The two passages immediately below are quoted in Submission No. 279 from PricewaterhouseCoopers and entitled Australia's Higher Education at the Crossroads - a business perspective.
 

This perspective of a market-driven restructuring of higher education as an industry - while perhaps both alien and distasteful to the academy, is nevertheless an important framework for considering the future of the university.

While the post-secondary education market may have complex cross-subsidies and numerous public misconceptions, it is nevertheless very real and demanding, with the capacity to reward those who can respond to rapid change and punish those who cannot. Universities will have to learn to cope with the competitive pressures of this marketplace while preserving the most important of their traditional values and character.

These social, economic, technological, and market forces are far more powerful than many within the higher education establishment realise. They are driving change at an unprecedented pace, perhaps even beyond the capacity of our colleges and universities to adapt.

There are increasing signs that our current paradigms for higher education, the nature of our academic programs, the organisation of our colleges and universities, the way that we finance conduct, and distribute the services of higher education, may not be able to adapt to the higher education, may not be able to adapt to the demands and realities of our times.
[James Dunderstadt, Leading Higher Education in an Era of Rapid Change, July 2001: p10]

The root cause of the problem with the HE sector is that the structures and systems of governance and leadership in all universities in Australia are unable to meet the change processes of today. This causes a total lack of ability to attract and keep people with strategic thinking ability inside universities – at Senate level and in the Vice Chancellery. Unless this is recognised as THE major issue to be addressed then the malaise will continue.
[According to PWC, one of Australia's leading and most respected Directors (unidentified) – interviewed for this submission: p10 of submission]

The stated viewpoint of the PWC submission is:

• Business will increasingly struggle to recruit the necessary skills and qualified graduates it requires to meet its future needs
   

• The management systems of universities are in need of a radical overhaul if they are to meet the expectations of their major stakeholders
   

• The current number of Australian universities appears to be unsustainable in the long term
   

• Traditional solutions are not likely to solve the future teaching shortage. New technology-based teaching methodologies offer the way ahead Change management within the HE sector will be critical.

And goes on to condemn the institutions roundly:

Universities do not understand the business sector

According to the business sector, universities do not understand labour market demands and the needs of the business community. Instead, they deliver courses based on the preferences of academics as opposed to what businesses may require.

This is caused by a reluctance to include people outside the academic environment when developing curricula. Also, business has failed to effectively define its needs and requirements.

The extraordinarily narrow viewpoint expressed in the document is reflected by the fact there is no reference whatsoever to the arts, humanities or core sciences, oh, with the exception of an excerpt from Appendix B which deals with the US for profit firm Thomson Learning:

The opportunities that I witness first hand in my role as president and CEO of Thomson Learning's International Group are truly boundless... As an example, each year Thomson Learning translates and prepares to sell over one thousand higher education books in universal areas such as business, math and science.

Now while the sweeping statement "Universities do not understand the business sector" is a senseless brickbat it is certainly the case that at least some facets of the business sector, if the PWC submission is representative, are severely limited in their view as to the role of a nation's universities. Nowhere has this become more apparent than in the enabling sciences. An example from the past fortnight demonstrates the point of what has transpired because of what can only be described as blinkered shortsightedness. Peter Hall, Chair of the National Committee for Mathematics reported in these pages,

Last Thursday, 11 July, Australia's Chief Statistician called a meeting of statistical scientists from industry, government and universities, motivated by his own organisation's inability to find the mathematical statisticians it needs to analyse Commonwealth Government data on Australia's industry, society and community. Eli Lilly's representative at the meeting reported that his company is experiencing the same problem, and that as a result its US office may shelve the company's plans for growth in Australia. The same problems afflict industry and government across the country.

While Hyam Rubinstein, Chair of Melbourne University's Department of Mathematics and Statistics in his submission to the "Crossroads" review has pointed out.

The Mathematical Sciences are in steep decline in Australia... Some stark figures - of the 16 professors of mathematics and statistics at La Trobe, Monash and Melbourne Universities in 1995, 10 have now left - 5 have gone to prestigious overseas jobs, and the remaining 5 have either moved to administrative positions, retired or one has moved to an academic position at the ANU. This year it is planned to refill 3 of these 10 positions, the remaining have been lost. There are now as many vacant professorships of statistics in the major universities as filled positions.

To further illustrate the point, Evans and White in their analysis of Australian university science have determined that between 1995 - 1999 the reduction in mathematics academic staff was between 28-30%. Their graph below shows the steep decline in post graduate enrolled full time students in the eighteen universities they assessed.

With regard to declines in academic staff in the other core sciences Evans and White found them to be comparable. Now it's not clear at all from PWC's submission just how it perceives the Chief Statistician, for example, is going to find competent and sufficient staff, and while not many things have the certainty of death and taxes it's almost as sure that we're not going to recruit them from overseas, there's a worldwide shortage of mathematical statisticians and they are not going to come up in Australia like mushrooms.

What appears to be an insuperable barrier is the instant gratification syndrome of both government and business, seemingly with little understanding for or interest in investment in academe for the  medium let alone long term . Using the whipping boy of academic mismanagement is all to easy.

On the reverse of this coin is a lack of comprehension by academics that government and an influential segment of the "Big End of Town" don't understand the ramifications of a stunted university sector. It's effect on the production of knowledgeable and inspiring secondary and yes primary school teachers; the production of industrial and governmental  researchers, engineers and technologists; the production of the next generation of university academics. The concept of biological spontaneous generation was read its last rights by Pasteur a century and a half ago, and as has been pointed out in the position paper to the Knesset by the inter-senate committee of Israeli universities,

[I]t should be kept in mind that the development of a high quality scientific department takes many years, in general, because only scientists of high quality are able to put together a department of high quality. Therefore, when a prominent scientist leaves a university department (usually abroad), double damage is caused, because mediocrity is self-perpetuating (our emphasis). In the academic world of Western research universities, the quality of the academic faculty in the humanities, social sciences, the sciences, medicine, and technology, is measured primarily in scientific achievements. This measure is closely related to the quality of teaching. The latter is measured, above all, in the quality of the subject matter taught and in the thought process the lecturer presents to the students; the quality of presentation is always secondary to the above. Scientific research is an indispensable and inseparable part of teaching. A teacher who is not engaged in research cannot keep up with the rapid development of science or technology in his field. The contact with developments is maintained by reading the scientific literature. Teachers who left research cannot keep up with the current professional literature, and while their contact with the scientific reality is severed, they stay chained to what they acquired while still active in research. Such a teacher not only proffers on the students obsolete science, but also is a barrier to all teaching innovations in his/her field.

All that said there are points made by PWC in stating its "viewpoints" which are undoubtedly correct. "Business will increasingly struggle to recruit the necessary skills and qualified graduates it requires to meet its future needs"  and "The current number of Australian universities appears to be unsustainable in the long term" but they suggest no solutions. Their view that "The management systems of universities are in need of a radical overhaul if they are to meet the expectations of their major stakeholders" is a sweeping statement but nothing is offered in the form of constructive proposals. All that the increasing governmental meddling together with decreasing competence has achieved is a system looking ever more like the proverbial dog's breakfast.

That Australian Higher Education requires urgent attention appears to be universally accepted, but reincarnating it in the image of a business enterprise is to demonstrate a gross misunderstanding of what the university can and should contribute to the wealth of a nation: defining wealth in the broadest of terms.

It seems appropriate to close with some figures.
        Australia's expends 1.38% of its GDP on research and development.
        Australia's GDP for 2000-01 was $716 billion. (the Australian Government National Investment Agency figure is US$394 billion)
        The OECD mean expenditure on R&D is 2.1%.
        2.1% - 1.38% x $716 billion = $5.15 billion.
Therefore, compared to the OECD mean, we have a shortfall for Research and Development of over 5 billion dollars per annum.

What are we spending it on?

Alex Reisner
The Funneled Web