RMIT's New Vice-Chancellor States Her Views as to the Functionality of Australian Tertiary Education. (April 9, 2005)

    The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) has a new Vice-Chancellor for reasons not too dissimilar to private sector institutions that change chief executives when the "stakeholders" are sweating on the company's profitability or lack of it.

In any case The Age sent David Rood along for a chat with Margaret Gardner in order to do a feature. Apart from getting a CV from Professor Gardner and finding out nothing about just how she intends to fix the leaking financial plumbing -- the lady, who holds a bachelor of economics and PhD in industrial relations, both from the University of Sydney, and was deputy vice-chancellor (academic) at the University of Queensland until moving to RMIT, stated some forthright opinions regarding the place of tertiary education.

She told Rood:

We are a nation that can and should live on its wits... I don't want a system . . . that produces a much better education for people who can afford to pay and a much worse education for other people... And I'm worried we may be doing that.

And Rood reports, "While she welcomes the debate about what is a university and where the higher education sector is going, her concern is how that discussion is framed."

It isn't a market decision. It's actually a public debate decision. We have to say: "What do we really want from our educational sector?" [And] What looks inevitable afterwards was never inevitable at the time.

Quite possibly, but unless the debate can work its way out of the higher education sections of the broadsheets and into the true mass media, inevitability may not be that far away.

 As for the federal government's squeeze play in regard to research, staffing and infrastructure of Australia's universities, that didn't come up for discussion or at least wasn't reported.