Gillard and Carr Meet with Withers, Sutton and Larkins -- Anxieties Ease but Faith Required. (December 12, 2007)

One way of the universities and public research sectors of gauging the election of Kevin Rudd and Co to the leadership of the nation is that that can't be any worse than their Coalition predecessors.

L to R Julia Gillard, Kim Carr and Gerard Sutton      Credit: The Australian

This past Monday, as promised, Education Minister Julia Gillard and Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Minister Senator Kim Carr met with University Australia's chief executive Glenn Withers, the current UA chairman, University of Wollongong vice-chancellor Gerard Sutton and Monash University's V-C Richard Larkins who will shortly takeover the chairmanship.

 Ms Gillard and Senator Carr requested the UA representatives to work up specific budget submissions on ways to reduce the burgeoning student-staff ratio, which has almost doubled since 1992, and approaches to overcome the funding gap engendered by the current indexing system compared to the actual costs of running the universities.

Following the meeting, Dr Withers told The Australian's Luke Slattery that he believed the Government was "strongly committed to the negotiated compacts", first outlined by Jenny Macklin when she was Labor's education spokeswoman, as a way of gearing funding to institutional strengths.

Dr Withers also reported that the Research Quality Framework as proclaimed by Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop had received the coup de grâce from Labor but, "It will be replaced by a metrics system perhaps modelled on the latest British experience."

Just what is meant by the "latest British experience" wasn't defined, which oughtn't to be surprising because at present, there isn't any.

The fact is that unless Mr Rudd takes a firm hand his government through the Minister of IIS and R will set up yet another layer of an unnecessary, wasteful system of micromanagement.

And on that note Academics Australia have published and open letter carrying the signatures of  over 150 Australian academics to the Prime Minister urging him to:

• Slim down and simplify the requirements of the higher education bureaucracy, and thus reduce university administrative costs.

• Provide world-class university education for our future generations through full government funding for the sector's teaching-related expenditures - including education at the honours and postgraduate levels.

• Reduce universities' dependence on overseas full-fee students - a practice that has led to the emergence of cash-crop education programs which have damaged Australia's reputation in education.

• Repeal the previous government's VSU legislation, to ensure an active and full student experience.

• Revive Australia's faltering international standing in innovative research by increasing funding for competitive research projects in all areas.

The group's co-ordinator, University of Tasmania philosopher Jeff Malpas, told The Australian's  Higher Education Section that: "Something like one-half of universities' budgets are devoted to administration and we believe that is indicative of a serious misallocation of resources. It is also indicative of a huge additional burden placed on academics in terms of reporting and assessment regimes that do little to generate improvements in the system."

Over the past 11.5 years it didn't matter too much what the universities said or did they were going to get the shaft from John Howard and his Coalition.

But now the sector is faced with getting down to doing some hard work and delivering carefully designed and detailed short - medium - long term policies and selling them to the public as well as Mr Rudd, Ms Gillard, Senator Carr, and if they are really clever, perhaps even Secretary to the Treasury Dr Ken Henry.