Australian Universities Seek to Enroll More Indigenous Students

April 11, 2011, 12:22 pm

Australian universities are creating new administrative positions to help craft policies and programs to enroll more indigenous students, reports The New York Times. The University of Sydney recently announced that a new deputy vice chancellor would be responsible for its indigenous strategy and services. The University of Queensland and Charles Darwin University have created similar positions. Indigenous students make up 1.25 percent of students entering universities, but are 2.4 percent of the Australian population, says the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne.

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david_r_evans

profmary, congratulations on the new position! As for the resources, you need to be able, first, to make the “numbers” case–your enrollments, course sizes, etc., are not consistent with what is going on across campus, disciplinary standards, etc. Unfortunately, these arguments are generally stronger than issues of quality invoked directly

As for the few resistant faculty, you have to try rational arguments first. If these don’t work, appeals to self-interest come next. After that it really depends on the person.

Minnesotan, the large majority of these positions (no fewer than 10) will be tenure-track, yes. There will probably be o.ne clinical type position in business that won’t be, and the two dean searches probably won’t, but the others, yes.
yellow1

Similar growth where I am. The fallout, for us, was the concern of maintaining enrollment numbers that justified the hires in the first place. I know we always concern ourselves with enrollment in many ways, and unprecedented enrollment growth often leads to unprecedented hiring. That growth has fallout in HR services, training, scheduling, in student relations, etc. We were able to have that equitable division of core classes after the fact, and I cannot undersell this as an upside. The “seasoned” faculty had to take on some other roles in exchange for this: FAR more advising than the newbies, lots of their staff development dedicated to prepping and conducting training instead of attending taining, etc. Area budgets had to be completely rethought to account for the growth.

Biggest challenge is the sea change in culture. Our growth happened over a 2 year period, but it was spread out between multiple campuses as well. Keeping everyone together after large growth (especially if there was little before) is difficult. The new folks are anxious to secure these new positions long term, and the institution as a whole has to redefine what its faculty expectations are when they are by far the largest contigent. And growing.
profmary

Thank you both for your good advice.
oh_richard

ProfMary – these are all true points, but only step one – you won’t get all you need on the first attempt.

Step two is follow closely the few new hires you get, and from Day 1 document every new/better/improved thing those folks do from research to new classes to new committees to pr spots for the Department in local news or papers… as well as everything anyone else was able to do because they had more free time… as well as every improved course eval result and every improved student satisfaction result. Tie this to the Dean’s and School’s goals as well where ever possible.

The idea is to go back to the Dean after your first round of hires, and make an overwhelming case for all the things your Department was able to do by having a few new folks. This supports that you really –do– need all those new positions you asked for last year but didn’t get. With the new budget coming up, the Dean should add in the positions that were cut last year…
lodovic1953

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