Yes Minister

A message from the Associate Vice-Chancellor Victoria Dr John Ballard:

Dear colleagues,

Welcome back for another busy year. The St. Patrick’s Campus was looking highly efficient in an empty, ‘Yes Minister’ way throughout much of January and it is great to see colleagues freshly returned and renewed by leave, along with the slowly growing number of students.

We are hopeful that construction will commence this year for our long awaited and much needed new teaching building, to be named the St. Theresa of Kolkata Building in honour of Mother Teresa. We are awaiting final Council and Heritage Victoria building permits, however, in the interim, Properties are commencing a study to assess and minimise the degree of disruption that a major building program will inevitably have on the adjacent and interconnected Mary Glowrey Building and the rest of our campus.

The recent extreme weather has resulted in the Facilities and Cleaning teams being called in at odd hours to fix building leaks, most recently in Campus Ministry. I wish to commend the team for their responsiveness and support at difficult times and commiserate with our Campus Ministers, Nathan and Fiona who will need a place to camp for a while.

We now await final enrolment figures and undertake the last adjustments for Orientation. I look forward to this each year as I never cease to be buoyed by the energy, enthusiasm and excitement of our new students encountering university for the first time. I almost remember my own experience, almost.

Along with all Australian Universities we will face a number of challenges this year following recent government funding decisions for the tertiary sector and we await further clarification as to how we may best respond.

Good luck for the new year and I extend a general invitation to Campus personnel and any visiting colleagues to join me on the last Thursday of February and each of the following months at 4pm in the Staff Room (Building 411- below my office) – warmly referred to as ‘Paddy’s’ for refreshments and catch-up with colleagues from across the Campus.