Letter from the editors

Abstract

Dear Colleagues, Welcome to 2023, and for Australian higher education policy wonks and managers, what a big year it will be! A still new(ish) Australian Government has announced a fullscale review of higher education with a renewed focus on student equity. Appropriately we open this issue with three articles from Australia on this topic. Dollinger, Finneran and Ajjawi provide evidence that students with a disability face significant and unique barriers to work-integrated learning, an important contributor to the government (and student) employability agenda. Disability does not discriminate – anyone in society can be impacted – and their research also identifies the additional challenges of multiple disadvantages, such as having a disability and being in a regional or remote area. Harpur, Szucs and Willox take this further examining university strategic and policy responses to the challenges of ‘intersectionality’. Students from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds are not formally identified as equity students for university funding purposes in Australia, but as discussed by Berg, Grüttner and Baker, they almost certainly face intersectional educational disadvantage. From an international comparative perspective, including government and universitylevel policy analyses in Australia and Germany, their research suggests how such students could be better supported. Equity and support are also concerns for academics. In China, at least according to Jinghui Si’s interviewees, the tenure track has exposed young academics to an ‘involuted managerial culture’ of overwork and metrics-based competition to decide who is promoted or eliminated. For Cuong Huu Hoang and Marianne Turner, this may be characterised in their framework as ‘high scholarly expectations’ but with variable levels of institutional commitment to research. Their framework for understanding the experiences of expatriate academics returning to Vietnam (but applicable elsewhere in Asia) suggests that there is a risk of (re-)expatriation if academics with international options feel under-supported. Support for junior staff through mentoring is the focus of Freeman Akama and John Stephen Keenan’s study in Ghana. Their findings are not promising. Formal academic mentoring appears to be a ‘luxury that cannot be afforded’ by most colleges in Ghana. Where it is available, it tends to be a top-down, skills transfer approach. But there is room for some optimism. Ayesha Abdulla and colleagues find that academics that enrolled in a leadership development programme in the UAE report strong knowledge and competency development. They attribute this to a ‘social constructivist’ and ‘systemic framework’ and offer insights for other practitioners developing similar programmes. Finally, we have three book reviews spanning a range of higher education topics: Chan, Bista and Allen’s Online Teaching and Learning in Higher Education during COVID-19; Federico Cosenz’s JOURNAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY AND MANAGEMENT 2023, VOL. 45, NO. 1, 1–2 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2022.2159114