University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Continues to Exhibit the Corporate CEO Mentality. (January 2, 2007)

    "We're going to have to compete and compete on a range of fronts. We're looking for the flexibility to be much more responsive to our markets ... in order to stay viable," Professor Davis told  The Australian's Lisa Macnamara.

And he continued, "It's not that we're doing anything wrong, it's just that students who once could go to America, Britain or Australia can now go to about 150 different countries offering English-language courses at prestigious institutions. It's becoming a mature market and so the growth we've all lived off is likely to evaporate. There are now more private colleges handing out degrees than there are public universities, and they're growing at a huge rate. I suspect that growth will accelerate in 2007.

    "The risk for us is not that we'll go out of business but that we'll become stagnant and it will become very difficult for us to make changes, and we'll watch the growth around us of very different private providers while we can't compete as aggressively as we should."

According to Ms Macnamara the latest figures reveal private providers attracted up to 60,000 mainly domestic school-leavers -- up from 45,000 last year -- with many enrolling in niche courses including natural medicine and media.

And if you were in any doubt that Professor Davis has lost touch with the what research universities are supposed to be doing while he points out correctly,  "Our system sets us quotas for each area each year and we get punished financially if we don't meet our quotas," he follows up with, "The effect of that is it locks us into a profile that makes us not incredibly responsive to changes in student demand."

And what's the cure, "It's that sort of flexibility to be able to respond to markets ... we're going to need in the public sector to be competitive with the private sector."

One is left with the impression that Professor Davis' University of Melbourne is approaching a state of bipolar disorder with the introduction of the Melbourne Model on the one hand and chasing fees by tailoring for perceived market forces to the subservience of providing for the long term commonweal.