Australia's Top Ranked University's Institute of Advanced Studies Rumoured to be Facing Stringent Belt Tightening. (August 5, 2005)

    In the last round of enterprise bargaining the Australian National University's (ANU) staff gained salary increases which will amount to about12% over the next 15 months. When the agreement was negotiated, ANU expected that it would receive reasonable supplementation to cover a proportion of the increased expenditure. However, the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) which currenty accounts for about half of the ANU's budget, is eligible for only a small proportion of the additional funds that have been made available. The funding gap, it is rumoured, will be about 80% which will have to be obtained from current funds. As a result, serious cuts to the existing programs of the IAS are foreseen and significant staff redundancies appear to be inevitable.

It would seem highly advisable that if the required funds will in fact be forthcoming from the Department of Education, Science and Training that Dr Nelson as Minister make public the fact in the immediate future, because the damage caused by the apparent impending funding cuts to the morale of the IAS staff is palpable, which is hardly conducive to fostering focused world-class research.