Universities in Crisis -

Excerpts from the Hansard transcripts of the Senate committee hearings on The Capacity of Public Universities to Meet Australia's Higher Education Needs
^{[The numbers given below [pXX] refer to the PDF page in the particular transcript]}

March 22^nd Brisbane

Dr Howard Guille, Queensland State Secretary, National Tertiary Education Union
The fifth issue relates to attracting staff. Clearly, there is a crisis for what we would call the high fliers. They are going to places with better research facilities. We are seeing very many early retirees from the system. So there is an exit from the system of very experienced general and academic staff. We are now in a position that the starting salaries are less than the starting salaries for teachers. [p3]

Senator Crossin (Labor)
    What impact has the current regime of enterprise bargaining had in relation to the casualisation of the work force under the guise of productivity efficiencies, particularly in light of the fact that there has been no salary supplementation for the last four years?

Dr Linda Hort (Private Capacity)
    The universities allocate their priorities in terms of their money as they need to in order to work as they do. I do not think there has been a massive increase - obviously you would have to go back to the statistics to look - in the number of casual staff being employed by universities over the last five years, which has been over the last two rounds of enterprise bargaining. I think the universities are managing to pay enterprise bargaining increases out of things like the private funding that they are moving more and more into and using overseas student money, both undergraduate and fee-paying postgraduate student fees, to be able to help to balance their books. However, it is certainly getting to the stage that another unsupported enterprise bargaining funding increase is going to start putting the sector into really massive crisis, I think, because it just cannot keep paying the full-time staff more. Of course, the casuals get the flow-on rise that comes through. Without being able to increase their funding in some kind of way, the private means available to them are relatively limited and are not changing very fast. [p62]


Ben McMillan, Student Representative Officer, University of Queensland Union
    I think it is quite clear to everyone involved in the higher education sector that higher education in Australia is in a dire state of crisis largely due to, as Juliana [ President, University of Queensland Student Union] said  the absolutely appalling lack of federal government funding to higher education institutions and the cut of approximately $1 billion since the Howard government came to office. This has been combined with the issues that Juliana raised in relation to the universities seeking corporate sponsorship from outside organisations and corporate ventures. [p66]

Senator Tierney (Liberal)
    Mr McMillan, you seem to be indicating that the sky is falling in, like Chicken Little, out there at the uni - that there are all of these problems. Could you just point out to the committee when the golden age of universities was? When did universities have enough money for the books they needed? When did they have the right tutorial balances? When did they have the right class sizes? When was this golden age? [p76]

Ms Juliana Virine, President, University of Queensland Student Union
    I do not think that there ever was a golden age.

Senator Tierney
    That is exactly right. These are not new problems. [p72]

Ms Virine
    No, we were never suggesting that they were at all. None of us said that.

Senator Tierney
    You seemed to be.

Ms Virine
    I do not think so. We were saying that the direction higher education is taking has significantly shifted from what it has been over the last 10 to 20 years. That is my personal experience, and I was not a student 10 or 20 years ago. The direction seems to be towards encouraging external revenue instead of focusing on internal academic issues and day-to-day teaching, research and things like that. That is what we were attempting to say. Perhaps that was unclear.

Mr McMillan
    I do not think we were suggesting that there was a golden age. The union and most student organisations that are pro-student and certainly pro-academic staff would say that it is possibly the worst it has ever been in Australia. I draw your attention to figure 4 on page 8, where we talk about student-staff ratios. They are at one of the worst points they have ever been. They are growing every year.

Senator Tierney
    I point out what was happening in an earlier era. From 1987 to 1993 some 50,000 students a year could not get into uni. Although numbers went up 40 per cent, resources went up nowhere near that figure. All these problems you are pointing to existed in that era as well.

Mr McMillan
    Our submission is that that needs to change and that the Senate and the government of the day need to be proactive and look to the future and begin to treat education as a national resource rather than as a commodity to be bought and sold. The fact that it was in a crisis state in 1987 and is still in a state of crisis today, if not a worse state, is no excuse. [p73]
 

April 26^th Hobart

Senator Carr (Labor)
    If I am clear, you are saying that there is a range of factors that are affecting the universities. Would you describe it as a crisis in the universities?

Professor Jeffery Malpas, Head, School of Philosophy, University of Tasmania
    Yes.

Senator Carr
    You would say that the situation is a crisis?

Prof. Malpas
    And we have said so in public.

Senator Carr
    You paint a picture, essentially, of turmoil within this university.

Prof. Malpas
    Yes.

Senator Carr
    You are saying that there is a question of inadequate funding and increasing commercial culture. They are the two factors that you are suggesting. You are saying that this actually risks the intellectual integrity of the university and the independence of the university? Is that the proposition you are putting to us?

Prof. Jan Pakulski Acting Dean of Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Tasmania
    Yes. [p175]

Senator Carr
    ... I am interested in the proposition that has come forward. As I have indicated to you already, I understand the difficulties the university administration is facing, but a number of submissions have mentioned the priorities that have been determined and the decisions that have been taken by the university administration in regard to dealing with the crisis in funding. There has been the claim that there has been a disadvantage felt by the humanities and liberal arts and that it is a result of decisions taken by the university administration. How do you respond to that?

Professor Donald McNicol, Vice-Chancellor, University of Tasmania
    On the teaching side - I might have to go back and look at the data to confirm this - probably the arts faculty was pretty much the same after the last round of decisions as it was before it. The point where they got into the greatest trouble was in the application of the new research funding scheme. We now have, in effect, a separation in the calculation of funds for research, which are rather largely performance based, and we decided, in effect, to mirror the allocation of research funds to our faculties and schools. We decided to mirror the Commonwealth allocation process. There was a very good reason for doing that. If you want to optimise your take of those funds on a performance basis, you had better be pretty clearly responsive to the rules for handing them out. [p214]
 

April 30^th Darwin

Senator Carr
    Thank you very much for your submission. I note that the university has been successful in a number of areas, particularly given the extraordinary difficulties you are facing at the moment. You say you support the Vice- Chancellors' Committee's submission. I note that the Chairman of the Vice-Chancellors' Committee, Professor Ian Chubb, said recently at the National Press Club that Australian universities were in crisis. Would you agree with that assessment?

Professor Ronald McKay, Vice-Chancellor, Northern Territory University
    We are certainly falling behind the rest of the world. The evidence provided in the AVCC's discussion paper on funding demonstrates that. [p255]
 

May 14^th Melbourne

Senator Carr
    ...on page 19 of your submission that you say, 'Universities are not private institutions producing predominantly private goods.' Can you explain to us how you see the university in the contemporary period? [p327]

Professor Simon Marginson, Director, Monash Centre for Research in International Education
    It is a long answer in its full sense, so I will try to be brief. I think universities face something of a crisis of identity brought about by the fact that, on the one hand, they inherit an academic tradition which is concerned with transmission of knowledge, the training of the learned professions with international links in relation to knowledge and so on, research and science, and scholarship. Secondly, they have inherited their postwar role of being mass educating and training institutions for a growing proportion of our population providing access to opportunity and to knowledge and professional credentials; the proportion of the population has grown from about one per cent in 1939 to about, over a lifetime, 40 to 45 per cent now. So there has been that immense shift.

The third thing is that they are also now expected to be self-managing corporations pursuing a, frankly, individual institutional interest rather than a public good or public interest. It seems to me the implications of that have not been worked through, but universities have had to deal with the implications in practice. They have had to deal with the fact that on the one hand vice-chancellors are expected to sustain the competitive position of their university yet, on the other hand, they are expected to be providing access to opportunity in the public interest and they are expected to be working at the end of the spectrum known as excellence in relation to teaching, research and especially research in scientific functions. [p328]
 

May 15^th Melbourne

Ms Eve Bodsworth, President, Melbourne University Student Union
    The shortage of funds has, for many universities, resulted in the sacking of staff and the closure and amalgamation of departments and subjects. Just yesterday, I heard that Sydney University is closing its Indonesian department - hardly an area of study that can be considered irrelevant. Whilst trying to maintain quality of remaining subjects and courses, it sacrifices diversity. Universities such as my own university - the University of Melbourne - have reacted to the crisis in a different way; however, with potentially the same outcome. The University of Melbourne has sought to make up the shortfall in funding through seeking out and initiating private commercial ventures and increased links with commerce and industry. The university's involvement in Melbourne University Private has diverted resources and money from the public university. Now, its spectacular failure has also damaged the reputation of one of Australia's top three universities. Not only has this impacted on the quality of education on campus but it has also led to concerns about the transparency of public institutions' decision making bodies, with more and more information cloaked in commercial-in-confidence, and issues relating to student representation on committees. This market driven approach is also apparent in the internal funding arrangements of the university. Faculties are under increasing pressure to initiate their own links with industry and commerce and, at the same time, attract more research grants and maintain the quality of teaching and learning. [p449]
 

June 22^nd Canberra

Dr Clive Hamilton, Executive Director, Australia Institute
    I am sure senators have taken close note of the brief but devastating submission to this inquiry by Professors Philip Pettit and Michael Smith from the ANU. They refer to a deep crisis in Australian philosophy 'as a result of the current government's policies'. They list in that submission 13 senior philosophers who have left positions in Australia for overseas since 1998, and contrast this exodus with the two only senior philosophers who have travelled the other way. On that basis these eminent philosophers conclude that we have lost 'almost two full generations of academic leaders in Australian philosophy'. We should not imagine that some very bright students, inspired by a passion for learning, will get into courses like philosophy and literature and pursue those even though they could go elsewhere to do courses which require higher UAI entrance marks. I am sure senators have listened to young people who have just finished high school discuss their university choices. Certainly I have been shocked on several occasions to hear students respond when a very bright student who might have got 95 or whatever as a TER say that they are going to study arts, and other students jump on them and say, 'Why waste a UAI of 95 on arts, or indeed science, when you could get into vet science or communications or media?' I think that is perhaps the most depressing comment on the state of learning in Australia.

So I would suggest that the conclusion from this simple table [overheads were shown] is that changes to the university system are depriving Australia of a culture of intellectual achievement. At a time of ever greater participation in higher education, the emphasis on career training and market outcomes from education over intellectual development is in danger of producing a generation of highly educated fools. [p529-30]


Senator Carr (to members of the National Union of Students)
    I will turn to the issue that I have raised with a number of witnesses: the culture of
universities. The AVCC President, Professor Chubb, speaks of a crisis in Australian universities.
It is not usual for students to agree with the AVCC, but would you agree with him on this
occasion?

Mr David Henderson, National President, National Union of Students
    Absolutely.

Ms Rachel Thomson, National Welfare, Small and/or Regional Campuses Officer, National Union of Students
    Absolutely.

Senator Carr
    Others will talk of a change in the way in which universities actually function. You spoke of the comparison in terms of the financial arrangements. You said it should be looked at in the context of what universities actually do. Isn't that the thrust of your submission, that they are different places from what they were just a few years ago?

Mr Henderson
    Radically different.

Senator Carr
    One of the concerns that has been put to us is the effect of the market oriented user pays business approach, particularly the concentration on serving industry and generating foreign income, in that it has eroded the capacity of universities to carry out their traditional civic functions - that is, to preserve and advance knowledge, and to prepare students for professional careers in a broad intellectual setting designed to foster inquiry and reflection upon public issues. Would you agree with that proposition? Do you think there has been a change in the culture? If so, has that undermined the traditional civic functions of the university.

Ms Katherine Davison, National Education Officer, National Union of Students
    Definitely.

Ms Thomson
    Undoubtedly.

Mr Henderson
    Particularly in the area of postgraduate study, where the funding formula for research grants, which now includes the commercial viability of the research output, has had a very big effect on the types of research undertaken by postgraduate students. That has filtered through the whole nature of undergraduate learning as well because most universities tend to want postgraduate education; they tailor the undergraduate course experience so it leads on to that.

Increasingly, that is becoming one that does not meet the civic need where research is done for research's sake and where inquiry is considered important of its own self for the fact that there is a possibility that it could come up with something which benefits everyone. It is now the students who undertake postgraduate degrees and who undertake Masters by research that receive more Commonwealth funding if they can demonstrate that research is going to have a commercial implication. So, forgetting intellectual property issues, that certainly means that the nature of the universities is completely geared towards getting those types of research students in, rather than the critical inquiry ones. That definitely means that the civic need through universities is not being met at all. [p547-48]

Senator Carr (to Prof. Quiggin)
    You make the statement at the beginning of your submission that universities are in crisis. You say that the causes of this crisis are complex and that the most important single factor is poor government policy. To what extent do you think that governments affect the policy directions pursued by universities? Can you expand on that comment?

Professor John Quiggin (Private Capacity)
    It is a complex process, but what is striking about developments in universities is their remarkable uniformity. Despite a set of government policies whose supposed primary merit is that they are going to promote diversity, we have seen the same kind of restructuring in every university, the same kind of responses to funds shortages and the same kind of expansion and proliferation of senior management right across the university sector. I believe that that is a response to pressures from central government, even if it is not the response the government intended to elicit. [p556]
 

July 4^th Adelaide

Professor Anthony Thomas, Chair, National Committee for Physics, Australian Academy of Science
On the next page [of the submission, No. 327] we come to 'student staff ratios'. Student to staff ratios in physics departments in the country - and probably in others - are bigger than those in secondary schools. They have the additional load of trying to conduct original research and trying to lead future developments in science and technology. If you look at the Oxford and Cambridge physics departments - at the staff that you can see and not the ones hidden away in colleges - there are seven students per staff member. Here it is 16 or more.

If you would just picture how much extra time you have got to engage in research or to exploit that research, you can see why the innovation process does not work well here. If you take funding per student as a measure - it is not necessarily a good measure but it is one that is available - in the United States the top 30 universities have more than $US100,000 per student in total funding. In Australia most have less than $20,000 per student, if you add the university grants and the research money they receive.

What are the reasons for the crisis in physics? I said in my submission that it is collateral damage - it is just happening. Why is it happening? At the tertiary level - and this is at page 5 - it is because staff in Australia are employed primarily for service teaching. They are teaching engineering physics, medical physics, physics for poets - that is a typical title for a US course. In the United States those courses are allocated to physics departments because people realise they need physicists doing basic research. Without it, the whole enterprise of science and technology does not have that engine room. [p794]

We come to page 8 and 'Solutions'. I pointed out that very few people even realise there is a crisis. The total number of academic physicists in the country is now 240. In 1994, it was about 360. It is a very small number, it is not seen and nobody reports on it. We need somebody who has a responsible watching brief - plus the resources to do something about it - on a crucial area like that. In the United States it would be the DOE. The officer in charge of physics at the DOE and NSF would immediately, when things like this start to happen, warn the government, and things would start to happen.

...we have a serious crisis. That means you have to spend money selectively. It means you have to make real quality judgments and put the resources where they are really needed and where they can do something. We need a success rate in research grant applications of at least 30 per cent in science and technology. There is no such thing as a well founded lab in the university anymore. Everybody who signs an application to the Research Council signs that they have the internal structure to support it. Most are lying; they don't. One needs serious overheads that can support technical staff, computing resources and Internet access, which are no longer possible in the university system. Maybe the way to solve the salary problem is that, along with those grants and provided the success rate is adequate, one should have an additional sum of salary in the way that it is done in the United States.

Professor Leon Mann, President, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
    I think the biggest thing we face is that the kind of staff we have who have many opportunities internationally - the really good ones - are simply not going to remain here much longer. I know it is a bit dramatic in a sense, but to say that we are living on borrowed time is quite accurate. People have a momentum in terms of living in Australia. They enjoy living here and working in our universities, but they go off to international conferences and talk to other people and discover that in many ways they could be doing better elsewhere. I think that we are facing a crisis. I do not think that we cannot retrieve ourselves from it. I think we can retrieve ourselves, but we need to do something fairly quickly, otherwise we will find large numbers of our staff leaving for other places. My field is computer science - information technology - and the contrast between working in a university and working in industry is not a favourable one. I have had a number of PhD students of mine who have temporarily been lecturers at Flinders University and who have left. In two cases they went to industry. When I saw them later socially, they would say, 'Life is much easier now. My workload is back to the point where I don't have to work 70 hours a week; my salary has nearly doubled and I'm a lot happier.' It is very hard in that sort of climate to attract people into an academic career.[p796]

July 12 Townsville

Senator Tierney (to Ms Margaret Jelbart, Representation and Research Officer, James Cook University Student Association)
    You have made much of things such as overcrowding. When I was a student in 1964 at Sydney University I went into my first lecture and sat on the floor along with a great number of others because the conditions were overcrowded. In 1963 the universities were in crisis. In 1970 I started lecturing, and I lectured tutorial groups of 30. I remember it very clearly because one of those tutorials was at 3 o'clock Friday afternoon and the next one was at 4 o'clock Friday afternoon. I remember those things very clearly. I did spend 20 years in the sector out of the last 30 - the last 10 being in the Senate - and I just wonder when this magic, golden age of universities was. From my experience it certainly was not in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or 1990s, and, given the funding in the 1950s, it probably was not then either. You are putting up these things as if they are new problems. My question is: is any of this really new?

Ms Jelbart
    They may not be new. Overcrowding in lecture theatres and tutorials may not be new, but the carryover impact from that is on students being able to access their lecturers and their tutors for feedback. A couple of years ago one area that always used to employ postgraduate students to conduct tutorials decided that they would not do that any longer so the lecturing staff took over the conducting of tutorials. Because their contact hours increased, that made those staff less available for student contact to get feedback. In some disciplines like business and accounting where a lot of the tutors are employed on a casual basis and they are employed in the industry so they are not physically on campus the students are not able to have contact with feedback for their work. The actual overcrowding situation itself might not be new but we are in an era now where one of the attitudes the students display is that they are paying for something and they want what is their perception of a good service. Overcrowding might not be new but when they go to a lecture or a tutor asking, 'Can I have feedback on my assignment, please, and please explain these notes,' they want to be able to communicate with the staff member in a positive way. Also there is the impact on workloads. I have been working in the student association and we have students come with complaints about staff acting in an unprofessional manner, the staff member having obviously exhibited signs of stress in front of the student, which is not good for either party. It is just the rollover effect of having increased staff-student ratios. [p897-98]

Senator Tieney
    I just say again that, sitting in lectures to over 500 students at Sydney University in 1965, we would have liked a bit of feedback too. I remember one lecturer in economics I made the mistake of asking the 500 students, 'Do you understand that,' and he got a resounding 'No' and then did not quite know how to handle that. I am saying that this is nothing new, really.

July 17^th Sydney

Senator Carr
    Professor Chubb, do you believe there is a crisis in Australian higher education?

Professor Ian Chubb, President, Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee; and Vice-Chancellor, Australian National University
    I have tried to avoid using the word 'crisis' because it has all sorts of connotations. I cannot easily think of another word to describe what I perceive to be the issues before us at the moment; yes.

Senator Carr
    It was a term that I thought you used at the National Press Club.

Prof. Chubb
    Yes, I did. I try not to use it too often.

Senator Carr
    Nonetheless, it is quite a significant observation for the chairman of the Vice-Chancellors' Committee to make. What was the government's response when you made that observation?

Prof. Chubb
    As you know, the minister for education is the minister responsible for the ANU. The ANU operates under a federal act, and I have lots of opportunities to discuss matters with the federal minister. I do not think he would agree that the word 'crisis' is the appropriate one to describe the sector presently, but our relationship is without angst and anger so we have a discussion about it; we see it from different sides of the coin. [p986]

Senator Carr
    The question of quality and of standards has been central to our discussions around the country. Many of the submissions we have received have argued that a decline as a direct consequence of budget cuts, the sort of crisis that you are talking about, has led to increased class sizes, reductions in contact hours, a reduction of time for scholarship and innovation by academics, and reduced content and assessment requirements. What is the AVCC's view on the issue of quality? Has one of the impacts of the budgetary policies been a reduction in quality?

Prof. Chubb
    If you are talking about the quality of the educational experience that a student would have and that indeed quite probably a staff member would experience when they travel along the academic career path, the answer is yes, for some of the reasons that you outlined. I have spent a good bit of my working life in universities. I have worked for universities and for the sector. When I have left an institution, I have tried to make sure it is a little better than it was when I went there.

I think - like a lot of my colleagues - that, when you get emails from students asking you about tutorials of 32:1 every second week, when you get lecture classes of 400-plus, when you get practical classes every other week, when your infrastructure is eroding and when you see all your equipment and your capacity to provide the resources you need for the staff to do the work that they want to be able to do slowly but surely degrading, then that does not make me - or a majority of my colleagues - very happy at all. We are committed to this system. We are committed to trying to make it better, like many of our academic colleagues and general staff colleagues; that is what they are there for too. We achieve what we achieve because they are probably working harder than ever before, and it galls me when there are simplistic solutions put forward - like 'stick it all on the Net' - that presume that that is an educational experience. We are actually preparing students in our in universities for an uncertain future, just as we were prepared. Deryck did not come out of diapers thinking he would be a vice-chancellor.

 Professor Deryck Schreuder, Vice-President, Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee; Vice-Chancellor, University of Western Australia
    Thank you. Nobody would do that, I can tell you, especially not if they knew what it was actually going to be like. [p987-88]

Senator Crossin (to Prof. Pratley)
    You have given evidence to us today of a 20 per cent increase in staff workloads. What other examples are there at Charles Sturt that would point to the way in which the funding crisis has impacted on your university?

Professor James Pratley, Dean, Faculty of Science and Agriculture, Charles Sturt University
    Let me give you an example from my faculty. I employ the academic staff in my faculty. In 1996 I had something like $1 million discretionary money over and above the appointment of staff to do the teaching. I start 2001 with a $0.5 million shortfall on salaries. The only way we can actually fund our teaching program is to go out and earn money. The university now gets 39 per cent of its income from government...

Senator Crossin
    Not only have you lost your $1 million contingency funding, there is a significant shortfall in the funding to pay academic salaries?

Prof. Pratley
    Absolutely. I cannot pay the academic salaries from government funding. The shortfall has to come from the fees we get in from overseas students. We are talking about overseas students subsidising the education of Australian students. I think there are some ethical questions there. [p1040]

 

July 19^th Newcastle

Senator Tierney
    If we go back to the time when universities expanded rapidly from 1955 onwards, I cannot recall the time when the universities have said that they actually had enough money. The calls of crisis have been longstanding. One of the things that possibly exacerbated this more than anything else was the reorganisation of the universities under the Dawkins reforms when, all of a sudden, we went from 17 universities to 36 without putting a cracker of money into the situation. Surely 10 years down the road we are perhaps paying the price for that rather radical reform - in other words, the setting up of a huge university system 10 years ago without putting a proper funding base under it at that point in time. Nineteen new universities without any money - that is what happened 10 years ago. [p1148]


Senator Carr (to Prof. Moses)
    I draw your attention to this parlous financial situation. Your university has been named 1998 and in 1999 as having a negative financial safety margin. This is when the financial safety margin under this government has declined from 6.5 in 1997 to 4.6 in 1998, if I remember correctly, and then to 4.4 and down to 3.3. You still have a negative financial safety margin.

Professor Ingrid Moses, Vice-Chancellor, University of New England
    I am not sure whether it is negative at present. We are very much aware of those figures; they were originally produced by Deloitte et al. We have been modelling it ourselves and have provided the figures to DETYA for our profiles discussions. We are very much aware of the tightness of our finances, and I refer to the lack of reserves for funding initiatives. But because we are aware of it, our finance committee of council - and, indeed, state and federal parliamentarians when we speak to them - are all confident that the university is not in a crisis. It is in a tight financial situation, and we keep going to DETYA for funding under the various competitive schemes, because we do need to get extra funding. [p1169-70]


 Professor Leith Morton (Private capacity)
    Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you to give public evidence concerning my written submission. The specific case I wish to make is that there is a crisis in our universities relating to education on Japan. Unless provision is made through additional financial and other material commitments on the part of government, this crisis will lead to the destruction of the educational infrastructure in universities, which constitutes the single most important source of expertise on Japan and virtually the sole source of meaningful training about Japan in the nation.

    In my written submission, I made the case that the educational infrastructure was collapsing. By infrastructure I mean, firstly, the academic staff teaching Japanese language and about Japan, and, secondly, the institutional bodies which house and support such staff. The evidence I pointed to came from a number of sources, principally the report by the Australian Academy of the Humanities to the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee last year, which is titled Subjects of small enrolment in the humanities. The report outlined the rapid decline in university staff teaching Japanese over the past four years. This report states that, between 1997 and 1999:

... the highest number of staff lost - almost twice as for any other language - was for Japanese, and that these losses were reported across the largest number of institutions.

Paul Kelly, international editor of the Australian newspaper, put a strong argument as to why we should be concerned when he wrote on 2 May this year in the Australian:

Japan is our most important Asian partner. Despite its decade-long recession, Japan remains the world's No 2 economy. It remains our No 1 trade partner and will be for many years. [p1199]
 

What can we do about it? The causes of this decline are many and varied, and solutions adopted to halt the decline will also need to work across a number of sectors. But to begin with funding must be made available, additional to that currently provided, to ensure that incentives exist for students to attempt study of this difficult language and to ensure that the long process of training and educating staff to teach Japanese studies can be maintained through the use of financial incentives and support in the area of in-country training and scholarships. Unless we do something, indications are that this current decline will deliver a fatal blow to university education on Japan. [p1200]