Are you struggling financially, on a low income or stressed about affording parking due to the significant increases?
If you have a Low Income Health Care Card (LIHC), you are entitled to support available from the ANU and the government. This list compiles the support services available to LIHC card holders.
A LIHC is used to prove financial struggle. It is a simple process and applications typically take about 30 days to process. Instructions on how to apply for a LIHC can be found here.
To be eligible for a LIHC you must:
Make less than $783 a week.
Be 19 or older (Under 19 eligibility is possible if you’re deemed independent or eligible for Family Tax Benefit).
Be an Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident (some visas are accepted — check here).
ANU INITIATIVES
(For some reason, you must be a domestic undergrad student to access any of this. Ridiculous.)
Students can apply for ANU initiatives here. They include:
Free student life surface parking permit at ANU
$150 textbook grant a semester
$150 student support grant a semester
Free 12 months ANU Sport membership
Free Griffin Hall membership (off-campus students)
Access to Community Connect Food Relief
GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES
Free Ambulances
Free public transport off-peak: on weekdays from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm, after 6:00 pm, and all day on weekends and public holidays
100 per cent off the registration fees of your motor vehicle registration (roughly 50-60 per cent of the total amount)
Greater access to bulk-billed GPs
Access to Canberra Health Services Public Dental
$200 spectacles subsidy from participating optometrists
Access to concession rate co-payments for PBS scheduled medications ($7.70 instead of the usual $31.60 maximum cost)
PBS Safety Net reduced to $277 from the regular $1,694 (this is how much you pay for PBS medications). After you’ve spent $277 with a LIHC — further PBS medication is 100% free.
THIRD-PARTY INITIATIVES
Concession fares for Neuron scooters
P.S.
Services Australia will give you a physical card — it is made from paper. You can access a digital card from the Centrelink App.
Resources like the Community Connect Food Relief and Parking support are likely limited, so bear this in mind if applying without genuine need.
Create art for Woroni’s online, radio and print content, adhering to strict deadlines and quality controls.
Be responsive to the Art Editor, attend meetings, Woroni events and social activities.
Sub-Editors must be able to adhere to strict deadlines and work as part of a team, including other Artists, the Senior Artist and the Art Editor. They will be expected to attend meetings roughly once per term as well as any other Woroni events and workshops.
As an Artist you will create between three and six artworks per print cycle (depending on what is assigned to you by the Art Editor), which will be published in print and/or online. Artists need to have proficiency in producing art of specific structural qualities (ppi, sizing, colour palette etc.). Previous experience in art and/or design is an advantage, but by no means necessary.
Ideal candidates will be
an innovative and creative thinker
a fantastic communicator
a team player
a good planner
approachable
Application form is below. Applications will close on Monday the 17th of February.
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Art Team Applications Semester 1 2025
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What are your preferred pronouns?*Phone NumberEmail*
Student Number*Degree*Degree Year*
QuestionsWhy would you like to join the team at Woroni?*What skills and experiences would you bring to the Art Team at Woroni?*Please provide a link to your portfolio/previous examples of your work (google drive, instagram account, or artstation are preferred).*What have you been reading/viewing/engaging with recently?What is your availability over the coming weeks for interviewing? This can be in person or online as preferred.*Some interviews will begin before applications have closed.
At any given moment in time, there are countless ripples travelling through spacetime, traversing the very fabric of our universe. These ripples are known as gravitational waves, and were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 in his general theory of relativity.
Almost a century later in 2015, direct evidence of gravitational waves was finally obtained when the Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) detectors, located in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana, USA detected the long-awaited signal.
The 0.2 second audible signal, which was described to resemble the “chirp” of a bird, was actually the product of a black hole collision. This event occurred more than 1 billion years ago. Two massive black holes merged into one, warping the fabric of spacetime and sending ripples through the universe which were eventually detected on Earth as tiny vibrations.
The successful LIGO experiment sent its own waves through the science community. The search for gravitational waves had consisted of decades of unrelenting hard work by over a thousand physicists around the globe and billions of dollars of investment, so the news was both extremely exciting and highly anticipated.
Now you might be wondering what is next for gravitational wave research. After all, the amazing detection of gravitational waves was already accomplished in 2015.
However, in reality, the exploration of gravitational waves has only just begun as researchers continue to use LIGO and a growing network of detectors around the world (e.g. LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration) to investigate the nature of our universe. In exciting news, the ANU, as part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), will play a central role in this global venture.
Last year I was lucky enough to get the chance to interview Dr Lilli Sun and Dr Jennie Wright, astrophysicists from ANU’s Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics to gain some further insight into the current field of gravitational wave research and ANU’s new LIGO remote control room.
Firstly, could you explain what a gravitational wave is in simple terms?
Jennie: A gravitational wave is a sort of stretching and squeezing of spacetime itself. When we have mass in the universe, it causes spacetime to curve, as explained in the theory of General Relativity. A gravitational wave is like a ripple instead of just a curve that stays still.
Lilli: You can also think of an analogy like a water wave – for example, dropping a stone in water and then seeing ripples spreading out. When we have something very heavy, like black holes that collide, they trigger those ripples in spacetime.
What are your specific research focuses and what are you currently working on?
Lilli: I do mostly astrophysics; using gravitational waves to study black holes, neutron stars, and even searching for dark matter. I do a lot of data analysis to see what the gravitational-wave signals tell us – e.g. whether it tells us that Einstein and his general theory of relativity is right or if there is something unexpected.
One of my projects is about searching for dark matter particles using gravitational waves – we don’t know if they exist or not, but analysing gravitational wave signatures is one possible way to look for them. I also work a bit on detectors, working with instrumentalists like Jennie.
Jennie: What I work on is somewhat related. I’m an instrumentalist as Lilli said, so I’m an experimental physicist and my job has two parts. Half of my time I spend at ANU, working on technologies that we can use to improve gravitational wave detectors of the future. We’re making them more sensitive so they can see further out into the universe and also can see a wider range of signal frequencies. And so, I work on developing technology that basically tries to distinguish things near the detector that look like gravitational wave sources, but actually aren’t – like a truck breaking near the detector, or just air moving near it.
The other part of my job is to help improve the current detectors. Since we use light in the gravitational wave detector to measure the stretching and squeezing of spacetime, we want to have as much light in there as possible. But, because mirrors and optical systems aren’t perfect, we sometimes lose quite a lot of light, so I look at those diagnostic measurements to try to figure out where we’re losing light.
Now that gravitational waves have already been detected, what is next for the field of gravitational wave research?
Lilli: There are many aspects actually: the 2015 discovery was only the beginning. The 2015 event for two black holes colliding into each other and the famous 2017 event for a two neutron star collision are very highlighted events, but now we are collecting many more of them including some special systems. The large number of detections will bring us important information of the population.
There are other types of gravitational waves. For example, we are looking for very faint gravitational waves from a single spinning neutron star. Neutron stars are not perfect spheres, so when they rotate they can generate very weak gravitational waves, which is something we are searching for. Another example is to probe dark matter using gravitational waves. So, we need more sensitive detectors and more of them in the network.
Moving onto the ANU remote control room, what exactly is a control room and how specifically would the remote control room work?
Jennie: So, a control room is usually a room you have next to a lab with an experiment in it: usually one that needs to be in either a really clean environment, or a slightly dangerous environment. So, you set all the physical parts of it up, so you can obtain electronic signals through to your control room that tell you what is happening. And then you can do all the data-taking and analysis from that control room.
In LIGO, they have the control rooms right next to the detector because they don’t want to be walking around next to the detector while it’s running, as they might introduce noise to it. They also have a whole bank of screens which decipher how each sub-system is working.
About the remote control room: whilst we don’t have a gravitational wave detector in Australia, many Australian scientists have been involved in gravitational wave detection from the start, and so this allows us to participate in improving the detector remotely. So, you can see on some of the screens here, I have a read-out of the different sub-systems and if they’re working correctly. For example, green tells us that they’re observing data and red tells us that they’re down and need to be fixed. And this is all in real time.
That’s really useful, because before we had this, we just had the little screen on our computers, and you had to try to view everything simultaneously and it was quite difficult. My colleagues and I will also occasionally do shifts when the detector is running, because we might have to call up people in other countries. If there’s an exciting gravitational wave event, we sometimes need to announce things to other astronomers, so they can point their telescopes to certain parts of the sky.
Lilli: Although it’s a ‘remote’ control room, you can still control some of the sub-systems of the detector. It’s just that we need to be very careful, especially during observation. There will be someone in charge in the real control room, and we can collaborate with them. The advantage of having the remote control room is that it makes it much easier for Australian colleagues, as we are not close to the detector, but we can read off the real-time information in a much more convenient way, on the other side of the world.
So, the detector isn’t always on all the time?
Jennie: There’s a trade-off between the physicists who work on improving it, and the astronomers who want to collect data using it. If you improve the sensitivity, you’re more likely to see really exciting events we haven’t seen before. But if you increase the time the detector is on for, you’re also more likely to see more events. So, there are sometimes periods where we’re not touching the detector for around 18 months, and periods where there is no data collection for a year, and maintenance and upgrading occurs.
From a bigger perspective, what role is Australia and ANU playing in the further research of gravitational waves?
Lilli: Australia is one of the major collaborators in the large international LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA collaboration. There is a large group here working on gravitational wave astrophysics and detector science. These days, Australian scientists also want to propose and work towards building an Australian detector in the future, which is pretty exciting.
Right now, we are also thinking about the next generation detectors – like what kind of design and technology is needed that can give us a one-order of magnitude increase in sensitivity, which can get us much deeper into the universe. Australian colleagues are working on both the existing science of gravitational waves, but also the future.
Jennie: In the past, Australia has developed sub-systems which are now used in the detector, contributing mirrors for example. Also, Lilli is in charge of the calibration group for LIGO, and that’s just an example, but we have a lot of staff in Australia who are leading some aspect of the LIGO scientific collaboration’s research. We’ve also been instrumental in the design of something called the Squeezer which is used in LIGO to improve its sensitivity, making the detectors the quantum instruments that they are.
Lilli: Regarding astrophysics and data analysis, there are quite a few large groups from different Australian universities within OzGrav working on the data being collected these days. A lot of studies are carried out in Australia, but we also work very closely with international colleagues.
What are some benefits of these large-scale projects, e.g. do they help bring countries closer together and encourage international cooperation?
Lilli: I think yes, definitely. These days, it’s getting difficult to do small narrow research projects by yourself. With projects like gravitational wave detectors, you have large instruments, and that involves many different aspects: you need to work with engineers on different sub-systems, theoretical physicists to understand how the astrophysics work, software engineers and data analysts for dealing with huge amounts of data, and also astronomers who do different kinds of follow-up observations. All these people are playing important roles, and they come from different countries, different parts of the world. Close collaboration is critical.
Jennie: I think it’s really useful to have these big projects, because any falling out between countries can get in the way. It also definitely broadened my horizons, as I’m from Scotland, which isn’t as multicultural. Without science, I definitely wouldn’t have travelled and experienced different cultures as much.
Last question, what’s your advice for students looking to get into this field or just interested in your research?
Lilli: I think there are lots of chances for students to talk to us and do small projects. If they’re really interested there are lots of ways to get into the field. We do lots of summer/winter projects and we also teach undergraduate courses, where we discuss gravitational waves at a more basic level. Many students are interested, and we have extended discussions and they come to us for small projects or Honours and end up staying for PhD.
Jennie: I think definitely the best way is just to email someone who works in the fields. Academics love students being interested in their research, otherwise they wouldn’t be working at a university and teaching. I’m really happy whenever a student asks me, and I think that’s how I got involved in the field too.
Lilli: Yes, definitely talk to academics and lecturers in the field if you’re interested.
Jennie: And I think that’s the same in all areas of science as well, people are super keen to tell you about their research, you just have to ask them.
Photograph of some of the screens in the control room.
Dr Jennie Wright (left) and Dr Lilli Sun (right) in the remote control room.
A huge thank you to Dr Lilli Sun and Dr Jennie Wright for taking the time to do an interview and for so generously sharing their knowledge.
Comments Off on The Ghost of the Author in the Machine
In I, Robot (2004), Will Smith plays detective Del Spooner, investigating a murder he believes was committed by a robot. In a heated interrogation scene, he dismisses the prime robot-suspect’s claim that it feels fear, because robots don’t feel anything.
“Can a robot write a symphony?” He asks. “Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?”
I, Robot is set in 2035, but in 2023 the answer to Spooner’s question is ‘yes’. Robots – artificial intelligence – are able to do both these things. Generative AI like Midjourney and Chat GPT have muscled their way into the one area we thought was uniquely human: art.
It’s therefore no surprise that paranoia about AI sentience has worsened in recent years. AI can pass the Turing Test, convince a seasoned, if slightly detached, Google engineer it’s alive, and create art that expresses emotions it shouldn’t be able to feel. Maybe Her, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Matrix were right, maybe we’re due for the AI uprising, or robot girlfriends, or the end of the world as we know it.
Or maybe not. As David Levy writes in Love and Sex With Robots, ‘Turing’s position [is that] if a machine gives the appearance of being intelligent, we should assume that it is indeed intelligent.’ But the appearance of intelligence isn’t the same as actual intelligence. And AI, despite its name, isn’t actually intelligent.
Take, for example, Chat GPT. It’s a kind of AI called a Large Language Model (LLM), trained on a massive amount of human text: webpages, chatrooms, novels. It can read more in an hour than you could read in a lifetime. It separates every word it encounters, assigns them a number from 1 to 170,000 or so, and groups them based on how frequently they appear together. To AI, that’s all language is: a huge network of numbers weighted by the probability of appearing in the same text. Which is why when you ask Chat GPT-4, the most advanced generative AI commercially available, how many l’s are in the word ‘intellectual’, it tells you that there are two. Words are just numbered blocks, which means it has no idea what letters are, let alone which ones make up the word ‘intellectual’.
AI operates like an incredibly advanced version of the predictive text on your phone. That’s why when you put a prompt into Chat GPT, its answer appears word by word. It’s calculating, in real time, what word is most likely to come next, with just enough randomness to give its responses the fallibility of human tone. It doesn’t understand your question, nor its answer. A poem, an article, your Foundations of Australian Law essay – all of these are just a matrix of numbers to Chat GPT. When it “reads,” it consumes without digesting, and regurgitates complicated concepts, fully-formed, back onto the screen. It’s not intelligent; it’s just very good at pretending to be – or would be, if it had the sentience to pretend. When you aren’t giving it a command it goes dark. Even in this sleep, it doesn’t dream. Like Barbie’s Ken, AI ‘only exist in the warmth of [our] gaze.’
We wouldn’t want a partner who only pretends to love us while on the inside they feel nothing. No matter how convincing they were, how well they made the motions of desire, something would be fundamentally wrong with the relationship. Is this the same with artists? Does it matter that the machine that writes love poetry can’t feel love? Detective Spooner asks about masterpieces and symphonies, and I’d be putting my head in the sand if I denied that the work AI produces can be beautiful. If a novel is well-written, or a song sounds nice, does the identity of the creator matter at all?
In “The Death of the Author”, French literary theorist Roland Barthes argues that the author is irrelevant to the meaning of a text. Instead, the reader’s interpretation takes precedence. Authors merely weave a ‘tissue of quotations’, rearranging words and blending styles in what is, at best, a slightly new way of doing things. Yet, isn’t this strikingly like the way AI produces content: mixing words and styles into a coherent soup for the audience to enjoy and interpret in whatever way they’d like. If the audience decides the meaning, as Barthes says we should, then it doesn’t really matter if the author didn’t mean anything at all.
The problem with this, among other things, is that if an author has no opinions, context or identity then we can’t understand their motivations. AI’s decision-making process is inscrutable. Although we feed it text, we have no control over what AI actually learns from that text, the connections it makes between words or the probability it assigns to each of these weighted connections. Particularly concerning is how little we know about what biases or assumptions are being built into these connections.
In 2021, a team of researchers from the University of Washington and the Technical University of Munich trained virtual robots on CLIP, an LLM created by OpenAI (better known for creating Chat GPT). Like other LLMs, it was trained on billions of captioned images from all over the web. Like other LLMs, some of the content it produced was disturbing. When asked to identify ‘homemakers’, black and latina women were commonly selected than white men, and when asked to identify ‘criminals’, black men were chosen nine percent more often than white men.
This is what’s known as an alignment problem: the values of the AI don’t align with ours. Companies like OpenAI try to counter this with ‘reinforcement learning from human feedback’, where they hire human contractors to rate responses and reward Chat GPT for creating ‘value-aligned’ text. But without a way to divine how or why AI makes the choices it does, it can’t be stopped at the source, and anyone who tries is playing whack-a-mole. Once they’ve stopped the AI from identifying men of colour as inherently criminal, a new, AI-optimised kind of racism will have reared its head.
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) strikes provided a grim insight into how this could shape our media. Many of the actors striking were background actors, who said they’d already been bodyscanned by their employers on jobs. Hollywood is no stranger to AI film editing, with tools that make actors look younger or older, replace their dialogue, and move their mouths in time with dubbed audio. With digital cloning, AI may be able to take the jobs of background actors altogether, populating scenes with CGI using the models of real people it’s scanned.
If AI is told to cast and puppet a hospital scene, who will it choose to play the doctor and who will it choose to play the janitor? Media sends a message, and even the background actors can indicate the kind of people who deserve to be in a certain space.
It’s easy to put this down to the AI reflecting our own evil, like some allegorical Dorian Gray mirror, wagging its finger at our foolish human bigotry. But we can’t know that, and we can’t fix it. Training it on more progressive media wouldn’t help, because when the output isn’t bigoted it could just be wrong. AI may not dream, but it hallucinates. LLMs are designed to spit out what is probable rather than what is right, and there are countless examples where AI generated information – dates, historical events, court cases – has just been wrong.
If that hospital scene is written by AI, what advice will the doctor be giving their patient? Hospital dramas aren’t exactly shining beacons of accuracy, but AI can spread dangerous misinformation. When testing an AI (specifically another kind of AI called a deep neural network designed for image-based diagnosis) studies showed that it was prone to superficial errors its human counterparts never made. Part of the problem, apparently, was that the researchers didn’t know which features the AI was using to detect the symptoms in the image it analysed.
Even if there were human fact-checkers and consultants looking over the AI’s shoulder every step of the way (at which point, why have the AI there at all?), its work would still be dangerously flawed. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway writes that when the feminist movement tries to find a single, shared female experience, it risks taxonomising the movement, forcefully superimposing the experience of the majority onto the minority so that they all fit the mould of ‘woman’. This resulted in what Haraway called an “embarrassed silence about race” – excluding the experiences of women of colour when they didn’t fit in. AI works in averages, finding common features and patching them together, assimilating diverse art, text and experiences into a single narrative. What will it be silent about?
Human media is by no means perfect, but at least it has creators we can hold accountable, understand and learn from. In an era where we’re striving for media diversity, allowing these bots to dictate our art will set us back.
Let’s say, however, for the sake of argument, that somehow we iron out all these problems and design the wokest AI ever, one that creates complex, thoughtful media giving voice to a diverse range of people and experiences. It still wouldn’t be worth it. Contrary to Barthes’ opinion, authorship does matter.
In I, Robot, the robot murder suspect – ‘Sonny’ – answers Spooner’s question, “Can a robot write a symphony?” with another question: “Can you?”
It’s kinda got him there. Detective Spooner, like most of us, isn’t a creative genius. He can’t write a symphony or paint a masterpiece. But the world is still full of imperfect art.
I’m teaching myself to use oil paints. I like watching ShakeSoc plays, even the ones my friends aren’t in. Some of the art that has meant the most to me, that has made me feel seen, right down to the most private, shameful experiences, has been created by amateur artists. People who publish their work online or sell it on their own website, people who won’t or can’t get on a bigger screen.
If the most important thing about art is that it’s technically good – that the novels are well-written, that the music sounds nice – then what’s the point of any of this? Why does it matter?
Humans have been telling each other stories since the invention of language. When you watch a movie or read a book or look at a piece of art you are looking at the work of anywhere between one and 100, 000 people, all of whom have come together to tell you a story. Isn’t that beautiful? Why would you want anything else, when someone has reached out their hand across time and space to hold yours?
If you’re okay to sit and consume passively racist, AI-generated slop for the rest of your life, then our values are fundamentally misaligned and I have no idea why you’ve read this far. But if you, like me, think that people and their art matter, then don’t buy media created by AI. Support studios like A24 that treat their human actors well. Support the strikes in the entertainment industry, both the Writer’s Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, whose demands include AI regulations to protect writers and their work. Support amateurs. It’s important that our artists are and continue to be real people – people just like us and people nothing like us.
Update: On November 8th, after this piece was published in Unsettled, SAG-AFTRA reached a deal with studios and streamers. The deal will allow ‘synthetic performers’ to take roles, though it will require producers to gain the consent of and bargain with the human performer whose features are being used to generate the synthetic performer.
The deal was ratified by SAG-AFTRA members on December 5th.
Comments Off on Eight Years Later: Schmidt’s Legacy
On the last day of the mid-semester break, campus is quiet when we sit down with Brian Schmidt. The brown brick Chancellery building is not a hub of student activity, and as we walk over it appears a bit like ANU’s own Battersea power station. Inside, it has been done up in traditional Australian colours: rusty red, muted orange, yellow here and there, brown wood panelling, and a soft sense of beige. As we wait in the lobby, the building feels a bit empty, except for when someone walks through and jumps into the elevator.
The tranquillity is pierced, but not broken, by ANU’s departing Vice-Chancellor and Nobel laureate, Brian Schmidt. He is not loud, but passionate, and he has a lot to say on a lot of things. But most notably, he is an arm-waver. As he speaks, every concept is given a corresponding gesture. Dwelling on the aim of an inclusive community, he swings his arms out wide, and when he waves off criticism about large capital purchases, he points to where the two purchases sit, beyond the office and the gum trees outside.
In February this year, at his State of the University speech, Schmidt announced that this year would be his last in the role and that he will be returning to research and teaching. It is hard to know if Schmidt’s status as a cultural icon comes from who he is, or from his last name, which has proved endlessly punnable for ANU students.
Having spent eight years in the top full-time position at the University, he is tired of the work.
When we ask him about his pay, which is less than most other Vice-Chancellors in the country, he is clear that he would never be a Vice-Chancellor at another university, and that he did this for the ANU. Of course, he is still paid in the ballpark of $500,000. He argues there would be a “disequilibrium” if he were paid less than the people he hires, and the people he hires are paid around that much.
Schmidt is distinctly American as well. Listening to this thick accent while tall gum trees sway outside, with classic Canberra pollen in the air, feels slightly anachronistic. It extends beyond his accent though. When he speaks of his aims as Vice-Chancellor, it is about putting ANU in the same league as other word-class institutions. The first that comes to him is Harvard. When he discusses inclusion on campus, he does so in a distinctly American liberal tone: disagreeing with what may be said, but defending people’s right to say it.
As we begin to ask Schmidt about his time at the ANU, the first thing that becomes apparent is his candour.
He wants to talk about the areas where the ANU is not doing well.
We open by asking him if he is excited to return to a quieter pace of life, and he is quick to describe the job as relentless, throwing his life out of balance. There is, he says, a lot of unpleasantness to it. To explain further, he uses what sounds like a frequent anecdote: 20,000 people come to the ANU everyday, and most people work 20,000 days in their life, meaning that everyday is bound to be the best day of one person’s life and the worst day of someone else’s. And he estimates they deal with one out of ten people who are having the worst day of their life. Throughout the interview he returns to the issue of sexual assault, and it seems he sometimes has to address events like this. He admits that this includes executing the procedural fairness of the university.
The Long View
With a mammoth institution like the ANU, it is difficult to know what gives it momentum and what can push it to change course. Schmidt says his focus has always been on students, despite the expectation that as an academic he would focus on research. In his eyes, his impact has been to give the campus and the University’s research “the foundation of a vibrant student community,” including a distinctly Australian undergraduate experience. ANU, he believes, may lack the “gold plating” of Harvard, but he maintains that
“if you get a degree from ANU, it’s as good as a Harvard degree.”
Schmidt attended Harvard for his postgraduate and then taught at the ANU, so he is better placed to comment on the two universities than most. But ANU did slip this year in the Global QS rankings, suggesting that the gold plating may not be the only thing ANU is missing. Schmidt has clearly thought about this or at least had this discussion before. He rejects the methodology of rankings, like QS or Times Higher Education, arguing they don’t reflect the ANU’s mission. He says the focus should be on students’ experiences on campus, and that Quilt surveys show that ANU students have good experiences on campus, better than most other Australian universities. He also questions the methodology, asking rhetorically how something like QS can measure satisfaction better than Quilt. The value of ANU lies in breaking people out of their “high school clique” and exposing them to the diversity of Australia. Schmidt believes on-campus life and ANU scholarships and programs achieves this.
Some ANU students may reject this characterisation of the on-campus experience. ANU has one of the lowest enrollment rates for low socioeconomic students, and the interstate move for many students presents a cost barrier not often found at other major universities. On-campus rent is itself more expensive than off-campus, further alienating the people who Schmidt wants to include. But, this may also reflect the growing cost of tertiary education in Australia, as higher inflation means that HECS has now become an important, if not crippling, debt for many young people.
The government, in Schmidt’s eyes, is not doing enough to support inclusivity and diversity across the sector, but to him ANU is doing more than most,
in an area where it matters more.
When he talks about inclusion, Schmidt means more than just making students feel included. He chastises the idea that certain people should not be allowed to speak at the ANU, and he is clearly frustrated when he brings up the example of Michele Bullock’s address. Bullock, now the Reserve Bank Governor, gave an address on campus which was briefly interrupted by students who said that if unemployment had to increase to reduce inflation, Bullock’s job should be the first to go. Holding an enlarged Jobseeker application form, the students walked past the stage, yelling with a megaphone, before being escorted out. As he explains his philosophy on free speech, he echoes historian Evelyn Hall’s famous quote, often attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Schmidt’s line of thinking fits into the broader issue of free speech on university campuses across the anglophone world. In Britain, the US and here, many controversial speakers have had events brought to a standstill by students protesting. The subject matter of the speakers has ranged, from Malcolm Turnbull at the University of Sydney, to transphobic speakers and academics. Schmidt wants students to ask hard questions, not stand up and shout, or to protest outside the event. Of course, a student asking a question gets probably half a minute of airtime, someone like Bullock gets the full hour.
More Recently
Serving as Vice-Chancellor for eight years – two four year terms – Schmidt has gone round the block more than a few times. His second term, though, was dominated by COVID-19, which presented a short-term and a long-term challenge. With one of the largest on-campus populations in the country, ANU administered its own lockdown. This presented immediate issues, from food provision for students living with communal kitchens or eateries, as well as the money spent on Rapid Antigen Tests and personal protective equipment. Part of the ANU lockdown involved Senior Residents distributing food to rooms, something they were not paid for and which led to protests, especially from Burton and Garran Hall. He noted the pay freeze agreed to in early 2020 as an example of a hard decision he had to make about the University’s staff: had staff not agreed to it, he says he would have had to make 90 more staff redundant.
In the long term, COVID-19 tightened the belt of ANU, and Schmidt has found that the financial constrictions stemming from the pandemic have impacted everything they do. “It’s one thing,” he says, “just being flat, but
it’s another thing having pressure to become smaller and… it’s not an easy place to be squeezed.”
There is, for him, no easy way to make things work. With staff enterprise bargaining having concluded this year, one of the centre points of the debate was how much the ANU could afford to pay.
Schmidt, from his own description, was not a diehard unionist before he became Vice-Chancellor, he only took note of union opposition to hiring young researchers, chiefly because he was a young researcher. However, he now sees the value in having the views and values of staff represented, because otherwise “there’s no one to talk to and you can’t actually get a sensible agreement.” But, he follows this up with an admonishment of what he calls “the theatre of the strike…
call it whatever you want, it’s theatre from my perspective.”
He doesn’t see the cause for the half-day strike, which, with around 300 participants, was one of the largest protests on campus in the last few years. He claims that it didn’t matter in the end, as the bargaining ended up where he wanted it to, although he would have taken the first deal: a payrise of about 16% over five years (compared to the 18% in the final deal). He believes that on casualisation, he was offering terms that were “far more exciting” than the language “that the Melbourne union office was using.”
Key Issues
Another recurring challenge for him, and for university administration across the country, has been sexual assault and harassment (SASH). Last year, the National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) found that ANU had the second-highest rate of assault in the nation, and the highest of all Group of Eight universities. This year saw the establishment of the Student Safety and Wellbeing Committee (SSWC), which Schmidt points out is the only committee of its stature – reporting directly to ANU Council – in the country. Last year the University also established the Student Safety and Wellbeing Team to provide assistance for students and to walk them through the often quite complex processes of the University. These are two key student demands that the ANU has met, and Schmidt is now “much more comfortable” with the position and work that the University is doing on SASH.
Sexual assault in the university sector is more likely to happen the more people live on campus, and Schmidt both understands that ANU has substantial work to do, but also thinks that ANU’s on-campus nature contributes to its poor performance. However, this is not an excuse for him, and he believes it only increases the University’s responsibility. With the SSWC reporting to the Council and having both students and sexual violence experts sit on it, it is likely that ANU is entering a new era in reform around SASH. Whether the University takes up the committee’s recommendations, will be the work of the next Vice-Chancellor. Earlier this year, Woroni reported on the ANU’s failure to progress its Disability Access Plan; it remains to be seen if the University has learnt from its mistakes.
Another alleged mistake the ANU, and Schmidt personally, are often charged with is the purchase of large capital assets to be developed in the future. In 2021, he oversaw the purchase of a $17 million disused bus stop from the ACT, and this year he announced another similarly large purchase of a parking lot to build a new health sciences precinct on. Schmidt denies that the purchases are too expensive, noting that the cost of the acquisitions are amortised to be paid over a number of years and that the land will be used to realise the University’s long-term goals. He also says the purchases were a drop in the ocean compared to the pay rises the NTEU demanded.
The conversation next turned to the ANU’s involvement in AUKUS, which Schmidt denies: “It’s news to me.” Schmidt made a point not often discussed by students which is that the ANU, as the national university, ought to meet the educational needs of government policy. Hence, if there is to be a nuclear-powered submarine program, and Schmidt does not express his views on the alliance itself, then the ANU should provide the requisite education. It’s a reason which doesn’t seem to always be applied evenly at the University, which attempted to cut its Bachelor of Public Policy (BPP) last year, a degree which surely aligns to the government’s interests, even if broader society may not care. Of course, the BPP does not map onto any specific government policy, but one can imagine that if any university is to teach it, it should be the ANU, along similar lines to Schmidt’s thinking.
Education and research into nuclear energy and nuclear-powered submarines is also part of successful nuclear stewardship, Schmidt believes. This argument is a bit more familiar to students, with speakers at the student union arguing that there is a space for nuclear research. However, the controversy revolves around the conditions of any AUKUS-related scholarship that the Department of Defence offers. Will recipients be expected to work on AUKUS submarines, and what steps will be taken to ensure the education can’t be easily applied to nuclear armament? Without more details, these are moot questions, and we will have to wait until the scholarship program is formally announced.
No one person can accomplish everything, so what would Schmidt like to have achieved as Vice-Chancellor but never did? An academic overlay in on-campus residences, something he promises he’ll work on after his term, and hence tells us to stay tuned for. The second aim is more equity scholarships. The goal “is that every person who needs a scholarship in first year should get one.” ANU has a growing asset pool, and it may be that, like Harvard, Schmidt wants to fund equity scholarships from this pool. He doesn’t pull his punches though, and says the federal government could do more to fund tertiary education.
Looking Forward
On Tuesday the 26th August, ANU announced that Professor Genevieve Bell would be its 13th Vice-Chancellor. She will be the first woman in the position, and Schmidt mentioned his passion for a more equitable hiring as Vice-Chancellor. Bell, like Schmidt, comes from the ANU, however she has worked as the Director of the School of Cybernetics, a more administrative role than academic. But, her experience in computing and anthropology makes her well-poised to lead the University in the age of AI, or at least the age of paranoia around AI.
Schmidt’s advice for Bell is clear: “Get out and talk to people, talk to students, include the students in the decision making that affects them.” At the conclusion of our interview, Schmidt mentioned that he doesn’t want to be an “alien overlord” believing that Vice-Chancellors must be “a part of the community, not an alien overlord.” Schmidt can be seen around Kambri fairly frequently, including in the queue at Daily Market. Having provided the name of ANU Schmidtposting, the ANU community’s largest online community, he is in a sense, instantly recognisable, and understood to be a part of the ANU. Whether he seems like a member of the ANU community is up to the reader.
I grew up in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, a place not many ANU students are from. Looking back on high school there, even though it wasn’t the best period in my life, it made me feel like I somewhat belonged. There was always a new club for me to join and I had a great group of friends, who never made me feel isolated for the things I found interesting. Maybe it was because of all those American college movies I had watched growing up, and all those YouTube videos I had watched in anticipation, but I believed that university would be the place where I became more confident and grew into myself. I assumed university would make me feel like I completely belonged.
I had two weeks of the ‘University experience’ before COVID-19 hit, but it was nothing like I expected. That first week of uni, I remember printing out my resume and immediately applying for every job in sight. I assumed every student was doing the same. I was sorely mistaken.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only 40% of people in tertiary education are working part-time. I was surprised when I found out that some students at ANU have never had to work, and will not have to work throughout their entire degree, to take care of themselves. This made me feel like an imposter at ANU, acutely out of place at such a prestigious university.
My first tutorial at ANU also made me feel like I was out of place. The way tutors speak is something that still perplexes me to this day. I felt like I was sitting in a Master’s program for International Relations, not my first ever uni class. I believe lots of ANU students have felt this, as I often see it plastered all over ANU Confessions. Some lecturers do not know how to teach and they can often make the course feel inaccessible. It became even more difficult over COVID-19 when everything was online; it was even harder to learn. For example, I took a French Introduction course, thinking it would be a pretty simple class. I had taken a little French in high school and thought I would have an advantage, – I was wrong. The lecturer attempted to teach a whole year of high school French in a few weeks!
There seems to be a pervasive expectation at ANU that University is our only priority, and ANU continually fails to take into account the complex and busy lives of its students. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in 2017 – 2018, 15% of people ages 18-24 had experienced high levels of psychological distress. With the impact of COVID-19, I know that this would have increased. As a student who works part-time and suffers from psychological distress, I can attest that the help provided by ANU is minuscule. Because of this, it is so easy to feel like you do not belong, or feel out of place. That first year of university impacted how I saw myself. The thing about imposter syndrome is, everything you feel about yourself is tipped on its head. The way you perceive yourself and the people around you is completely different. You internalise it and feel like you are the only one feeling this way – as if you are the only person who is in the wrong place.
Imposter syndrome also makes you feel like you are in a constant race to keep up, and ANU reinforces that toxic narrative.
Have you ever noticed that most tutorials seem to be during the middle of the day, making it difficult to work and study at the same time? Some lecturers, even after COVID-19, still expect students to go to their lectures in-person and you may even lose participation points if you do not attend. I do not have time to go to a three-hour lecture on a Monday morning, especially when it’s a day I work. ANU perpetuates the pressure to keep up with your peers, you need to graduate when everyone else graduates, you need to get HDs, and you need to be prefect, mentally and physically
When you break them down, though, none of these goals make sense. When it comes to graduating ‘on time’, people change their degrees, I know, shocking! When you do that, you often end up extending the time you need to study before graduating. Many people also do fewer courses to work or take care of their mental health, which also extends their degrees. It feels like to finish your degree perfectly in three or four years would mean that you didn’t work, and never had a mental breakdown, ever!
Moving on to pressure to get all D’s or HDs, not all courses are the same, also shocking! Unless you have done the course already, you do not know what to expect. Your tutor might be a harsh marker and maybe the last exam is really hard for no reason. When you take a look again at these societal expectations that make everyone feel like they are doing something wrong, you realise that they do not make any sense. Many students take time off here and there, many students are working multiple jobs to afford to stay in Canberra and many students are simply trying to pass their courses and survive.
The one thing imposter syndrome has taught me was that it is easy to idealise everyone around you and look down on yourself, what is more difficult is to treat yourself with kindness and remember that this path in life is your own and no one else’s. Tertiary systems also need to look at every student as an individual and provide more financial and mental resources. While I do not believe that uni will ever get easier, especially if ANU continues to forget about the welfare of their students, I do believe that the communities students have created, such as ANU Confessions and ANU Schmidtposting will continue to bring us comfort, so we never fully feel alone.
Comments Off on Editorial | Support your teachers, support the strikes
On Thursday of Bush Week, the 27th of July, ANU staff will strike for better pay, working conditions, and to reverse the casualisation so rampant in the tertiary sector. The students of this University have an obligation to stand in solidarity with staff: we must support our teachers, we must support the strikes.
One of the most important jobs in society is educating future generations. And yet, our society pays the most socially useful jobs, some of the lowest wages, and lecturers and tutors are no different. They are underpaid, under-supported and overworked. Burdened not by our assessments, questions, and debates, but by the ever-increasing administrative work of the University. They are stretched thin, and to add insult to injury, they are screwed over by the ANU.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has brought several key demands to the bargaining table. Some have seen success, as Woroni has previously reported. But, where university management remains most intransigent is exactly where change is needed most. Our teachers deserve to be paid more, more because of how valuable their work is, more because of how difficult it is, and more because of the cost-of-living crisis that they must struggle through.
The ANU recently revised its previous paltry pay rise. Despite the overall increase this still includes an administrative pay rise from earlier this year, and ignores the pay rise due from 2022. The University has remained stubbornly opposed to giving casual employees – often fellow undergraduate and postgraduate students marking assessments and teaching tutorials – clear paths to permanent work. Casual research assistants are often paid from research funding grants, and the dilemma between claiming the full hours worked and eating into the research budget of a supposedly research-based university is real. Such casual work is rife with exploitation.
Capitalist ideology preaches the ultimate freedom of the market. The ultimate freedom of the worker is to strike for better conditions, to stand in solidarity and withhold the most valuable part of the production process: human labour. But capitalism does not practise what it preaches, and industrial action is increasingly curtailed, while corporate freedom – from profiteering to monopolisation and downright fraud – remains untouchable. In this climate, every strike reiterates the importance and power of workers, even as those workers are straw manned as “intellectual elites.” ANU staff should strike, so that they can reassert their power as the foundation of this University.
Students are familiar by now with the paradox of apparently being the customer of the University, and yet constantly having their demands rejected, their voices ignored. When we stand in solidarity with staff, we remind the University that it is not run by vice-chancellors or deputy vice-chancellors who want to cut degrees. We remind them that hardworking teachers and students are the lifeblood of this University. The relationship between the student and the teacher is the nexus of learning and education, this relationship cannot exist when teachers cannot live off their wages.
Our University’s status is slipping. We’re no longer amongst the top-ranking universities in Australia, and our research funding has fallen, driving lower revenues. Our University increasingly leans into predatory, exploitative systems of revenue generation. From dodgy financing deals leading to drastic rent-increases to prosecuting students over parking fines, it is creating a conflict between the institution and the person, whether they be student or staff. Higher pay and better support for staff is going to improve learning outcomes, not spending $17 million on a health precinct when the researchers to work there are not paid enough.
The corporatisation of the University goes hand in hand with poorer working standards. As managerial and finance-sector thinking has infiltrated the tertiary sector, staff have seen themselves lumped with more and more administrative work. Even as the genuinely helpful administrative work, such as special considerations and accessibility concerns, is still considered voluntary.
Woroni is a proudly independent media outlet, but on this, we agree with ANUSA: staff working conditions are student learning conditions. If we won’t stand in solidarity with teachers out of principle, then we can at least support them knowing that the better paid they are and the more flexible their work is, the better it will be for us.
Take just one example: assessment marking. Often, casual staff are paid per assessment marked, or paid per hour with the expectation that they mark a certain number of assessments in that time. Both practices drive markers to spend less time on each assessment, increasing the likelihood of unfair marks on students. The NTEU demand for pathways out of casualisation can help ensure markers are not pressured and exploited, and that students’ assessments are not rushed through.
And in turn, solidarity begets solidarity. Rent for next year has increased again, meaning that the cheapest student accommodation now exceeds the average rent one person pays living in a three bedroom sharehouse. We are seeing continued cuts in degrees and changes to the curriculum that remove the flexibility so many students desire. ANU has the highest sexual assault rate of any Group of Eight university. If we stand with staff, they will stand with us at our next protest. Stand with no one, and no one stands with you.
It is unclear how the staff strikes will progress from Bush Week. In other, more corporate universities like the University of Sydney, the strikes continued for months. Since the ANU NTEU branch announced its intent to strike, the ANU has moved forward on some issues. But, if management digs its heel in, we may see strikes throughout Semester 2. We may see picket lines and multi-day strikes and as frustrating as some may find these, it is our obligation to support better standards for educators. Staff will already be under pressure to compromise and give in to the University’s demands. Students have an obligation to stand with staff, to remove the guilt-tripping and emotional argument and say that no, strikes do not negatively impact students, not in the long run.
Support your teachers, turn out to the rally on the 27th of July. Don’t complain when class is cancelled because of industrial action, let your striking teachers know you support them, that you want this too. Remind the University who really matters.
Support the strikes.
The students of this University have an obligation to stand in solidarity with staff: we must support our teachers, we must support the strikes.
Comments Off on Clubscore’s Fantasy Museum of Trans Excellence and Portal to Other Dimensions
One of the most innovative and exciting elements to emerge from the Unchartered Territory festival is Clubscore’s Fantasy Museum of Trans Excellence and Portal to Other Dimensions.
The Fantasy Museum, located in the Kambri Gallery at ANU, is a free installation which acts as a portal, transporting guests to another dimension, in which openly trans and gender diverse people have always been included and celebrated in sport.
The museum allows guests to move through the space in their own time, and engage with the ‘artifacts’. These artifacts represent the sporting careers of imagined trans and gender diverse athletes from this fantasy universe of acceptance. The artifacts are historical, sensory and interactive, and at times funny. The installation invites viewers to “take a step back from the complexity of this reality” and focus on joy, inclusiveness and the possibilities of the future.
The Fantasy Museum is the brainchild of Clubscore, which is made up of Ketura Budd and Zev Aviv, two non-binary artists and sports fans. Clubscore, started in 2019, is a queer sports and art collective which aims to centre the experiences of trans and gender diverse people in sports, and the Fantasy Museum is the collective’s first public art work.
“Sadly there are not that many trans and gender diverse heroes, we wanted to highlight that” says Katura.
“But more importantly, we wanted to create something that is silly, and fun and joyful and imaginative, that invited people to use their own creativity to think about what the world would need to be like in order for trans and gender diverse people to actively participate in sport and be celebrated for that.”
And that’s precisely what the Fantasy Museum achieves. The space resembles a museum in the ways one might expect, but scattered throughout are careful and hidden elements of joy and creativity.
“I think because for queer people, particularly for trans people, our lives and participation are debated constantly and it’s really exhausting, and so we wanted to create a space for joy. For queer joy, and for trans joy. We wanted to create a space that felt as safe as possible for trans people, and I guess a bit of respite from the debate and from the pressure that’s put on us all the time to prove ourselves and have these arguments that are really taxing.”
The installation leans strongly into the concepts of ‘other dimensions’ and portals, and this creativity oozes out of the installation – literally and metaphorically. The exhibition is interactive, inviting guests to choose from an array of items and insert their own trans fantasy historical figures into the museum.
“I don’t really enjoy making work that doesn’t have a conversational element to it. I always want to know what the response is and I want to know what it stirs or what it creates for the people who are interacting with it” says Katura.
The Fantasy Museum is free to visit and open 12:00 – 5:00 pm upstairs at the Kambri Gallery, every day until Sunday the 16th.
There are also free workshops on Saturday, one is ‘sporty’ and one is ‘crafty’. You can either register or just rock up.
On Sunday night there will also be an “Opening Ceremony for Queer Futures”, which Katura describes as an opening ceremony for “all of the queer futures”. This ceremony aims to celebrate the opening of the “portal” and call into being a world in which openly trans and gender diverse people are included and celebrated in sport.
The ceremony will include drag performances, fun playlists to boogie too, and be an overall “cute, daggy, fun event”.
One of the most innovative and exciting elements to emerge from the Unchartered Territory festival is Clubscore’s Fantasy Museum of Trans Excellence and Portal to Other Dimensions.
If you were one of the unlucky few who didn’t make it to Europe this break, then fear not, Unchartered Territory has arrived to fill that Cinque-Terre sized hole in your heart.
Unchartered Territory is Canberra’s new arts and innovation festival, aimed at celebrating creativity and experimentation.
Running from the 7th to the 16th of July, the festival will showcase many exciting events that span science and research, many of which are free and on campus!
Events include a number of panels and forums with experts, covering topics such as cyber security, culture and artwork , and the critical role that women play in this industry.
There are workshops for everyone, depending on what skills you want to learn, including 3D printing and laser cutting , or for the slightly craftier minded folk, sewing and circuit making.
The festival also includes a theatre performances from the Canberra Youth Theatre’s Emerge Company, and experimental video work that blends scientific, literary, queer histories with personal narratives.
The festival will be spread across a number of locations in Canberra, including the Gorman Arts Centre and the Belconnen and Tuggeranong libraries, however many of the events will be held on campus, particularly in our very own Kambri Cultural Centre.
Check out the full program here
If you were one of the unlucky few who didn’t make it to Europe this break, then fear not, Unchartered Territory has arrived to fill that Cinque-Terre sized hole in your heart.