ANU's Vice-Chancellor Looks a Gift Horse in the Mouth and Finds Serious Dental Decay. (August 8, 2008)

    Ian Chubb, the Australian National University's straight talking vice-chancellor, has now stated publicly what his cohort of public university heads would only mutter privately. The $5 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund is in all probability a gift with little or even no substance.

Back on May 16 TFW reported the then  ANU policy director, now executive director for the Group of Eight, Michael Gallagher was described in the Weekend Australian as saying: "[The Higher Education Endowment Fund is] a very welcome initiative. But it's about the same amount of money - $300 million - that was committed by the government in 1992 to the capital roll in. That's an annual amount they get for annual maintenance. But we don't know what the rules of the game are yet in terms of what you have to comply with to be eligible. It's unpredictable. This is a bidding process so it will be volatile. The risk is downstream the Government may cut some of the other infrastructure funding pool."

And as if on cue Catherine Armitage in the broadsheet's Wednesday Higher Education Section reported that the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop "confirmed the $5 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund (HEEF) would eventually supersede existing commonwealth funding sources for university capital works."

The Minister then went on to say that the issues of governance, quality and data collection would all be "negotiating points" for the new funding arrangements, because "they are three areas where universities still have some challenges ahead".

Now almost three months along Professor Chubb has told the national Education, Science and the Future of Australia seminar at the University of Melbourne in his August 6 address Putting Research on the Policy Agenda:

Without a pre-election commitment to research infrastructure renewal, we don’t know where we will be, or even where political thinking is heading.

 

It means for the ‘worriers’ that HEEF looms as a possible substitute for several current funding schemes such as the Capital Development Pool, the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme, the Institutional Grants Scheme, even the Research Infrastructure Block Grants Scheme.

 

In other words, the annual formula-based schemes could be replaced, in full or in part, with periodic submission-based schemes and new conditions attaching to payments, including matching funds and other compliance requirements. We are presently told that this will not happen. But…

 

Additionally, I have no doubt that the pressure will build for HEEF proceeds to be spread across all universities for all manner of capital works; or to be skewed towards certain, say regional, institutions. At around $8 million per annum per university on average, the potential benefits of HEEF will not be what they seemed they might be at first blush – and what they need to be.

 

It follows that, in a worst case scenario after a short while, we could be worse off financially in net terms and worse off strategically in real terms.

The ANU V-C then took up the matter of basic research:

Increasingly, international corporations are seeking out centres of strong basic research capability as sites for their global investment. In Australia, basic research represented two thirds of university R&D spending in 1990-91. By 2004-05 only half of university spending on R&D was directed to basic research. There has been a significant shift in university spending towards applied research over just fifteen years.

 

Australia is pretty much alone in having both Business and Higher Education R&D directed heavily to applied research. It is a big risk for a small country to have such a limited approach – or to let drift happen. While it may be true that we cannot yet see the consequences of running down our investment in basic research, the danger is that by the time we do it may be too late.

 

Other countries are increasing their investment in basic research capacity to attract inwards investment as well as to capture the broader benefits that flow from university research, including the production of new knowledge, the training of skilled graduates, the development of scientific instruments and techniques, the formation of networks for sharing know-how, and the creation of new businesses.

 

[Australia] faces the serious risk of becoming a backwater if we squander the opportunity to invest in significant upgrading of domestic research facilities and participate in strategic international research infrastructure partnerships.

Meanwhile the Australian Labor Party remains out to lunch and clearly Professor Chubb is losing patience: "Australia cannot afford to go into the second decade of the 21^st century without a firm commitment to building the knowledge base for the future. Both sides of politics have a duty to address this challenge, and those of us in the university community have a responsibility to help them understand why and what is required."

He then made a strong pitch for additional support being directed toward the Group of Eight: "We have to be mature enough to recognise that some (universities) will never catch up and we should not spend scarce resources in the false belief that it can happen".

One of the most difficult matters to address is the problem of how the nation's second  tier universities will give their students a sound grounding in the subjects that are prerequisites to producing a competent graduate. One exemplary problem: engineers without sound maths and physics to underpin prospective projects for which they may/will be responsible.  

There is the suggested solution of Anders Flodström, Sweden's newly appointed University Chancellor at the nation's National Agency for Higher Education (Högskoleverket) -- namely, Sweden's fourteen state-run universities should be pared down to a more manageable five.

However, when it comes to the logistics, we're met with considerable hand waving and little more.