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Ancora Imparo

22 June 2005

I will start this month's column by congratulating everyone involved in the stunning success that Monash University achieved in the recently announced round of Federation Fellowships and ARC Centres of Excellence.

With three new federation fellows (Professors Alan Bond, Barry Muddle and John Bowman) and with Monash as the lead university in two of the 11 ARC Centres of Excellence (led by Professor Ben Adler and Professor Muddle) and partners in a further three, Monash, along with the Australian National University, was the most successful of any Australian university.

On top of the equally stunning outcome in the NHMRC Program Grants for 2005 onwards, announced last year, when Monash again was the most successful university, it demonstrates the breadth and depth of Monash's research capability. It also reflects the enormous effort put into this round by all the applicants and by the DVC (Research), Professor Edwina Cornish, and the Research Office. It is great to see this effort paying such dividends.

We must put similar effort into improving our performance in teaching and learning. Again, I feel that the commitment is there to really lift our performance, with the unit evaluations to be completed for first semester providing a short-loop to feed into the quality improvement cycle to complement the information provided by the Course Evaluation Questionnaire (CEQ) and the Monash Experience Questionnaire (MEQ). Currently, Monash is performing relatively badly compared with other Group of Eight universities in the CEQ. We can and will do much better.

On the workplace relations front, I am delighted Monash University is the first university to sign a Memorandum of Intent with the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) following the announcement by the Commonwealth Government that it intends to tie future university funding to a university's ability to comply with its Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements (HEWRRs).

The memorandum recognises the necessity for Monash to comply with the new HEWRRs but within that broad framework indicates our intention to include the features agreed with the NTEU in the Heads of Agreement signed in December in a new 'HEWRR-compliant' Enterprise Agreement.

We will be involving staff who are not members of the NTEU in discussions regarding a compliant agreement, and also offering Australian Workplace Agreements as an alternative to the Enterprise Agreement as required to comply with the HEWRRs.

We are pleased that we are working towards a satisfactory outcome for all in the new environment, bearing in mind our intention to offer the most generous arrangements that we are reasonably able to afford. We propose to hold a series of staff forums once the detail of the proposed 'HEWRR-compliant' Enterprise Agreement has been negotiated to allow broad staff input.

Lobbying is continuing to try to obtain a compromise concerning the proposed 'Voluntary Student Unionism'. As students in Victoria are already able to choose whether they wish to belong to a student organisation, the legislation would be more accurately described as 'Anti-Amenities and Services legislation'.

Despite the inherent sense of a compulsory fee akin to council rates to preserve student services and amenities, too often the response to the call for a compromise ignores this logic and instead we hear "VSU has been an article of faith in the Liberal Party for a long time". Such a response implies blind ideology and ignores the threat this legislation poses to university finances and the provision of facilities and services for students.

University education is more than that which is learnt in the lecture theatre. We are working with the student groups to design a response to the proposed legislation that is as constructive as it can be in the face of meddlesome and unnecessary legislative interference in our affairs.

Richard Larkins