on the move
campusreview.com.au
COMMISSIONERS
REAPPOINTED
TEQSA has announced
the reappointment of
three commissioners.
Professor Nick
Saunders will continue
as chief commissioner, with Dr Lin Martin
and Professor Cliff Walsh as commissioners.
Saunders served as vice-chancellor of the
University of Newcastle from 2004 to 2011
and received an Order of Australia for his
service to medicine and higher education.
Martin is a part-time ombudsman for RMIT
University and played a key role in the
Bradley Review, while Walsh is a research
fellow at the University of Adelaide and has
acted as a political adviser.
BUXTON PICKS
DIRECTOR
The meanings of words are constantly
changing, with some ending up very
far from their original sense. Smug was
originally a positive adjective, used for
complimenting people on their smart
appearance. Obviously this praise
went to their heads, giving us the
modern sense of ‘self-satisfied’. Slang
usage is particularly volatile, with such
reversals sometimes happening very
quickly. A case in point is snowflake.
First recorded in the 1980s is the sense
of a person (especially a child) who is
considered special because they are
unique – alluding to the belief that no
two snowflakes are identical. More
recently the transient, fragile nature
of a snowflake has been invoked to
denigrate people who are considered
overly sensitive. These might be the
“precious little snowflakes of the
liberal media” (Philadelphia Daily
News, 25-01-12) or a “snowflake
generation of insufferable idiots with
the coping skills of overtired toddlers”
( The Age, 17-12-17), depending on
your view of the world. Note too how
the noun use in the first example has
evolved to an adjectival one in the
second. The slipperiness of these
changes in meaning and function
may make us yearn for a world where
language stays fixed and certain.
There’s a snowflake’s chance in hell of
that happening.
Written by Dr Adam Smith, convenor
of the Editing and Electronic
Publishing Program at Macquarie
University.
28
The University of
Melbourne has
appointed Ryan
Johnston as director of
Buxton Contemporary
– the new home of the Michael Buxton
Collection at the university’s Victorian
College of the Arts. Johnston has more than
15 years’ experience as a director and curator
and has also le