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The Age: Commentaries on the State of Australian Universities
Various Commentaries from the The Age
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When Professor Malcolm Gillies
received his latest promotion at Adelaide University a colleague sent
him a very long spoon. It was a clear comment on his new post:
provicechancellor for commercialisation.
Gillies ruefully told the story last
week at a summit of the Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the
Social Sciences and the Business Higher Education Round Table. The
academics and bureaucrats had come together at Canberra's new National
Museum to discuss how the humanities and social sciences "could
best contribute to 21st century Australia and its knowledge
economy"
The atmosphere was not jolly. At
the end of two days the mood was one of resignation and defeat. There
seemed to be a universal recognition that the humanities had not only
failed to match the expectations of business and government but, even
more disturbingly, had lost their sense of selfworth.
In the recent government and
opposition policy documents on the knowledge economy, the humanities
have been written out of the script. There is bipartisan expectation
that the engine of the new economy will be driven by the sciences,
medicine and information technologies.
Melbourne University's dean of arts,
Stuart Macintyre, told the summit that national entry scores for the
humanities and social sciences were in freefall. Bipartisan support of
the free market and the userpays principle are creating a bleak future:
opportunistic commercialisation or honorable poverty.
Depending on your point of view, the
summit was a memorial for the humanities, a last stand for the value of
a generalist education, or an opportunity expressed in New Age business
babble.
For those in search of a metaphor
for the decline, the architecture of the conference space was eloquent.
A seminal moment found many of Australia's leading academic
functionaries arranged on a stage less than a metre deep. A vigorous
sneeze and Australia's most senior academics would have been
unceremoniously projected into the audience's lap.
Charles Leadbeater, delivering the
keynote address, was the very model of a modern man, the embodiment of
"Cool Britannia". A researcher with British thinktank Demos
and an adviser to Tony Blair, Leadbeater began by asking the
vicechancellors, deans and bureaucrats to reflect on their personality
types. Were they squares, triangles, pluses or circles? Leadbeater's
party trick, which he had borrowed from an American corporate lovein,
polarised the academics into players and refuseniks.
The five people in the auditorium
who confessed to being "square" were proclaimed to be highly
intelligent. The "pluses", who made up most of the audience,
were highly creative but not highly intelligent. And the circles? These
senior academics, it transpired, were obsessed with drink and sex.
After limbering up, Leadbeater began the ubiquitous Powerpoint
presentation on the opportunities and threats for the university in the
new economy. If the growing role of knowledge was a boon for the
university, how was it that the university's monopoly was being
dismantled by new competitors: consultants, thinktanks and other
marketers of knowledge? Leadbeater urged his audience to concentrate on
the competitive advantages of the university's "brand", whose
value depended on creating new ideas that are "easy to replicate
but hard to imitate"
The simple belief in the value of
ideas was destined for the "dustbin of history", Leadbeater
proclaimed. Instead, his Third Way University would be a site for
creativity, to make markets, encourage collaborations, and access to
networks.
Leadbeater's argument flowed
seamlessly into that of Professor Ashley Goldsworthy, Liberal Party
stalwart and executive director of the Business Higher Education Round
Table. The pair found common ground in the exhilaration of the global
marketplace and the need to wake up those relics of the old economy
languishing in the humanities and social sciences. He described a
future where the key principles were (in dot points on his Powerpoint
presentation): design, value, creativity, entrepreneurship,
heterogeneity, transdisciplinarity and a focus on learning. Tomorrow,
he promised, when the university engaged fully with the new economy,
generalists with a broad understanding would be "hot". If
Goldsworthy is right, why are the humanities not central to the
knowledge economy?
The answer may lie in part with the
paper From Blue Poles to fat pipes, presented by Professor John
Hartley, dean of the creative industries faculty at the Queensland
University of Technology. The economy, Hartley enthused, had moved
"from Adam Smith to Delia Smith". Accordingly, Hartley's
curriculum has been rewritten around the "outputs" of design,
performance, production and writing. Heavily dependent on British
Labour's creative industries rhetoric, Hartley proposes a shift away
from the nambypamby '70s stuff of the creative arts. The QUT model will
train students and "develop commercialisable applications of
creativity in a research environment". Creativity, he said, is an
enterprise sector, and be reassured, the arts are "intrinsic, not
opposed to, productive capacities of contemporary global mediated
technology supported economy"
But Hartley's language betrayed the
problem: the clash between the civilising assumption of the humanities
and the jargon of the free market. It also inspired a collective slump
in the audience. Few reached for their palm pilots or checked their
cell phones for emails. Most searched for a toothpick or another mint.
Yet Hartley is right that the Third
Way university demanded by government and business depends on
commercialisation. Malcolm Gillies, he of the long spoon, briefly
lamented the passing of free education, then moved swiftly to the
brutal realities of a sector overly dependent on government for funds.
The Gillies model proposed "an educational unit that maximises the
use of all its resources through trading its expertise, gaining extra
value through accessing the facilities, expertise or market share of
its partners"
It is hard to decipher the personal
journey that leads a musicologist specialising in Bela Bartok to arrive
at the point where he speaks like a corporate executive. Yet Gillies
was not the only one in the auditorium who has undergone such a radical
personal transformation.
The humanities and social sciences
now have to sell what they do. That is anathema to many. David
Henderson, president of the National Union of Students, unequivocally
voiced student opposition to commercialisation. But the issue is
complex and deserves more than reflexive rhetoric. Tertiary education
has been transformed by the increase in international students who pay
hefty fees (often offensively called the "cash cow"),
feebased postgraduate courses, distance education, the ability to sell
educational services and the potential for research income.
The attendees at this summit were
divided, with great politeness, between those prepared to live within
the new landscape and those unwilling to capitulate.
Don Aitken, vicechancellor of the
University of Canberra, mourned the state of "mutual
incomprehension" between the university and the rest of community.
Peter Karmel, from the ANU and the eminence grise of Australian
education policy, vehemently proposed that the case for finding the
humanities and the social sciences should be separate from the GDP.
Curtin's Tom Stannage, who liberally quoted Gwen Harewood's poetry,
described the life of a dean of arts as divided between meeting
footballers and bank managers and encouraging reluctant researchers.
And Alan Gilbert, vicechancellor of Melbourne University, was in a
melancholy mood. He wondered aloud why this great golden age of
leisure, consumption and the triple bottom line did not feel like a
golden age.
Stuart Macintyre's paper,
Traditions, succinctly articulated the problem. Universities are
contending with mass interest in tertiary education, global and local
competitors in the education business, competition for research
dollars, and the pressure of quality assurance.
Macintyre is a historian. His
business is to make sense of the present by understanding the past.
Many in the sector sniggered when RMIT, the arriviste university, held
its graduation ceremony at Colonial Stadium but Macintyre was able to
find a link between that and the procession of Cambridge graduates
through the streets to the University Senate.
If the summit offered a call to arms
it was Professor Marcia Langton of Melbourne University who found the
high ground and demanded her fellow academics defend it. In a polemical
paper she pushed her colleagues to understand the value of their labor,
to demand a fair price for it. The relentless calls for academics to
act as unpaid experts, for the print and electronic media through to
government taskforces, devalued the training and knowledge produced by
universities, Langton said. Academics needed to understand the value of
their intellectual work in order to assert their place in the new
economy. Langton's "no script, no Hollywood" argument was not
a call to strike. But it was a clarion call from the trenches.
The summit also dwelt on the
difficult relationship between the humanities and the Department of
Education, Training and Youth Affairs. Academics are buffeted by a
blizzard of white, blue and green papers that with extraordinary
regularity and increasing obtuseness rewrite the funding rules.
The new ideology, driven by all
education ministers from John Dawkins to David Kemp, combined with an
increasingly interventionist bureaucracy, has left the humanities
adrift, illprepared, even ineffectual in arguing their case. Much
frustration was vented at the summit regarding the department's
research rules.
Take the case of Helen Thomson, The
Age's theatre critic. She has published more than 2000 words a week for
more than a decade, and until recently was a senior academic teaching
English literature at Monash University. Thousands of readers saw her
writing but it has remained invisible to the department. Thomson's work
gives her university a regular engagement with the community. It should
be highly valued. Yet the rules regarding the "research
quantum", as the department calls it, have meant that all that
writing can never be "counted". In other words it will never
earn her department income, nor Thomson the promotion she was due.
For two days the National Museum was
filled with battle-weary academics. Defeatism fought a longcherished
sense of education as an important and ethical endeavor. Is too much
being asked of poorly paid academics, expected to teach with
increasingly untenable class sizes and take on increasingly complex
administrative duties and responsibilities all while delivering a hefty
yearly research portfolio?
The humanities and social sciences
have to rebuild their sense of selfworth within. It may even be
necessary to indulge in some worldly proselytising for that worthy
cause: education for education's sake. If the new economy needs
creativity, surely interpreters, analysts and commentators are of
greater value than ever.
Associate Professor Louise Adler
is deputy director (academic and research) at the Victorian College of
the Arts |
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No group in society fills me with greater fear and loathing than
those of my generation who, having benefited from a good education in
government schools and free universities, want to wind up the
drawbridge for future generations - either because they don't want to
pay the taxes necessary to fund their education or, more insidiously,
they want to limit the competition for the "top jobs" to which their own
offspring aspire and which are available only to those who get a
first-class education.This group has been well represented by both sides
of parliament.
Government expenditure on higher education fell from 1.5
per cent of GDP in 1975 to about 0.8 per cent now, even though student
numbers more than doubled.Since 1996 the burden on students of
financing higher education has grown from 25 per cent to about 40 per
cent. The Commonwealth contribution has fallen from about 65 per cent to
less than 50 per cent.In the main, the vice-chancellors no longer
complain about the cuts to government funds for higher education. They
now compete feverishly against each other for the corporate dollar and
the full-fee-paying student from overseas, and sprout the mantra of
neoliberal managerialism as approved by the government.Despite
Commonwealth funding being cut back to 1990 levels, federal leverage
over higher education has increased. Thus the paper given the closest
attention at last week's conference in Canberra on "The Idea of a
University: Enterprise or Academy?", organised by the Australia
Institute, was that presented by the chief bureaucrat in the higher
education division of the Education Department, Michael Gallagher.He
pointed out there would be losers as a result of the new higher
education environment, and it was unlikely that government would be
willing to pick up the pieces.
According to Gallagher, "some traditional
vertically integrated, locally focused universities will find it
increasingly difficult to compete in the new global era; several
universities face difficulty sustaining the overhead cost of their
current range of domestic course offerings and research aspirations ...
(and) universities with limited capacity to invest in new educational
technologies, and with cultural, governance and industrial restrictions
on their operating flexibilities, will find the future even more
difficult".Gallagher said the academic union insistence on enterprise
bargaining would be the cause of "universities losing market share if
they are unable to match competitors who can offer convenient programs"
(seven days/24 hours is now international practice).He also threatened
university councils that resisted change: "Several vice-chancellors in
recent years, who have endeavored to make management improvements for
the strategic advantage of their university, have been rolled on the
vote of representative interests of council members ... Were these
people subject to the normal requirements of company directors, they
may well now be suffering penalties."
And what about vice-chancellors
like Melbourne's Alan Gilbert, who diverted some $150 million from
Melbourne University to the struggling Melbourne University Private? Who
pays for this ? Gilbert told the conference: "It is futile to ignore the
phenomenon of the corporate university as if it is some sort of
transient irrelevancy ... (we must not) succumb to that greatest of
contemporary dangers: the denial of reality."In the glossy magazine that
Melbourne University (public) sends out annually to graduates in the
hope of bequests to make Melbourne University (private) the Harvard of
the south, Gilbert says: "Alumni in and around Melbourne may be aware of
factually incorrect media commentary on the alleged `failure' of
Melbourne University Private Limited. ... Taking initiative invites
both failure and criticism and always entails risk, including the risk
of criticism that is sometimes ill-informed."The reality being denied in
the wilful trashing of the idea of public universities is that unless
taxpayers are prepared to find an additional $1.5 billion a year to
meet the unmet demand for university places and a reasonable level of
spending on research, Australia's future as an increasingly poor
exporter of commodities is assured.
Kenneth Davidson is a staff
columnist. dissent@iaa.com.au |
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I am an evolutionary biologist. Australia is a treasure trove of plants
and animals for an evolutionary biologist to work on. It also offers a
high quality of life in many other ways. So why did I recently resign
from a position as professor in a leading Australian university to go
overseas?
The reason is I was exhausted by the increasing struggle to do
good-quality research and teaching in an Australian university. Does my
decision reflect broader problems in Australian higher education? Yes!
In the past two years as head of department, imposed change was rampant
and accelerating, staff morale declined and some of the best academics
and postdocs left to take positions elsewhere - anywhere but an
Australian university.
Academics need to be able to move among national and international
institutions - it's healthy and normal. At the moment, however, an
imbalance has led to a steady brain drain of academics.
It is increasingly difficult to attract high-quality candidates,
creating a despondency within the system and a further downward spiral.
The legacy of 10 years of mismanagement of higher
education is significant damage to our most important asset:
people who can take the lead in scholarship, education and public
debate.
Who or what is to blame? Public apathy, misguided government policy and
increasing isolation between university management and staff.
The Australian public is besotted with sport and recreation. The scant
and mostly low-quality reporting of science in the media, exacerbated by
the recent cuts to the ABC's science unit, reflects a view that this
doesn't sell and that the public doesn't care.
Yet I believe many people are fascinated by well-presented news about
research and technology. Recent policy papers on funding of medical and
general research have had a significant media profile. The interest is
there and could be increased by enhanced outreach from universities to
the public.
Recent federal governments have made decisions that have been
catastrophic to the quality of higher education.
The first was to combine universities, colleges of advanced education
and institutes of technology within John Dawkins' unified system,
leading to loss of specialisation and student choice.
The second is the Howard Government's attitude that higher education is
more for personal benefit than the public good. A direct result has been
declining government spending per student. Universities no longer
receive sufficient government funding to pay for the salaries of their
permanent staff, who are then rearranged constantly like deck chairs in
an attempt to stop the Titanic from sinking.
The result for students is they are far less able to question their
university teachers, tutors or demonstrators, testing is by multiple
choice rather than essays, and lectures are given in sardine-like
conditions. Academics who would be proud to be teaching the next
generation of bright and capable young people are constrained to offer
them less than they deserve.
University administrators have reacted to reduced funding by looking for
managerial solutions. The reforms of the Dawkins era led to powerful
executives who were less subject to oversight from councils or senates.
This replaced flatter structures, where those who did the research and
teaching had a voice about how things changed. These people have been
disenfranchised.
In this context, the enthusiasm of staff for change erodes rapidly. If
the staff are disenchanted, then the indicators so precious to
management - completion rates, student feedback and research performance
- likewise decline.
A second response by universities to cutbacks in government spending has
been to drive academics to increase income from international fee-paying
students and from commercialisation of their research. Yet fee income
should be additional to, not instead of, government funding.
It would appear the government expects the private sector to contribute
to funding of university positions and infrastructure while also sharing
intellectual property with universities. Given the limited tendency
towards philanthropy in Australia, this seems naive.
The single most effective solution to these problems is for the
government to recognise the value of universities for the public good
and to restore funding per student to 1996 levels, at least. The US,
Britain, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Singapore and so on have increased
funding substantially over the past few years; the Australian Government
has done the opposite.
In response to strong criticism, the government has offered to increase
funding for basic and applied research. This sounds positive, but the
catch is that the bulk of the increase will not flow until later years -
the actual increase in this year's budget is miniscule.
The government also intends to increase funding to universities via
additional student places. However, unless the core funding per student
is restored, the excessive workloads endemic in the system will remain.
How will already overstretched academic staff have the time to do the
creative thinking necessary for internationally competitive research
when class sizes continue to increase?
To maintain the scholarship that is the basis for new knowledge, wealth
creation and education, university staff need a reasonable assurance of
security and, crucially, time to think. Further, to respond positively
to policy-driven change they need to be involved directly in the
decision-making process.
Instead, we have a system where academics are readily discarded, have to
leave their workplace to think or write, and are disempowered. It is
this reduction in job quality, rather than non-competitive salaries,
that is driving our best academics away.
Our higher education system is at a turning point. Australians could be
as proud of our contribution to world knowledge as we are of our
sporting prowess. For sport, we invest heavily in training athletes. For
higher education, we face a stark choice - business as usual, leading to
further declines in staff morale, productivity and quality, or major
reinvestment to restore our capacity for original research and quality
education of tomorrow's leaders.
Craig Moritz was head of the Department of Zoology & Entomology and the
School of Life Sciences at the University of Queensland, and is director
of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and Professor of Integrative Biology
at the University of California. A longer version of this article first
appeared in Australasian Science.
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last modified 15:10:26 30/04/02 |
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