News & Views item

In 2001 the Harvard Corporation (board) tapped Larry Summers to be Harvard's 27^th president. It was with the view that the university was in need of an extreme makeover.

After four-and-a-half years the blunt talking combative former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton concluded that it was no longer possible for him to reach a rapprochement with the majority of Harvard's faculty and he needed to make way for a replacement.

One of Summers' principal goals was to remake the undergraduate curriculum with the avowed objective of having Harvard graduates more knowledgeable, particularly in the sciences.

Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism writes in the March 6 issue of Time, "Summers was right that Harvard and other universities need to provide more structured education for undergrads."

A specific example of the revamping of undergraduate science teaching is given in the February 24 issue of Science, but in this case it is to modernise the teaching of a particular subject (molecular biology). Campbell, et al describe the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT). The authors point out that "recent advances in technology have yet to be incorporated into many biology classrooms. Most undergraduates are taught the same way their instructors were taught, which seldom reflects leading-edge research practices. Training faculty in the latest research methods is not well supported on most campuses. Worse yet, when students with outdated undergraduate science experiences become primary and secondary school teachers, they condemn future generations to inadequate preparation for college. Today's teachers may also neglect the more quantitative aspects and increased interdisciplinary involvement of modern biology... We have developed the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT) to engage undergraduates in genomics experimental design and data analysis."

Recently, Julie Bishop, Minister for Education, Science and Training has given lip service to the importance of science and the teaching of science while being part of a government that shows little inclination to foster updating and renewing science teaching as described by Campbell and his colleagues whose disquiet is as applicable to the enabling sciences as it is to biology.

Which brings us to Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis and the "Melbourne Model". In its current state of development students would be offered up to five generalist strands of undergraduate programs, including arts, science and humanities, but there would be a de-emphasis on undergraduate teaching with Professor Davis suggesting that the proportion of graduate to undergrade students would reach the proportions current at Harvard which has probably the highest in the world.

University	Type	Undergraduate students	Graduate students	% Undergraduates	*SJTU Ranking**	Endowment US$ M
University of Melbourne	Public	25,100	8,500	75	82	--
University of California, Berkeley	Public	22,800	9.300	71	4	2,037
University of Michigan, Ann Arbour	Public	25,000	14,000	64	21	4,900
Indiana University, Bloomington	Public	27,800	7,900	78	87	--
Ohio State University, Columbus	Public	37,400	13,100	74	43	1,600
University of Wisconsin, Madison	Public	29,000	13,000	69	16	--
University of Washington, Seattle	Public	31,000	12,000	72	17	1,330
University of Cambridge	Public	11,800	4,700	71	2	--

Harvard University	Private	6,650	13,000	34	1	25,900
Stanford University	Private	6,650	7,800	46	3	12,400

What is worrying about Davis' model is that there seem to be no hard-headed economic calculations behind it and no serious consideration given to developing a rigorous undergraduate course structure, precisely the problem Lawrence Summers was attempting to address at Harvard, which concerns Nicholas Lemann, and is illustrated by example in the paper by Campbell, et al.

Is short, Glyn Davis is on a fool's errand; Australia's federal and state governments show little interest in properly resourcing the rebuilding of the university sector and Davis has Buckley's of amassing sufficient philanthropic funding or revenue from fees to reshape the University of Melbourne into the elitist research university of his model let alone one that would provide outstanding modern undergraduate curricula.

Not until there is a perception by our politicians that a critical proportion of the voting public considers it an matter of urgency to properly resource the higher education sector will a significant change occur, and so far the higher education sector has made no effort to engage the public in its pursuit of that goal.