One of my Course Co-ordinators sent this article through the week to all the tutors of this subject. I found it quite interesting as I hope you do too. It’s by Gerard Noonan from the Herald Sun (who is incidently a former editor of the Australian Financial Review).
I thought that I’d just post the best parts of the article and supply a bit of my thoughts at the end.
Universities are supposed to be places of ideas. For more than six centuries they have nurtured great minds and channelled the intellectual aspirations of society’s thinkers. A striking feature of Australian universities over the past two decades is how unimpressive their collective leadership has been, as it has been unwilling, or unprepared, to take the fight over the way universities are funded – and thus effectively run – to the real culprit in what has emerged as a national disgrace.
The announcement this week by the Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, that education is to become his party’s most important economic issue at the federal election suggests he has sniffed the wind and realised the Government is vulnerable on the issue. The statistics tell a sorry story.
Over the past decade, while spending by the rich nations’ club, the OECD, has risen by close to 50 per cent in real terms, Australian Government spending on higher education has fallen. In some countries, notably in Scandinavia, parts of Europe and Singapore, Malaysia and China, investment in universities as the focus of ideas and growth has far outstripped the average. Academic visitors to China are regularly astonished at the sophistication of the Chinese higher education sector, which has systematically sought to reverse the Chinese diaspora and pays top-flight, Chinese-background professors from Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, Berlin and the Sorbonne handsomely to return to the Middle Kingdom and educate a new generation of Chinese thinkers.
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It was the Labor education minister John Dawkins who was the political architect of the university campus inflation to 38 and the funding system called HECS, the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, in 1988.
Perhaps Dawkins could not have anticipated how perverted would become his purpose of forcing students to bear more of the cost of running universities. But even he should have seen that targeting students to substantially fund their tertiary studies through HECS, effectively a delayed payment scheme, would encourage a parsimonious and myopic future federal government to find ways of avoiding its responsibilities.
The original idea had some philosophical merit: students were usually beneficiaries in the wages race after they finished their studies, so repayment of the HECS loan through a slightly higher tax rate for the first few years of work on higher salaries seemed fair. The university leadership, with some reluctance, went along and also acceded to the accompanying rhetoric of “user pays”.
Gifted academics some of them may have been, but with a couple of notable exceptions they seemed unable to fend off the heavy hand of government.
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With a divide and conquer approach, the government was always on a winner.
The screws were really turned in the late 1990s, in budget after budget after budget, as federal education ministers presided over increasingly tougher government cuts to direct university grants. The vice-chancellors were told bluntly to get on their bikes and find other sources of income – and don’t come begging to Canberra.
At one point the vice-chancellors employed as a lobbyist a former Liberal Party director who was waiting to secure a safe seat in the present Government.
As they realised the folly of how they dealt with the Government – essentially to grumble and complain and lobby to blunt the effect of the changes, instead of taking their predicament to the streets – they were forced to put up a “For Sale” sign and go after full fee-paying students, mostly from offshore.
So, just as state governments have become addicted to gambling taxes, universities have become hostage to the foreign student dollar, despite the problems facing university teaching staff who must manage large numbers of students with widely ranging but often limited English skills. In some large universities up to 30 per cent of students are from abroad.
The universities had a chance in 2003 to draw a line in the sand with the Government on the indexation of federal payments to the sector, but effectively squibbed it. Now, as a new round of negotiations begins, it appears the only way universities will meet funding shortfalls is to become partners in the Government’s ideological push to have students meet the ever-increasing cost. It is as if the university leadership’s earlier timidity has led to a weakening of the very institutions that should stand against such anti-intellectual behaviour. Instead of using their intellectual rigour to fight for a culture of academic freedom and institutional independence, they have been manoeuvred into expending energy in a narrow, penny-pinching spat over who should pay.
The dumbening of our universities is a problem. What I mean by that is, most of the schools in the country are now catered for overseas students, especially in the major cities. Programs such as Humanities, Arts, and other disciplines find themselves short changed by bureaucracy that is hell bent on getting the overseas dollar. But as one AFR writer once posed, where is the future policy makers of this country going to emerge from? You can’t teach an Engineer to be a Social Scientist, nor can you teach a Management consultant to be an Economist. But these are the areas where universities receive most funding. And so we face a dillema. Should Universities receive more funding? I believe the answer is yes. But I am indeed interested to hear our bloggers thoughts.
