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.