◆ NEWS
Impact of COVID-19 on universities Even with COVID-19, life goes on, but the academic world has changed extensively since early 2020. One thing is that Australia’s hard-working, still employed scholars are writing even more papers than in the past! For journal editors, having more papers is good news to a point. In fact, my main duty here to advise that a new issue of the NTEU’s scholarly refereed journal, the Australian Universities’ Review (AUR), recently hit the streets, and is also available online. AUR has a strong social commentary role, and it attracts strong pieces about the current state of our ‘industry’. But please allow me to digress. Unfortunately, all is not well in Australian universities, and this is not rocket science (as they say). Having been hit with a pandemic, the JobKeeper scheme seemed like quite a good idea. However, for universities, being excluded from JobKeeper payments was one of several straws trying to break the proverbial camel’s back. Universities are poorly dealt with by an anti-intellectual Federal Government, and just when you think the next Education Minister will be better than the last one, they manage to find someone to disappoint even further! Of course, we all know that universities are hotbeds of leftist extremism, but why do Liberal/ National parliamentarians, most of whom have university qualifications, seem so against others acquiring such qualifications? Much of the policy development of the Coalition Government could be a script from a discarded series of Utopia, but without the credible (and better looking) actors. Given the pressure before COVID-19, no one should be surprised about the loss of 40,000 jobs in tertiary education in the 12 months to May, and the 17,000 before that.1 University growth in recent years has been based on the expansion of the international student market. If most of that market is taken away, something must give. If you don’t have a job, your perspectives might change; you certainly won’t be writing papers for scholarly journals! The circumstances of academics still with a job have also changed: having to work from home or home school student children might cause some to revisit their scholarly priorities. Even before our sensibilities were altered by COVID-19, there had been the creeping then rampaging increase in the casualisation and precariousness of academic staffing, not to mention the exploitation and underpayment of staff. In a world of random events, we might expect the payment of the wrong salary to be an over-payment about half of the time, but it is always underpayment. Why? Perhaps universities have become their own worst enemies, as suggested by Crikey.com: [Universities] ‘…paid their executives huge salaries and set themselves up as businesses reliant on fee-paying foreign students, systemic wage theft and an army of casual staff’.2
contemporary universities, and even an opinion piece on being ‘woke’. These papers cover important issues in Australian higher education, but several directly address what is happening right now on campuses around the country, and what is causing such pressure. The release of this issue of AUR sees our journal move to a new website, designed to make access from any type of device simpler and smoother. The entire AUR archive back to 1958 is included in the new site. Check it out at aur.nteu.org.au. This issue also coincides with another momentous event. On 25 September 2021, the Melbourne Football Club won its 13th Australian Rules premiership, its first for 57 years. I admit that the link between these events is somewhat tenuous, but all are important events, at least to me. I was a very young chap when I watched Melbourne’s last two grand final victories from the top deck of the Southern Stand in 1960 and 1964. Watching games on television is probably more convenient now I am of advancing years, so it didn’t matter that the game was in Perth.
AUR special issue in 2022 But back to the topic at hand: the next issue of AUR will be a special issue on the impact of COVID-19 and universities. As we speak, guest editors James Roffee and Nic Kimberley are assembling a bevy of relevant papers and commentaries on the impact of coronavirus. Were I not an optimist, I might suggest that COVID-19 had a major negative impact on universities, just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse! The real test is going to be how we go forward. Scottie (from Marketing), please DON’T beam us up! ◆ Ian Dobson is Editor of AUR 1. Burke, C. (2021, October). An avoidable catastrophe. Campus Review, 31(10), 5. 2. Napier-Raman, K. & Wilkins, G. (2021, 28 October). Huge salaries, but then crying poor. Are universities their own worst enemies? Crikey. Daily. Retrieved from www.crikey.com.au.
visit our new website at
aur.nteu.org.au
Latest edition of AUR & new website If you haven’t yet got around to the latest AUR (vol. 63, no. 2), when you do you will find that it contains six refereed papers, three opinion pieces and several book reviews. There is something for most members. Topics covered are scholarly publishing, women, sexism, teamwork, dispersed campuses and regional universities, international doctoral students, higher education and regulation, workplace ostracism, early career academics and the role of
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ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 3 ◆ NOV 2021
