ACADEMIC BOARD MEETING - 15 MARCH 1995

Meeting 2/95 was actually the first to be held; the Steering Committee
called the February meeting off.

There was the usual monster agenda, with most uncontentious matters passing
"unstarred". Many were surprised that ProVC Leo West's announcement about
an agreement between Monash & Sunway College to establish a "Monash
University Sunway Campus Malaysia" was allowed to pass without comment.

The matters that did get discussed included:

(a) a to-ing and fro-ing over the "preservation of rights" clause in degree
regulations. Apparently a lawyer on the Council doesn't like the wording,
and many don't like the new wording in the University Solicitor's rewrite.

(b) tut-tutting over the AB no longer receiving notification of who got
promoted to AssPro & Reader (Dave Arnott whispered to me that this was due
to the Committee now being a Council committee rather than an AB
committee.) Anyway, AB will now be told, and mirabile dictu, it might even
get in Et Cetera. (Remember when there was an AB Report in Et Cetera?)

(c) DVC Darvall commented on the declining numbers of ARC Large Grant
applications, and on the poor quality of many. He suspected HODs did not
read what they have signed. There was the usual hand-wringing over why we
don't get more grants.

(d) the VC will write to Professor Chubb thanking him on behalf of the
Board.

(e) ProVC West proposed a curious arrangement for twinned courses which
said something like "if you get into first year by getting an SAM (South
Australian Matriculation) score of 65, you will need to average credits to
proceed to 2nd year, whereas if your SAM is 75 or more, you will only need
to pass to proceed." He seemed to think it was a good idea. The Board didn't.

(f) the Language & Learning Activities report and recommendations were
finally discussed. An on-the-fly amendment to the recommendations was made
by ProVC West to have the LLS staff appointed under Academic conditions. 
This was widely supported by Arts Faculty people, particularly Professor 
Klein (Linguistics). It was clear that the proposal had been canvassed and
lobbied before-hand, as was confirmed to me later by John Pilbrow
(Physics) who is on the Steering Committee. It was approved.

(g) the 1995 admissions results were discussed, and DVC Pargetter seemed
pretty pleased with the outcome. Mal pointed out that it looked as though
Monash was 10% over-enrolled. Pargetter responded that we seemed to be on
target for meeting the two census-date sets of figures.

(h) MGS and APA offers & take-ups were discussed. There were 842
applications of which approx. 400 were H1s. 116 APA and 183 MGS offers
were made. Declines were about 20% (jobs, other offers, etc.) with Science
seeing a 37% decline rate. Max King thinks we will end up under target,
and there is likely to be a mid-year round of offers.

(i) a revised "Code of Practice for Supervision of Doctoral Students" was
discussed, with general approval. John Miller lamented the total lack of
space for PhD students at Caulfield, which led to an interesting lecture
from DVC Darvall on the inadvisability of having the full range of
research on all campuses. He talked about building laboratories, which I
hardly thought was relevant to the Management Department.

(j) I was surprised to see the Annual Reports of the Deans of Arts & Law
were not accompanied by oral comments from the Deans. Perhaps this no
longer occurs.

I'll try hard to keep these reports coming, as the AB summary in Et Cetera
seems to have fallen through.

Jim Breen