A Blast from the Past Tells Universities to Get Real and Become Commercially Viable. (January 7, 2005)

    When the New York Times gives its Op-Ed columnists 700-800 words to make their point they usually do a pretty good job of it, some get Pulitzer Prizes for their efforts.

Today the The Australian Financial Review allowed John Hewson* 750 words to make his case as to why "universities should abandon their ivory towers and show some commercial drive."  Dr Hewson tells his readers, "The bottom line is that universities are big business Unfortunately they are largely run by academics rather than competent business managers." There's no indication that this is written in irony and to bang the  message home the former Liberal Party leader tells us, "Out of the 38 universities, very few of the chief executives/vice-chancellors have any commercial experience."

Now it's a strange thing regarding excellence. The US' best private universities have academics at their heads, strange that. Then there's Oxbridge and Switzerland's ETH... funny that. And the University of California campuses?

Mind you Dr Hewson does say, "I am the first to admit that that not all academics can be expected to be commercially minded. There are fields of research that need to be sponsored irrespective of their commercial viability.

Awfully decent of you, old chap, even if one comes away feeling that you definitely consider them to be of a low caste. The enabling science and mathematics perhaps?

In a nutshell to hell with the long range good of the Commonwealth and the public good. Look, you clots, make money NOW. The nation's future? Don't both me with future, that's another generation's problem.

But give the devil his due:

Part of Nelson's review should recognise that we have too many universities. The conversion of colleges of advanced education to universities was a dumbing-down that should never have occurred. It should therefore, come as no surprise that so few of our universities rank in the top 300 in he world.

 Dr Hewson, however, has a simple solution. First "professors are not all the same. Some are very marketable and worth at least three or four times the base professorial salary. ...Until we develop a sensible salary structure many Australians will not return... and the drain to the commercial sector will continue," and second, "Universities need to be amalgamated and the management needs to be much more commercial."

See, no problem. Of course the matter of the dilapidated state of the universities' infrastructure didn't get a mention let alone the decimation of university staffs which has had such a debilitating a demoralising effect in the enabling sciences and mathematics to site just two sectors.

[Note added 12/01/05: The Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University and President of the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, Di Yerbury replies to Dr Hewson's column in today's Australian Financial Review --  http://afr.com/articles/2005/01/11/1105423484636.html]

* The AFR describes Dr Hewson as an "investment banker and former Liberal leader and leader of the opposition. He was dean of the Macquarie Graduate School of Management from 2002 to 2004"