Ferociously Intelligent Former Vice-Chancellor Battles With the Most Amorphous Terms of Reference. (August 23, 2008)

Professor Denise Bradley

So observes The Canberra Times' education reporter Emma MacDonald in analysing Denise Bradley as she works to create the Higher Education Review for the federal government.

The four-membered  review panel has just under 350 submissions to examine (the 2002 review under Brendan Nelson received 728 written submissions) and is scheduled to provide its report on priority action by the end of October 2008, to be followed by a final report at the end of the year.

It is also to decide in consultation with the Minister of Education, Julia Gillard, on the best way to implement review recommendations.

The members of the Review Expert Panel in addition to Professor Bradley are:

• Mr Peter Noonan           (11.6 KB), Director of Peter Noonan Consulting;

• Dr Helen Nugent AO      (14.8 KB), Director of Macquarie Bank and Chair of Funds SA; and

• Mr Bill Scales AO           (9.5 KB), current Chancellor of Swinburne University of Technology and Chairman of the Port of Melbourne Corporation.

It's certainly not top-heavy with cloistered ivory-towered academics.

As Ms MacDonald reminds us the review is being prepared under the spectre of a 20-year precedent where "governments regularly commissioned higher education reviews and just as quickly shelve them".

Will it be much different this time around?

We ought to know a bit more toward the end of October when Professor Bradley is to release the panel's "report on priority action", i.e. it ought to give an indication of just how critical its four members think is the situation of Australia's higher education sector.

Ms MacDonald observes: "Big changes necessitate losers as much as winners. And with universities currently operated like independent fiefdoms, it is unclear how much they would be prepared to sacrifice individually for the greater good. Failure to get them on board may be the real decider in getting any revolution off the ground."

But aren't the fundamental issues that universities are foremost collections of scholars pursuing and disseminating learning and research and one of the requirements of a nation intent on progress is to foster that? Yes, they also train those that populate the professions and directly and indirectly all those that contribute to the commonweal, but when fundamental research and scholarship become secondary considerations as is increasingly the case in Australia, the nation's intellectual infrastructure is on a path toward irreparable damage.

Maybe, just maybe, the individual in authority will come to the realisation that you play the guy first, the institution, sandstone or otherwise, second.