CQU lists its values as Engagement, Can-Do, Openness, Leadership and Inclusion, conveniently acronymed as ECOLI.

The UNSW “home-drive migration programme” does not appear to be going especially well. Last Friday university IT advised students that there was, “emergency maintenance in order to ensure the stability and performance of our systems during the exam period next week.” But by 11 am Tuesday, IT was reporting, “all staff and student home drives were unavailable.”

Things got a bit better that afternoon, but only a bit, after IT called in the cavalry. “Student home drives have been restored by the vendor IBM to a state as they were Friday 1 June 22:00. Files changed or created after that time are currently unavailable.”

But, and it was a very big but indeed, at 11am yesterday “staff drives access is still being addressed. IBM continues to work to restore those newer student files and staff home drives. “

There is all sorts of anguish at UNSW, with staff wondering where work, and research files are, and when, or whether they are coming back.

There was talk yesterday that backups are gone. Surely not, CMM thought, so at 12.30 yesterday afternoon he asked the university’s media unit. UNSW had not responded by CMM’s deadline last night.

UTS is very pleased with its new, under-construction Building Two, not least for its four-flight double-helix staircase. Nice-touch for a university of technology. Leonardo da Vinci is generally held to have designed the world’s most famous d-h staircase, at the Chateau Chambord in the Loire Valley.

The government will be pleased with new stats showing Commonwealth supported student starts staying stable in first half 2017 over ‘16, down 0.3 per cent. This continues a trend starting in 2015 which appears to indicate the demand driven system had peaked. If so it will make it easier for ministers to argue that the coming cap on undergraduate places at this year’s level will not generate unmet demand.

Overall growth in higher education enrolments is being driven by international students. While total domestic student numbers in the first half of last year were up 1.2 per cent on 2016 comparable international student growth was 10.5 per cent.

CMM is taking the Monday public holiday in most states. Back on Tuesday.

Just about every university conducts a VOICE staff-survey but few are coloured in as much green (for great results) and gold (for good ones) as CQU.

On a survey response of 77 per cent CQU-ers, generally by thumping majorities, report believing and belonging in the university and being committed to its goals. Even the few weak results are relatively strong – while 49 per cent of respondents said they had input into every day decision-making, this was 5 per cent up on the 2015 survey and six per cent above the uni-system benchmark. There will be a bunch of speeches about what a good job VC Scott Bowman has done when he retires at year end. These results already say a bunch about how he led CQU.

A bright spark (sorry) at UoQ suggests CMM is a dill for not knowing the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt hour. The university will build a solar farm which will produce 154 000 of the latter, which is way less than the former. Guilty as (ahem) charged.

There was the usual ducking and covering yesterday as universities did not respond to reported security breach warnings from UK provider of HR software, PageUp.

Honourable exceptions are, the University of Tasmania, which warned people who had successfully applied for jobs in the last few months that their details might be exposed (CMM yesterday). The University of Melbourne also spoke up, saying no breaches were obvious but people who might be effected should change passwords. As did the University of Adelaide, which states it isn’t aware of “fraudulent activity” and that it “has strong assurances” from PageUp that there is no current security risk. However, UniAdelaide does suggest that people in contact with the university via PageUp change their passwords.

Yvonne Breyer and Macquarie U colleagues have won Coursera’s outstanding educator award for transformation, for their four-unit MOOC, Excel skills for business (CMMFebruary 5). It’s had 40 000 enrolments and the current sessions started last week.

Curtin University public health researcher Mike Daube is the West Australian of the Year.  The university made him a professor emeritus this week.

Anita Bowman (CQU) is the Australasian Sonographer Association educator of the yearand sonographer of the year. Both honours double as lifetime achievement awards as Aspro Bowman, along with husband CQU VC Scott Bowman are leaving the university at the end of the year to travel.

Vanessa Pirotta from Macquarie U won the Australian round of FameLab, the British Council’s explain-your-research-in-three-minutes competition. She goes on to the world finals, at the Cheltenham Science Festival, this week.

RMIT researcher Hannah Badland is the Australian Health Promotion Association’s new thinker in residence.

Lara McKay is moving back to the University of Melbourne, where she used to run marketing comms,  to become master of Ormond College.

Nick Birbilis is moving from Monash to ANU where he will be deputy dean of engineering and computer science.

Simon Wilkie will be the next dean of business and economics at Monash U. He joins from the University of Southern California.

Isabelle Skinner from James Cook U is the new CEO of the International Council of Nurses, the global umbrella body for 130 national associations.

Gwidon Stachowiak and adjunct professor John Stephens are new emeritus professors at Curtin U. PVC Andris Stelbovics becomes a John Curtin distinguished professor.

The Higher Education Standards Panel identified attrition rates at universities and some other providers, using regression techniques to ‘allow for the influence of student characteristics’.  “Controlling for student characteristics reduces variation in institutional attrition rates by just under half. The standard deviation of adjusted institutional attrition rates is 7.5 percentage points which reduces to 4.4 percentage points for the OLS method and 4.3 percentage points for the logit method,” HESP states. (Sorry, no idea.)

Adjusted and ‘modified for student distribution’ institutional attrition rates, domestic bachelor commencing students, 2014, per cent