ACADEMIC BOARD REPORT #6 - 18 October 2000

Apologies for the missed report from Meeting 5. I was all set to do it
when a bout of 'flu knocked me out for a couple of weeks. I'm still
catching up.

Yesterday's meeting began with the chairperson, DVC Alan Lindsay,
telling us he had a sore throat, so he hoped it would be a short 
meeting. It's a funny aspect of the consultative processes at Monash
that their success is measured in terms of how little time is spent on 
them.

I should mention at the outset that nothing apart from the main items
from the VC's Group nothing was starred for discussion, and therefore
everything was approved. I don't think anything from InfoTech, apart
from the chair in Malaysia, was on the agenda.

As the VC was stuck in the traffic somewhere, we began with Peter
Darvall presenting the revised Research and Research Training 
Management Plan. An update on the 1998 RMP, it is a longish document
with a lot of useful comments and recommendations. The earlier version is
on the WWW (http://www.adm.monash.edu.au/rmp/) so I expect this revision
will get there eventually.

Peter spoke to it briefly, mainly to draw attention to Monash's poor
showing in the per-capita league tables, and hence the need for
encouragement, sock-pulling, etc. There was almost no discussion, so for
some reason Alan Lindsay, sore throat and all, launched into a long
monologue in which he seemed to repeat everything Peter had just said
several times over. I say "seemed to", because as usual his voice
acted as a powerful soporific on me.

There was an agendum listed for discussion about the setting up of a
Committee to Oversee Expenditure at Monash Malaysia. I'd like to tell
you what Alan said about it, but I suspect I slept through that too.

Still no VC, so Roy Jackson spoke to "Future Directions Report"  (i.e.
what they did last year) of the Green Chemistry CRC. The written report
was brief and interesting, but nothing Roy said seemed to add anything.
He made a funny comment about Green Chemistry being about the only branch 
which didn't have explosions.

The VC having arrived, it was into the main item for the day, the 2001
Budget. The budget summary was presented in not particularly much detail
by John Levine. The main change has been to adjust the proportions going
to faculties based on teaching load from 84% to 75% and on research from
11% to 20%. At the same time the internal calculation of the research
component was adjusted to align with the White Paper measures, i.e. less
on grants and publications and more on HDR completions.

Looking across the summary of the faculty budgets, the most outstanding
thing was the way IT exceeded its estimated 2000 income by nearly 30%.
This has led to a much higher allocation for 2001, in fact we have moved
into 4th place behind Medicine, BusEco and Arts on size of operating
budget, and if it wasn't for a $700k special allocation to Arts we'd
almost be tied for 3rd. Needless to say, all the growth is from fee
income, the DETYA component is dropping for everyone.

Attempting to work through the impact of the change of formula for
research component shows something interesting. When the formula change
had been discussed earlier this year, Darvall commented that he expected
Medicine, Science and Engineering would be the winners. Without having
the raw figures to work from it is hard to analyze what has happened, but
from the papers it appears that the cut in the teaching component has
had a fairly even proportional impact across faculties, averaging about
10% in that component, whereas the changes due to the research component
have been very uneven ranging from an increase of 450% for Art & Design
down to 50% for Medicine (that's a 50% increase in a number that was
pretty big to start with.). Medicine ended up with $12.7M of research
component funds, and Art & Design  with $0.27M. The nett effect of all
this is that in the teaching plus research components it appears that
Law and Art & Design dropped; Arts, BusEco and Education stayed the same;
and IT, Medicine, Engineering and Science increased. Science's nett
increase was small; if it had not been for the formula change, they'd be
in quite some trouble.

Discussion of the budget concentrated largely on one aspect, the fact
that the Library was only getting a 5% overall increase, which was less
than the overall increase, whereas with the exchange rate problems, etc.
its real operating cost was increasing far more than that. Chris Avram,
who is the AB's rep on the General Library Committee raised the issue,
and was supported by John Crossley and then by Graeme Davison who chairs
the GLC. Alan Lindsay and David Robinson made soothing but basically
meaningless noises about this, which really only served to demonstrate
the powerlessness of a body like the Board when it comes to things like
the budget. I guess we could vote not to receive the budget, but I
suspect the Board's boat-rocking days are past.

And that being the end of the listed agenda, we departed.

[This may be my last Academic Board report for some time. I will try and
attend the next meeting on 27 November, but as I will be departing
overseas a couple of days later on OSP, I doubt I'll find time to do a 
report.  My term expires next June, and I have decided not to stand again. 
In the circumstances I think it best that I resign from the Board after 
the November meeting, enabling Faculty Board to fill a vacancy for the 
first half of 2001.]

Jim Breen
19 October 2000