With the Australian public distracted by Iraq, the time may be ripe for the Howard government to start putting into effect the revolutionary changes in the tertiary sector it has been contemplating.
University reforms will certainly be on the agenda at the meeting of ministers on February 24-25. The meeting is “part of a system inaugurated last year for twice-yearly planning sessions to talk about ‘whole of government’ issues” (Michelle Grattan, The Age, theageFeb13).
Perhaps this was also on the minds of Peter Dawkins and Paul Kelly when they wrote their joint article, “Support Knowledge” (The Australian, theaustralianFeb4):
Higher education has been an area of policy disappointment and political aggravation for the Howard Government. Its first term was marked by cuts in higher education funding and its second term by a failure to tackle funding and structural reform.
The appointment of a new minister, Brendan Nelson, after the 2001 election signalled a belated effort to improve Australia’s university system. He knows that the status quo is unsustainable.
Their article is steeped in an ominous mood for change and attempts to persuade readers as much as inform them. Under the banner of “supporting knowledge” – an ideal that every thinking Australian feels drawn to – and quoting a number of sources, Dawkins and Kelly lay the groundwork for how the status quo ought to be changed.
Some of the sources correctly identify insufficient private sector investment in universities (eg through joint R&D projects) as a major area of concern. We know this happened following drastic decreases in federal funding since 1996: The private sector has failed to fill the gap, and one result is that “resources are inadequate for undergraduate teaching”, as Peter Karmel so dispassionately put it.
What strikes me about much of the tertiary sector debate in Australia is the careful avoidance of calling a spade a spade. It seems that pseudo-objectivity is meant to facilitate rational debate, but instead guarantees that whatever solution is decided, it will always lie in between the reality, so the root of the problem is never addressed, just passed on further down the line.
Politics and objectivity are irredeemably mixed here, with the solution already contained in the language used for the debate.
Ian Macfarlane, of the Reserve Bank of Australia, tells it more bluntly. He is also quoted in the article. You just wonder how his observation of a national catastrophe could be mollified in the bureaucratic hyper-reality of the rest of the article, as if an automatic assumption by all parties displaying this relativism is that any one man’s observation of general catastrophe contains enough figments of his imagination to justify relativising it out of existence. There are always mitigating circumstances for those who feel the need to avert their gaze.
In reality, the opinion that stamps its mark on everything is that of the federal government, which holds ultimate power in the tertiary sector. The proponents in the debate are merely jostling for position before their audience with the government. Under no circumstances may one step on another’s toes by speaking of the catastrophe at universities: the argument would be too strong if it were accepted as true, and would stymie other parties’ ambitions for a piece of the tertiary sector pie. Therefore it must be diluted in advance. Talk of catastrophe is downright rude and un-Australian.
Macfarlane had said:
The Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University made the assessment that Australia no longer has a university ranking in the world’s top 100. I have no reason to dispute his opinion as I have heard similar views from other academics. It is imperative for all involved in higher education – governments, bureaucrats, academics and their spokespersons, taxpayers and businesses – to tackle this assessment. It may elicit the old catchcry of ‘elitism’; but far better that than a complacency permitting higher education to slip further.
The same observation was repeated – though with mollified bureaucratic obfuscation again – this week in The Age (Academic standards at risk: study):
Australia’s Group of Eight elite universities believe a new study shows Australia is now at risk of lagging behind the rest of the world in tertiary education.
The Productivity Commission’s International Comparisons of University Resourcing report released today was a useful contribution to the current higher education debate, Go8 president John Hay said.
“It reveals a university sector at risk of lagging behind the rest of the world,” Professor Hay said.
“While the Productivity Commission warns readers not to draw conclusions from the comparisons it makes in its report, it is clear that, on many measures of performance, Australia’s universities are falling behind their international competitors…”
Professor Hay said the report provided a valuable snapshot of 11 Australian universities and 26 international universities drawn from nine countries. “However, an analysis of the university funding trends across the countries surveyed tells the true story.”
The headline says: “Academic standards at risk”. Absolute rubbish. Academic standards in Australia have fallen through the bottom. Here, politeness is propagating a lie.
Ian Macfarlane does not give a feel for the scale of the academic dissent, the near-universal awareness of disaster. It is not just one vice-chancellor here, a professor there. You could hear this view from hundreds, if not thousands, of academics.
Kelly and Dawkins trace out the happy, sanitised medium of their fossicking:
Overall, there appears to be a series of shared principles: that universities become more autonomous; that such autonomy must involve greater revenue-raising scope; that the goals of international excellence and equity be advanced simultaneously; that universities should evolve with more specialisation within institutions and diversity across the sector; that greater public funding is necessary but insufficient to address current inadequacies; that improved undergraduate teaching and a stronger research base are essential; that HECS is the mechanism to deliver student equity and greater private source revenue; and that the shift towards more market-based principles be limited by government price caps and an overall regulatory responsibility.
The article in The Age tells us how far management bureaucrats have taken us with their eyes set on the ever-more-distant mirage of “goals of international excellence”. In fact, over the last decade, they have presided over an intellectual catastrophe in Australian universities.
I do not believe it is an exaggeration to note that this is a classic example of the historical pattern of revolution: goal-oriented, theoretical frameworks are imposed from above with ignorance of the decimation perpetrated at ground level. The devastation is explained away as a necessary step in the path towards future salvation.
No, it is not Marxism. On the contrary, in Australia we have been seeing the management cultural revolution.
Given the failure of the private sector to fill the financial crisis that has arisen particularly since 1996, one might wonder if there isn’t something more basic at work here that Paul Kelly, Peter Dawkins and a few of the commentators they cite are not letting on (or are not aware of).
Some might judge, for instance, that minimalist fiscal policy is fatally unsuited to Australian conditions. Perhaps there is something dreadfully wrong with the economic paradigm that is being applied to education thinking in Australia, with such disastrous results.
The jargon of this paradigm informs and constrains the debate, including the article by Dawkins and Kelly – their entire worldview is limited by it. So too the world-views of the power brokers in the education debate in Australia.
The Howard government acted ideologically correctly in severing a significant portion of its lifeline to the tertiary sector, hoping that the invisible hand would rise to the occasion, but instead found that Australian values (eg managerial suspicion of clever, “merely theoretical” solutions) apropos knowledge precluded closer interaction between the private sector and universities.
Perhaps Australian society is sending a message that universities aren’t really necessary in our country, that we can get by without being clever?
The government tried a free market experiment, and here we have the result. Clear as day.
But no: even the staunchest neo-liberalist cannot accept the evident rejection of universities – after all, he or she was most probably educated at university – and, accepting as a fait accompli that government funding cannot be reinstated to previous levels (plus an allowance for inflation and increased staff-student ratios), the neo-liberalist will claim that the free market experiment was too limited, had flaws, should be extended, universalised, more closely supervised.
Sounds like Marxist apologists following the fall of the Soviet Union – Marxism was never really given a chance.
Both the private sector and universities will have to be educated to view things differently, with a view to changing their natures. Mainly, though – because this, too, is the nature of the matter – universities will have to move closer to industry for the required proliferation of ties to be established.
This is the main gist of the article by Dawkins and Kelly; for buried in their lofty rhetoric, such as “an emerging consensus in Australia” – ie “the [importance of the] nexus between investment in the knowledge economy and national economic performance” – are the same pure, short-term utilitarian values that have permeated university culture since Labor minister John Dawkins’s reforms a decade ago.
In their article, not a single mention is made of the devastation wreaked on the humanities, as well as on the pure sciences and mathematics, in the last decade by the cultural revolution led by management ideologues. Where do these human endeavours fit in in the flea market of the “knowledge economy”?
No space exists in the imaginations of the reformists for institutes of philosophy, history, classics and music – to name just a few – even though ever since the Renaissance, these fields have played a major role in the development of our – Western – culture.
Western culture is rationalizing itself out of existence, destroying its own memory of itself. It is transforming itself into a universalised, globalised husk of economic exchange value.
Given the self-centred utilitarian imperatives advocated – at least in the language used – by all the commentators quoted by Kelly and Dawkins, the question arises, who is going to pay for those pillars of human (and self) knowledge that cannot be immediately bartered as economic goods, if not the federal government, which is supposed to be entrusted with the well-being of our education system?
If Dawkins and Kelly truly supported knowledge, they would also support the type of knowledge that cannot be immediately cashed in for the benefit of “national economic performance”.
The funding for these must come from a pool established for the public good: ie the federal government.
I’m not talking about basket-weaving courses that have proliferated at universities under the inspiration of John Dawkins and ever since, but the pillars of western culture, which have been devastated in Australia.
There are undoubtedly other fields that are on the verge of extinction that we would desire keeping. Are the decision-makers aware of which ones these are? The problem is, in the sanitised bureaucratic relativism, the danger never seems real, so the issue never comes up.
The reality contradicts the vision of the revolutionaries.
Australia in the last decade has lost world authorities in fields too numerous to mention, and is in serious risk of losing most of the rest. Why should the world’s leading authority on Alexander the Great, for example, remain in Australia any longer, when the rest of his department has been decimated?
Does the Australian public care? The Australian public is not even aware of the intellectual holocaust perpetrated in Australian universities over the last decade. Somehow the news has not penetrated the fog of government propaganda, bureaucratic obfuscation and media disinterest. Australians would be outraged if they knew what was happening.
Considering the big picture – which the utilitarians have cut themselves off from – contrary to the hopes of the reformists, the focus on utilitarian values rather than free inquiry guarantees that the economic benefits will be relatively small-scale.
With the extinguishing of much fundamental research at maths and physics departments around Australia, and the push for fragmentation into applied, technological areas, Australia is losing the ability to discover new concepts and new paradigms.
This means we will forever be locked into figuring out better ways of designing, say, circuits for electronic gadgets, but we will never discover new paradigms of technology, something like the successor to the mobile phone.
Even if somebody did, the resources would not be present to support the development. Australia is digging her own grave – for this reason, apart from a tiny number of exceptions, the country has become a technological backwater.
Utilitarian values are fundamentally backward looking because they encourage fragmentation. As the philosopher Thomas Kuhn and many others have noted, free inquiry is the foundation of scientific progress.
Healthy humanities departments are a sign that a nation values free inquiry – and that society does not just grab at short-term material gain, but values knowledge, which actually means mastering the process of acquiring solid, well-founded knowledge. The benefits of this flow across all fields of endeavour.
Nations that value free inquiry will reap the economic benefits of owning the intellectual rights to new technological paradigms. That’s where the real money is. The federal government has its eyes set on peanuts.
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1. The Next Step in Howard’s Revolution?
After Labor’s John Dawkins departed, Howard accelerated university reforms drastically. We are now at a point where a new level of severity may be set in motion. What might Howard’s revolution look like? How bold will he be?
The noises coming from reformists are entirely utilitarian, and are stuck in an economic (rather than a broader civil) paradigm. The reforms will be impregnated with the values of those who conceived them: an economic order will be imposed on universities even more drastic than at present.
Paul Kelly and Peter Dawkins cite University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Alan Gilbert: The aim is to revitalise universities as more autonomous and accountable institutions.
Peter Karmel is cited as saying: Centralised government planning that dominates the sector must be dismantled to allow each institution to determine its destiny.
All this sounds fairly innocuous. But to an observer of university reforms in Europe, particularly in Austria in 2002, it is all too familiar.
We can anticipate other aspects of the coming Australian university reforms. Universities will be brought closer to the private sector to make them more “useful” for industry. Universities will have to be less “cerebral” and more applied. Management ideologues would find very attractive a restructuring in the tertiary sector that forces, for instance, extensive top-down allocation of scientific or technological tasks to universities by a higher body such as the education ministry.
After all, in the last decade (at least), company heads have purged democratic elements and imposed despotic in-house regimes that abrogate basic rights in a way that would be outrageous if imposed on an entire nation. Company structures are anti-democratic.
If Howard is really bold, he will go the whole way with the reform and impose a power structure that facilitates quick and effective imposition of government will.
He would put a vertical power structure in place whereby the federal government will have direct influence, in principle, on all functions of the university, which will enable it to force the assimilation process between the private sector and universities. This will be done under the banner of boosting national productivity while solving the university funding crisis. And, of course, “supporting knowledge” and “goals of international excellence”.
The reforms could therefore have the character of a bloody purge, with government henchmen appointed to strategic positions, while entrenching a compliant majority in the most important university governing bodies.
Does this sound impossibly far fetched? Hardly. This is exactly what has been happening in Austria since 2002. It is happening now.
A look at current university reforms in Austria – conceived and set in motion by Austria’s right-populist, economically neo-liberal, coalition in 2002 – may well be a guide to the next step in the neo-liberalist revolution in Australia.
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2. In the Image of their Creators – the Management Ideologues
The following article arose in the context of the Austrian university reforms, which were passed into Austrian law shortly before the collapse of the People’s Party/Freedom Party coalition in the northern autumn. Academics there are helpless to stop the devastation, while private sector commentators are very enthusiastic.
The article was published in German in an Austrian academic magazine in July 2002. I have adapted it extensively for Webdiary. The article expounds on the reforms in Austria, as well as the effects of the reforms we have had in Australia since the Dawkins era. The story is told from the angle of freedom of expression and separation of powers.
I explain the mechanisms with which the Australian federal government controls universities – essentially two purse strings do the trick – as well as why freedom of expression still exists on Australian campuses. The latter does not exist anymore – in principle – on Austrian campuses. A successful purge by the Australian government would likewise have to eliminate the possibility of public dissent from academics.
Along the way, I outline the way HECS works, and how HECS money gets funneled to universities from the federal government. This was intended for the magazine’s Austrian and German readership – in Austria, there were no student fees until recently, and these low fees were introduced with the same propaganda to the effect that they would not rise very much. Anybody interested in a quick overview of the Australian system may want to read this.
I use actual financial statements – available online – from the University of Western Australia, an Australian Group-of-Eight university to argue that the main cause of the crisis in Australian universities are the values imposed by the policies of the two federal governments since the early 1990s, particularly the Howard Government since 1996.
The statements clearly show that the drastic measures for cutting back public spending in the tertiary sector it implemented have failed to invigorate private sector investment in the tertiary sector, while the value-laden vision imposed in that period of what a university is meant to be is now thoroughly entrenched.
Regarding this last point, the figures clearly show universities have been transformed into the image of their management ideologue reformers – while many academic departments such as classics, philosophy and the pure sciences have been decimated and staff have been at breaking point providing courses of inadequate standard because of lack of money, expenditure on “administration” and “student services” together doubled between 1996 and 2000.
[In 1996, when the management cultural revolution began to be implemented immensely more severely, “Administration and Other General Institutional Services” amounted to $22,918,000, “Student Services” amounted to $3,957,000, a total of $26,938,000. See uwa and uwa. In 2000, “Administration and Other General Institutional Services” amounted to $38,266,000, “Student Services” amounted to $15,654,000, a total of $53,920,000. See uwa. The increase in the university’s spending on administration and student services in these four years is more than one-third the total academic staff salaries in 2000 (Ibid.).]
Unfortunately, as I noted above, the situation can get worse. In this Webdiary article, I want to draw attention to this possibility. I also want to show why the charge of “economic fundamentalist revolution” sticks. Here is the reworked article.
***
Those who want to familiarize themselves with the future effects of the current university reforms in Austria would be well advised to read Rudolf Muhr’s article on the situation in Australian tertiary institutions. His subheadings give a good overview: for example, “Falling standard of courses.” “High workload due to chronic staff shortages.” “Study without prospect of a job in your field in industry or at university.” This is the interim balance of the reforms introduced into Australian universities in the early 1990s by Peter Dawkins, but made significantly more severe since 1996.
On one point, however, Mr. Muhr is wrong. Unlike the Australian situation before 2003, the Austrian reforms – and I will argue this below – serve only the end of permanently entrenching neoliberal ways of thinking and values – which have all the characteristics of a kind of fundamentalism – into everyday university life. The current Austrian reforms’ strategic goal is the establishment of a vertical power apparatus permeating all levels, with which the government – the present one or any in the future – can in principle directly influence every aspect of university life.
In each Austrian university, extraordinary power is to be given to a small clique – the “University Council”. This clique will be controlled by the Austrian chancellor or other ministers. Austrian universities will become the playgrounds of government ministers playing politics.
In principle, the Council’s five members (or seven, depending on the final wording of the legislation to be enacted) will have the last word on all university decisions at all levels, irrespective of the considered opinion of the University Senate, even though the University Senate is the body that knows its own university best. In an attempt to counter what it sees as self-serving bias in university senates, Austria’s right-populist government swung to an extreme position, and made the university senate irrelevant.
As with any executive body, the small clique of the University Council will certainly have human flaws. The problem is, because of the concentration of power, any imperfections in government or university policies will be magnified throughout the university. Even small misjudgements will have far-reaching effects. In particular, the values of the clique will be imprinted easily on the rest of the university.
Incredibly, then, according to the reforms, all five members of the University Council must be found outside the university. In fact, because of the way the process has been designed, three of them (i.e. a majority) can ultimately be appointed by the government. They can be business leaders or former ambassadors, people without knowledge of how universities work, or of the nature of ground-breaking scientific research – nor with a sense of the importance of the humanities.
This grab for power in the universities via the University Council is the main feature of the Austrian university reforms. University employees will be forced to submit to – at best – benevolent absolutism. Democracy is being pushed aside, as if the clock has been suddenly turned back to the early 1930s.
The imminent danger in the vertical power structure is that short-term university contracts will be used as a tool of selecting out undesirable personnel quasi-automatically. If you want to keep your job, you will have to conform to the official line and remain silent. This affects all qualification levels, from research assistant to full professor (for new staff appointed after the law is enacted).
In Australia at the beginning of 2003, in contrast – ultimately as a consequence of separation of powers – mechanisms still exist that are supposed to protect freedom of expression at universities. It is still possible, for instance, to voice hefty criticism of government policy in the media. Even in Australia, however, the danger is everpresent that these mechanisms can be corrupted – and in some instances, they already have been.
As far as I am aware, no direct government interference exists in the everyday working of Australian universities. Rather, the government exerts hands-off control by setting framework conditions that the universities have to follow. These framework conditions are permeated by the government’s values and worldview. The government defines the framework, and the senate and various committees at each university must work within this.
In contrast to the reforms being enacted in Austria, each Australian university is – in early 2003 – autonomous in the sense that its actual peak body is the senate – not the “executive group” or some other council – and the senate is not dominated by external appointees. By far the majority of its members are university employees – both academic and non-academic – and students, with some outside appointees from business or elsewhere. The university senate in Australia is not (yet) a committee of party cadres appointed by the government.
Although the universities manage themselves autonomously, their autonomy – as well as commitment to freedom of expression and freedom of academic inquiry – can be corrupted in the face of incessant political pressure to conform. Eventually the payoff for conforming might seem to outweigh the cost, and enough members of the university power structure might fall into line to form a majority. Moreover, individuals – such as a chancellor or single-minded committee – can cause great damage before the democratically elected senate has the chance – or finds the will – to intervene with a corrective influence. (The documentary “Facing the Music”, directed by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, focuses on the early stages of such a process at the University of Sydney in 2000.)
The university must dance to the government’s tune even if the government’s worldview and values are contrary to the values that are basic to scholarship and education. The reason is two-fold: the universities are financially dependent on the public sector; and they are unable to impress on public opinion the need to alter the government’s values.
I am not convinced that the government in Australia reflects community values on the question of university policy. If Australians new the true state of our university system, they would be outraged.
The Australian Ministry of Education provides universities with two types of financial assistance: “Operational Grants and Infrastructure” and “Research”.
3. “Operational Grants and Infrastructure” Funding
This is used to pay salaries, purchase new equipment and so on. This money is distributed by the government in accordance with a framework formula contained in the HEFA (Higher Education Funding Act). Then at each university, the finance committee decides how the money is to be further allotted to the various academic departments and institutes.
Although the distribution of funding by the financial committee is strictly regulated by numerous norms defined by the university itself, the university’s performance and economic indicators must conform to the policy framework handed down by the federal government. If it fails to conform, it will lose funding, in accordance with the HEFA formula.
Otherwise the university is free to do what it wishes with the funding. When the distribution of funds within a university appears to be unjust, it is still possible in Australia to alter a few details of the distribution through the university senate – or even to go so far as to dump the chancellor (as occurred not very long ago at the University of Sydney).
4. Research Funding Through the ARC
The other somewhat brittle buffer between the Australian government and the universities consists of the second category of funding, namely “Research”. The federal government assigns a certain amount of money to an expert committee – the “Australian Research Council” (ARC) – and this is responsible for distributing the sum among academic research groups at universities.
Although the framework conditions are strictly defined by the government (for example, in 2002, a large proportion of the money had to be allotted to a small number of applied technical fields), I believe that the expert committee can carry out its work of evaluating the scientific merit of ARC applications without further government interference.
Moreover, as far as I am aware, there have been no cases where the ARC has withheld grants – or rejected applications – from applicants who expressed criticism of the government or its policies. Members of the ARC themselves have criticised government policy with integrity, at hearings such as the Australian Senate Estimates Committee.
Nevertheless, in 2001, only about 20 percent of ARC applications were successful. Most of these resulted in only a part of the requested sum being granted (a minority received more than requested). The main reason? This depends on whom you ask. However, everybody agrees there isn’t enough money in the system.
5. Funding Black Hole Since 1996 has not Been Filled – Failure of Laissez-Faire Policy
A telling statistic appeared in The Australian on May 8, 2002. In 2001, the entire landscape of funding sources for research at Australian universities looked like this: Federal Government (ARC) 47%; Federal Government (other grants) 9%; Companies 16%; Donations 7%; State Governments 9%; from overseas 9%.
This ought to be seen as a damning statistic. Indeed, this is probably an important reason for the increasingly loud calls in Australia for university reform. However, most supporters of reform are calling for more free market measures, not less, while ignoring the devastation of academic fields in Australia whose knowledge cannot be immediately cashed in as tokens of national productivity.
Free market reforms in themselves are not evil if applied rationally, introduced gradually to wean away academic fields from government funding if they are able to stand on their own two feet; so that fields that are vulnerable in the brave new world – and that we want to keep alive – can be identified and supported by non-free-market measures.
However, they are evil if applied with ideological fervour, imposed from above equally blindly to all areas of human endeavour, perpetrators indifferent to the destruction they cause. This is clearly what has happened in Australia.
After nearly a decade of free market reforms in the tertiary sector, of encouraging private enterprise to participate, and despite massive cuts to tertiary spending in the area of “operational grants and infrastructure” resulting in great pain within academic departments, the federal government still holds a massive stake in research funding.
It can rid itself of less than half of its research grants burden. It still provides 56% of research funding.
By withdrawing from the tertiary sector and provoking difficult times there, the federal government has been trying to draw other sources of funding out from Australian society.
But the private sector has shown itself much more reluctant to put money into the tertiary sector than the federal government had hoped.
This is despite the very attractive prospect of cheap scientific or other scholarly labour in the form of doctoral or senior undergraduate students: companies have not rallied to sponsor PhDs at university as much as the ideologues had hoped.
I should add that in the one country where the free market model works (at least for the wealthy universities), namely the U.S., a significant factor in departmental survival is the hundreds of millions of dollars received in the form of donations from wealthy graduates. A comparable culture does not exist – and is unlikely ever to exist – in Australia. This is a major difference in the underlying conditions where the free market model is being applied.
The last decade can be viewed as the government’s experiment to guide a macroeconomic system – decrease government spending, and see if private investment increases. But the experiment has failed.
Now, there are two divergent ways to proceed. It seems that a choice is about to be made between them by the federal government, if it hasn’t already been made.
The first is to put the reluctance of the private sector to invest in the Australian tertiary sector down to something about the nature of Australian society; to accept this as being too big a phenomenon to change on a large enough scale to solve the problem; and to support the academic fields that need it with more public funding. Other free market reforms (e.g. deregulation) can be gradually introduced so as to minimize the destruction of fields we think are valuable.
The second is to continue, and increase the severity of, the ideological experiment by attempting to draw vastly more investment from the private sector through bringing the universities to the companies.
As the article by Paul Kelly and Peter Dawkins shows, it seems that a number of commentators – unsurprisingly, most commentators from industry and a few from academia, exactly as is the case in Austria – are keen on the latter solution.
6. HECS for Some Courses Will at Least Double Under Deregulation
Student fees in Australia create a cash inflow under the category of “Operational Grants and Infrastructure”. They are not used to fund research directly. Under HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme), students must pay a portion (between about 25 and 45 percent) of the deemed cost of their studies. The federal government is at present still responsible for establishing the HECS fees structure. This centralization is one of the main irritants for reformists.
A small proportion of students (about 2 percent) who are Australian citizens – and all foreign students – pay the entire cost of their studies up front, which are deemed to be between about $15,000 to $28,000 annually.
(In some cases, these figures are absurd overestimates: for instance, a mathematics PhD student, who works largely independently, only ever uses some space in a crowded room, pens and paper – ie lighting and stationery costs – and a computer. The amount of time spent with his or her supervisor is minimal. None of this justifies such a massive HECS fee. The deemed amount is completely irrational.)
Foreign students must pay in advance, while Australians have the option of repaying the HECS loan upon commencement of employment with a graduate salary. If a student becomes a missionary in India, or a struggling artist, he or she may never have to repay the loan. At present, the loan attracts a small interest rate.
Australians can buy university places by paying HECS up front, though the ratio of full-fee paying places and HECS loan places is strictly controlled by law. In a deregulated tertiary “market” (i.e. a changed law), as is currently being mooted by the Australian federal government, the proportion of full-fee paying places will certainly rise.
Based on the number of HECS-scheme students at a census date each semester, each university gets an immediate grant from the federal government. Fees paid in advance also go towards a university’s operational costs and infrastructure.
In accordance with the HEFA legislation, the universities also receive a performance-based grant from the Education Ministry calculated using a complicated formula that considers the number of HECS-paying (or loan) students and foreign students at the university. This grant also goes into “Operational Grants and Infrastructure”, as is by far the largest single contribution to a university’s cash receipts. At UWA in 2000, the commonwealth government HEFA grant received was $108,136,000 – out of the total operating revenues of $334,566,000 (about a third of revenue). The source of the HEFA grant is the Australian taxpayer, not the student paying HECS.
It is the size of this grant that has caused havoc at universities. At UWA between 1996 and 2000, it decreased by 12 percent, despite a vast increase in the number of students enrolled at the university and concomitant increase in workload for academics. [In 1996, UWA received commonwealth grants for “operating purposes excluding HECS” of $108,136,000. In 2000, the same entry was $95,539,000 – a decrease of 12 percent in four years: uwa and uwa]
When vice-chancellors complain about inadequate federal government funding, they are referring to the size of the HEFA grant towards operational costs and infrastructure.
The shortfall in commonwealth funding of operational costs and infrastructure in 2000 – disregarding increased workloads – was $12,597,000. In that year, total HECS receipts by UWA were $39,651,000 (see uwa).
Therefore HECS would have to go up by about one-third across all courses just to make up the shortfall in commonwealth government HEFA funding. If you add inflation over four years, and take into account the extra pressures on operation costs and infrastructure caused by the increase in student numbers since 1996 – and assume that university managers will actually want to fix the problem – we’re looking at a jump in HECS across the board of at least two-thirds.
This is what the deregulation reformists are advocating – but nobody ever mentions the figures.
But HECS won’t rise equally across the board – the increase will be greater for some courses than others. I would not be surprised if HECS for some courses would double under deregulation.
According to the Productivity Commission report in The Age (Feb 4, 2003), if staff-student ratios were to be returned to 1993 levels, “Australian universities would need to have employed almost 10,000 equivalent full-time academic staff”.
If this extremely unlikely event were to occur, I estimate that HECS would have to at least triple.
7. Failure of Reforms
The federal government reduced its contribution in the hope that student fees (and private industry) could make up the shortfall – but they haven’t. The absence of a significant increase in private sector contributions means there’s a problem.
From the financial statements at the UWA website, if the university wanted to regain the 15 percent decrease in federal funding since 1996 by increasing student fees in a deregulated “market”, some student fees would have to be nearly double their 2001 levels.
Fees would have to increase substantially in a deregulated sector to make an impact.
The rest of the university’s income comes from returns on investments, donations and the sale of real estate and other assets – hardly a solid long-term strategy. This cannot be relied upon for any extended length of time.
Unless Australian industry’s reluctance to engage with university changes drastically – which would represent a seismic shift in culture, in either one direction or the other – Australia’s university reforms will continue to be a failure. Student fees alone cannot be a substitute for government funding.
The Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC) repeatedly emphasises that the main cause of the crisis at Australian universities is the sharp decrease in federal government funding under HEFA since 1996. As I have shown, the claim is supported by analysing universities’ financial statements.
8. The Human Cost of the Laissez Faire Policy – the Extent of Australia’s Intellectual Holocaust
Because of these cuts to funding of operational costs and infrastructure, numerous – but certainly not all – academic departments and institutes are experiencing enormous difficulties in functioning from day to day. A significant number have been closed down.
Amongst the academic fields threatened with extinction in Australia – virtually without exception – are those that since the Renaissance have played a major role in the development of our – Western – culture. Institutes of philosophy, history, classics and music have been decimated. Australia has lost world leaders in these fields, and is in serious risk of losing most of the rest.
Moreover, the expertise required for Australia to acquire fundamental knowledge of other cultures – particularly Asian, and aboriginal Australian, cultures – has largely fled the country or left academia. Most foreign language departments are in dire straits, some unable to offer more than the most threadbare degree programs.
Apparently, not even national productivity is the main factor in the educational policy of the Australian federal government. Japanese studies at university, and Chinese in high schools, have been dealt a death blow, despite the fact that less than ten percent of Australians (excluding immigrants) speak a foreign language, and despite the fact that Japan is Australia’s most important trading partner.
Australians are being asked to believe that ignorance of Asian cultures will have no negative effect on current or future contracts worth billions of dollars – as if money and self-interest are the only factors that decide a deal; as if self-centred cultural ignorance cannot sink deals worth millions.
In the last decade, Australia has lost knowledge and expertise in every field that underpins both technological advances and the “knowledge economy”, without which the nation’s ability to compete in international markets is endangered. The situation is getting worse: for instance, the number of physicists in academia nationwide has fallen from 360 (1994) to 240 (2000) in 6 years. A similar rate of attrition exists in mathematics.
The worst aspect of this annihilation of fundamental research in Australia is that a significant proportion of the best, most experienced and most gifted researchers – who would have formed the kernel of future physics or mathematics departments in Australia – have left the country.
The reason for the exodus is the poor working conditions in Australia – if a department still exists to work in. Since the threat of exorbitant cutbacks is everpresent, researchers have to fossick practically continuously for money, while simultaneously carrying out their research and teaching duties – in lecture rooms where the staff-student ratio was only ever higher in the 1960s. In this respect, the free market reforms at our universities have set us back 40 years.
According to an article this week in The Age (“Academic standards at risk: study”, Feb 12, 2003)’:
Australia’s Group of Eight elite universities believe a new study shows Australia is now at risk of lagging behind the rest of the world in tertiary education.
The Productivity Commission’s International Comparisons of University Resourcing report released today was a useful contribution to the current higher education debate, Go8 president John Hay said.
“It reveals a university sector at risk of lagging behind the rest of the world,” Professor Hay said.
“While the Productivity Commission warns readers not to draw conclusions from the comparisons it makes in its report, it is clear that, on many measures of performance, Australia’s universities are falling behind their international competitors.”
Student teacher ratios were a good example, he said. “The commission’s summary of findings states that student-teacher ratios have increased somewhat, yet the detail of the report reveals that the ratio of students to teaching staff has actually increased from 14.3 in 1993 to 19.9 in 2001,” he said.
“Australian universities would need to have employed almost 10,000 equivalent full-time academic staff to have restored our student-staff ratio to its 1993 level.”
Professor Hay said the report provided a valuable snapshot of 11 Australian universities and 26 international universities drawn from nine countries. “However, an analysis of the university funding trends across the countries surveyed tells the true story.”
In universities at present, on average over all courses, the staff-student ratio is higher than in high schools.
But working conditions are not bad in all areas at university. On the contrary: no employee in a university’s administration has to put up with such job insecurity or such a workload – and in many cases (especially compared to casual academic staff) is better paid.
Indeed, since 1996, while most academic departments have been relentlessly trimmed, management and administration at each university have been fattened generously.
As I demonstrated above, the figures clearly show universities have been transformed into the image of their management ideologue reformers – while many academic departments such as classics, philosophy and the pure sciences have been decimated and staff have been at breaking point providing courses of inadequate standard because of lack of money, expenditure on “administration” and “student services” together doubled between 1996 and 2000, and have increased further in the two years since then.
In 2002, the situation for academic departments worsened. The number of enrolled students nationwide rose by 103,000 (The Australian, May 8, 2002: “Student Bonanza”). Measured in “effective full-time student units” (EFTSU), the increase amounted to 8.3 percent. Nevertheless, the cull in departments across many universities was accelerated (The Australian, May 8, 2002: “Academics Resigned to Jobs Cull”).
The education minister emphatically ruled out an increase in the HEFA grant, so academic workloads increased significantly. The effect? For example, courses in poorer departments had to be given without tutorials.
Moreover, these days in academic departments, one can come across a strange spectacle. It sometimes happens that within a department, two or three research groups hit the jackpot with millions in research funding, while the department itself cannot afford to pay its professors and assistants to run courses properly. Not only must tutorials be abandoned due to lack of funding, laboratories for students remain fitted out with museum pieces.
Nevertheless, government slogans try to convince Australians that our standard of education is one of the highest in the world, and that the tertiary education sector can never ever fall into ruin.
The reality in Australian universities is unacceptable in a system whose political minders employ boastful, self-congratulatory slogans like “world’s best practice”. Courses standards at Australian universities are unacceptably low. Government propaganda on this issue defies common sense.
Yet the Australian public allows itself to be conned by the illusion that education policy is no more than management. Instead of reporting the facts, the media actively propagates the value that “good management equals good education policy”.
Hence the explosion of meaningless “objective” performance measures – disconnected from the ground-level reality – that mean anything to anyone, and can be manipulated at whim.
In practice, the pre-2003 university reforms in Australia have been oriented towards pure, short-term utilitarian values. They have also increased Australia’s national isolation. Despite record numbers of foreign students, Australian students are learning less about other cultures and languages.
The winners – the departments that attract enormous student numbers because that’s the road to economic prosperity – are big winners; but there are many losers that should not be – e.g. classics and foreign languages.
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9. Why Utilitarian Values are Incompatible with the Nature of Research – An Economic Paradigm of Pure Exchange Value Cannot Solve the Problem at Universities
Unfortunately, no significant other source of funding of “University Operating Costs and Infrastructure” and “Research” has surfaced, contrary to the minimalist neo-liberalist economic theory. Or, on the contrary, this is quite in accordance with principles of survival of the fittest – when the rules for the gladiatorial contest for survival are rigged so that certain measures of degrees of death are ignored.
The reason for the failure of the private sector to work more closely with universities is also clear. It is ultimately this. Absolutely essential for significant research to take place, and for proper lecturing to be carried out, is the ability to free oneself of imposed ideological authority.
The history of scientific revolutions repeatedly confirms this: every single significant discovery has been a heresy against the orthodoxy of the day. One could almost take this as the definition of “significant discovery”. The prevention of expression of heresies hinders scientific progress, and sets a society back to the Middle Ages. This is also demonstrated by the entrenched scientific backwardness of Islamic countries today, particularly those leaning towards fundamentalism.
Political force cannot guide creativity.
Economic competition and the predominance of economic exchange value stand in bold, destructive contradiction to scholarship, because the fundamental basis of scholarship is the free (also in the sense of without material reward) exchange of ideas.
Scholarship cannot exist without free exchange of ideas: scholarship must be open, containing motives that are the opposite of self-interest, even when much self-interest (e.g. ambition) is present. Even in Europe, where professors have their own fiefdoms at university, and everybody is essentially working for the professor’s (and their own) aggrandisement, results of research are distributed freely upon request.
Quite understandably, companies cannot afford to be patrons of universities: they have to take care of their own, short-term profit interests – which these days, unfortunately, all too often mean those of the shareholders and, particularly, the directors.
In contrast, the evolution of a civilisation, or of a scholarly community, is a long-term process.
A paradigm shift has occurred in our culture. A break has occurred with the university tradition, which has resulted in the collapse of trust in the competence and working methods of scientists and scholars of our time. The values these entail have also been rejected. What is behind this change?
If you look at the effects of university reforms in Australia over the last decade, you could be excused for thinking that the management ideologues hate the humanities and the pure sciences. Why would they?
Universities are places where heresies must be pursued. Despite the fact that it is ever more rarely seen – and conformity is becoming ever more the norm – universities in Australia are still the last bastions in our society where freedom of thought and unfettered discourse can occur.
Exactly because of this, universities are a thorn in the side of the neo-liberal missionaries.
Neo-liberalism – itself a theory with strengths and weaknesses like any other – has become a theistic belief with missionary ambitions. The deviation from rationality is clear in the arrogant blind eye given to the catastrophe in the humanities and pure sciences in Australia, while magnificent visions of “goals of international excellence” are proclaimed as the reality.
Plausible arguments or rafts of material proof of the catastrophe make no impression on the zealots. As long as public opinion is not mobilised towards exercising political, democratic power, a course correction is not to be expected.
