Comments on: Canberra’s loss is Mānoa’s gain as the ANU walks away from decades of excellence /2016/05/26/canberras-loss-is-manoas-gain-as-the-anu-walks-away-from-decades-of-excellence/ Notes and Queries in Anthropology Fri, 08 Dec 2017 18:00:10 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1 By: Melissa Demian /2016/05/26/canberras-loss-is-manoas-gain-as-the-anu-walks-away-from-decades-of-excellence/comment-page-1/#comment-839409 Fri, 27 May 2016 09:36:35 +0000 /?p=19793#comment-839409 Thanks Alex. “This is not the last cut of this nature the ANU will see” because it is not the first, not even this year. In February, quietly and without fanfare, another unit at the ANU axed the contracts of six of its most active research scholars in Melanesia (including myself), again due to funding constraints. The reality of the funding shortfall was not at issue, although it does raise the question of why the Australian government appears to be running its universities roughly the way it runs its mining sector, along boom and bust principles. The result of this kind of fiscal instability is that actual scholarship is almost invariably eschewed in favour of the kinds of “instant experts” you describe here, wherein rough and ready policy documents that have never been peer reviewed can be generated very quickly to keep the sources of government funding happy and create a simulacrum of research activity. But the damage to the ANU’s reputation will ultimately be done not by petitions or public declarations that you or I might make, but simply by the absence of any real scholarship coming out of units that have behaved in this spectacularly short-sighted and self-defeating fashion.

]]> By: Todd Harple /2016/05/26/canberras-loss-is-manoas-gain-as-the-anu-walks-away-from-decades-of-excellence/comment-page-1/#comment-839408 Fri, 27 May 2016 01:35:16 +0000 /?p=19793#comment-839408 As a graduate of The ANU I can say that I’m more than a little disappointed. Sure, we had restructuring of schools and programs over the time I was there, but none of them as harmful to the school’s reputation as these!

]]> By: John McCreery /2016/05/26/canberras-loss-is-manoas-gain-as-the-anu-walks-away-from-decades-of-excellence/comment-page-1/#comment-839407 Fri, 27 May 2016 01:14:12 +0000 /?p=19793#comment-839407 Have signed the petition.

Interesting sidelight: The window for signing the petition appeared in Japanese with numerous Pacific Island places appearing in katakana, the san-serif syllabary, before the usual list of countries for which Japanese has kanji, Chinese character, names.

]]>