A Vision of the Future for Australian Higher Universities as Dictated by Brendan Nelson and Interpreted by Monash's Simon Marginson. (May 10, 2005)

    Simon Marginson is an Australian Professorial Fellow at Monash University, and the director of the Monash Centre for Research in International Education. In the May 9 issue of The Sydney Morning Herald Professor Marginson predicted the state of Australia's universities after the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, concludes his "extreme makeover".

Some excerpts:

Australian universities are being jolted into another universe... Such changes are never about teaching, learning or knowledge. They are always about university fees, finances and structures. Australian policy-makers are economic determinists. Get the economic incentives right, they reason, and the best possible social and educational world will follow... the main changes [to come] are in financing and research.

 

Under Nelson the clear winners are the strongest and oldest research universities: Sydney, NSW, Melbourne, Queensland, ANU, Western Australia, probably Adelaide and Monash, possibly Macquarie and a couple more... These universities can charge premium surplus-generating fees in high-demand courses such as law, medicine and dentistry... These universities will improve staffing and facilities, sustain the basic disciplines in the sciences and humanities, make marginal improvements in teaching technique (though they will spend more on marketing) and, above all, develop research.

 

Universities with less pull in the status market... will follow bargain basement volume maximisation strategies, designed to generate efficiencies from product standardisation and scale... The crunch issue is capacity for blue-sky research, which has no immediate practical application.

 

The problem here is that the Government still refuses to index the public funding base... [and] [r]esearch cannot pay for itself. It has immense long-term benefits but most of them do not translate into marketable commodities.

 

But research is the driver of university mission and status, for good reason. Research universities have a more advanced capacity in teaching, and offer more to professions, industry, foreign universities and bright students from here or overseas.

 

The Nelson reforms are likely to lead to a stronger group of top research universities... The most likely outcome is only eight to 12 first-class research universities... That will not be enough for a global knowledge economy. [except] by using public funding to broaden the research base.

But there seems little likelihood of "using public funding to broaden the research base" and with a substantial majority of current public research funding already being allocated to the Group of Eight universities even were what remains for the rest to be redirected to the Go8 and a couple of others, their fundamental research would gain little, certainly not sufficient to significantly raise their profile on the world stage. In short even the very modest optimism of Professor Marginson appears misplaced.

As to the generation of additional revenue from popular courses to subsidise the remainder, which would be deemed worthy, while usefully upgrading the crumbling infrastructures of even those universities to be most favoured would seem misplaced wishful thinking.

Not until academics can gain the sympathetic attention of a significant majority of the public will there be a turnabout by the government and that will remain the case whether the Coalition remain in power or Labor wrests it from them.