Sydney University and the ANU Make Moves to Jettison Their Dead Wood. (March 28, 2012)

Ian Young (l) - Michael Spence (r)

 In today's Australian articles by Julie Hare and Jill Rowbotham discuss staff reductions at The Australian National University (ANU) and The University of Sydney respectively. According to Ms Rowbotham three months before Sydney University's vice-chancellor, Michael Spence, signalled the university would be collecting some 100 redundancies, the university's provost, Stephen Garton, circulated a letter to "colleagues" which read in part: "Some other Go8 universities are pulling ahead of us in terms of research performance" as measured by ratings in the Excellence in Research for Australia audit and world rankings. "Similarly . . . in many areas we are consistently below the Go8 average in terms of teaching performance."  Senior executives were working on "this major reputational and budgetary issue" and needed co-operation in identifying some key research performance measures by the end of September. "The vice-chancellor and I consider this a vital and urgent task," Professor Garton concludes... "The fact that we seem to have a tail of mediocre-to-poor performers is obviously a critical factor in terms of overall institutional performance with respect to research income per FTE and ERA scores... many of these poor research performers are also not making up teaching hours to compensate . . . adding unnecessarily to levels of part-time teaching expenditure. Given our current budget situation, these are things we can ill afford to ignore."

    But he said there was no "university-wide conceptual clarity" regarding research performance, which left the university "seriously exposed in any effort to manage underperformance".

Ms Rowbotham concludes by reporting that Professor Garton said yesterday that the criteria that were to be used to determine under performance which is considered to be as Ms Rowbotham understood it to be "separate from identifying academics for redundancy based on their contribution relative to others in terms of their publication record and other factors".

If this all seems to be somewhat Humpty Dumptyish it's probably because it is. Somewhere in what appears to be in the distant past the concept of peer review of research seems to have gone, if not missing, at least misplaced.

And the fact remains dumping dead wood is much easier than replacing it with top grade rosewood.

Meanwhile Julie Hare tells us that ANU's vice-chancellor, Ian Young, announced this past Monday that "the university must find $40 million in savings, including cutting 100 to 150 jobs, and improve work practices to remain financially viable and internationally competitive."

In describing what might be called Professor Young's 8-year plan the vice-chancellor told Ms Hare: We are not proposing to do an across-the-board cut as some institutions have done, because that means everyone has less resources to do their work. We are trying to be more strategic, so we will look closely at academic and administrative functions of the university which we can either no longer afford to carry out or no longer want to carry out.

     By 2015, 85 per cent of academic staff will be in four-digit field of research code areas (discipline areas) rated ERA 4 or 5. This will rise to 90 per cent by 2020 (compared with 80 per cent in 2010).

Professor Young told Ms Hare that areas of national importance would be maintained, even if they had low student demand and did not have "cutting-edge performance".
"In the criteria we are using, there will of course be research performance and teaching quality, but there should also be disciplines of national importance that ANU must maintain."

Commenting on the matter Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne is of the opinion that: "The ERA is the only thing around that ranks people competitively in a holistic way. So it's not a surprise we are seeing such a major shift in the landscape. It gives you an objective basis on which to make decisions.... It's about encouraging universities to improve themselves through the competitive pressure it creates."

But is this really the way for universities to improve and in particular for the university sector as a whole to improve. First of all the ERA is a retrospective evaluation and has the potential for poaching within what is a limited resource rather than replacing mediocrity with excellence.

And when you combine this sort of centripetal administrative mindset with increasing dependence on international student fees and a Federal Opposition which at best doesn't give a damn and a worst is actively antagonistic toward academia you have a recipe for stagnation.