The Conversation: Australian Research Discussion Site

The following link (via Colm) is an interesting new Australian site devoted to discussions of research emanating from the university world in Aus. Their basic statement of purpose is below. Interesting idea. My experience of being one of the less frequent contributors to irisheconomy.ie is that there is definitely a demand in Ireland to debate research coming out of the universities. A blog post I put up about one of Kevin's papers on higher education generated nearly 150 comments and, while the most popular post deal with developments in the macroeconomy, people do debate research papers when they are put up. The format of the website below is an interesting model.

The Conversation is an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector – written by acknowledged experts and delivered directly to the public. As professional journalists, we aim to make this wealth of knowledge and expertise accessible to all.

We aim to be a site you can trust. All published work will carry attribution of the authors’ expertise and, where appropriate, will disclose any potential conflicts of interest, and sources of funding. Where errors or misrepresentations occur, we will correct these promptly.

Initially, our Content Partners include the Australian Group of Eight universities (Adelaide, ANU, Melbourne, Monash, NSW, Queensland, Sydney, Western Australia) plus University of Technology Sydney, CSIRO, and the Australian Science Media Centre.

Sincere thanks go to our Founding Partners who have given funding support. Those universities are ANU, Monash, Melbourne, UTS, UWA, plus CSIRO. See also our list of Strategic Partners.

We are based in Melbourne, Australia, and wholly owned by The Conversation Media Trust, a not-for-profit company.

This is a beta site in development. We have a program of additional features and functionality that we will be introducing over the next few months. In the meantime, we'd be keen to hear back from you on any suggestions.

If you have any comments or suggestions about our service, we’d like to hear from you. Email us at: feedback@theconversation.edu.au

HEA Chair on Humanities

I would like to get a copy of HEA chair John Hennessy's actual remarks but people who want to get a sense of how the relationship between academia and government is degenerating rapidly into farce in Ireland should read this report about yesterday's event with Martha Nussbaum.

Autonomy and Universities

It is worth rereading this VOX summary of the influential Bruegel report on the reform of European universities. They basically said that the reason that European universities are so far behind the US is that they have too little funding and too much state interference in process rather than evaluation of outcomes.

1.European countries should invest more in their university systems. On average, EU25 members spend 1.3% of their GDP on higher education, against 3.3% in the US. European countries should increase funding for higher education by at least 1 percentage point over the next ten years. It remains an open question how the burden of this increase is to be shared between public budgets and private funding, including tuition fees.

2.For this effort to pay off, European universities should become more autonomous, in particular with regard to budgets, and also in hiring and remuneration. What matters for good performance is both money and good governance. The two are complementary; increasing university budget has more impact with good governance and improving governance has more impact with higher budgets. We are aware, however, that greater autonomy can be perverse and that it must be accompanied by greater performance evaluation.

Brendan Walsh on Leaving Cert. Points and University Performance in Economics

Title: Leaving Certificate points and performance in first arts economics: a study of the 1987/88 UCD class
Authors: Walsh, Brendan M.; Garvey, Padhraic
Date: Apr-1989; UCD Centre for Economic Research Working Paper Series WP89/6

This paper shows that there is a weak association between Leaving. Cert points-scores and university performance in Economics. The authors recommend that the optimal scoring scheme for entry to university Economics would give more weight to Mathematics. It is also recommended that Irish should be given less weight, or indeed none at all. Finally, the authors recommend further research that would include socio-economic and psychological factors amongst the variables explaining academic performance at university.