Thursday, June 25, 2015

Changes at ANU

Yesterday we heard the surprising news that Brian Schmidt would be the next vice-chancellor (president) of the ANU. Here at Crawford there is change too with the recent announcement that Tom Kompas would step down as School director after five years. We will be searching for a new school director and in the interim Bob Breunig will be acting director. That means that director of the International and Development Economics Program became vacant. I have agreed to be acting director of the program while Bob is directing the School (till 15 July 2016). There is more to the program that just the Masters of International and Development Economics. We also have a Masters of Environmental and Resource Economics. Effectively, though, it is the department of economics located at the Crawford Building. Crawford also has another department of economics - the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics - located in the Coombs Building. I was based there in 2009-2010. Other changes at Crawford is that Frank Jotzo is becoming deputy director of the School and John McCarthy is replacing him as READ director. I am leaving the READ group.


10 comments:

  1. Is Trevor Breusch retiring then?

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  2. It then means that Crawford website is not being updated regularly.

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  3. Yes, there have been problems in keeping it up to date since the web team and many other professional staff moved to the Coombs building. One of the things we will try to fix.

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  4. The web-site is still not updated. Is this a resource issue or management problem.

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  5. The website is an ongoing problem. There are several of these types of problems currently...

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  6. May be it could be related to the funding problems facing the Crawford school.

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  7. ANU is doing a lot of restructuring - centralization and standardization - of the admin side of things to try to save money and there are a lot of "teething problems" with the new ways of doing things.

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  8. I agree. However, I was informed that the restructuring may also affect academics. If you look at anu's performance in arwu ranking there has been a secular decline since 2006.

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  9. ANU and Crawford need to cut spending or find more revenue. In economics, US R1 universities can pay a lot more and so universities in Australia and Europe find it hard to compete to hire strong candidates. However, the latter is not due to current restructuring or anything.

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