News & Views item - June 2006

 

 

The Case Against Governmental Micromanaged University Diversification. (June 21, 2006)

    Last week the Centre for European Reform released The Future of European Universities: Renaissance or decay? authored by two leading members of the British business establishment which lists five principal recommendation. Among them -- that Europe should devote more resources to research and give its universities more autonomy.

 

Simultaneously Australia's Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop, in an address to the Inaugural Knowledge Transfer & Engagement Forum told her audience, "We must use [the Research Quality Framework] as a tool for greater diversity in the higher education sector, focussing universities’ attention on their strengths, and moving away from the 'one-size-fits-all' mould of universities..."

 

Now Vice-chancellor Ian O'Connor of Griffith University and Gavin Moodie, a higher education policy analyst at Griffith argue in a paper presented to the Business/Higher Education Round Table conference on Tomorrow's Universities and reprinted in edited form in today's Australian, "While diversity has considerable advantages when it develops organically, enforcing it by government regulation has big disadvantages. It produces stasis. It prevents unplanned, open-ended institutional experimentation that stimulates innovation and progress. It also restricts institutions' capacity to respond to their communities, and entrenches privilege and disadvantage. It induces complacency at the top and reduces incentives at the bottom."

 

They go on to quote a statement put out by the twelve member League of European Research Universities, "A rigid institutionalised system of selectivity runs a severe danger of fossilising the system at a particular point in time. It is essential for research universities to be dynamic and to enable new centres of expertise to develop, possibly at the expense of more established ones that have lost their edge."

 

What is foreseen if not prophesied is an inflexible micromanagieral  system imposed by the federal government. You might liken it to Canberra prescriptively dictating administrative details at the county and municipal level.

 

O'Conner and Moodie are vague in detailing how the would devise a system to allow universities appropriate autonomy in developing their individual strengths while seeking public funding, but they are definite in concluding, "The best strategy to deal with the future is not to fix institutions in unchanging roles but to give them the flexibility to try different ideas. Not all will succeed, of course. But if the system is sufficiently competitive, institutions will discard the strategies that fail and adopt strategies that have succeeded elsewhere."

 

What is at the crux of the dilemma is that the entrenched single tiered system of universities is now to be devolved back to a two or three tiered system.

 

It remains to be seen whether any Australian Government will be able to withstand the wailing and gnashing of teeth that will ensue when/if  the "reconstruction" is impressed on the sector, because there is little indication that either major party is capable of developing a workable evolutionary mechanism to reform the current system.