Last week the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, gave an "exclusive interview" to the Australian's Higher Education Section's Samantha Maiden. Emanating from the views that Dr Nelson expressed (not for the first time) are strong suggestions that he is playing to a populist gallery.

    He has on occasion quoted the former Labor Minister for Science, Barry Jones, so perhaps it's not out of place to take a paragraph from Jones' address to the University of Melbourne when he was awarded a Doctor of Laws honoris causa in April last year. In that address, as Dr Nelson has pointed out, Barry Jones commented, "A turning point in the history of Australia’s higher education was the comprehensive reorganization which was initiated, and indeed imposed, from 1987 by John Dawkins, Bob Hawke’s Minister for Education and Training. I have little doubt that Dawkinsisation will prove to have been the greatest single mistake of the Hawke-Keating years." Dr Nelson indicated his agreement.

    However, there were other observations made by Barry Jones which Dr Nelson hasn't quoted –

There are at least four reasons for the retreat of universities from public engagement:

 

    1. They are under very heavy pressure to achieve more with reduced resources and many academics are crushed by administrative burdens and keeping up with the complexity of new developments to have much time for research or to engage in public debate.

 

     2. Dependence on outside funding means that academics are uneasy about offending major corporations, for example by taking up such issues as pollution, global warming, drugs of addiction.

 

    3. The media sets the agenda for public debate and the academic community is not called on for comment - it then withdraws within its fortress

 

    4. Universities are accused of being elitist (a particularly damaging accusation in the current climate), self serving and remote.

 

We live in deeply troubled times and I would hope that intellectuals could provide more leadership than they are at present.

Not only do Dr Nelson's higher education "reforms" not address the first two issues raised by Barry Jones, by his actions and statements he plays on the fourth through perceived populist sentiment coming out with the sweeping statement such as:

What I've tried to do is develop an environment where universities themselves, with financial assistance, if they choose to, can start to rationalise some of their low cost, low-demand courses.

 

Scores of courses [have as few as five students enrolled].

    
[You then find] Kids are jammed in like sardines, hanging from the rafters,
They have 600 people doing a particular course, at 350 they put the boom gates down on the lecture theatre.

 

For the very first time, we have competitive pricing tensions between the universities. Every university campus is going to have to sit down early next year and think about a number of things. What is this course worth? What's the capacity of our student profile as graduates to meet the HECS contribution when it is levied? What do students actually get for their money?

So is the good doctor advocating that the study of antiquities, or classics, or languages such as aboriginal dialects are to be crushed. Or perhaps subjects such as gauge theory, or orthogonal polynomials, neither of which are on the undergraduate hit parade, ought to be junked?

    But perhaps it's the case that the minister really does think only in populist sound bites. He concluded with this tilt at a straw man on the indexation of university funding.

If all we did was put more money into universities, you would compound the problems. You might delay the crash against the wall, but you would compound the problem.

I don't recall anyone in authority in the university sector suggesting that indexation was all that was required. But it sure as hell is one element of many that is. And from a financial viewpoint the university sector will require a lot more than indexation if is to raise its level in order to form the foundation of a "first world" knowledge economy.

Returning to the Minister's avowal of Barry Jones' condemnation of Dawkinsisation, what appears to be Dr Nelson's approach to corrective measures is little short of corrosive, and suggests perhaps that he has coined a triumphant motto for his  department...

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web