Senate Submission on Public Universities - 2001

At a time when Australia is undergoing massive changes in the globalizing context, the public has the right to expect teaching, research and public comment from university specialists that can help them shape and control their lives

We believe it is our responsibility to warn that in many different fields it is becoming increasingly difficult – even in some cases impossible – for this duty to be adequately performed.

The role of the university is being undermined by government policies on the one hand, and by corporatist administrative practices on the other. These policies and practices threaten the future of the university as a centre of intellectual discovery and creativity, and of teaching and research.In recent times both Labor and Coalition governments have implemented policies that effectively reduce universities to mere business enterprises. As a result Australian universities have moved towards administrative structures and ideologies based on the business corporation – structures entirely inappropriate for carrying out the proper role of a university.

Some senior administrators have taken advantage of these policies to expand their own power and to treat universities as effectively their private property. Vice-chancellors generally no longer consider themselves, or behave, as academic colleagues, but as Chief Executive Officers. The thrust of this bureaucratic restructuring is to turn Australian arts and sciences into an auxiliary for immediate commercial needs, to stifle free enquiry and critical debate, and to debase the public university so that it becomes, at best, a limited form of vocational training and, at worst, a sales counter for titles.

This adulteration of Australia’s universities occurs at a time when media ownership is becoming further concentrated in private hands, the ABC emasculated, and the arts trivialized and commercialized. Australia faces the prospect of a rigid, monolithic, market-fundamentalist culture, which can no longer question itself, the society of which it is a part, or its governments. This threat to higher education further endangers our public culture. Democracy is in danger of losing the vital public sphere without which it can only be a hollow shell.

We call on the government to make a commitment to quality public tertiary education by fully funding all of Australia’s currently operating public universities.

We call for public support to defend universities against the damaging growth of coercive administrative control that is reducing their function to servicing short-term needs of the economy.

We seek to enlist everyone supporting these aims, as outlined in the constitution, especially university staff (including managers) and students, to mount public education campaigns in support of the idea of universities as public institutions responsible for the generation and dissemination of the widest possible forms of knowledge.

We assert the right – indeed the responsibility - of public intellectuals to speak out about corrupting practices and financial waste in universities, and to mount teaching and research programmes to remedy deficiencies in existing university curricula. We shall later propose a national conference to highlight and further these aims and to recruit members and public support.

• To advocate a world-class public university system for Australia
• To this end, to promote a collegial administrative culture in Australia’s universities
• To monitor governance in Australia’s universities
• To defend and extend academic freedom and intellectual responsibility in Australia’s universities
• To organise meetings, seminars and conferences to further these Aims
• To publish web pages, newsletters, papers, pamphlets, magazines, journals and books to further these Aims
• To nurture significant academic programmes that have been removed from existing university courses
• To lobby university authorities, politicians, the general public, and the media to further these Aims

It is now general knowledge, both nationally and internationally, that standards have collapsed in most coursework postgraduate courses in Australian universities. Essentially, under-funded universities have been selling titles and newly empowered managers have been pressuring academics to conform to short-term economic imperatives. What is less well appreciated is the extent to which there has been a general fall in undergraduate teaching standards also, although the recent sacking of Ted Steele at Wollongong University for speaking out on this issue should have alerted everyone. A survey of academics throughout Australian universities has given a good indication of what is happening. That standards have declined is most readily acknowledged by academics who teach in areas where this is difficult to disguise, such as mathematics, the core disciplines of science and languages.

For instance, in 1970 a textbook was produced for first-year students by the Chemistry Department at Monash University, providing a benchmark for subsequent years. Standards had already begun to fall by the 1980s. Much of what had been taught at first year, by the mid-eighties was being taught in second year. However, after the corporatisation of the universities, standards fell dramatically further. Now, some courses formerly taught to first-year students are considered too hard even for third-year students. This decline is not merely a quantitative reduction in the amount of knowledge learned. According to former lecturers in physics and chemistry, it is a decline in students' capacity to think abstractly and to understand theoretical concepts. This is corroborated across all disciplines. A biology lecturer from Melbourne University complained that he had been forced to reduce students' exposure to abstract concepts. Illustrating the effect of this, it has been alleged that at Swinburne University in 1998 a very large number of engineering students failed first-year mathematics and, despite this, were allowed to go on to second year.

Teachers of languages have also noted declines in standards. A lecturer in French at the ANU noted that all students in the Faculty of Arts have had their contact reduced by about 25%, with reductions in contact hours, reading lists, length and written assignments. The effect of this in the French Department is that students now do as part of their second year what they used to do in first year, and students can only take two years of language work where once they could do three. Present graduates are substandard in comparison to the past graduates. French has been "very badly damaged over the last 2-3 years".

Such observations concur with language teachers elsewhere. A teacher at Monash, at which 9 of the 12 Asian languages once taught will not be taught in any form in 2001, described the effect of reducing contact from 5 to 3 hours per week and forcing tutors to take over the role of senior staff who have been pushed into early retirement. The languages remaining cannot be taught properly. At Swinburne University lecturers in Japanese claim that with a dramatic reduction in staff and in student contact hours, students who complete their degrees are no longer proficient in the language.

There is less consensus about whether standards have fallen among academics in disciplines where it is more difficult to provide objective measures of performance. What is objectively measurable is the dramatic reduction in course offerings and in contact hours of teaching. A lecturer at Deakin University noted that student teachers have had their contact hours for one course reduced from 130 hours to 60 hours, entire topics have been discarded and students no longer have to demonstrate their competence at teaching Year 6 students. The lecturer wrote of the consequences of this: "I have been appalled by the low standard both of intellectual content and skills in English expression of some student assignments which have received Pass grades from some of my colleagues."

These under-educated undergraduate students are then accepted into Masters. A lecturer from James Cook University explained how standards fall: "As most students are marked comparatively, this means that standards for assessment drop in consequence. I am aware that what might have received a Pass from me ten years ago is now getting a Credit, and I am not alone."

However, it has been sessional tutors (who, with the retrenchment or forced retirement of senior academics, now do much more of the teaching in universities) who have been most emphatic about falling standards. Many of these are research postgraduate students who have been amazed at the changes that have taken place in the few years since they were undergraduates.

A tutor in media at Swinburne University conducted his own survey of students to find out whether they were doing their reading. While a few students did some of the reading for the first few tutorials, virtually nothing was being read for the remainder of the semester and most students did no reading whatsoever. The vast majority of students still passed the course.

A tutor in philosophy at La Trobe complained that little is demanded of students, that they now seldom read for tutorials, yet still pass. It appears that students are avoiding core disciplines such as mathematics and languages where it is difficult or impossible to disguise falling standards and are enrolling in subjects where falling standards are most easily disguised.

The decline in overt standards is indicative of an even more dramatic change in the quality of university life. A lecturer formerly at Monash and now at Melbourne University compared the attitude of his daughter in her studies at Melbourne University, to his own experience as a student. With the reduced contact hours, with the dwindling variety of subjects available for study and the decline of intellectual life as staff have been overworked and demoralized, the typical student goes to university merely to attend their particular classes in order to get through their courses. There is much less interest by students in education as such or in the cultural life of universities.

Several things should be noted of these falling standards. To begin with, this has little or nothing to do with the increasing number of students enrolling in universities. It is occurring across all universities, including universities that are now enrolling a more select group of students than previously.

Nor is this collapse in standards a simple consequence of the reduction in funding of universities. It is due to a fundamental transformation whereby managers using economic categories and criteria have gained power at the expense of academics. Not only are these managers siphoning off money from core teaching and research activities, academics are losing control over their work. Where the university's goal is defined as satisfying customers or clients to generate the maximum throughput and to maximize profits, it clearly pays to pass as many students as possible and to focus on those students who want to get their degrees with the minimum amount of work.

These are the customers who generate the greatest profits. Students who want an education are expensive to process and sometimes troublemakers. The ideal students for the new corporate managers of universities would be those who pay their money, keep away from the university and then download their degrees from the Internet.

Of course, the severity of the decline differs between universities. As a general rule, the more a corporatist style of governance has been imposed and the more effectively management has succeeded in reducing academics to mere employees, the greater the decline in standards.

In the corporatist university academics are in no position to judge their students, let alone uphold standards. They are merely workers employed to satisfy the customers or clients of the university. They have no job security. If disciplines lose student numbers or do not increase student numbers they or their colleagues are likely to lose their jobs. For example, the mathematics department at Monash University has already halved in size since the mid-90s, a not uncommon level of decimation among the more demanding disciplines, and further cuts are threatened.

Student assessment of staff, while by no means undesirable, acts in the present context to increase the pressure towards lower standards. A lecturer at Melbourne University described student responses to his efforts to teach students difficult concepts. While greatly appreciated by good students, most students described these as "boring sections of the course" or "poorly taught sections." The lecturer wrote: "I know it is not my teaching of these concepts because it does not happen in a class of very good students." But he has had to simplify his subjects because, as he wrote, "I cannot afford to have bad survey results for my course." Such tacit complicity in lowering standards makes it all the more difficult for academics to speak out about what is happening. And if complaints are made about falling standards, this is likely to lead to dismissal. The sacking of Professor Ted Steele from Wollongong University illustrates this.

The effect of pressures to lower standards compounds. Students come to expect that less work is required of them and so fewer students master their disciplines. Having failed to gain such mastery they fail to gain an appreciation of the value of education. With generalized lower expectations it becomes increasingly difficult for individual academic staff who are trying to uphold standards and for students genuinely interested in education.

It cannot be expected that the world at large will long fail to notice this widespread deflation in the real value of Australian tertiary schooling. Global reaction is likely to include a severe reduction in overseas fee-paying students, with even those departments or universities still trying to maintain standards suffering from guilt by association. But, in the longer term, the internal ill effects on Australian society as a whole could well be much more severe than such losses in international status and income.

1. Medical Research Council (MRC). Funding for 98/99 is $267.6 Million. This will be increased by $180 million over the next 4 years. By comparison, our NHMRC received $185 million in 2000, which will increase by $30 million per year up 2005 for these figures. The Canadian dollar is currently (March 26 2001) worth 1.288 Australian dollars, so that, in $A, the funds in 2005 will be: Australia - $A335m ; ; Canada - greater than $A576m.
2. National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) The funding for 2000 is $550 million compared with $104 million for our ARC. The Australian figure will double over the next 5 years, after the Coalition government's decisions following the Batterham report. Here the comparison in $A gives: Australia (2005) - $A208m    Canada (2000) - $A708m.
3. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) The funding for 98/99 is $96.4 million, or $A124m. We don't have a similar body, but notice its budget exceeds that of the whole ARC ($A104m).
   
   

Finally, and most amazingly, Canada is to fund 2000 new Research Chairs across all universities plus a billion dollars of infrastructure money. At the moment there are 157 research chairs in Canada. It should be noted that the provincial governments also have research funds for universities of the order of $20-30 million. These figures show clearly how much we lag behind the funding available to Canadian universities, even after allowing for its greater population (at 30 million, it is only about half as much again as Australia's).

An issue of great concern to academics is their loss of democratic rights in the changes to university governing bodies. This situation can be clearly seen in the case of Victorian universities. In 1996 the Kennett government appointed a 'Committee of Advice', chaired by Haddon Storey QC, to report on university governance in Victoria. One of its recommendations was that University councils should be like the board of directors of a corporation, in that they should be small. It was argued that this would be more efficient. Thus Monash University and Melbourne University were reduced from 59 and 58 members to 21. In the case of Monash, the main reductions were in staff and graduates numbers. Membership in these categories fell from professors (2), academic staff (7), general staff (3)and convocation/graduates (2) to one professor, one academic staff,one general staff and zero convocation. This was a reduction from 14 to 3. In percentage terms, this meant that these categories in all formed only 14.3% of Council members, when they were formerly 23.7%. Similar changes took place at Melbourne University, where in addition they lost the 10 convocation representatives.

It is not necessary that staff representation should fall when council size is reduced. In NSW, there were reductions some time ago, but Sydney University still has 4 academic staff and 5 convocation out of 22 members. In fact, overall staff and convocation representation is 54.5% of the council. I understand that unacceptable reductions are planned for South Australian and West Australian Universities. The result of these changes to Victorian universities is that councils are dominated by corporate members without any major input from the staff. With only one academic staff representative, it is not possible to show the council the concerns of staff. Any problems cited are dismissed as being due to one trouble maker.

It is vital that academics have adequate democratic representation on university councils. This is a prerequisite for the concept of collegiality in a university, which is so essential to its health.