by institutional leadership, it is important to have individual academics assume responsibility for shaping their role and work profile. It calls on institutions to put in place mechanisms which support and reward accomplishments in the interests of the individual, the institution and the system as a whole. “While currently there are good mechanisms to recognise achievements on research, there are more limited means to reward other activities,” it reads. “The teaching performance measures are sketchy – and currently appear very largely reliant on student evaluations. We favour staff incentive systems to include performance in community service and consultancies alongside teaching and research.”
Association of University Staff (AUS) National President, Professor Nigel Haworth, warned that, while the report identified the need for institutions to establish a systematic, forward-looking assessment of organisational direction and to define the requirements and workloads needed to achieve the desired profile, a number of proposed solutions would not fit within a university context. “In particular, we strongly disagree with any suggestion that the requirement that teaching at degree level be undertaken only by those actively involved in research could be relaxed and replaced with the prerequisite that teaching needs only to be informed by research.”
Professor Haworth said that the AUS would continue to impress upon the Minister for Tertiary Education and Tertiary Education Commission the vital importance of the active link between teaching and research. “It may help that link if universities were to rely less on casual labour, as the report indicates,” he added.

TEC hits the refresh button
The Tertiary Education Commission launched what it described as a refreshed and updated website on Monday this week, saying the decision to change came from a need to have a web-content-management system that could more effectively deliver on the requirements of the TEC. That is a time-sensitive turn-around of information and resources and formatting of complex information.
An important factor when updating the site, which is used as a funding resource by New Zealand’s tertiary-education sector, is to maintain usability and a degree of familiarity. TEC Chief Information Officer, Greg Smith, said that the new site is being kept as similar to the old one as possible, while simultaneously increasing usability through, for example, an improved search function. Site visitors will experience a cleaner and fresher interface, but it will still be recognisable as the old TEC site. “As well as a new look, the behind the scenes change for staff working on the maintenance and development of the website is very significant. The TEC IT team’s service delivery to the business, and thus to stakeholders, will be enhanced,” he said.
The TEC website has not had any significant redevelopment since the organisation’s inception in 2003.

Enrolments reach record level
More than 504,000 students were enrolled in publicly funded tertiary education in New Zealand in 2005, according to the latest education statistics. Of those, 457,065 were domestic students and 47,369 international. The total figures are significantly up on 2004, when a total of 486,806 were enrolled, 436,356 of them being domestic students and 50,450 international. Interestingly, the total number of students recorded as enrolled in public tertiary-education institutions in 1965, which is as far back as the data is published, was 51,613.
Of the domestic students enrolled in 2005, 254,580 were women and 202,458 were men. The most populated age group was between eighteen and twenty-four, with 148,236, while those in the group aged forty and over numbered 136,128. In terms of ethnic origin, European students dominated the figure, with 294,885 enrolled compared to 90,765 Maori, 28,398 Pasifika and 55,763 Asian.
Most students were enrolled in institutes of technology and polytechnics, at 202,164, with 140,064 at universities, 62,101 at wananga and 6,596 at colleges of education. Just over 75,000 were enrolled in private training establishments.
The full data set of tertiary-education statistics for 2005 can be found at:
http://educationcounts.edcentre.govt.nz/statistics/tertiary/participation.html

NZVCC endorses women’s leadership programme
The New Zealand Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (NZVCC) has endorsed a programme which aims to recognise and enhance women’s leadership capacities and influence within universities. The New Zealand Women in Leadership Programme, funded by the Kate Edger Educational Charitable Trust, is described as a tertiary education initiative. Other parties involved in the initiative are the Human Rights Commission, the Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Equity) at the University of Auckland and Massey University’s Centre for Women and Leadership. One of the programme’s benefits is seen as assisting the NZVCC to address in a cost-effective manner gender imbalance in senior academic and managerial positions. Further benefits are described as building research, teaching and administrative leadership skills for participants and enhancing university capability in these areas.
The first course will incorporate local and international guest speakers from a range of backgrounds and cover leadership skills and strategies, professional self-development and career planning. The event is also designed to allow participants the opportunity to build networks with senior women from other universities and the wider community.
The programme’s objectives include increasing knowledge of governance and management competencies relevant to higher education, increasing understanding of the socio-political and economic context in which the tertiary-education sector operates and increasing research-management/leadership capability to develop strategies for the funding environment.

Worldwatch
Reports reveal decline of key subjects
Students in some parts of the United Kingdom can no longer enrol in key subject areas such as core Sciences and Modern Languages, according to two reports released this week by the University and College Union (UCU). The reports, Degrees of decline and Losing our tongues, catalogue the decline in Science and Modern Languages courses that has led to regional “deserts” where there are few or no courses available.
Degrees of decline reveals that 10 percent of UK Science and Mathematics courses have been axed in the last decade, among them Chemistry, with a 31 percent decline, and Physics, with a 13 percent decline.
The other report, Losing our tongues, shows that there have been dramatic falls in the number of universities offering Modern Languages, with the number of higher-education institutions offering French falling by 15 percent over the last decade, German by 25 percent and Italian by 9 percent.
UCU joint General Secretary, Sally Hunt, said that the state of Science and Modern Language provision at university demonstrates the shameful gap between rhetoric and reality in higher-education policy in the UK. “Since 1999, seventy Science departments have been axed and there are now parts of the country that offer very few specialist Science degrees,” she said. “We are facing a potentially irreversible decline in the provision of Science unless action is taken now. Similarly, without [linguists] we will witness a terminal decline in students studying languages, which will damage our civil society and impact on how we interact with the rest of the world.”
Both reports can be found at:
http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2017

Harvard names first woman president
Professor Drew Gilpin Faust was named as the new President of Harvard University in the United States on Sunday night, becoming the first woman president in the 370 years since the founding of the University in 1636. Harvard is the fourth university of the eight “Ivy League” schools to have a woman as president.
Ironically, Professor Gilpin takes over as President from Larry Summers, who resigned in controversial circumstances last year after causing outrage with a comment about the genetic differences between sexes as an explanation of the lack of female presence in top scientific jobs. Summers was given a vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Art and Sciences, leading to his resignation.
Professor Faust, who will take up her role on 1 July, is only the second Harvard president who is not a graduate of the University, the first since Charles Chauncy, an alumnus of Cambridge University in England, who died in office in 1672.
Professor Faust says she recognises the significance of her appointment and hopes her appointment can be one symbol of an opportunity that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago.
Harvard has a budget of $US3 billion dollars and has 25,000 employees.
From Associated Content

Aiming to cut cost of disputes
Long and costly disputes between universities and their staff and students in the United Kingdom could be a thing of the past if the academics behind a new project get their way. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has awarded a £125,000 grant to a team of academics to raise the awareness of the use of mediation and other ways of avoiding costly and often drawn-out legal disputes within the higher-education sector.
According to the Oxford University Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, universities spend an average of £100,000 a year on legal fees, most of which goes on defending legal claims against students and staff. Settlement costs can reach six-figure sums.
The two-year project, called Transforming Policy and Practice in Dispute Resolution in Higher Education Institutions, aims to encourage institutions to overhaul their procedures to ensure that disputes are resolved fairly and speedily. The research team will also examine mediation-training provision and design training for mediators.
A spokesperson for HEFCE said that litigation is time-consuming and often stressful and expensive for all parties involved. Alternative approaches such as mediation are used relatively little in higher education at the moment and can offer opportunities to resolve conflicts promptly and in a non-adversarial manner.
From The Times Higher Education Supplement

Getting to the butt of the matter
The Chancellor of Australia’s Macquarie University has moved to quell an escalating public dispute between the former and present Vice-Chancellors, one which is said to be threatening the reputation of the University. Former Vice-Chancellor Di Yerbury and her successor Steven Schwartz are locked in a bitter battle over ownership of 125 boxes of documents, $12 million in artworks, the terms of Professor Yerbury’s employment contract and her termination payout.
Among the disputed artworks is a painting of a woman’s bottom which, Professor Yerbury claims, is her own posterior and which was on display at the University. Yerbury has told the Chancellor that she posed for the thirty-one-year-old painting and that it had been given to her by the artist. “There are a lot of people who saw the work at my home years before I came to Macquarie University and still remember it, having joked that they didn't expect to see their boss’s nude backside when they visited me,” she said.
The controversy was brought to a head by an audit ordered by Professor Schwartz last year after he discovered what he said were gaps in the University’s records. The auditors found a number of irregularities, especially around the ownership of the artworks, which they said have been “co-mingled” with the University’s collection. The auditors could not find a signed contract of employment for Professor Yerbury and the University claimed she had failed to reconcile $A40,000 in credit-card expenses.
In a letter to the Chancellor, Professor Yerbury launched an attack on Schwartz, portraying him as a control freak.
From The Australian and the Education Guardian

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AUS Tertiary Update is compiled weekly on Thursdays and distributed freely to members of the Association of University Staff and others. Back issues are available on the AUS website: www.aus.ac.nz . Direct enquires should be made to Marty Braithwaite, AUS Communications Officer, email: marty.braithwaite@aus.ac.nz

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