They Can't be Serious, Can They? (September 23, 2009)

It's the Spring Equinox today and perhaps it explains the report by Bernard Lane in today's Higher Education Supplement of The Australian.

This past May the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) presented a 20-page proposal for the standardisation and monitoring of curricula for Australian universities, and last month TFW reprinted submissions from Dr Michael Gallagher (Executive Director) Group of Eight, Professor Alan Robson writing as vice-chancellor of The University of Western Australia but who is also the current chairman of the Group of Eight.

Now, as the executive director of the Group of Eight, Dr Michael Gallagher, told Mr Lane: "People are anxious about government intruding into academic affairs; "You'd never want a national (university) curriculum in history or in philosophy or in economics."

But that is just exactly what the federal government does appear to want -- a national curriculum within which the dictates of prescribed compacts are concocted.

If anyone should know how the ministerial mind works it'd be Dr Gallagher who at one time was first assistant secretary, higher education division of Dr David Kemp's Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs and later joined  the Department of Education, Science and Training under Brendan Nelson.

When AUQA's proposal of overseeing university curricula is coupled with the Minister for Education, Julia Gillard's championing of a national regulator for tertiary institutions whose province is yet to be defined, it's understandable that the sector is rather windy.

According to Mr Lane's report: "A definition of academic standards by discipline, proposed in AUQA's paper, would be 'virtually impossible to achieve,' far too costly and damaging to diversity, the Group of Eight said in one of 55 written responses to the agency."

 Universities Australia's chief executive Glenn Withers told the HES that the logical extension of the AUQA approach was a prescribed curriculum.

 In its response to the AUQA proposal RMIT was blunt:

RMIT believes that the focus of the paper on Academic Achievement Standards is too narrow and is an active constraint to the expression of institutions’ specific missions. This will serve to homogenise the sector and constrain the desirable diversity that institutions and governments are intent on achieving. This homogeneity will be further emphasised via application of standardisation as opposed to standards (potentially at the institutional grouping or institutional level). In stressing our support for the ATN position RMIT does not resile from support for rigorous quality assurance approaches nor the application of benchmarks. Rather, RMIT believes that standards and associated performance levels need to be determined and applied at the institutional level consistent with institutions’ missions.

Following from this, it is evident that the proposed national approach to standards, if it is to serve institutional autonomy, support achievement of diversity across the sector and ensure informed governments and markets would need to be at so high a level of abstraction as to be meaningless.

We can only hope that Kevin Rudd and his ministers will step back, consider objectively how they're operating with respect to the universities and lighten up. That the federal government is showing and promising very significant increased support for the sector is clear, but to give with one hand and then crush initiative with a heavy boot isn't the way forward.