Emeritus Professor Sol Encel: "We Should be Apprehensive About the Dangers of Brain Atrophy" Rather Than Brain Drain. (March 26, 2007)

    For the Sunday, March 25 broadcast of the ABC's Ockham's Razor Robyn Williams invited UNSW Emeritus Professor Sol Encel to have his say on matters of greater consequence than arguing if there is or isn't a net draining of Australia's brains?

Here are the last few minutes of his 15 minute talk which you can catch in its entirety at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2007/1878754.htm#transcript.

    I believe that there is a more serious form of internal brain drain with far-reaching implications for the future of our intellectual and scientific health. There is now widespread concern about the steep decline in school and university enrolments in the natural science. Dr Peter Andrews, chief scientific adviser to the Queensland government, recently pointed out that the number of high school students taking physics and chemistry has halved in the past 25 years. A flow-on consequence is that the proportion of university graduates with degrees in the physical sciences, fell from 8% in 1989 to 2.3% in 2002.

The decline in basic science is not the only problem affecting the universities. Since 1995 there has been a catastrophic reduction of one-third in the proportion of national income spent on higher education, down from 1.2% to 0.8% of GDP. It is now common knowledge that this has pushed Australia down to 29th place in the OECD league table of expenditure on higher education. Commonwealth government expenditure on universities now accounts for less than half of university revenue, down from more than 90% in the 1970s. The results have included much greater reliance on casual staff, reductions in job security, a relative decline in salary levels, tighter government controls over teaching and research budgets, the expansion of managerial authority at the expense of academic freedom, and the growth of so-called 'marketing' activities by universities in an attempt to gain more finance.

Another result is the ageing of the academic workforce. Professor Graeme Hugo, of the University of Adelaide, has calculated that 16% of full-time academic staff are aged over 55, compared with 11% in professional occupations in general. At the other end of the age scale, 41% are aged under 40, compared with 67% of professionals in information technology. Like Australia as a whole, the universities are suffering from a drought rather than a drain.

The prospects for higher education are not improved by allegations about excessive left-wing influence in the universities. This concern was expressed by the former Federal Minister for Education, Brendan Nelson, and it was taken a good deal further by his successor, Julie Bishop, who claimed that 'Maoists' had too much say in university affairs. For his part, the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, added his voice to these concerns when he told an audience in Sydney last October that 'We should not underestimate the degree to which the soft Left still holds sway, especially in Australia's universities.' Mr Howard did not go on to identify the 'soft Left', but I suspect that it embraces many of my colleagues in the social sciences and humanities, myself not excluded.

A strikingly different view of the cultural and intellectual landscape was expressed by one of Australia's most distinguished architects, Glen Murcutt, in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald in October, 2004. He described Australian culture today as, 'fearful, conservative, ignorant of its possibilities, always reaching back to the past for reassurance and comfort, instead of looking at the future with imagination and brio.' Perhaps, instead of worrying about a brain drain, we should be apprehensive about the dangers of brain atrophy.

Robyn Williams: Sol Encel is Emeritus Professor of Soft-Left Sociology at the University of New South Wales.