Perhaps the most interesting and certainly the most articulate of the interviewees was Allan Luke of Singapore's  Nanyang Technological University. He was speaking as one who was looking from the outside but has an intimate knowledge of the Australian University sector. Some excerpts:

Q. Why do you have an interest in Australian universities?

A. Well because I’ve been a participant. My daughter’s gone through and gotten three degrees out of this system. I believe in this system and it’s given me as a young academic and as a young intellectual who came here from Canada in the 80s, a great opportunity.

Q. What do you think it would be like to be a junior academic in Australia today?

A. ...they’re working hard but the issue is that by competitive international standards their working conditions are quite difficult. ...if I go to some of the major universities that we’re trying to compete with – tier one land grant institutions in the United States – an assistant Professor might have 6 to 8 hours of contact, access to some initial grants, and then be told to go off and write and go off and publish and research, and many of our institutions the beginning young academic might be working, 12, 16, 18 hours a week and teaching, plus marketing work, travelling to offer courses offshore, admin work and so forth. So there’s been a work intensification – particularly around entrepreneurial activities, that has drawn many academics from their core business.

Q. There is a suggestion that there would be a shift away from research-oriented academia. What are the risks in terms of what that might do to a university?

A. Well look – let’s be honest about it. All universities can’t be Harvard, and all universities can’t be Cambridge. Nonetheless, by definition universities are places where we profess and generate new knowledge. When we get our PHDs, we’re supposed to create new knowledge and make contributions to knowledge. At the point in which a university just becomes a teaching institution and isn’t engaged in generating new knowledge, we have a problem on our hands.

Q. Do you think all new knowledge should have the potential to make money pretty quick?

A. Nope...

Q. What happens if we do do that?

A. Universities will lose their soul. They’ll lose some of their very powerful historical functions as social critics, as forms of alternative knowledge, as sources of aesthetic and intellectual activity and wealth - the kind of thing that as corporations come and go, they’ll never be able to recover.

Q. Sitting in Singapore, how do Australian universities measure up to expectations?

A. Australian universities are caught between a rock and a very hard place. They’ve been cut and they’ve been cut and they’ve been cut, and as they’ve been cut they’ve been told to go get the money in the creation of the multi-billion dollar Asian student export business, to go get the money from elsewhere, okay?

Q. Well let me ask you about Asia then, and what is going on at universities in Asia?

A. ...My view is that many of the Asian universities, and Singapore has never made any kind of national secret about this, are cashing up and building their infrastructures, so that within 10 to 15 years they will in effect be able to place themselves in the top tier of world class universities. Shingwa, Fujan in China and some of the Japanese universities are also positioning themselves – busy repositioning and redefining themselves. So I think the sleeper is, is if we see these people as markets, as places where we can draw students or draw scientists from – ultimately we’re gonna turn around and the shoe could be on the other foot. Already the bio-technology labs, some of the salary levels, the access to top rate graduate students is world class. We could turn around and they could’ve outspent us by multiples of four to five to ten in some of the key research areas.

Q. So this is presumably a key question for our government?

A. Yes it is. Yes it is. If you allow research capacity to slip, if you allow ultimately you won’t be able to attract the best and brightest scientists from Asia, from North America – from anywhere, to work in these institutions. They’re going to be attracted to some of these Asian universities.

Q. With the level of public funding that they’ve got at the moment – do you think Australian universities have the ability to keep up with the massive investments in Asia in universities?

A. No I think that at present Australian universities are both under-funded by government and also are not able to access the private endowment and the tax break kind of support that the large American universities and many of the other endowed universities are. So they’re kind of stuck in many ways. The current investment of Singapore is about four per cent of GDP...

One of the salient points not emphasised by the program is that while the Liberal government's reorganising of the university sector will squeeze funding for the nation's second and third tier universities, it will not significantly augment the funds available to Australia's leading institutions. The fact is those institutions already garner the vast majority of government funding and there is no indication that the federal government intends to substantially increase funding for the sector, quite the contrary; it's decision not to index block grants comparable to costs is a stark message.

And Professor Luke's assessment ought to be a wakeup call as to what's happening in the world around us.

Will it?

Probably not.