In April 2002 Barry Jones spoke at a meeting at The University of Melbourne. Mr Jones in his day had been Labor Minister for Science and President of the Australian Labor Party (not simultaneously). He told his audience in part:

 

A turning point in the history of Australia's higher education was the comprehensive reorganisation that 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.

[U]niversities were required to adopt the corporate model of governance, and to see themselves not only as communities of scholars, but as trading corporations as well. Is there no alternative? It seems, not.

Universities have less to spend proportionally for expanding knowledge, pushing back the frontiers of the unknown - the traditional areas of university concern: philosophy, history, geography, the classics, literature, music, physics, chemistry, mathematics, archaeology, anthropology, astronomy. Law, medicine and the life sciences are expanding, but marketing, management and IT courses are doing best of all - answering the "How?" questions, not the "Why?"

We are in the age of "wedge politics" when the deepest division is not between left and right (terms that now seem almost devoid of meaning), but between elite opinion and popular opinion. The term "academic" is routinely used in a denigratory way - to mean remote, pedantic, impractical or irrelevant.

 

Now six-and-a-half years later John Howard's Coalition government has been voted out of office and Labor will have been in power just under 11 months with the echos of a promised "Education Revolution" growing fainter, but not yet vanished. From the viewpoint of the tertiary sector that most important Bradley Review has yet to be published as well of course the eventual government response.

 

In an address to the National Press Club on October 29 the vice-chancellor of The Australian National University (ANU), Professor Ian Chubb appears to have vented his frustration telling his listeners that the nation risks a dramatic slide in global [university] rankings if it fails to concentrate research spending on proven performers. He explained his viewpoint to The Australian's Higher Education Supplement: "If an institution that has no demonstrated capacity and can't bring forward evidence of that capacity says that it wants to be a world class research institution, then somebody has to say: 'No, you're not going to be funded for it'."

 

Professor Chubb added: The United States clearly identifies out of its several thousand universities that only a small number can offer doctorate degrees and are comprehensive research institutions; in Europe by contrast they have 980 universities, all of which aspire to international research excellence, and it's silly to fund them as if they can.

What we have lost is the serious strategic capacity in our higher education institutions. Our strategies are being driven by the choices that funding agencies make about which grant out of four or five they are prepared to only partially fund.

 

The ANU vice-chancellor might have singled out the state of California's tertiary education system with its 10 university of California (UC) campuses and the 23 of California State University (CSU), where the latter predominantly offer bachelor and master degrees (but do offer some PhDs). In addition there is the 110 California Community Colleges System offering two-year degrees which can be credited for students who may continue onto UC or CSU institutions.

 

However, any suggestion that academics at the 23 CSU campuses are not funded to undertake research is without foundation.

 

Not until research funding is predominantly directed to the researcher and that funding is sufficient to adequately support the research for which it is ostensively given will we see rectification of the allocation of research resources. That said there will also have to be a recasting of awarding of degrees, which may require little more than specific agreements for particular advanced students at "secondary universities" to gain accreditation from a research university while under the supervision of a member of staff at a university normally limited to awarding masters degrees.

 

The approach of awarding resources on a competitive basis for university based research is already well entrenched. What is not, is to fund it adequately, and to have the researcher the alpha individual, not the institutions' administrators.