Source The Australian

Macquarie University has announced plans to offload its chiropractic teaching by 2015.

It said it would begin discussions with other “interested” higher education providers about taking over its chiropractic units and degrees, including academic staff and teaching facilities. Executive science dean Clive Baldock said his faculty wanted to concentrate on developing “recent major strategic investments” in research-intensive disciplines including biomedical science and engineering.

“Macquarie University has recently invested significantly in a postgraduate medical school and a state-of-the-art private hospital,” he said. “We naturally want to focus our efforts on supporting these initiatives with our teaching and research.” Professor Baldock issued a sales pitch to possible tenderers while acknowledging that the discipline didn’t meet Macquarie’s requirements “from a research-intensive perspective”.

“We believe our chiropractic degrees to be of the highest teaching quality, and they remain extremely popular with students,” he said.“We therefore believe the responsible thing to do is to begin discussions with other higher education providers who are keen to grow in this area.”