The Detritus from Brendan Nelson's Reign as Minister for Education, Science and Training Keeps on Falling. (May 17, 2006)

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson visiting Camp Smitty, Iraq.  Picture: ADF

    It really ought not to come as any surprise that the now Minister for Defence who put out three mutually exclusive versions of how Australian soldier Private Jake Kovco was shot and killed, none of which is credible, has left Australia's university system in disarray.

The Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee's chief executive John Mullarvey has reported research that has found the cost burden faced by universities of administering the Nelson "reforms" exceeded by up to $50million the $12.6 million the Government had initially earmarked for their implementation. Of course the research quality framework is still rotting on its vine while voluntary student unionism is gestating ectopically in the sector's womb.

The Australian's Dorothy Illing did a ring around to get the views of vice-chancellors now that Dr Nelson has been away with the troops for something over 100 days and the Treasurer, Peter Costello has brought down the 2006/07 budget. She says, "All vice-chancellors contacted by the HES pointed to benefits arising from the Nelson blueprint, among them his decision to put private providers on an equal footing by extending student loans to them.

Ian Chubb of the ANU:

I think bits of [the reforms] were successful. It's like all big complex things: it depends a bit on where you sit in the sector.

 

I think he was right to have a teaching and learning quality fund, [and] he was right to not spread the money over the lot of them and take on some of the issues. ...he was right to float the RQF issue or the quality of research issue. I think that had to be done and I think he was right to link PhD students to that quality and accept the fact that our system needs to differentiate more and more.

According to Ms Illing, Murdoch University vice-chancellor John Yovich said as a group vice-chancellors took forward "quite a few" of the Nelson reforms, including charging students higher fees, and he echoed the view that some of the policies were good but said they had fallen down in the implementation. Professor Yovich said:

All the Nelson reforms [responded] to a need for a degree of differentiation in the sector and more options being put in front of us for student markets and growth, but the underlying machinery and financial drivers need to be improved to match those goals.

You get the feeling that following Mr Costello's, "medical research is good the rest of you get lost", budget the vice-chancellors are walking on very thin-shelled eggs.

Oh, but getting back to stealth bureaucracy, Brendan Nelson told the media on November 18, 2005,  "Following discussions with vice-chancellors, I have agreed to a series of changes ... to significantly reduce the level of red tape and simplify the administration of the reform programs."

Its mind boggling to think of what it might have been if he'd not had a chat with the V-Cs. Ms Illing reports, "One big metropolitan university now has a database of 102 pieces of federal, state and local government legislation with which it must comply."

Now you might have thought that some serious thought should have been paid as to the effect Dr Nelson's machinations have had on the quality and direction of university teaching on undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels, or on research, fundamental and strategic.

Think again, Ms Illing sums up:

Education consultant David Phillips believed history would judge Dr Nelson's education era as positive overall. But there had been some serious mistakes along the way and no real shift in the way universities were resourced. He said the Government should have gone decisively down one path or the other: adopt a free market or ramp up the role of government and fund universities properly.

"As it is we have an odd combination of deregulation and re-regulation," he said.

It's a view shared by academic Simon Marginson: "We are left betwixt and between public and private funding, able to access neither on the scale needed, and so forced back into cranking up the foreign dollar despite uncertainty."