Support for Higher Education and Research: Some Thoughts of Simon Marginson and Bob Park. (February 19, 2008)

Simon Marginson is professor of higher education in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne while Bob Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park and a former Executive Director of the American Physical Society. While they have rather different ways of expression they both are believers that research and higher education are on the whole A GOOD THING.

Professor Park in a recent What's New made the following observation:

STIMULUS: A BETTER WAY TO FUND RESEARCH.

The US$168 billion stimulus package, was approved by Congress yesterday, exactly two weeks after the President told Congress he wanted it. A better plan would be to send every physicist a check. If all 42,000 members of the APS received $1 million for research it would not only directly stimulate the economy, it would provide incalculable future stimulus, while saving $126 billion. Record speed was possible because no thought was involved. By contrast, it took Congress all last year to wreck physics (WN 28 Dec 07) .

Professor Marginson in an opinion piece in the February 17, 2008 Age tellingly uses understatement in venturing that: "Former prime minister John Howard saw the universities as a political problem to be controlled rather than a site of economic, social and cultural investment. He marginalised them, under-funded them and talked down student participation."

He then defends the lack of specifics regarding research and higher education by the new  Rudd Labor government despite having made it a central campaign issue: "Some have criticised Labor's education revolution as mere rhetoric because the Government is yet to finance it. The critics have missed the point. The Rudd education revolution is rhetorical because in the first instance it is about changing attitudes. Only when there is stronger public support can the Government invest in education and research at internationally competitive levels. After all, the community has to pay for this investment through taxation."

And while he's got a good point that when it comes right down to it, a significant proportion of the voters view higher education and research as rather esoteric not to say elitist products: "We cannot live forever on highly favourable commodity prices and, like most OECD governments, the new Labor government sees a continually improving education and research system as essential to long-term prosperity."

But just as Canada's Liberal government under Jean Chretien and the UK Labour government of Tony Blair strongly led their populations (taxpayers) in supporting research and higher education it's up to Kevin Rudd to now show comparable leadership.

Professor Marginson concludes his op-ed: "Perhaps Rudd does not yet know how he will answer these questions*. But he will answer them and the answers will shape the classes of 2008 and beyond."

The May budget is likely to give significant indication regarding the shape of those answers.

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*How to reforge the universities and in what order of priority — unit funding, growth of numbers, student allowances, research support, scholarships and fellowships, innovative missions like the Melbourne model — and how to deal with other issues such as early childhood education, government schools and industry training.