Canberra Times | 29 July 2013
The University of Canberra proposes to spend $15 million over the next five years on attracting top researchers as the university pushes to break into world rankings by 2018.
The university has budgeted $3 million a year to attract 10 ”high performing” researchers in five specialist areas: governance, environment, communication, education and health.
The recruitment drive has started with advertising in the London Times Higher Education supplement, the target of UC’s campaign being the ranking of ”young” universities, with 13 Australian universities already in their top 100.
Professor Frances Shannon, the university’s deputy vice-chancellor of the university has
…decided to aim for [that] one particular ranking, although that will probably mean we’ll hit some of the targets for many of the rankings, because there are an overlapping set of criteria that are used. There’s a whole suite of measures that go together to form an overall [ranking] score, but research is a key part of the whole thing.
National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) ACT Divisional Secretary Stephen Darwin says the NTEU is “staggered” that UC management 
would commit such a significant amount of money after only a month ago claiming it was forced due to budget pressures to cut all UC languages programs, sack seven academics and introduce costly pay parking for staff and students.
The NTEU believes there is no evidence such schemes actually work. The experience of elite recruitment schemes like that proposed by UC management is that they attract researchers in the twilight of their careers, leaving little lasting benefit to the institution, aside from being temporarily bumped up a few places on largely illusory university league tables.