The Vice-Chancellors are Becoming Restless Not to Say Somewhat Stroppy. (October 27,2006)

    The fact that the Australian Federal Government's contribution to higher education has diminished to 41% down from about the 60% when John Howard's Coalition was elected to power should hardly come as a surprise. It's certainly been no secret and indeed Mr Howard takes pride in the fact - and there's no reason to believe that the slide will stop should the public's and the media's indifference continue.

The indifference is unwise because the nation's economic and cultural well being is very much dependent on the health of its higher education resources, but the problems won't begin to seriously bite until our present crop of political leaders are beyond caring.

And with the reduction in federal funding there has been a concurrent increase in politically directed bureaucratic demands for accountability as well as downright interference in the functions of Australia's public universities.

Sydney University's vice-chancellor, Scottish-born mathematician Gavin Brown, put it this way, "What happens is that as the Government forces us to go out and be more entrepreneurial, they get more and more nervous about what we might do, so they increase the regulation."

As far as Fred Hilmer, vice-chancellor of the University of New South Wales is concerned,  "We are either regulated and funded properly or if we're not going to be funded fully then we need to be deregulated and we need to be able to set our price structures, and if the Government doesn't believe that they're appropriate, I think the Government should control what it's prepared to lend students rather than control what we charge."

Macquarie University V-C, Steven Schwartz is strongly in favour of deregulation and is quoted by Dorothy Illing in The Australian, "I can see the huge amounts of benefit if [the government] said to universities: 'Have as many students as you like, charge them whatever you like so long as they're willing to pay it and you can collect it through the HECS system, and we'll subsidise the students.'  From a competitive point of view that would really change the system."

On the other the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop, made it clear that as far as she (i.e. John Howard) is concerned the universities are in a strong financial position and she quoted the usual set of statistics with the intentional lack of placing them in appropriate perspective -- and while she is somewhat less combative than her processor, she is equally disingenuous and unsupportive.

University of Queensland vice-chancellor, John Hay doesn't see much light at the end of a very long tunnel, saying he had not seen any intention by either of the main political parties to significantly increase the net levels of funding to universities, "Rather, I've seen this position, even on the part of the Labor Party, to allow the student debt to keep rising."

Unfortunately from a higher educational viewpoint it's very unequal combat, as though a 400 lb gorilla were holding a flailing child at arms length while have lunch.