'Silly, soft and otherwise suspect': Doctoral education as risky business

This paper investigates how certain doctoral practices come to count as scandalous and with what effects on universities. To do so, it engages with a number of recent media allegations that relate to doctoral practice in Australia and elsewhere. The analysis of these allegations is developed in terms of three broad categories, namely allegations of silliness in relation to thesis content, allegations of softness in relation to entry, rigour and assessment, and allegations of suspect conduct and/or credentials. The impact of such allegations on university governance is then addressed

THE DISTRIBUTION OF RESEARCH PERFORMANCE ACROSS AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES, 1992-2003, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR 'BUILDING DIVERSITY'

We contribute to the debate on research performance by comparing the distribution of research inputs and outputs across Australian universities during 1992-2003. We have calculated annual Gini coefficients for various performance measures and Lorenz curves for the final year of the study. Various findings are evident. Research-input measures have remained relatively unevenly distributed across universities. Output measures were more evenly distributed and this exhibited a gradual and rather consistent convergence through time, supporting the view that the research output is being generated gradually more equally across Australia's universities. The exclusion of the 'Group of Eight' (Go8) universities results in a more even distribution of performance. However, in 2003 this group took the lion's share of research inputs but produced a smaller share of outputs. Our findings are relevant to current funding policy discussion. Copyright 2006 The Authors Journal compilation 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/University of Adelaide and Flinders University .

Quality assurance and the quality of university teaching

The quality of university teaching is increasingly the subject of political rhetoric, but doubt remains about both actual performance outcomes and the role and relevance of the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA). Present quality procedures are found to be inadequate, and scepticism about AUQA's capacity to achieve its aims is well justified for two reasons: the almost complete lack of recognition of the importance of incentives to motivate teachers to allocate effort towards teaching at the expense of research; and the inadequate attention to the need for more accurate indicators of teaching performance. This paper suggests ways of improving the effectiveness of AUQA in raising the quality of university teaching. Two key reforms suggested are: (a) the wide reporting of more accurate teaching performance indicators; (b) a revised university funding model in which university income is based on teaching performance indicators in the same way that research income is based on research performance indicators