University Morale -

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

Timothy Bugler, Postgraduate Officer, University of Queensland Union
    Completion [of post graduate degrees] is also threatened by the low morale and lack of job security among academic staff. For instance, with the restructures that we have been talking about in the biological and chemical sciences faculty, the school of zoology and entomology alone looks to be dropping at least a dozen academic staff. [p68].
 

April 26^th Hobart

Professor Graham Priest, Chair of Council, Australasian Association of Philosophy
    Philosophy is, I think, very important for Australia, and has been historically, because the Australian philosophical community has such a high profile; and there are some statistics and data in the submission which tell you that. Yet the last 10 years have been very unkind for philosophy, and the level of morale in the profession is incredibly low. That is reflected in the number of good philosophers who have left to take up jobs elsewhere. Again, we have given you names, and those names include three or four of Australia’s highest profile philosophers and public intellectuals... This is a direct product of the amount of money that is spent on funding universities...
    Education is for preparing the next generation to find jobs, but also to live fulfilling lives and to contribute to society. The feeling is that Australia has forgotten this and that all it is really interested in is training an output...[p153]

Professor Jeffery Malpas, Head, School of Philosophy, University of Tasmania
...all of these things, of course, bring with them reductions in morale and increasing difficulty in keeping staff here, particularly senior staff. So there are a range of different factors. Many of them are, I think, directly attributable to changes in funding - and not just the level of funding, but also the way the funding is directed and the new mechanisms that have come with new models of funding. So there are a whole range of arrangements. [p175]

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?[p175]

Prof. Malpas
    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.

Senator Carr
    All of that is obviously supported by extensive evidence across the country, but when I ask the department in Canberra about the situation, they tell me that things are pretty good and that there is a new quality assurance regime and a new funding regime that actually allows for 30 per cent of staff time to be spent on research. They tell me that the profiles negotiations with individual universities will provide for a balance in the loads that are being offered. Are you saying that I have been misled? [p176]

Prof. Malpas
    I would say that for the most part DETYA live in a different world - DETYA dreamland, if you like - that does not bear much resemblance to what actually happens in any university in the country.

Senator Carr
    A DETYA dreamworld, I will have to ask them about that.

Senator Carr (to Dr Martyn Forrest Secretary (CEO) Department of Education Tasmanian Government)
    We have heard today from various witnesses that universities are in crisis and turmoil, there is a serious problem in regard to staff morale, there is a decline in standards, and serious detrimental effects of these cuts are being felt in the philosophy departments, in the arts generally, and in music, language and education. We have heard of an engineering faculty being de-accredited by Singapore. We have heard of a whole range of quite serious problems. What responsibility do you think the state government has, given that the university operates under a state act of parliament on these questions? [194]

Dr Forrest
    Whilst the university acts under a state act of parliament - and that is palpably true - funding of universities is and has always been the responsibility of the Commonwealth government. I think the Commonwealth government has got to address these concerns.
 

April 30^th Darwin

 Mr Peter Toyne, Shadow Minister for Education, Northern Territory Labor Party/Caucus
    ...there is one psychology lecturer for 300 students, as I understand it, at the moment. That is clearly going to be detrimental to the quality educational delivery here, but it is an inevitable result of the funding cutbacks. Overlying that is a huge problem with the morale of the students and the staff because that flows straight into the students’ perception about the kind of service they are getting. Certainly, the staff gets more and more stretched as the staffing becomes thinner. So overwork becomes a morale problem after a while, and we are seeing that as well. [p231]

Christine Silvester, President, Australian Federation of University Women (Northern Territory Branch)
    I think out there in the community it is a credibility factor. When there are cuts, particularly to the faculties of English, anthropology and some of those courses, then people talk. They are very concerned about the credibility, about whether the courses will be able to offer enough subjects in a unit or in a major to actually allow a student to achieve what they want to achieve. Some of the courses have definitely had severe cuts. That is when you get students thinking that maybe they should be doing the course in a southern institution. I feel that the community is looking at the university from the heady days when it first started and we were all tremendously excited and it was reasonably well resourced. That has diminished and it has affected the morale of the community in the Territory. Again, I would like to go back to saying that that affects families and people in the region; it affects whether people will stay, and it affects our northern development and status as a region in the rest of the Australia. [p285]
 

May 14^th Melbourne

Professor Jim Falk, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Victoria University
    The capacity to build, long term, an effective group of staff with high morale and effective staff development, able to always be up to date with the latest research and with other things they need such as teaching techniques, is reduced in a stressed funding climate. Over time, this will tell on the Australian higher education system. So, whilst it may be true that we have managed to maintain our quality but reduced the scope of services, we must be on the edge of a serious decline in the quality of Australian higher education. I do not see how the current situation can be sustained over five years, 10 years, in the current paradigm of funding. [p354]
 

June 22^nd Canberra

Senator Carr (to the Government's Chief Scientist, Robin Batterham)
    Can you give the committee the benefit of your advice in regard to the broader question of staff morale within universities. Could you give us your view as to what you have observed to be the general level of the intellectual climate within the universities and the extent to which the traditional role of the university and, particularly, the questions of academic freedom, have developed in recent times. [p526]

Dr Batterham
    There is no doubt that the academics have been significantly squeezed in terms of performance. I look at that one as the key driver for such things as whether they feel that they have academic freedom, the standard of scholarship, the amount of time that they have for research, and so forth. When student-staff ratios, just to use a common indicator, have moved the way that they have over the last 20 years, it is not surprising people feel squeezed. I do not know where the ratios should be. I am not making an absolute statement. I am simply saying that we know that they have moved from 11 or so in 1975 to over 18 in the year 2000. I am quoting from Karmel's paper; I do not know the accuracy of the figures but I have certainly heard these sorts of numbers. That squeeze on people creates the impression that they do not have enough time to go and think broadly - and that is an awful lot of what academic freedom is about. If there is a pressure on performance, for example short-term performance on publications, then you are not going to spend a lot of time writing a paper that is just exploratory and which might get rejected or which might get a very unfavourable response, as opposed to pushing out a couple of fairly safer bets. So my response is, broadly, not to try to put a peg in the sand about morale or academic freedom and the like but just to say: when you squeeze a system it is not surprising that some of the attributes of it which take time at the personal level to engender and to encourage feel threatened or somewhat under siege.

Senator Lyn Allison (AD; to Professor Peter Karmel, former Vice-Chancellor, the Australian National University,1982-87 and Flinders University of South Australia, 1966-71 (Private capacity))
    One of the difficulties for the committee is reconciling the contradictory claims by some groups that the cost pressures on universities are leading to a decline in morale - and you mentioned that yourself - and that this has led to a decline in quality and outcomes. If this is so, how do you measure that? What sorts of criteria do you use?
Would you give us some advice on what we should ask in that respect? [p614-615]

Prof. Karmel
    I think it is very difficult to measure. There is no question in my mind that a very large reduction has occurred in the staff-student ratios. There has been a very big deterioration over the last 20 years. That has resulted in larger classes, less contact between staff and students, and less time for staff to prepare their work properly and do their research. All of this has happened. It is very difficult to measure in an objective way what the decline in standards is because, if you look at things like pass rates, they do not tell you anything. They depend upon the quality of the intake, judgments about what is an appropriate percentage to pass and, as you know, all that sort of thing.

One thing that puzzles me is that, over the period when student-staff ratios have gone from about 12:1 to 19:1 - which is what has happened in universities - this has not happened at the school level. Of course, it should not have happened, but over the same 20 years there has been quiet a significant improvement in school staff-student ratios, despite the fact that in one or two states they have gone backwards a bit in the last few years. I do not think a reduction in staff student ratios in schools of the kind that has happened at universities would be tolerated. The universities must be one of the few institutions offering personal services where there has been this gross deterioration. It has not happened among doctors and it has not happened among lawyers, but university teachers are now dealing with much larger numbers of students than they used to. I do not have much doubt that there has been a deterioration in standards.

There is also the problem that, since we have been admitting larger and larger numbers of people, there must be some difference in the appropriate courses that we can offer to the intake of students otherwise there will be a deterioration in terms of what can be done. You asked me to specify how you could measure it. That is very difficult. All you can rely on really is peer judgment - that is, the judgment of senior academics who are experiencing these things.
 

July 4^th Adelaide

Professor Anthony Thomas, Chair, National Committee for Physics, Australian Academy of Science
(part of opening statement)
    I need to talk about a really major problem in what, if you were a football fan, would be called the ‘engine room’ of science and technology. That is really what physics is...
    To summarise, since 1984 in Australia academic staff in physics are down 29 per cent; if you go to 1994, the situation is even worse. Student-staff ratios are ridiculous compared with the rest of the civilised world. Support staff are down 26 per cent. There are almost no workshops left in physics departments. Morale is terrible, salaries are uncompetitive and research supports demoralising. That is the basic point. I will try to suggest a solution towards the end, but let me just give you a couple of examples to remind you of what physics has done for society. [p792]

Senator Stott Despoja (AD)
    What do you really think is required, in terms of dollars? In your letter urging the Prime Minister, you recommend in the strongest possible terms that the Chief Scientist's report should be implemented. We know that, to an extent, that Chief Scientist report was implemented or contained in the Backing Australia’s Ability innovation statement. But we also know that the $2.9 billion over four years still amounts to a slowing of our investment in R&D as a percentage of GDP. What is really required? [p803]

Prof. Thomas
    I do not know overall. I know in my own area that a very small amount of money could have a major impact. For all the talk about research and development support by the government, you will find that many of the figures are incredibly padded. I have given some examples in the notes here. If you look in the science and technology budget papers for last year you will see more than a billion dollars of the imputed expenditure on scientific R&D attributed through indirect support in the university system. That is a nonsense. It is some imputed fraction of academic salaries. It includes academics across all areas, not just science and technology.

When you come to the coalface and ask what do you really need, the ARC funding for physics in Australia is about $7 million or $8 million a year. If you doubled that you would have an enormous impact on morale. It is tiny amounts of money, but it is just hidden away in there. If you were clever about where you allocated key amounts of money, it could make a major difference both to morale and to productivity. It is not huge amounts of money.

When you talk about doubling of the ARC budget, that is a wonderful thing. However, if you look at what happens, the moment money is allocated somewhere, first of all it tends to be taken from something else. I do not know whether that is the case now, but every past experience suggests that it is. Secondly, the Australian National University is allowed to compete for it. Thirdly, CSIRO will probably be allowed to compete for it. So I doubt that in the end the success rate will be any different from what it is now.

Senator Stott Despoja (to Professor Kym Adey, Pro Vice-Chancellor, and Vice-President, Access and Learning Support, University of South Australia)
    So you do not deny that there is a correlation between resources, morale, funding and quality? [p807]

Prof. Adey
    What I have wanted to emphasise here is that I believe we have done remarkably well, given those restraints and difficulties that we have faced, and it has been through the expense of a huge human effort and significant financial commitment by the university. But the point I want to emphasise is that I think we are at the threshold of our inability to sustain that - and I am now talking about the sector, not just the University of South Australia.
 

July 17^th Sydney

Ms Moksha Watts, President, Students Representative Council, University of Sydney
    An NTU stress related study, which I think came out recently and which was a joint effort between Adelaide University and Sydney University, revealed that the academic workplace is one of the most high stress workplaces. This has meant that we have experienced low staff morale at Sydney University. We have also experienced staff cuts such as through the voluntary early retirement plan instituted by the vice-chancellor, which led to 18 acceptances of voluntary early retirement. These staff were then replaced by casual and part-time teaching staff. What this impacted on was not only the teaching ability of the university but also the ability of the university to go for the research quantum, because you are effectively getting rid of very well qualified and established researchers in the field. [p957]

Senator Carr
    What you have said is quite disturbing. I think you should take that up with the vice-chancellor. Your submissions point to a whole series of measures that one could look at to see the decline in quality. It is not just the morale issue amongst academics or the challenges to academic freedom but it is this challenge to this notion of what we understood to be the traditional civic responsibilities of universities as well - namely, the capacity of the university to carry out its functions: to preserve and advance knowledge, to prepare students for their professional careers, to foster inquiry and to reflect on public issues. Do you think those sorts of questions are now coming into sharper focus as a result of what you have been arguing here? Is the purpose of what you are putting to us to draw out these questions? [968]

Ms Watts
    Yes, I think so. I think that there needs to be a recognition, which is lacking in the current funding structures from the federal government and the current structures of university governance, of the wider role the university does play in society. There needs to be a recognition that it is more than just a training ground for jobs and much more than just the pursuit of excellence; it is actually about being able to create the next generation of society, in part. That is something that needs to be considered in the way any party formulates education policy for the future.

Senator Carr (to Professor Mary O'Kane, Vice-Chancellor, University of Adelaide)
    I thank you for your answer; I think it is very helpful. However, I am concerned about the impact of this new climate on morale and academic freedom. One of the most disturbing and depressing issues arising from the inquiry has been the clear evidence given of the poisonous atmosphere of mistrust, intimidation and often unethical behaviour which is exhibited in some of our universities. How do you respond to that proposition? [p977]

Prof. O’Kane
    I certainly agree that there is mistrust and there is low morale. I think the atmosphere is fairly poisonous in several universities and they have become a lot less pleasant places to work. That is very bad for both staff and students and ultimately for the nation, and I think it is actually getting worse. There are other aspects to this matter, which I mention in the paper: overall we have people on staff who are tired, the staff are older and there are fewer opportunities for young people to come in. It is for a good reason that we do not have a retirement age but it really has affected universities badly that there is not a standard retirement age. I think that overall it is a fairly distressing situation: it is distressing for academics, it is distressing for general staff and it is distressing for senior management.

Senator Carr
    One of the questions I raised ...[was] about the poisonous atmosphere and the sense of fear. I come back to the point: doesn't the issue of academic freedom in that context need to be reasserted? [p983]

Prof. O’Kane
    No. What is meant and what is wanted needs to be re-examined. The real issue underlying some of the issues you are raising is the poor morale and the questions people are asking, such as: is there a future? What is going on? They have a strong belief that they do not always support what they see as a more managerialist approach and there is a strong sense of tension between management issues and some of the academics and sometimes students in a university. Management can be under strict government imperatives of various sorts and imperatives to get funding.

It comes back not so much to issues of whether one is critical or whether one has the right of speech. Right underneath this discussion is a sense that our academics are overly stressed and pressured in various ways that I think are unacceptable in a system, that our managers are far too stressed, that we have unrealistic expectations of our governing bodies and that we are not facing up to what we really want out of our universities. We are letting a great national asset slide into a very parlous state.

Senator Carr (to Professor Janice Reid, Vice-Chancellor, University of Western Sydney)
    Could I also put a case to you that the morale at your university has fallen? Would you agree? [p1011]

Prof. Reid
    It depends over what time frame you want me to comment.

Senator Carr
    The last six years.

Prof. Reid
    I think we share with the sector great consternation amongst staff about the working conditions - that is, about the pressures under which staff work; as others have said, about tiredness; about the demands on staff under what we commonly call accountability, which also means time reporting on what one is doing; and about their opportunity to contemplate the areas of endeavour in which they work. I think morale has slipped in the sector. We have the particular experience at UWS of having the great majority of staff passionately committed to Greater Western Sydney and to UWS. Any staff member who works there realises that it is a wonderful region in which to work - it is a region which is extraordinarily diverse and very rewarding to work in - but that it is becoming much more difficult to do that and to gain the satisfaction that academics normally seek.
 

July 19^th Newcastle

Senator Crossin (to Dr Neville Webb, Chairman, Past Presidents Advisory Committee, Australian University Alumni Council)
    Dr Webb, I am trying to get a handle on your association's views. Your submission actually says, "The council regards the present funding arrangements as grossly inadequate." Are you suggesting therefore that the amount of dollars being put into the university sector - public dollars - should be increased significantly, or are you suggesting that there should be a further increase towards privatisation and a bigger role for your association in that? [p1145]

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Dr. Webb
    My short answer to you is yes, we believe very strongly in this. The alumni are there to be harnessed in ways that universities can do it, provided they see it in the long term. Sure, it would be desirable for us all to get together, public and private. But in the meantime considerable public funds need to go into this area, because I know that these people are overworked, the morale is constantly low, people are being put off, departments are being closed and these people have to find other ways to go. As far as we are concerned, it is vital that the government, whichever party is in, does something and is not complacent. I am sorry I heard the minister praising himself last night on TV. Candidly, his complacency is misplaced. [p1146]

Professor Brian English, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Newcastle
    ...[T]he growing number of students compared to staff really means that we are able to devote less of our effort to postgraduate work. We have more postgraduate students than we had 10 years ago, but proportionately we are able to devote less effort to it. Our staff, who should be able to have periods of research et cetera, are required to teach. So staff-student ratios are not about class sizes but about the mix of teaching and research. [p1210]

Senator Carr
    Nonetheless, some of your colleagues have drawn our attention to the decline in quality as result of the decline in staff morale, the increasing demands upon staff and the changing nature of staff. There is increasing casualisation. Has there been an increase in casualisation at your university?

Prof. English
    No, there has not. We carefully monitor the use of casuals, and there has not been an increase in casualisation. Again, we will leave a report - [p1211]

Senator Carr
    Would you say in the general, though, that the morale of staff of staff is down on what it was?

Prof. English
    Morale is definitely down in our university and, from my soundings in the system.

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