Late-breaking erratum: Dick White is to be a PVC at Kings; not head of the Menzies Centre (unless and until we formally take it over.) ACADEMIC BOARD REPORT #6 - 1 September 1999 [Apologies for the lack of report report from the last meeting. Things got away from me a bit.] Wednesday's meeting was mercifully brief - 47 minutes. The usual chairperson, DVC Alan Lindsay, was absent, so we had the unusual spectacle of the meeting being chaired by the VC Himself. He seemed in a rather chirpy mood - could it have been due to Council having just extended his appointment to the end of 2006? The meeting began with the announcement that the position of Deputy Chair of the Academic Board, held by the Redoubtable Merran Evans (RME), is to be discontinued. Merran is now the Director of Something and Something (I couldn't catch it), presumably in Alan's office, so the "Deputy Chair" notion is no longer needed. A quick segue to another departure, this time of DVC Maloney who is "going back to the West". I'd like to report that the VC said a few words praising John for his achievements and thanking him for his good work while he was here, but I didn't actually hear anything of the sort. What I *did* hear him say was that the position wasn't really needed any more (after all, since we are an International University, it's all part of our mainline activity), and hence John wasn't being replaced. And while I am on departures, the VC commented at the end of the meeting on the departure of two deans (which was mentioned in the papers under Items of Interest from the last Council meeting.) John Rickard (BusEco) is off to become the VC of Southern Cross University at the end of the year, and Dick White (Education) is off to Blighty to head the Menzies Centre at Kings (I can see this post being the Monash equivalent of High Commissioner or Ambassador.) I must admit the Rickard move is surprising; as Dave Arnott points out, the whole university (a Dawkins fusion of Armidale and Northern Rivers CAEs) is about half the size of his present faculty. I wondered too about the fate of SC's present VC, Barry Coningham (a noted contemporary composer.) Mike Skully (Accounting & Finance) enlightened me on this; Coningham wasn't offered re-appointment. At least John and Dick got a few words of thanks. After a bit of not very comprehensible waffle about the Melbourne-Monash Protocol, we moved into a lengthy discussion of the mid-year International enrolments. The report was introduced by Tony Pollock (I guess if the organ-grinder is under a cloud, it's left to the monkey.) The good news is that depending on the way the figures are done, enrolments are up by either 10 or 25%, with BusEco and InfoTech way out in front as usual. Interesting also to note that the Singapore and Malaysian numbers have been pretty flat over the last 4 years, but both Indonesia (now our biggest source) and India have been booming. Peter Darvall did one of his quivering-with-mock-rage acts about how long it takes to get applications processed, so pull your collective fingers out. Some of us could have told him that a lot of the delay occurs outside the faculties. Another International snippet is that things are moving along with South Africa, and that the business planning had reached a stage where an agreement in principle could be contemplated, whatever that might mean. The last few minutes were spent with Colin Chapman presenting Pharmacy's Future Directions report, which read and sounded to me awfully like a traditional annual report. The only bit of future I heard was a comment that Latrobe was planning a competitive pharmacy program at Bendigo. Colin did say that he'd like our Parkville Border Post to be regarded more as part of Monash, and used for meetings and conferences. Food for thought that. Jim Breen 3 September 1999