Recent staff and students surveys for one of WA’s biggest universities returned damning responses with many fearful to speak out for fear of litigation.
A once-in-a-decade stoush is brewing over the political leanings that have potentially silenced student and academic action over job losses and education reforms.
Welcome to Western Australia’s campuses of the future,if American communications giant Cisco and dwindling Commonwealth funding has anything to do with it.
The Curtin University guild has become a lone voice standing up to how some of the state’s higher education institutes have set a path to do away with traditional face-to-face lectures permanently and alter the course of higher education forever.
An ambitious timber building,estimated at $134 million before COVID-19 and the price of timber hiked up an average 20 to 50 per cent,along with more selective staff promotions continues.
Ambitious spending on rejuvenating ageing infrastructure,including possibly relocating some of its faculties away from Hampden Road in Nedlands,flies in the face of job cuts.
Students are dealing with reduced support and teachers are having funding requests dismissed while the heads of the uni are parading a modern new logo.
Western Australia’s four main universities have lodged their annual budgets and the results were not as catastrophic as once predicted,with two even turning a healthy profit.
Professor Leinonen will serve as Murdoch’s VC for the next six months while the university commences a global search for her replacement.
Murdoch University has started its new year by flagging the sudden departure of two deans,with reports that more than a dozen students have been wrongly enrolled in defunct courses,one of which was an international student whose visa was now in jeopardy.
Education Minister Sue Ellery has called out WA universities for hiding behind the excuse of COVID-19,labelling the push to online learning a"cost-saving measure more than a safety measure".