Yesterday the shadow education minister, Tanya Plibersek, announcedLabor plans to invest an additional A$174 million in the higher education sector if there’s a change of government at the next election. This extra funding would be to give first in family students, students from outer suburbs and the country, Indigenous students, and students with a disability a […] … learn more→

Gender equality – and the unconscious biases that challenge it – is now a mainstream concern in academic life. Codes of conduct are drawn up in efforts to support dignity at work and at study. Efforts are made to free senior academic appointments from gender bias. Many believe there is a long way yet to […] … learn more→

Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 13·5% of the global population but less than 1% of global research output. In 2008, Africa produced 27 000 published papers – the same number as the Netherlands. There are some areas of improvement. A 2014 World Bank study showed that the quantity and quality of sub-Saharan Africa’s research had increased substantially in the previous 20 years. It more […] … learn more→

Schools are often where children’s and adolescents’ mental health problems are identified. While there is ever growing demand for mental health support for pupils, such as in-school counselling and mentoring, the focus now – just like for any health problem – should be more on prevention than intervention. Prevention makes sense financially, given that specialist mental health services for […] … learn more→

Back when I taught at a predominantly white, selective liberal arts college, I came across a book called “Acting White? Rethinking Race in ‘Post-Racial’ America.” In the book, legal scholars Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that in the “post-racial” era, white-controlled organizations prefer to hire “‘good blacks’ who will think of themselves as people first […] … learn more→

After the recent report by The Children’s Society that a quarter of 14-year-old girls have self-harmed, many campaigners have called for the root causes of the adolescent mental health crisis to be tackled – rather than just firefighting the symptoms. Resilience lessons, peer mentoring, awareness campaigns and provision of early intervention may be valuable initiatives. But they do […] … learn more→

If academia was a Disney film and I was a street rat (early career researcher) living on the sandy backstreets of Agrabah, who happened to summon a genie, my three top-of-my-head wishes would be: publications, grant money, and a pipeline of non-traditional research outputs. But after the wishes were granted and I was flying away on […] … learn more→

Self-help books are my secret shame. I can’t resist them, especially if I find myself in an airport bookstore. The siren call of the self-help section means I inevitably board the plane clutching two more paperbacks (which I have no room for at home). My latest secret shame is Gretchen Rubin’s ‘The four tendencies: the indispensable […] … learn more→

I’ve been slow to accept that our higher education system is turning into, or already is, a mass indoctrination system. Focusing more on the falling standards and mass academic fraud, I’ve perhaps missed that these were simply side effects of the political goal of indoctrination (and thus education is of no importance) rather than the […] … learn more→

Labor Day is our New Year’s Eve. Rather than vowing to lose weight or spend less time on our phones, as college professors we head into the new school year with a different kind of resolution: to inspire and prepare our students to become agents of positive change. The world’s problems certainly didn’t take a […] … learn more→