Ernst and Young (EY) Oceania education leader Alison Cairns told Campus Review their student surveys have shown digital transformation – using new technology to improve learning and teaching experiences – needs to be led by vice-chancellors and boards. (You can read a summary of EY's survey results here.)

"It is absolutely about leadership. The difference between transformations that are successful and transformations that fail is around leadership and bringing people on that journey," she said.

"The ones that don't do so well are the ones that are purely technology transformations, and then they follow up with change management and it's a little bit challenging."

"[Then staff] say, 'Well actually I'm not sure I signed up for this'. Or 'I don't like the way this works'. Or, 'this doesn't really suit my faculty, doesn't really suit how I want to do it,'" she said.

EY recommends university leaders put humans at the centre of any tech or digital learning upgrade, instead of placing new online resources to 'tick a box'. Their approach is to ask different questions of the different humans who will be benefiting from the tech transformation.

Ms Cairns said universities that have used this style of digital learning innovation have seen an uptick in student enrolments and engagement, along with higher staff and researcher satisfaction.

She explained one of the most important aspects of university study for students is quality of teaching. If students can pick which format best suits them, they are likely to think the quality of teaching is much higher.

Students also care about career outcomes – what is going to get me the qualification I need, for the least amount of money, in the shortest amount of time?

What are the tech innovation limitations?

Layers of leadership in bigger universities might be a reason for slow change, some education thought leaders say, but EY says it hasn't found a difference in the ability to adapt between small and large unis.

"I think our universities are very positive about change. They're very positive about what the education sector does for our country," she said.

"Some of these businesses and universities have been around for 500 years, so they do something right."

She said universities have already shown what they're capable of, through the rapid switch to online learning in 2020.

"Universities did a fantastic job of moving from classroom teaching to emergency response teaching [during the Covid-19 pandemic]," she said.

"I just want to be really clear, that's not digital learning. It was emergency response teaching. And they did that so swiftly with just the resources that they had just so that students could keep learning.

"But that took leadership from the top, right? Obviously there was technology involved in that, but we had staff leaning in, we had academics leaning in, we had research leaning in and the students had to lean in as well."

For example, posting recorded lectures and tutorial slides fits into 'emergency response' online learning, but doesn't represent learning operations that reflect digital competency.

Asynchronous education, where students access course material on their own time, is the required next step.

"I might be an under-served learner, you might be a particularly bright student. I might need my learning slightly different," she said.

"So I might be someone who does well in case studies, gamification or video as opposed to text. And you might be someone who actually prefers text.

"[Asynchronous education] means that we can have all of that information and we can actually consume it as students in a manner that suits us best."

This approach is a real asset to universities, Ms Cairns said, because it promotes lifelong learning and attracts different cohorts, something all education sectors are looking to achieve.

"[Students] need to have the option of being able to consume in the manner that maximises their learning because a lot of them have either got care responsibilities or they have to work," she said.

"Or if you look at people who are career changes or job upgraders or lifelong learners, they might have family commitments.

"They cannot commit to being onsite on campus all of the time, even if that's their preferred method.

"If you think to the Universities Accord report and the under-served learner, and making sure there are plenty of opportunities for everyone to go through higher education, this is actually having a significant change."

How can universities put people at the centre?

The ones who are doing it well "are consulting, bringing people in from the faculties, bringing people in from executive, bringing people in from their council and actually saying, what is our 10-year vision? Where are we going to focus first?" she said.

"We've actually seen great acceleration in learning, and we've been able to see the fantastic content that the universities have being able to be shared to a much wider audience."

However, some university staff say they don't want to teach to half empty classrooms, and if students choose a more digital learning method where they don't have to show up to class, that might become the reality.

But, Ms Cairns said, a drop in class numbers could actually result in more engaged students, and called on universities to track that engagement.

"If you are replacing [face-to-face classes] with engaging learning and personalised learning and things that you like to learn in a manner that you like to consume, you're actually going to get increased engagement," she explained.

"It's not one or the other, right? It is not classroom or online, it is now hybrid," she said.

"Some things will still be in classroom, some things will be online, some will be asynchronous, some will be deep engagement.

"And if you think in Australia [there's] remote and rural; it's not practical, particularly with cost of living for some students to have to come to the city or come to a big regional campus in order to learn.

"They need that flexibility."

Even if universities are large and established institutions, the education leader said, they should be looking to set themselves apart through tech learning.

"We don't want any university to be homogenous. We actually want them to have their uniqueness and differentiation," she said.

"We're at the end of the industrial revolution, which was about mechanising labour. We're at the beginning of the information revolution. Where does information live? It lives in universities.

"How do we take the best of that into transformation and use the best and brightest minds to take education forward into the next century?"

"You are a spokesperson, not an answer person. You're there to answer questions and deliver your key messages."

Theresa Miller

How can academics excel in media interviews, gain success in grant applications, and better communicate at conferences or on panels?

Media and presentation skills trainer Theresa Miller and Campus Review education editor Erin Morley sit down to discuss how academics can best represent their research to the media.

Theresa Miller is the director of TM Media Training and has over 30 years experience in media. She is passionate about helping academics and subject matter experts share their stories and research with audiences, and wants to encourage more women to step up to the microphone, too. As an MC and panel moderator, author, former journalist and former media advisor, Theresa feels she has the experience to help academics and business leaders master their message and promote their cause. 

The University of New South Wales launched its Nuclear Innovation Centre last Thursday, a hub where engineering, mathematics, physics, and chemistry students will research and design nuclear technology.

The centre will contribute to building the workforce required to operate nuclear submarines, although research and development will also be targeted at medical, mining, and space exploration industries.

AUKUS purposes aside, academics and students have put nuclear-powered climate-change solutions high on their list of priorities.

Centre director Associate Professor Edward Obbard said although the net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 goal is a start, longer term, Australia will need to find ways to de-carbonise its energy supply.

"I have two children, and they are seven and 13 years old. In 2050 they will be 33 and 39. If I was them, I would want every single technological option for the challenges they endure," he said.

"This includes nuclear energy and nuclear technology. That's why I'm a researcher in nuclear materials, striving to make this technology better."

Former UNSW mechanical engineering student Harvey Ling said his studies inspired him to join a student nuclear research project called AtomCraft, which he believes exemplifies the Centre's important job of building workforces.

"[AtomCraft is] planning to design, build and operate the first nuclear fusion device built and designed by undergraduate engineering students; the first of its kind, never done before," he said.

"The innovation centre brings together science, technology, engineering, policy, law; all those pillars Australia is propped up on ... it represents what nuclear is about, which is broad application."

Mr Ling is going on to study nuclear fusion for his PhD thesis to contribute to global warming solutions.

"It's a problem for my generation; I'll grow up in a world that's been impacted by climate change," the UNSW alumni explained.

"It seems like there is an obligation for me to contribute to a solution, which is what drew me to nuclear technology, [that's] improving and saving human lives.

"We don't have many nuclear linear people, or a nuclear workforce; if we are to find a solution for climate change, we need those people."

Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy said STEM studies and workforce development is of upmost importance.

"To deliver the AUKUS submarine programme, we need to train a workforce of thousands of Australians, and we're setting ourselves up for success by expanding the pool of young people who study engineering, mathematics, chemistry, and physics," the minister said.

"The Albanese government is funding an additional 4000 places on STEM courses across 16 universities to support the development of the nuclear workforce we need.

"I'm proud to say that UNSW is one of the top destinations for these students, with 340 places allocated."

Academics from all three AUKUS countries - Australia, the US and the UK - will share defence research and technology across borders as one of the pillars of the agreement.

The Group of Eight (Go8) contributes 53 per cent of Australia's defence research output.

An advisory body of former defence leaders and security experts will oversee the Go8's research, chief executive Vicki Thomson explained.

"This is about coming together as a group of universities with expert advice from those who actually know the other side of the fence," she told ABC Radio National.

Ms Thomson said the committee will provide streamlined communication from universities to the government, but also create a sense of trust between industries and academics from different countries.

"There's often a disconnect between the language of [the Department of Defence] and the language of universities," she said.

"All research is global ... but what's different about AUKUS is the three major parties will share very sensitive, very classified research in a trusted environment, but we need to make sure that trust is real."

A former chief of army, a former director of land capability, defence intelligence, and Australian defence institute leaders will sit on the advisory body.

"When I talk to any of our defence colleagues, and ask 'what is keeping you up at night?', it's not about the submarine going through the water, it's about the people [needed], and that's a big role for our universities," Ms Thomson said.

Donations and funding gifts have been received by the Nuclear Innovation Centre, including a $7.5m injection from the Tyree Foundation, announced by foundation chair Dr Peter Tyree at the launch.

Dr Obbard said the donation will help to provide an amazing opportunity for students of the centre because they can use their time there to form a career beyond their possible PhD studies.

"It actually provides a career path for these academics into research careers at UNSW or elsewhere as well," he said.

"And that's why it's really exciting, because normally funding just gets you a postdoc and then you're out."

Koslowski and Gleeson discuss how vertical capabilities can augment the increasing scope for horizontal discipline in managing ambiguity and change.

The co-hosts discuss employers' different approaches to meet these needs, including new roles and partnerships with higher education facilitators.

The rift between the union and university stems from multiple factors, including an expired enterprise agreement and excessive workload due to the Covid-19 aftermath. 

“The enterprise agreement expired in 2021 and staff wanted to negotiate a new one, but we were told by the Vice Chancellor that he would not commence bargaining until next year,” NTEU RMIT branch president Tricia McLaughlin told Campus Review.

“Which leaves staff with an outdated agreement that is no longer relevant for modern tertiary sectors.” 

According to the NTEU, RMIT should come to the bargaining table and negotiate current wages which have not kept up with inflation, and better working conditions for staff as workload has increased due to mass redundancies and hybrid teaching. 

“The 2% administrative pay increase that was given last June instead of an enterprise bargaining has meant that staff wages have effectively gone backwards.

“There has also been more of an emphasis on teaching and less of an emphasis on academic research, which has resulted in staff also having to undertake additional classes. 

“All of this workload has resulted in much staff stress, and we can’t wait for 2023 to bargain,” McLaughlin said. 

In order to demonstrate the extent of the excessive workload at RMIT, the union voted to have 11 days in August where academics would not undertake any additional work and finish their tasks without exceeding the number of hours they're required to work for a week.

These 11 days of ‘non-extra workload’ also included two days of open days at three of RMIT’s city campuses.

As a result of that motion, the union said it received a letter (viewed by Campus Review) from the university's external solicitors stating that the action was considered unprotected, and that the university would pursue legal action against the union if it went ahead. 

The NTEU was asked to send an email to all members to cancel the action, which the branch did.

“I think there is a genuine disbelief at the overreaction, we're talking about excessive workloads and they're talking about threatening legal action,” McLaughlin said.

“Given the level of threat and the overreaction by the university's external solicitors, the branch committee took a decision that we would not pursue."

RMIT response 

Campus Review approached RMIT for comment and received a statement declaring that the suggestion it refused to come to the bargaining table and threatened legal action against its staff is completely baseless. 

“We are currently in the final stages of developing our new strategy for the next decade.  

“While this work is underway, a policy pay rise was announced in May and staff were updated on the need to finalise the strategy first before bargaining could commence.  

“We are keeping our people regularly updated as we complete this work. 

“RMIT employees who participate at our Open Days are remunerated. They receive pay or time in lieu for their support, depending on their employment arrangement,” the statement said.

Staff pushed to the edge 

The current situation at RMIT has pushed some staff to reconsider their careers. 

An academic from the College of Business and Law (who wishes to remain anonymous) told Campus Review that they would soon be leaving RMIT. 

“We know that conditions are difficult all across the sector, but it does feel as though RMIT is an institution that hasn't paid a lot of respect or care to its staff.”

According to the anonymous staff member, working conditions at RMIT have worsened since the Covid-19 crisis as staff have been facing the revoking of contracts after verbal offers and the blacklisting of particular casual staff who were pursuing wage theft claims.

“I had a member of human resources laughing at another member of staff who was raising well-being concerns during the pandemic; that was something that really stays with me.

“We saw so many forced redundancies in 2020, and I've been through other redundancy processes at other universities, but it was so brutal, the way it was done, just the absolute disregard for staff was horrifying to be honest."

The academic who has been working at RMIT for a number of years did not expect to leave so soon as they were hoping to have a long and prosperous career with the institution. 

“I was really happy to go there when I first moved there. There was a great group of researchers doing some really cutting-edge kind of stuff.

“But over time that was chipped away, and the sort of collegiality that was a hallmark of higher education is something that doesn't seem to be valued here anymore.

“The conditions in which we're doing the job, are almost unrecognisable from when I started.”

In a couple of weeks, the anonymous staff member will be joining another university after having had a long reflection on whether or not to continue to work in the sector. 

“It does make you question whether or not it's sustainable; the kind of intensification of work and the lack of listening to staff when they raise concerns about overwork and conditions, is just sort of unbearable.

“But for the moment, for me, it's still that passion and that love for supporting other people's research and that connection that you get with other people, through teaching and learning.”

According to RMIT Associate Professor Darryn Snell the loss of staff and expertise contributes to the burnout of those who remain, which ultimately contributes to more workload challenges as universities struggles to fill roles.

Snell told Campus Review that senior staff positions are advertised at a lower level and there is an over reliance on casuals to quickly backfill these positions.

"That institutional memory is simply gone," Snell said.

Snell believes that the situation brings a whole range of new challenges such as managing and supporting more sessional staff than previously, as well as a higher expectation in term of administrative workload associated with these changes.

"When professional staff is being cut back, the expectation is that academic staff perform a lot more of that administrative work as well.

"There are a lot of staff that don't feel valued and are feeling extremely stressed about their futures, about how they're going to manage their workloads, and the growing expectations of staff.

"Refusing to negotiate with the union has angered a lot of staff, which is unfortunate and it's not contributing to a high trust workplace, which is what we'd expect at a university," Snell said.

“In certain settings, having an accented English can be seen as being less competent, less intelligent," senior lecturer in Linguistics and Language Lab Director at UWA, Celeste Rodriguez Louro, told Campus Review.

“People assume that someone with a mainstream accent is more knowledgeable.”  

According to Rodriguez Louro, women with an accented English are even more likely to suffer from the situation as they tend to be regarded as having less credibility than their male counterparts. 

She joined Campus Review to discuss the impact of having an accent in an academic career.

The NDIS will give people with a disability choice and control over the services they receive through a person-centric approach. People will be able to pick and choose between NDIS service providers to mix and match services, creating a personalised plan.

There are currently 19,000 disability service providers in Australia, with hundreds more entering the market each month. Most are planning on delivering services under the NDIS.

A complex regulatory environment
Such a big initiative requires a big investment in time, energy and money from the disability services industry. To deliver services under the NDIS, organisations will need to register as an NDIS service provider – an onerous and expensive process – and then meet tight ongoing compliance measures. Service providers are required to uplift their understanding of quality practices to ensure the community is treated fairly and safely.

The new Quality and Safeguarding Framework, which is overseen by the NDIS Quality & Safeguards Commission, covers new practice standards, codes of conduct, worker screening, complaints, incident management and behaviour guidelines that NDIS service providers must comply with. Each comprises multiple chapters of documentation. Providers must translate legislation into policies and processes that apply to their business. On an ongoing basis, they need to ensure their staff understand and operate based on these.

Complying with the fast-evolving NDIS requirements is challenging enough on its own. Combined with additional scrutiny through the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, and the pressure is well and truly on service providers. Feedback from the industry has been that the new NDIS compliance landscape is jarring, confusing and expensive.

What role does the education sector play?
The education sector plays a critical role in supporting the disability services industry to meet the challenges of fast paced change. To achieve the highest quality NDIS service delivery, we need to start by upskilling the workforce.

Failing to educate staff and managers about their compliance obligations under the NDIS is an organisational risk for the providers, participants and community. If staff don’t comply, service providers may fail their NDIS audit, fail to become registered, have their registration revoked or even be prosecuted. It makes sense to expose future and existing employees to these requirements – even before they enter or work in the industry. They need to be equipped to comply from day one.

As a result, higher education providers are reacting by offering a range of courses to introduce or upskill students in the requirements of the NDIS.

How can educators keep pace with the changes?
The NDIS is a good example of where industry changes are in danger of outpacing the education requirements for that industry. The speed at which the industry is changing makes it challenging for educators to adapt and develop a curriculum and coursework that is up-to-date and relevant.

One way educators can keep up is by working closely with the private sector to leverage innovation and learnings. An example is the University of New England, which has recently updated its NDIS post-graduate law certificate to better enable students to gain a sound grasp of the complex legislative frameworks underpinning the scheme. They’ve partnered with my team at Centro ASSIST to allow students to access our centralised online compliance system for NDIS service providers. Students will have access to NDIS policies, processes, forms, guides and registers via the platform. The overarching goal is to give students real-world experience with the audit and compliance documentation that they will see in their workplaces.

By partnering with the private sector, the University of New England has lessened the burden of updating the ever-changing policy and compliance components of the coursework.

Where to from here?
The partnership between Centro ASSIST and the University of New England is a great example of where the private sector, the education sector and the care services sector can join forces to deliver better outcomes for industry, the community and individuals. I’m hopeful that we will continue to see more cross-sector collaboration to meet the challenges of sweeping changes like the NDIS.

Walter Tran is executive director, health and social care at Centro ASSIST.

Such statistics glimmer with utopian possibility. They suggest we are on track towards a high-skilled future workforce, where a legion of diverse, super-educated powerhouse individuals and teams will push forward frontiers of progress, wealth, knowledge and humanity.

Paeans of excellence sung by university upper management everywhere further give the impression that higher education is tackling modern challenges with unmitigated success. Yet beneath the jubilatory public relations-speak, some hear a critical dissonance with what’s really going on.

Raewyn Connell is one. In her many years as a researcher, the leading Australian social scientist has seen universities drift from their core purpose. Increasingly – by dint of the enormous market pressures placed upon them – they are putting profits before the people they employ, the students whose dollar they take, and the society they serve.

To give just one example, workforce casualisation has ballooned in tandem with job insecurity, at the detriment of teaching quality, career progression, workplace morale and job satisfaction. Research has found that in some Australian universities, 80% of undergraduate courses are taught by sessional academics.

As the competitive spirit is thrust into overdrive, Connell also argues we’re losing out on the enormous benefits of collaboration. On a broader scale, she also critiques the fundamental structures of the ‘knowledge economy’, which prioritises certain ideas and discoveries above others according to which region in the world they’re produced.

These issues and more have led Connell to believe the system as it is requires radical change. In her bold new book The Good University (Monash University Press), she performs a comprehensive analysis of what a university is, who it’s made up of, the reasons behind its current dysfunction, and what needs to be done to build a more equitable, engaging and productive model.

Connell talked with Campus Review on the premises and proposals of her book.

CR: Much of your book is a critique on the ways that, in the last fifty years or so, universities worldwide have come to increasingly resemble corporations allied with neoliberal agendas, controlled by market-orientated managers. How did we get here?

RC: Similar things have happened to NGOs, cooperatives, and a lot of public sector agencies, so there's obviously something wider going on. Basically, in the last generation the rich have got richer and the public sector has been squeezed, corporations have become more powerful, and governments have had their heads soaked in neoliberal, market-first ideas.

In that environment, universities have been re-defined as money-making firms, not as a public service. They have been forced to compete with each other rather than cooperate. Fees have been brought back and ratcheted up. More and more university councils have been controlled by businessmen and corporate thinking. All this has given power to corporate-style managers to change the character of universities.

How has the corporate style of management impacted the university labour force in terms of makeup, and individuals’ day to day lives?

I think there have been two really big changes. One is worse conditions of employment. There's been a steep rise in the number of university teachers and researchers who are in insecure jobs – more than in the economy generally. Universities don't advertise this, but two-thirds of undergraduate teaching in Australia is now done by casualised labour. The non-academic staff have been more affected by outsourcing. In this scheme, people working for the university (whether as cleaners or computer specialists) are not actually employed by the university. They are employed by another company that holds a university contract. They vanish from the statistics, they lack rights and recognition on campus, and they come and go.

The other big change is how work is controlled on campus. The highly skilled workforce in universities aren't trusted to know their own jobs and get on with them. There's been a major growth of hierarchy and surveillance, control through intrusive online systems, arbitrary restructures, and just plain bullying. The workers have to be measured, 'incentivised' and made fearful, to keep them in line with the corporate plan. University management now promotes a corporate culture glorifying 'leaders', and the top leaders now pay themselves on the corporate model, a million dollars a year.

Why is the collective important, not only within a university, but between institutions globally?

Universities are our society's main sites for making knowledge. When you look closely at research as a form of work (the main topic of Chapter One of The Good University), it's clear that reliable knowledge depends on shared information and methods. It needs a workforce – now a global workforce – cooperating, talking together, publishing, pooling ideas and data. There's a name for this: research builds a knowledge commons, a kind of public park to which everyone has access. That's the basis of university curricula, so it is also at the heart of university teaching.

The fine details of everyday work show the role of cooperation. Consider a single lecture: it's given by the professor, right? Actually that lecture also involves work by cleaners, to prepare the room; technicians, to install the video machine; IT staff, to record the lecture; clerical workers, to get course information to the students; other academics, to bring the students up to the necessary level; building maintenance staff... and so on. The whole process is a collective one.

There’s a chapter in your book called ‘Privilege Machines’. How do universities actively participate in creating inequalities?

It's not a comfortable thought, but universities have always been associated with privilege. They produce an elite workforce for governments, corporations and professions. The ways they select students give preference to the skills, know-how and language found in professional and upper-class families and schools. Universities do have some scholarships for clever students in poverty. But the evidence for large social biases in selection is overwhelming – and international.

More: in the neoliberal era, universities model inequality themselves. This is dramatised in the so-called 'league tables'. Harvard constantly comes in as Number One. That's not so strange when you discover that this one middle-sized institution has a capital endowment of forty-two billion dollars. It has received huge subsidies from the corporate rich in the richest country in the world.

As the system becomes more commercialised and fees are pushed upwards, access to well-funded universities is heavily dependent on the student's (or their families') capacity to pay. That's now a global story. Families with assets try to position their children for privilege in a global corporate economy. English is the dominant language in the corporate world. Why do we think so many families from east and south Asia pay through the nose to send students to Australian universities? It's not because Australia is the humming centre of global culture.

Given the obsession around rankings, do you think it’s ever going to be possible for universities to become less competitive?

Yes. It's entirely possible. There are universities in Europe that have recognised how destructive this obsession is. They are simply withdrawing from the rankings game. After all, no-one forces universities to help the predatory corporations that produce these league tables. Bear in mind that this 'obsession' is carefully fostered by the corporations themselves, which produce many sub-rankings to boast about – and then sell universities advice on how to improve their ranks.

You’re critical of that traditional paradigm of imparting knowledge used in most universities: the lecture. What do you take issue with, and what are the alternative pedagogies?

The lecture is a classic case of the 'empty vessel' model of teaching. Students are supposed to be empty of knowledge; lecturers, who are full of it, pour the precious fluid into the students' heads. It's incredibly inefficient, as anyone knows who has looked at the notes that students write. But lecturing is cheap, packing in 100 or 500 at a time. And cheaper still online.

You don't need lectures to teach a university course, at any level. Good university teaching starts where the students are, engages their creativity, gets students learning together, uses a whole variety of resources. Students do the main work of learning. There's still a very active role for the teacher in this – learning about the students, organising groups, finding technical resources, diagnosing problems, leading discussions into the zone where the next discovery has to be made. In some Latin American contexts the teacher is described as an 'accompanist' to learning, and I think that's a nice way of putting it.

Lectures have some uses. They can be public gatherings, they can put a human face on research and researchers, they can put groups of students in touch with each other. But those are special events. We shouldn't make lectures the routine of teaching, and then complain that students aren't interested in learning.

You also explore how much of what we call knowledge is or has been produced in universities through research. But, you point out that most of this knowledge has to be produced in certain parts of the globe, or published in certain papers, for it to gain traction. Can you explain the history of this hierarchy, and how we can break out of it?

It's a big story, going back about 500 years. When powerful European states invaded overseas, they brought back more than gold and silver, coffee and sugar from the plantations. They also brought back data, masses of it, which went into the making of biology, astronomy, geology, social science, linguistics and much more. We should know that very well in Australia! Lieutenant Cook bumped into our east coast precisely because he was on a data-gathering expedition. He called the landing place Botany Bay because the scientists on his ship were so excited by the plants they found here.

So the colonial world became a vast data mine, while the information was processed and theorised in the learned societies, botanic gardens, museums and universities of the imperial centre back around the North Atlantic. The result is not 'Western' science, it's imperial science. That pattern survived the end of the old empires. The key scientific research centres, the major databases, the majority of journals (and all the most prestigious), are based in the rich countries of the global North, but they depend on data from the rest of the world. Academic work in the rest of the world normally follows the models of the USA and western Europe.

How to break out of that? It's not easy, this hierarchy is deeply ingrained, and it has now got mixed up with the commercialisation of research. But there are many things we can do to get started. Disconnecting from Eurocentric status games is one. Making practical connections around the post-colonial world is another. We can share curricula, we can share research. I've published papers in journals from Mexico, Colombia, Sri Lanka and China, and I've been in research teams with colleagues from Chile, Japan, Brazil and South Africa. I'm not alone in this, of course. The resources are enormous, but they are dispersed.

In practical terms, what actions need to be taken so we can transform universities into more equal, fair and ideal environments for students and staff?

We can change public policies. University councils and vice-chancellors should be elected. Universities should be financed as a mainstream public service, not by fees. Policy should not force universities to compete with each other, it should support cooperation and joint planning. If we want the university system to educate students from poorer countries, we should fund it to do so properly, and not treat students as ATMs with legs.

We can change internal workings. We can democratise universities' decision-making. This is not rocket science, we know how to run institutions democratically! We can link curricula better to the diversity of students, though it will need some hard work. We can put effort into making equality of access a reality: start by thinking who is not at university.

We should tell university managers to sell the Mercedes, zero out the advertising budget, and forget the glitzy prestige buildings. Universities should be modest in everything except their intellectual ambitions.

Professor Raewyn Connell

I really appreciated how you didn’t shy away from lampooning the language of upper management. For instance, quoting a line from your book: “No university president opens their mouth in public without the word ‘excellence’ floating out.” From your own experience, is this exasperation with empty rhetoric shared by your colleagues?

Too right! There are lots of colleagues who just sigh when the latest blast of hot air floats past. Eventually the boasting (fuelled by the league tables), the empty pronouncements ("If You Change Nothing, Nothing Will Change"), and the sheer silliness of slogans ("Never Stand Still") can be numbing.

I think it's worse than annoying. Together with image-fabrication through advertising, all this undermines the universities' cultural role. Universities' business is to sustain the search for truth, to be the site of open enquiry and a source of reliable knowledge. That role is now at stake.

And delaying retirement would mean postponing beneficial effects, researchers have warned.

Australian and French economists cautioned against postponing pension access on the back of their research, saying that the move to raise the eligibility age in Australia from 65 to 67 years by 2023 could leave workers more vulnerable to unexpected health shocks with negative consequences.

Dr Cahit Guven, a behavioural economist at Deakin University, said the team found that both men and women were up to around 24 per cent less likely to experience unexpected bad health after retirement.

"Conversely, men and women are up to around 14 per cent more likely to experience good health unexpectedly after retirement, compared to beforehand," Guven.

The research team used extensive data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey 2001 to 2014, covering more than 1600 transitions to retirement.

Guven said the results showed representatives should think twice before raising the retirement age.

"Many developed countries have recently increased pension eligibility age, leading to massive protests," he said.

"Our paper implies that even if such reforms seem necessary, they may postpone the beneficial effects that retirement has on people's health.

“Policymakers should take this factor into account when deciding whether or not there should be compulsory or voluntary retirement and whether or not we should increase the official retirement age."

The research, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, looked at the ways after-work activities of employees shaped their proactive behaviour and motivation at work the next day.

Lead Australian author Professor Sharon Parker, from Curtin University’s Future of Work Institute, said after-work activities like hobbies and sport have a knock-on effect for quality of sleep and how workers feel the next morning.

On the flip side, conflicts with family members, additional work demands at home, chores and disciplining children negatively affected someone’s proactivity at work.

Parker said employees and managers needed to be aware of how their personal activities might influence their work performance.

“How we feel at work impacts our proactivity, which helps create competitive, dynamic and fast-changing work environments, and translates to better work results and career success.”

But beware of going too far – the researchers said too much relaxation or detachment after work, while contributing to feelings of calm the next day, did not give people the energy and confidence boost needed for next-day proactivity.

Parker said the research suggests that managers and organisations could run workshops or seminars to help employees better understand the relationship between their personal lives and their daily work.

“It may also be beneficial for managers to take measures to help employees cope with negative experiences that occur outside of work and accept that employees’ proactive behaviour fluctuates from day to day. If managers have more reasonable expectations of their employee’s proactive behaviour, then they will be better equipped to respond to an employee’s change in proactivity.”