Restructuring higher education systems through institutional mergers: Australian experience, 1981–1983

This paper reviews Australian experience over the period 1981–1983 in order to illustrate how institutional mergers can be used to tackle system-wide as well as local institutional problems in higher education. It also illustrates some of the tensions and complications that arise in a federal political system where the legal control for two out of three sectors of tertiary education lies at one level of government and funding responsibility at another. The background and context to the mergers are explained, an analysis is provided of how institutions and state governments reacted to Federal Government coercion, and an attempt is made to assess outcomes.     

New challenges for higher education: global and Asia-Pacific perspectives

With rapid socio-economic changes, twenty-first century higher education is facing major challenges to its governance systems, curriculum, mission focus, external relations, research, and financing. A theoretical framework to analyze these post-massification challenges is suggested, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region as well as global issues. Five main topic areas provide the basis for the theoretical framework: massification, privatization, accountability and governance, internationalization, and ranking and world-class universities. Some discussion of the possible effects of the financial crisis that commenced in 2008 is provided.     

“I Could Not Believe That Would Happen”: Challenges and Opportunities in a Critical,Project-Based Clinical Experience

As part of a youth summer program—a partnership between a large Southeastern university and the local school district—middle-school-aged youth, preservice teachers, and doctoral candidates interested in arts-based literacy practices spent their mornings in June 2016 engaging in activities that both explored and expanded thinking around their communities, schools, and families. Whereas the youth were enrolled in a monthlong creative arts and tentative unschooling experiment that ran roughly the length of a typical school day, university faculty and graduate students were engaged in a course on the application of youth participatory action research (YPAR). This article is an examination of the experience of preservice teachers, through an analysis of their reflections on events within the course, to suggest ways forward through the promises and perils of project-based, clinical preservice teaching experiences. In our exploration of the experiences of focal preservice teachers when engaged with youth coresearchers in a monthlong YPAR project, we found the work to have been filled with contradictions, unexpected shifts, and moments of great understanding, community affiliation, and suffering.     

Professional versus academic values: cultural ambivalence in university professional school in Australia

University staff who teach and research in professional schools inhabit an ambivalent cultural world. Their dual mandate requires commitment to traditional academic norms and scholarship through the disciplines on the one hand, and commitment to the transmission of distinctly vocational skills and attitudes on the other. Tensions created by these two intersecting roles both within professional schools and between professional school staff and their colleagues in non-professional fields, and the implications of these for the functioning of a university are explored. Findings suggest that university leaders who understand more fully the bases of tension between the two and develop strategies to minimise symbolic separation, are more likely to ensure the survival and growth of both the academic-scholarly and practice-oriented cultures.     

Institutional Mergers in Australian Higher Educaiton since 1960

For the past forty years, institutional mergers have been a major and controversial theme in Australian higher education. Three main phases of major mergers are reviewed with particular attention being paid to reasons for merger, success factors, and longer term results. While merger experiences have often been traumatic for participants and participating institutions, on balance the longer term results have been positive, producing a university system today comprising relatively large and comprehensive institutions, well suited to compete in the new internationally competitive environment.     

Scaling Up the TREC Collection

Due to the popularity of Web search engines, a large proportion of real text retrieval queries are now processed over collections measured in tens or hundreds of gigabytes. A new Very Large test Collection (VLC) has been created to support qualification, measurement and comparison of systems operating at this level and to permit the study of the properties of very large collections. The VLC is an extension of the well-known TREC collection and has been distributed under the same conditions. A simple set of efficiency and effectiveness measures have been defined to encourage comparability of reporting. The 20 gigabyte first-edition of the VLC and a representative 10% sample have been used in a special interest track of the 1997 Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-6). The unaffordable cost of obtaining complete relevance assessments over collections of this scale is avoided by concentrating on early precision and relying on the core TREC collection to support detailed effectiveness studies. Results obtained by TREC-6 VLC track participants are presented here. All groups observed a significant increase in early precision as collection size increased. Explanatory hypotheses are advanced for future empirical testing. A 100 gigabyte second edition VLC (VLC2) has recently been compiled and distributed for use in TREC-7 in 1998.     

The erosion of university independence: Recent Australian experience

This article is concerned with the issue of institutional independence in the Australian university context. It considers why institutional independence is important, maps how independence has been reduced since the late 1960s, discusses factors leading to this erosion of independence, and explores possible university responses. It argues that, while recent cases of government interference give cause for disquiet, there is probably more reason to be troubled about where recent developments might lead and about the ability of universities to withstand and contest further encroachment.     

Author index

Authors Index

Author index