A Vice-Chancellor and a Higher Education Policy Analyst Venture Some Opinions. (April 1, 2009)

The vice-chancellor of The University of New South Wales, Professor Fred Hilmer, gave The Australian's Luke Slattery an extensive interview in which he dropped a verbal IED: "[the university sector] always feels that it loses, and along comes [the Bradley] report that offers more money for this, more for that. There was an argument that we should take what we can get and not be critical." This "mendicant attitude" has been observed as far away as Cambridge, where a colleague of Hilmer, when asked by the UNSW vice-chancellor how British academics viewed their antipodean peers, offered a disparaging image: "Church mice."

It's probably just as well that French academics weren't interrogated.

Professor Hilmer is one vice-chancellor who takes academic rankings very seriously telling Mr Slattery that for starters what is needed is "better performance in the global rankings. In The Times rankings for all Australian universities we slipped from 100 to 150 between 2005 and 2008, and the thing that drove the rankings down was academic peer review. That's 40 per cent of the index. We had 12 Australian universities in the top 100 and we're now down to seven.

      "The reality is that if you get better rankings you get more and better international students, and the full fees from international students contribute to research. So you get better funding. This means you get better rankings and outputs: that's your virtuous circle.

     "Putting a bit of extra money into research - some hundreds of millions - is pocket money compared with putting extra into the infrastructure needed for other big industries, such as a coal loader. I think the funding question for research should be looked at as basic infrastructure support to sustain our third biggest industry in export terms.

"Education is an industry that is still growing through the downturn and has growth prospects ahead."

And Professor Hilmer is not one to push the barrow for academic research being for the public good: "The argument that research produces a social good is attractive in theory, but in practice a dead end. Research should be thought of as infrastructure that supports vital industry."

How the UNSW vice-chancellor sees the arts and humanities as well as the relevance of the more abstruse areas of science and mathematics remains to be addressed. But there is a hint, and a positive one:

It's a great time for people in the humanities to remind everyone of their importance. Public debate about the course of the global recession is led by politicians figuring out who to blame and how to re-regulate, but what are the complex lessons we've learned about the way we want society, the banking and finance sectors to be designed? Deeper still, because one of the sources of failure is ethics and the greed economy, how do we handle ethics at university and school? Where do ethical ideas come from and why? What form do they take today? How, in a practical sense, do levels of remuneration impact on ethics? ...I used to think it could be integrated across the curriculum. But I'm swinging away from that now. It wouldn't be a bad thing to have a specific course with ethics in it as an integral part of an undergraduate education.

So how about a term course as Ethics 101. One of the US' highest ranking research universities had (perhaps still does have) ethics as an elective in its first two years. It was paired with a term course in formal logic, which most students took before sitting ethics.

But Professor Hilmer gives the impression of not being sure just what he wants from the university sector and therefore he appears at a loss as to how to guide it. Luke Slattery reports: "Hilmer believes that the universities will probably not generate the technology destined to fuel the next boom. 'We need something with commercial impact in the next five years, something that's probably already out there.' But he is confident that higher education can equip the labour force in preparation for economic and industrial lift-off.

     "He is especially cheered by the strong growth in engineering enrolments at the UNSW and the strength of business and commerce. "But the liberal arts are really important," he adds. "You can say the MBA got it wrong. But if you go to America every one of those MBAs has a liberal arts undergraduate degree. We should be looking at that."

On the other hand Gavin Moodie, a higher education policy analyst at Griffith University, makes the point in his opinion piece for today's Australian HES that: "...work is needed on university research policy, partly because the terms of reference of the review of the national innovation system weren't directed explicitly to university research, and partly because Innovation Minister Kim Carr has done little more than embroider slogans federal Labor took to the 2007 election."

Dr Moodie  goes on to say:

[T]here is no indication that the Government's thinking [regarding institutional compacts] has advanced beyond then Opposition spokesman Stephen Smith's statement of August 24, 2007.

The Government's position on university research hubs and spokes is even more underdeveloped. Nor does the Government have a mechanism for identifying, evaluating and monitoring hubs and spokes. The Excellence in Research for Australia assessments being conducted by the Australian Research Council are a possibility, but these are tied tightly to academic disciplines defined by the Australian and New Zealand standard research classification.

Carr's statements on the full funding of research are so qualified and replete with weasel words that only the most desperate could gain comfort from them.

Carr has also introduced a major delaying and make-work diversion by requiring activity-based costing and additional analyses as a condition for more research funding.

Meanwhile, the ability of attracting and retaining the most creative and the most competent of academicians and researchers seems to slip ever further to the Northern hemisphere while government and university administrators appear increasing impotent.