Kate Smithers

A big shout out to all the wonderful reviewers that have contributed to HERD in 2025. You’ve done an amazing job of handling the papers and providing constructive, collegial feedback to your peers. Of the 1500 original submissions in 2025, reviewers have guided 138 excellent papers through to publication. The full list of reviewers will appear on our website soon. Meantime, the editorial team would like to pass on our thanks to all who have made HERD such an important source of insights about the current state of higher education.

A big shout out to all the wonderful reviewers that have contributed to HERD in 2025:

There is something very tumblresque about this

Thread. 💔

I thought the same.

Even @andrewjnorton.bsky.social is on a short 1 year contract - hard for ECAs who roll from short contract to contract to feel they can have academic freedom (but Andrew is close enough to retirement to feel secure to speak out on key issues)
#herdsa2025

We should all be interested in policy and how it frames our work.

Grammatical amusements aside, TEQSA recommended a bunch of crackdowns and unis have pushed back recognising their place in community (to allow others to come on campus too).

Oh, and now onto casual underpayments (dare I say it, wage theft @katesmithers.bsky.social ...)

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Full article: Working at the level above: university promotion policies as a tool for wage theft and underpayment

Diabolus Ex Machina This Is Not An Essay

Possibly the best thing I've read about ChatGPT yet.

h/t @melaniemitchell.bsky.social

amandaguinzburg.substack.com/p/diabolus-e...

Spending to the moon and back Universities making staff, students and the public wear the costs.

‘in 2023, the Australian National University spent $11 million, just on executive travel. Who are these people - and did one of them go to the moon?’ Equivalent of 95 academic salaries spent on 15 people, averaging $3/4M each. @hannahforsyth.bsky.social hannahforsyth.substack.com/p/spending-t...

The rise of the pro-sessional: precarious employees taking on complex and faculty-critical roles Researchers have noted for several years that universities are increasingly relying on precariously employed academics rather than employing continuing or permanent staff members, and consequently,...

#auspol

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The rise of the pro-sessional: precarious employees taking on complex and faculty-critical roles Researchers have noted for several years that universities are increasingly relying on precariously employed academics rather than employing continuing or permanent staff members, and consequently,...

Interesting paper about the rise of the Pro-Sessional, 'a new category of university employee who is expected to carry out complex and faculty-critical roles despite not having the salary, job security or support of a tenured academic'. (open access)

#HigherEd

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This piece is extremely well written and beautiful in its eloquence.

I live in Bathurst and this one almost got me…

The same thing happened to me when I started running. I felt a bit weird about it at the time but then decided to embrace it, because I love it!

What you do is impressive: A tip I learned from learning to run I've never done anything in my life that gets as much credit as running. Even when I was just starting out, people were so impressed by me going for a run. I was given a huge amount of encouragement, even for short runs, slow runs, runs with lots of walking. As I passed various milestones (whether that was being able to run for 10 minutes without stopping, or my first 5k park run) I felt all the support along the way.

I've never done anything in my life that gets as much credit as running. Even when I was just starting out, people were so impressed by me going for a run. I was given a huge amount of encouragement, even for short runs, slow runs, runs with lots of walking.

Active Recovery: a tip I learned from learning to run A tip I learned from learning to run is 'active recovery'. In fact, there is a whole thing in running called a ... 'recovery run'! This horrified me when I first found out about it. Any run felt like a huge effort, surely any kind of running was the opposite of recovering from running! And it's true, you should be sleeping, and resting, and taking days off from running, to recover from running. But it's also a good idea to sometimes run, slowly, easily, not for too long, to help you recover from running. And this made me think about what active recovery strategies we might use to help us in our writing.

A tip I learned from learning to run is 'active recovery'. In fact, there is a whole thing in running called a 'recovery run'! This horrified me when I first found out about it.
But it made me think about what active recovery strategies we might use to help us in our writing.

Tonight I made carrot cake. I don’t have any cake holding device, so pie dish it is!

“The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.”
— Augusten Burroughs

Interested in sharing your insights, experience and advice about being an early career academic in Australia?
We are looking for those who have worked or work as an academic in an Australian university. You can be early career, mid-career, late-career or retired. See more: tinyurl.com/2j5xyaaw

The house of cards: equity-group students’ experiences of structural inequity in higher education Globally, correlations are reported between lower academic attainment and university students being a member of an ‘equity’ or ‘historically under-represented’ group. We seek to illuminate how this...

🚨🥳 new paper alert! The House of Cards paper (the companion to last year's seminar - youtube.com/watch?v=IO-y...) has been published. Thanks to Rola for her leadership of the project and the team for their hard work.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Decasualisation and the universities accord: an examination of university approaches Casual and fixed-term employment is rife across Australian universities, with current estimates suggesting that around 60% of the workforce are precariously employed. This level of precarious emplo...

This is probably compulsory reading for anyone who's involved in Australian higher education - big changes still rolling out, and who knows what will happen when the merry-go-round stops?

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This post is very interesting and puts into words something I had been feeling. Although I think I fell more into the paralysis/overwhelm part.

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.

A useful read.

Academics - we have a lot of skills to offer in organising against fascism.

Last night I used my skills as a teacher to educate new door knockers on how to talk to people in low conflict ways.

I felt useful. And I felt better about stuff

www.404media.co/you-cant-pos...

- A key contribution is the identification of positions, such as doctoral fellowships and practitioner positions, that diversify from the types of ‘scholarly teaching’ positions found in previous EBAs.

- In this paper we identify the range of university responses to the call for decasualisation in Australia
- Across the 35 EBAs analysed in this paper, there are a minimum of 2,554 FTE positions expected to be advertised by Australian universities within decasualisation schemes between 2021 and 2026

Decasualisation and the universities accord: an examination of university approaches Casual and fixed-term employment is rife across Australian universities, with current estimates suggesting that around 60% of the workforce are precariously employed. This level of precarious emplo...

New paper! In this paper, we examined the creation of decausalisation schemes in the latest round of Enterprise Bargaining Agreements. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

2025 Special Issue Launch ‘Reimagining Higher Education Learning Spaces' Are you interested in what the future could look like for learning spaces in Higher Education? Hear from contributors to the HERD 2025 SI.

📗🚀 Special Issue Launch! Next Wednesday!

‘Reimagining Higher Education Learning Spaces: Assembling Theory, Methods, and Practice’

🗓️ Wednesday 29 January 2025

Online 7-9pm Australian EST / 8-10am UK

🎟️ Register here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/2025-speci...

One of those cases where you just couldn’t make it up…

Perverse impacts of competitive funding: public school principals as revenue generators in the grant economy This paper focuses on competitive funding models for public schools, drawing on interviews with public school principals serving disadvantaged student cohorts in Australia. Public schools receive t...

What happens when we ask school principals to generate grant revenue? It's not necessarily good. New peer-reviewed study from Emma Rowe @sarahlangman.bsky.social Nicole Mockler & yours truly #edusky Free downloads at www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CXVBQ...