Dear UWAASA members,
We are back, and so is the beloved WA sunshine! We hope that everyone is holding up well and has enough left in the tank for the final stretch of semester.
Before we start, we know that outcomes are being communicated for applicants seeking promotion from levels A to B and B to C, and that applicants for promotion from levels C to D and D to E who have been knocked back are also being notified. If you intend to discuss the matter further with the SDVC (as is the process for unsuccessful applicants seeking further feedback or planning to appeal the decision), and require a support person for that meeting, please feel free to reach out to us at uwaasa@uwa.edu.au.
UWAASA Annual General Meeting 2025
A gentle reminder that our AGM will take place on Thursday 23 October, at lunchtime, in the Ashburton Room at Forrest Hall. You should have received a calendar invite, and we do hope to see you there!
RSVP: Please register your attendance at the AGM via Trybooking (for catering purposes please include any dietary preferences) by Monday 6 October 2025: https://www.trybooking.com/DEGGP.
If you are unable to attend, please consider a proxy vote! Each attending member can hold 2 proxy votes. If you would like to (and we would like you to!) place a proxy vote, then please complete the proxy form.
In this newsletter:
- Some reflections on Academic Freedom in the current world and in Australia
- A Roundup and Reflections on our Forum on ‘The future of the teaching and research balanced academic’
- A report on our meeting with the Chancellor, our recent observations of Senate, and emerging reflections on the state of our University’s governance
- Some musings on the corporatisation of everything, from oddly named mid-management positions to the re-emergence of mergers…
Academic Freedom
First of all, we as an Association wanted to begin by acknowledging our colleagues across the globe who are facing termination, the loss of valuable research, and a stifling of academic freedom due to the increased politicisation of university life. From Trump’s expansive attacks on higher education in the United States to the bombing of universities in Gaza, we are fortunate in many ways as educators in Australia. However, we are acutely aware that, like so much else, our own academic freedoms die in the darkness. As advocates for academics at UWA, the Academic Staff Association recognises the need to remain vigilant to threats to our roles and rights as academics at UWA and in the Australian tertiary education sector more broadly.
Considering recent debates generated by the release of the Special Envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism, we affirm our commitment to the principled view that linking university funding to wider socio-political issues is both unproductive and a dangerous slippery slope that puts student and academic freedom at serious risk. At the first meeting of the UWA Academic Board this year, the Vice Chancellor noted that UWA was not willing to adopt the contentious definition of Antisemitism advocated for in the Plan. We welcome this position and will continue to advocate for our university to be a place that welcomes debate and engagement with complex social and political issues, for both staff and students.
Forum Roundup and Reflections
In June, UWAASA hosted the year’s second forum, which was dedicated to the challenges currently facing the role of the ‘balanced teaching and research academic’. The forum’s panel included: Professor Tim Colmer, Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor; Emerita Professor Lynette Abbott, UWA School of Agriculture and Environment; Professor Sarah Collins, UWA Conservatorium of Music, and Deputy Dean of GRS; and Dr Laila Simpson, Director Office of Research.
Each speaker offered insights into the policies and culture that define the balanced academic at UWA. It was heartening to see consensus on the premise that balanced positions are critical to the University. Yet, the realities of contemporary academia pose serious threats to the viability of the model in general, and to the ability of balanced academics to progress in their careers more specifically.
On the specific topic of career progression, Tim Colmer noted how promotion pathways have been streamlined, with positive results in terms of accessibility of the process. This is true, however substantive issues remain ongoing, including the difficulties of capturing disciplinary diversity in a centralised one-size-fits-all process.
On the broader topic of the forum, Sarah Collins made an important general point, emphasising the difficulties of achieving any form of meaningful balance in a sector that appears to be in a constant state of crisis. Indeed, the frequency with which university restructures, bad governance, and job losses are making the news isn’t exactly conducive to that stable and focused environment that academia can thrive on.
Much of the open debate that concluded the forum centred on the role of sabbatical, with many attendees pointing to inconsistencies in how and when sabbatical is granted. In an environment where research is considered residual in most workload models, sabbatical plays a crucial role for the balanced academic to maintain ‘research momentum’, complete ongoing projects, and develop new lines of inquiry. Is sabbatical a right or a privilege of the balanced academic’s working life? The debate focused on the risk of distorting effects when sabbatical becomes a privilege – how does competition for this valuable time impact upon collegiality within a School? These issues, among many others, highlight how seemingly subtle shifts in policy over the past years have had cascading effects on our ability to pair ballooning teaching and administrative loads with the demand for research. On the back of the Forum, UWAASA will advocate for a different policy approach, one that does not simply identify sabbatical as a privilege but recognises that periodic research leave is unequivocally essential to academics who carry increasingly significant teaching and administrative loads as well as substantive research expectations.
A related topic is that of the splintering of professional support systems, which in their current format often create significant additional work for academics. This is not a criticism of our professional colleagues, who continue to do their utmost, often going well above and beyond. The issue is systemic. A system with centralised and siloed professional services cannot succeed in a context with 22 separate academic areas – it is pretty much a textbook example of square pegs and round holes. The stories of academics chasing supports for anything from basic IT assistance, to timetabling, to finance, HR, Campus Management etc are endless. One of the greatest threats to the balanced academic at UWA isn’t necessarily to be found in our official workloads. It often lies in all the invisible work that falls through the cracks of splintered systems. And it bears reminding that, at UWA, this splintering is a direct consequence of the hasty disestablishment of the four Faculties. In the eternal words of our glorious former SDVC Simon Biggs on the eve of the last restructure: “To put it simply, we will have to learn to do more with less”. He never elaborated on how exactly this magical shift was supposed to happen, but as many great leaders in our tertiary sector do, he has long moved on to a higher paid position while we are still trying to solve his riddle.
Finally, our NTEU friends have now embarked on the bargaining round for our next Enterprise Agreement. Management is pushing for the formal introduction of Teaching Intensive positions. These positions exist in many other universities and are linked to increased (and often unmanageable) workloads, as well as reduced opportunities for career progression. At the Forum in June, Tim Colmer emphasised how, unlike many Go8 counterparts, UWA had decided not to go down the path of normalising teaching intensive positions. That notwithstanding, we are aware that many of our colleagues are effectively in teaching focused roles, but we understand that, for the moment, this is a matter of yearly workload allocation, not a defining contractual feature. We are worried about the normalisation of teaching focused positions and disappointed with our management’s change of tack. We continue to believe that people should not be contractually locked out of research, and we will strongly advocate in this direction.
Meeting with the Chancellor and Senate Observation and University Governance
On 21 July, we met with our new Chancellor, Diane Smith-Gander. This meeting was a good opportunity to discuss some fundamental aspects of university life and start a conversation which will hopefully be ongoing. We emphasised the uniqueness of university communities, which are inherently different to the corporate world more familiar to our Chancellor. UWA is not, should not, and will never be McKinsey!
Our discussion also covered the issue of Senate, and its current fundamental lack of transparency. Ironically, the same day we met the Chancellor, Senate was scheduled to sit. As always, we sent an observer to the Open Session of the meeting. For context, the agenda for the Open Session is ridiculously minimal. Any governance decision of any relevance is left to the Closed Session – with no observers and no publicly available minutes. We send observers to the Open Session of Senate meetings primarily as a symbolic gesture, to remind Senate that we take accountability seriously, and so should they. In practice, this often means attending for 10-15 minutes of the overall Senate meeting, which goes on for hours.
On 21 July, contrary to years of experience, we were not provided with the documents and reports relevant to the Open Session agenda items. Since reports are often “taken as read,” the observer was only able to have very limited understanding of the issues. After we pushed back and asked for the Open Session documents to be circulated to observers, at the subsequent and most recent Senate meeting on 1 September, our observer was allowed to see the Open Session reports during the meeting on a dedicated device provided by the Senate secretary for use during the meeting. Thus, the observer was left to rapidly peruse the documents while also attempting to follow the commentary and discussion. This is what an ‘Open’ Session of Senate looks like these days – a largely perfunctory exercise.
Frankly, the current approach is also quite insulting. We have observed Open Sessions of Senate for a very long time. We have always taken that role seriously and performed it respectfully and responsibly. Yet, this latest interesting take on ‘transparency’ with a further curtailing of Open Sessions is not really surprising. During our meeting on 21 July, the Chancellor mentioned that she was discussing with other Senate members the possibility of closing Senate meetings entirely for some unspecified period of time while the transparency issues were sorted out. While this option has now mercifully been discarded, the fact that it was even considered in the first place is concerning. We do not see any movement toward closing more of Senate to be congruent with increased transparency. Self-evidently, the opposite is true! The current levels of discomfort that Senate is showing towards openness and transparency is revealing of a governance culture that thrives on opacity. It also happens to be fundamentally at odds with the direction the sector may be about to take…
…Indeed, advocating for transparency and good governance in the Australian university sector is rarely conducive to experiencing any form of vindication. Yet, it was heartening to read the Interim Report of the Parliamentary Inquiry into the ‘Quality of governance at Australian higher education providers’. The UWAASA submission, which you can access here, is cited multiple times. If you need a cathartic read about the findings and recommendations of the inquiry so far, we highly recommend this ABC article. The issue of transparency (and the current outrageous lack thereof in university governance) features prominently among the recommendations. The devil is, of course, in the details and (provided these recommendations will be adopted and acted upon) we will need to keep a close watch on their implementation. Yet, the recommendations put forward some crucial statements of principle, and we welcome this development.
Ah, and while we’re at this, the observation that Vice-Chancellors and Senior Executive salaries at Australian universities are obscenely high is of course nothing new. What is new though is the formal recommendation that these remunerations be reviewed, capped, and transparent. We will keep a close watch on this space.
The Corporatisation of Everything
Many of us will have completed the staff engagement survey circulated by the Executive a while back. We imagine many of you had constructive feedback in the section about our University’s ‘Company Culture.’ We wait with bated breath to ‘BeHeard’ on all things UWA! All irony aside, if the results of this survey are to be of any use, it is important that they be tallied and reported for professional and academic staff separately. The constraints, expectations, and work environments can be experienced very differently by these two groups and amalgamation will not be enlightening for anyone.
Speaking of ‘company culture’, there seems to have been a flurry of new appointments in our central administration in recent times. But not anyone likely to do work at the coalface to support the core business of teaching and research mind you. No, interesting figures in oddly worded departments such as ‘Transformation and Innovation’, ‘Organisational Capability’ and similar. This would be relatively innocuous if, in the same breath, we were not told that ‘there are no resources’ to do basic stuff, such as adequately resourcing schools, or engaging in basic improvements that other universities have gone through years ago. For example, a pilot project that saw some units run on-campus digital exams last year was discontinued in 2025 due to insufficient resources in the Exam Office. And so, back to indecipherable handwritten exams we go! Maybe, since we apparently have entire departments dedicated to transformation, innovation and organisational capability, this could be investigated? And what of timetabling? We continue to use an outdated system that requires manual entry of every individual event over a calendar year, from tutorials to conferences to meetings, etc… yes, they are all manual entries, well over 12k a year! And while moving to an automated system is apparently a horrendously complex and expensive process, we’re pressing ahead all guns blazing to build a couple of brand-new campuses in [checks notes] India! Are we being facetious and taking cheap shots? Maybe. But taking cheap shots shouldn’t be this easy. Before committing to building new campuses abroad, maybe we could try and make sure our current ones are in decent nick? Just a wild thought.
And to cap it all off on a note of ‘company culture’ on steroids… mergers are back! Our Vice-Chancellor had recently told Academic Board that the review of WA universities was in very deep freeze. Well, it appears to be thawing pretty fast under the heat of a ‘cost-benefit analysis of state university structure options’… Not sure what that means yet, but if pretty much every single merger that has gone down in the history of the private sector is anything to go by, it will suck for us and our professional colleagues. But it will be awesome for the senior managers who come on top, and for the armies of external consultants that will lead the way! Yay for them. No point worrying too much about this just yet. We will be here to keep close tabs on it. So, there’s that!
Thank you all for your continued support. Until next time!
The UWAASA Committee