From a working-class family living in the hard-scrabble, tiny coastal town of Umina in NSW, Phil Honeywood soared through study abroad and university. He wound up becoming one of the youngest Liberal government ministers in Victoria and deputy leader of the party in opposition before retiring from politics and taking the helm of the large …read more

The University of Sydney has launched a wholesale revamp of arts and social sciences research that may presage a change in the focus of humanities studies across Australia, focusing humanities research on the important questions of the modern world.

Brimming over with enthusiasm, the vice-chancellor of the University of Technology Sydney lets fly with a rapid-fire paean on the ­institution’s modernity, achievements and sheer potential. Attila Brungs has been in charge of the uber-modern university for four years and he’s “loving it, absolutely loving it”.

Disputed elections for staff and student representatives for Mon­ash University’s council have spawned contested results, a successful appeal to the Victorian Ombudsman, hastily rewritten regulations and a call for the state’s Higher Education Minister to consider changing the relevant laws to ensure impartiality.

Elanor Huntington is readying herself for the imminent arrival of the next world-changing engineering discipline, one she believes will overlap the realms of the built and digital worlds.“Engineering is not a static thing,” she says. “There have been new disciplines emerging over time for centuries, and I think there’s a new one coming.”

Daniel Hutto will start to sell the curriculum he has designed for the University of Wollongong’s contentious new Western civilisation bachelor of arts course in on-campus town hall meetings over the next few weeks. For the privately funded Ramsay Centre, it will be the culmination of a tortured series of negotiations with universities across Australia …read more

Murdoch University has been through some contentious times recently, seeing its enterprise agreement terminated in 2017 after protracted and occasionally bitter negotiations, and late last year jousting with the National Tertiary Education Union in the Federal Court and the West Australian Supreme Court.

As a kid in Sydney, Mohamad ­Dawoud loved playing football. An athletic boy, he started kicking the ball around when he was three years old and it became the passion of his life.