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,…

This statistical note updates earlier work on the salaries paid to general staff working at Australia's public universities, and the levels at which universities classify those staff. In 2017, higher proportions of general staff in more senior grades could be found at the University of Technology Sydney, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology,…

Analysis of aggregated data files on staff sent by all Australian universities to DEST in 2007 and of salary schedules posted on university websites reveals a considerable variation between salaries paid to general staff at each salary level and the relative seniority of those staff. This paper outlines the differences in staffing structures and…

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…

Statistics from a 1977 study of the status of women in academe in Australia are compared with results of a 1987 study. Significant differences are evident in some institutions, but the reasons are not. The discrepancies require further study. Overall, the relative position of women has improved, but not substantially. (MSE)

It's no news that Australian academics, like Australian cricketers, are getting older (and perhaps tireder). But the exact dimensions of the sector's staffing crisis haven't been clear. Graham Hugo has been studying the figures in detail, and he suggests that the problem may in fact be worse than has been thought. Around a quarter of the academic…

A discussion of the changing relationship between college faculty, the institution, and society concludes that, although the context of the interactions between them is evolving and faculty are shifting from a collegial to a managerial mode, there is little change in the formal conditions of academic employment. (MSE)

The evolution of the faculty and working conditions at the University of Sydney (Australia) since its founding are chronicled, focusing on academic ranks and promotion, the growth of the faculty, internal governance, tenure, policy on sabbatical leave, salary levels, and the status of academics in the community. (MSE)

It is proposed that, to address the lack of women in senior academic ranks, higher education should reexamine appointment procedures, scrutinize the standards by which men have been assessed traditionally, ask men to justify their own merit, and examine the way in which male academics interact with their female counterparts. (MSE)

A discussion of changes in Australian academe resulting from industrial deregulation and collective bargaining in higher education looks first at the history of employment regulation before 1980, then at transformation in the 1980s. Tenure, pay, academic rank and classification, and the impact of industrial law and public educational policy are…