Reports from the Vice-Chancellor, President of the Academic Board and key Senate Committees on happenings since the last Senate meeting.
There was also discussion of the 'Respect. Now. Always' report on sexual harrassment and sexual assault of students in Australia's universities released recently, and UQ's response.
There was also a well-received presentation by Dean Moss, CEO of UniQuest, of how commercialisation of UQ intellectual property is travelling. UQ is a national leader but can aspire to greater international benchmarks. It was pleasing to here that UniQuest invests in IP not only on the basis of financial return, but also impact - for example malaria solutions primarily relate to the third world where there are not big financial returns, but UniQuest pursues. This is also relevant for the social sciences, said Dean.
A member suggested that the minutes were becoming too succinct and not providing enough of a record of the extent to which Senate was considering some matters. Following discussion it was agreed that the brevity of the minutes be revisited by the Chancellor (as chairman). I agree that the minutes are now so light on that historians of the future will wonder why the Senate bothered to meet.
On the Management Dashboard (see last meeting for an explanation of what this is) I noticed that with respect to the monitoring of the implementation of staffing changes associated wtih Stage 2 of ESS (Finance & HR) that "change management expertise is being commissioned". When I asked the Vice-Chancellor what this was, he replied that the fact that casual salary claims processing via Timekeeper had not been properly accounted for in the carve up of what is 'Finance' and what is 'HR' was a sign that something was wrong, being "too big to miss". Apparently the extra expertise that is being commissioned will be done so within the existing ESS budget.
The Equity, Diversity and Status of Women Committee (of which I'm a member) commissioned a data analysis of pay equity in UQ, which revealed differences at certain academic and professional staff levels and job types between men and women. EDSWC forwarded the report to the Vice-Chancellor's Committee, where concerns were expressed that the data needed more finessing before coming to Senate as an accurate report of gender pay differences and what could be done to address them. Having seen the report, which is great work and is granular enough to be able to 'get to the bottom of things', I can see where the VCC is coming from, because wrong assumptions could be made about, for example, the responsibilities of positions with a similar local job title, where local job titles are not aligned to any particular common understanding. Senate looks forward to seeing the finessed report and to discussing the issues and scope for correction I believe to be obvious from even the first version of the report.
