ANU Vice-chancellor Addresses the Lowy Institute. (August 12, 2009)

Last month, Ian Chubb, the vice-chancellor for the past fifteen years of the Australian National University addressed the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney.

The following excerpts are taken from an edited text published by University World News. The administrator's implication that the university is somehow an entity apart from its scholars pervades Professor Chubb's remarks, and the vagueness in the suggested methodology in implementing "compacts" matches that of the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Carr.

Why not support the nation's best scholars outstandingly well? Do that and not only their but their peers' hearts and minds will follow and stay. If that's done, critical scholarly mass will develop and while the nation won't have Harvards and Stanfords, it will achieve evolution to University of Californias and California State Universities.

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I'm clocking up my 15th year as a vice-chancellor and it's now 23 years since I first became a deputy vice-chancellor... My 23 years have seen a lot of changes - some of them good, some not so good.

Among the not so good was the erosion of regard and ultimately the erosion of trust between government and universities. It was a two way street and in my view did not serve Australia's interests at all well. What the cause of that was, we'll never really know but I'd wager that a not insignificant element in the equation was that universities, playing their proper role in society, operate in a way that does not (at least should not) make them meekly subservient to the whim of the government of the day.

Our university leaders must stand for values and strategies and their institutions, not just (or not only) tactical opportunism... I cannot conceive that you can educate if you don't challenge accepted wisdom and try to develop it through research and scholarly work that take it to new levels.

Maybe the fault is partly ours... We consent to a system of quality assurance that is akin to saying we have clean and comfortable trains because they run on time... We have accepted funding formulae that disperse student-based funding widely rather than to support true differences in outcomes and costs.

Within the context of government policy and the broad directions it indicates, the real issue before us is how we provide Australia with the quality and range of universities that will serve this country best.

Education is no different. We must never be content with outcomes that do not include some that are comparable with the world's great universities. I would also argue that this must mean purposeful differentiation and respect for the differences that evolve. Other countries achieve what they do with structural differences and focused funding.

I do not believe that research activity should be the defining characteristic of a university. If it is, and unless we are more careful than we have been for a long time, we will have no research institutions in the world's first division - as we spread thinly whatever resources are available.

We must move beyond our traditional approach: a zero sum game where you feel the need to bring somebody down to create space for yourself ... if Australia is to sustain a place in the world of knowledge where it counts - at the leading edge - as we also provide opportunities for people to secure an education for personal and national advancement.

Since the mid to late 1990s, preceding the Howard years but exacerbated during them, we experienced... The double-whammy of policy drift and under-investment resulted from a lack of will and lack understanding in Government. It has left Australia vulnerable in the global knowledge society.

Our citation impact over the period 2001-2005 is reasonable in that we are mostly just above, or just below, average. In the biosciences, over the same period, our citation impact is behind the UK in every field. I would argue that this is a consequence of the chronic partial funding of everything so that we give everybody something.

[Regarding Compacts with the government] Each institution will need to know what it stands for, what its distinctive purpose is, and how well it performs, and be able to convince others of its convictions through evidence and argument.

We already have a spectrum of institutional characteristics covered by the university title. According to 2007 data, one university admits more than 50% of its school leaver commencing students with tertiary entrance rank scores above 95, while another admits more than 50% with a tertiary entrance rank scores below 50.

One university has 90% of its academic staff active in research while another has less than 3% active in research. The proportion of academic staff with a doctorate in 2008 varies from a low of 33% to nearly 82% at the highest, with the average near 64%.

One university devotes in excess of 85% of its budget to research-related activities while another spends less than 5% on research. One university has 30% of its enrolments in graduate programmes and 15% in research higher degrees, while another has 7% in graduate programmes and less than 1% in research higher degrees.

We should put an end to the upward pressure on institutions to be other than what they are. At the same time, we should cease the levelling-down of flagship universities to be less than they could be. To do so diminishes Australia.

While expanding and diversifying the higher education system, Australia needs to rediscover the value of its flagship universities and recommit to their unique role. Can you imagine a United States without a Harvard or a Yale? A United Kingdom without Oxford or Cambridge? A Singapore without the National University of Singapore?

The concept of university autonomy has substantive and operational dimensions. Substantively it is about giving space for the exploration of ideas and the discovery of knowledge, and exercising discretion in decisions over: student admissions; staff appointments; curriculum and pedagogy; research content, methods and publications; student assessment; and the award of qualifications.

[However] I for one do not believe that universities should be left entirely free to decide matters in their own interests to close particular courses or open new ones. Nor do I regard higher education as a commodity, where learning is incidental to the purpose of gaining a degree as a currency, and where tuition prices are set at what 'the market' will bear.

 [W]ith regard to research degrees, I do not believe that universities should be totally free to initiate new programs or expand funded enrolments without having to demonstrate their capacity to provide such programmes of an acceptable quality.

Universities not governments must chart their course but they need to do so by ways and means, visible to governments, that have regard to the public good and the national interest.

I suggest that the compacts, negotiated between each university and the government, have the potential to sharpen the exercise of responsible university autonomy... [and] concentrate investment in those fields and institutions with the capacity for the best performance, wherever they may be found.

Clearly it would be impossible, as well as undesirable, for government officials, whose skills are in other areas, to try to form judgments about narrow disciplines for teaching and research, and engage in negotiations with universities about such specifics. The universities must take the lead.

So how can we proceed? In terms of education, one approach would be for universities to bring forward their mission statements and strategic plans, ahead of bilateral consultations with government officials, identifying the main changes in direction they intend to pursue, drawing particular attention to growth and decline by field of education and field of research.

In terms of research... universities should be asked to demonstrate that they have adequate threshold capacity to commence or continue to offer PhDs in particular fields. In other words, there could be useful differentiation around the PhD - comprehensive selective and case-by-case.

There has been an over-emphasis in policy development, since 1989 and particularly pronounced since 1999, on the direct application of university research for commercial purposes.

Consequently, basic research in Australia's universities - the search for understanding of the nature of things - has fallen over the past 20 years from two-thirds to one quarter of total research effort. For a country that is so dependent on being able to access the 97% of world knowledge generated outside Australia, this is definitely a dumb approach.

[F]or 'compacts with teeth'. I see them having five elements:

1. Core agreement based on the mission of the university;
2. Continuity of scholarship in designated fields of education;
3. Provision of quality research training in validated fields of research;
4. Contribution to the national equity agenda;
5. Contribution to the national and international innovation agenda;

I think the government should give serious attention to supplementing its teams of departmental compact negotiators, at least for the initial phase, with respected academic authorities and university leaders.

To get this right, we will have to take the hard decisions.

To get it wrong would be to leave an unthinkable legacy.