Is It Really the Sandstones vs the Rest? (February 22, 2008)

In his second opinion piece in a week Simon Marginson, in today's Sydney Morning Herald, points up some stark facts pertaining to the state of Australia's higher education system compared to its OECD cohort:

Between 1995 and 2004, Australia reduced public funding of universities and TAFE by 4 per cent. We were the only OECD nation to reduce public funding. The average OECD country increased it by 49 per cent.

Meanwhile, in Australia, fee-paying international students were pumped up to fill the funding gap, tertiary student numbers rose by one-third and public funding per student dropped by 28 per cent.

Mr Rudd wants to lift quantity and quality... The goal is to become a leading knowledge economy like the US, Canada, Finland or Singapore. The US spends 2.6 per cent of GDP on tertiary education. We spend 1.5 per cent.

Ian Chubb, the Australian National University's vice-chancellor, who is in fact expressing the desires of the Group of Eight as a whole which believe that they are entitled to get and should be apportioned a larger slice of the higher education funding pie.

Professor Chubb said in his address to the Australia and New Zealand School of Government in Canberra on February 20:

We should not hold back the best-performing universities in the hope that some of the others will join them at some high level if we deflect resources, or spread them thinly, for long enough ... the gap does not appear to be closing.

It is an issue about which we cannot expect consensus in the sector; it will need real political courage if we are to maintain at least some of our universities in the upper reaches of the world league.

Australia's catch-up cannot be predicated on a thinly spread distribution of any additional investment because of the scale and pace of our competitors. The hard reality is that the rest of the world is not waiting for Australia, and if we play catch-up politics internally waiting a few more decades in some vain hope that the Dawkins reforms will eventually give every university a place in the sun we may well be watching the world from the sidelines.

Australia cannot afford any longer to dissipate resources and level down the performance peaks.

I would like to see this process [of university funding] moving in the direction of customised block grants to universities from the research councils reflecting true operating costs with accountability for quality of outcomes as the means by which we judge the quality of our work and adjust the block.

On the other hand University of Canberra vice-chancellor Stephen Parker voiced his indignation saying:

I don't know whether Australia can sustain about 40 stand-alone institutions and be internationally competitive.

Now one of the issues is how can we have a university which is right up the top of world rankings?

One way is to think about combining two Group of Eight universities, which almost with a stroke of the pen would create stronger performance.

...Sydney and in Melbourne...

My point is that these kinds of big ideas aren't being canvassed at the moment. I think we should start with that kind of big thinking before we start looking at how money might be taken away from younger and smaller universities to help fuel the research of the Group of Eight.

Professor Chubb in reply to a barb from National Union of Students president Angus McFarland who said this was "petty factionalism" when the sector should unite to fight for more funding:

I've now been in this game for 20 years and every year all we do to avoid petty factionalism is to go out and ask for more money and every year we don't get it notwithstanding the fact that we might need it.

In order to get resources these days, you have to show ... that you're prepared to do something to earn it or something different to earn it.

And then we have the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr, and the Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Julia Gillard, respectively quoted as contributing vacuous rhetoric in that the universities must diversify and must be world class.

If at this point Kevin Rudd, prime minister for just over 80 days, is beginning to think that on this one issue alone he requires the wisdom of Solomon and the power of Fredrick the Great it wouldn't be all that surprising.

Perhaps he might consider playing primarily the scholar and the institution secondarily.