Opinion- 22 December 2003

 

 

  The Minister, the Shadow Minister, and the Former Bureaucrat Weave a Tangled Amyloid Web

 

Three articles in the December 17th Australian are worth more than passing attention. The Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, is followed immediately by Labor's shadow minister for education, Jenny Macklin, and was preceded by Dorothy Illing's interview with Michael Gallagher, currently the Australian National University's Head of Policy and Planning.

    You might be excused for thinking that ANU has hired the wolf to guard the sheep paddock – Mr Gallagher in a previous life was an influential bureaucrat in David Kemp's Department of Education, Employment and Youth Affairs, and was then moved to Dr Nelson's DEST when it succeeded DETYA. Mr Gallagher gained some notoriety when he testified in August 2001 to a Senate committee looking into the ability of universities to meet their obligations:

Senator CARR--But is it not, therefore, a concern to the department that we should have such a widespread collection of opinion coming to us saying that the system is in deep crisis?

 

Mr Gallagher--  ...I do not think it is surprising that a committee set up like this one to review the higher education system will draw disaffected submissions from various parts of the sector, including--

 

Senator Carr-- We are talking here about the vice-chancellors.  At Sydney, there were five vice-chancellors putting this position, representing some of the most prestigious institutions in this country. They are hardly what you would call a disaffected group or disaffected individuals. These are not your normal run-of-the-mill agitators--heaven help us.

 

Mr Gallagher--I put it back to you again that the people who are advocating that position to you are possibly looking for an easy way out rather than fronting up to their management responsibilities.

But returning to the matter in hand, Dr Nelson wrote:

Last week's publication of the latest global league table of universities is a sobering reminder of the reality we face. Only ANU and Melbourne made it to the top 100.
    Increasingly the only benchmarks that will count are international. It is against those standards alone that the quality of Australian universities will be judged. Of more direct relevance to future generations of graduates in an increasingly mobile international labour market is that their employability will rely entirely on the reputation enjoyed by the university that conferred their degree.

 

One of those International benchmarks Dr Nelson speaks of.

 

Followed by To meet these challenges, Australian universities need more money. They also need a radically different regulatory and administrative environment, and then Changes to the structure and function of governing councils, performance-based funding pools, expanded HECS places, competitive pricing between universities, income contingent loans for private universities and second chance public fee payers, 35,000 education and accommodation scholarships, discipline-based funding, increased resources and emphasis on teaching – these form the backbone of overdue reform.

    Just how this approach will raise the international standard of Australia's universities is "an enigma wrapped in a mystery." Oh, for the record, the words, research, or learning didn't make it to the starting line.

Ms Macklin hoed right in:

Higher education is set to be a key battleground for the next election. The university changes forced through the parliament last week by the Howard Government will be overturned by Labor.
    Australians won't accept a university system based on money, not marks.

    Labor aims to give every Australian with the motivation and the marks the opportunity to obtain a tertiary qualification. No other Australian government has given this commitment.

    We will properly fund Australian universities through sustainable indexation, worth $312 million from 2005 to 2007, that continues to grow into the future. That means smaller class sizes and more resources to support quality teaching and research.

She did at least say research (learning didn't get up), but we're still waiting for Labor's policy on research and development both within and outside the university sector.

 

As for Mr Gallagher, according to Illing, "Universities outside the Group of Eight will have to admit more students with low entrance scores, accelerating the sector's 'dumbing down'". He went on to say, "If, instead of using the inappropriate safety net adjustment for the salary component of university operating grants, the Government had applied the wage cost index, universities would have received $483 million more between 1997 and 2003," and concluded that the Nelson reforms were developed through an "unprecedented poor policy process."

    Dr. Nelson has agreed to examine the matter of indexation in 2005.

 

What is remarkable is that the raison d'etre for a university system as distinct from an additional three to four years of extended secondary schooling is not even alluded to let alone discussed by any of the three.

    Oxford, Harvard, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Toronto or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to name but five of the world's best, are not Technical and Further Education, Australia  on steroids.

 

A very wise Hungarian psychiatrist once made the observation in a seminar to her students, "unfortunately it appears to be the case that no matter how often, how vigorously, how simply - even monosyllabically, or how patiently you attempt to explain some concepts, there will be individuals who will be unable to grasp them."

 

When the foundation of a nation's knowledge economy is the issue, it becomes a crisis leading to disaster.

 

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web