THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: CONFLICTING DEMANDS ON ACADEMICS IN AUSTRALIAN HIGHER EDUCATION*

This paper addresses the important issue of the increasing pressure on academics, and pays particular attention to the contribution to this pressure from attitudes and expectations students bring to their university studies. It explores, in particular, student expectations and misperceptions about the learning process. An additional source of pressure comes from the views of educational theorists about such things as curriculum design and quality assurance. These views appear at variance with the dimensions of education valued by students as evidenced by open ended comments on student surveys and online discussion boards. Students seem to value academics who engage with them in certain ways on content and they also value particular types of assessment regimes rather than administrative issues such as the mapping of curriculum characteristics to goals and graduate attributes. It is argued that maintaining the quality of higher education in Australia will require correction of students ’ unrealistic expectations and some suggestions are made for the direction this correction might take