The Universities: Current Problems and Future Options

PREFACE

Early in 1984 the Universities Council of the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission decided to publish a series of discussion papers on contemporary university problems.  These papers were meant to raise issues for discussion within the university community, and to be quite separate from Council policy statements or advice to Government.  This paper was originally written for that purpose, to be one of a series which would include papers on such matters as university staffing and finance.  Later in 1984, however, the Universities Council reviewed the idea of issuing discussion papers and concluded that it would not be appropriate to publish any paper over the name of a single author, or one which might be misunderstood as reflecting Council views and policies.  At the same time the Council thought that the ideas contained in this paper deserved to be aired and the Chairman, Professor D.N.F. Dunbar, submitted it to the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee for possible publication.  That body took the identical view:  the ideas should be published but not in a fashion which could be interpreted as representing AVCC policy.  In consequence, it now appears, with the consent of the Council, independently.

A discussion paper on the universities, such as this, gives its author an interesting set of opportunities.  He must try to summarise the history and characteristics of a group of organisations of considerable individuality and diversity.  He must peer into the political and educational future, but without obvious implausibility or even more implausible prescription.  He must not present a thesis, should try to present fairly views not necessarily his own and raise questions which are bound to be controversial.  He should do so in a way which is sufficiently responsible without lapsing too often into rotund banalities.  Above all, given the scope and traditions of the subject, and the virtual impossibility of saying anything wholly new about it, he should try to avoid superficiality as well as novelty for novelty's sake.

This paper is very much one man's view of the role and problems of Australian universities.  It focusses on the short term, though one suspects that in the medium and longer term the environment will change more dramatically than most present plans cater for.  It does not pretend that all the problems of universities will be soluble or that those which are, are easy.  The world in which universities must live is rapidly becoming more volatile.  Less and less will universities be able to look to federal authorities to provide a secure and predictable environment for what seems to them to be orderly planning.  They will rather have to cater for unpredictability and uncertainty, whether of student flows, or research grants or relative demand for disciplines or staffing.

The paper makes no attempt to express the views, still less the policies, of the Universities Council.  I owe a deep and genuine debt of gratitude to the Council's Chairman, Professor Dunbar, and to its indefatigable Secretariat.  All have been most generous with advice and comment.  None of them are responsible for any remaining sins of commission or omission.  Indeed, I know that some disagree strongly with certain points.  But then, the paper is a contribution -- perhaps even stimulus -- to discussion, not the draft of a suggested consensus.

THE ARGUMENT

This paper argues that the traditional purposes of universities -- dedication to scholarship, research and teaching -- remain essential to the health not just of universities themselves but of society generally.  Those purposes have to be maintained in an increasingly difficult and volatile administrative and political environment and in the midst of varied and pressing demands upon the university system.

It argues that there is an inevitable tension between the university's longer-term aims and the desire of society and politics for instant remedies for social and other problems;  between different concepts of accountability;  and between the views of the Government of the day and that of universities not whether but how far universities should become involved in programmes of social amelioration.

It suggests that while there is no realistic alternative to major university reliance upon central Government direction and funding, that dependence will have to be increasingly complemented by more self-reliant, even in some ways de-regulated, methods of operation.  These will range from the search for plural funding and the marketing of courses for full fee-paying overseas students to, preferably, an end to equality of academic salaries across disciplines and universities, acceptance of more rapid shifts in research emphasis, greater competition between institutions and greater diversity of student flows and preferences.

Such flexibility will be required not in spite of, but because of, the universities' need to have the security to look at long-term, fundamental and even unpopular issues or to come up with unpopular views.

The paper therefore raises questions about how the universities might see their role in the contemporary world;  how they might balance between the demands of scholarship and the call for social action, between demands that their graduates should be trained for particular jobs or careers, and statements by various authorities pointing out that the economic and other practical reasons for university activities are not the only and not necessarily the most important ones.  The Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission (CTEC) report, Learning and Earning, for example, says:  "Education is an investment in the quality of life;  it is a good in itself and must be seen as such by students and the community". ⁽¹⁾  What is less clear is whether that traditional notion can be assumed to be settled and accepted in contemporary circumstances.

In looking at such questions, the paper makes no attempt to deal with all aspects of university work.  Capital and equipment problems are barely touched upon and staffing and finance mentioned only to round off the general discussion.

CURRENTS OF CHANGE:
THE GROWING DISILLUSIONMENT

Respect for learning and scholarship, and the granting of special privileges to those who profess them, is an ancient phenomenon.  It was a priestly function in ancient Egypt.  In the Jewish tradition, it goes back to biblical times.  European scholarship had its origins in the intellectual brilliance of Greece, and especially of Athens, in the last half millennium before Christ.  The examination system by which China provided special training for an administrative elite probably goes back to the second century B.C.

Universities proper appear, however, to be a European invention.  The precursors of modern universities were founded in Bologna and Paris in the twelfth century, closely followed by Oxford and Cambridge.  In time, the institutions acquired an explicit training role.  At first, and most obviously, it was training for the Church, Medicine or Law.  By the nineteenth century, universities in many places were reformed, new ones founded and, in particular, science was given a new and important role in scholarship and study.

Australia joined in these developments around the middle of the nineteenth century.  The University of Sydney was founded in 1850, Melbourne in 1853, Adelaide in 1874 and Tasmania in 1889.

In the period after World War II the demand for higher education increased dramatically throughout the advanced world, as people came to believe that the evils of depression and war might be curable by more and better education.  Science, in particular, had acquired enormous prestige and many people were prepared to believe that other problems, including social ones, might yield to solution by the application of scientific principles.  They believed, too, that just as individuals who had enjoyed higher education could look forward to a higher standard of living and enhanced status during their working lives, so society as a whole would enjoy more rapid economic growth as a result of greater investment in the education of young people.

The number of universities grew rapidly.  So did the number and variety of roles they were expected to fulfil.  The United States, both before and after World War II, developed a particularly varied system of universities.  In Australia, a whole generation of new universities was founded, following the Murray and Martin Reports and with the encouragement of the late Sir Robert Menzies.  In all advanced countries, university growth was accompanied by the development of colleges and technical colleges.

In the 1960s and 70s universities throughout the advanced industrial world found themselves confronting a set of novel historical circumstances which produced unprecedented strains and questioning.  The changes can perhaps be summed up under six broad headings:

• The rapidly increasing number of institutions of tertiary education posed severe problems of staffing, of defining the distinctive missions of individual institutions or classes of them, and in fitting new ones into patterns compatible with established sectoral boundaries or existing institutional traditions and responsibilities.
• Universities found themselves confronting an unprecedented rate of the expansion of knowledge;  and more rapid shifts of emphasis in teaching and research between disciplines and areas.  At the same time many of them found themselves in a situation of steady-state, or at best slowly growing, resources.
• All advanced countries found that knowledge-related activity was increasingly central to a range of social, economic and fiscal policies or wishes.  Universities, which had hitherto occupied a socially respected place as centres of learning largely separate from the spheres of political and social decision-making, found themselves propelled into the role of engines of social change, economic growth and reforms of all kinds.
• The flow of knowledge became more rapid not merely within nations but between them.  That accentuated a trend towards international and trans-national specialisation in different areas of science or scholarship, and increased the tension between the national (social) responsibilities of academics and universities, and the trans-national emphasis of much professional activity and research.
• As university systems grew they came to absorb significant percentages of social resources and therefore also became subject to the normal processes of dispute which surround resource allocation, including many fashionable criteria for judgement in such matters.
• Last, and perhaps most dangerous of all for the classic rale of universities, was the way in which, in an era when differences of sex, age, ethnic background, social role and wealth were increasingly regarded as illegitimate bases for individual selection, academic merit often became the main or sole criterion for the classification of individuals in relation to jobs and careers.  That led, as it was bound to, to serious dispute about all aspects of academic assessment and even the legitimacy of a pursuit of excellence which could mean lifelong disadvantage for those classified as non-excellent.

There were other reasons for the widespread disillusionment with universities which became apparent in Britain, the United States and Western Europe, as well as in Australia, during the 1970s.  They include the following:

• wars and depressions were seen, after all, not to be curable through scholarly enlightenment;
• in a period of economic recession and rising unemployment, university training no longer provided a passport to secure jobs of high standing; ⁽²⁾
• in times of social, including student, unrest, many politicians, parents and members of the media came to believe that universities were becoming centres of unrest or that many academics were out of touch with contemporary needs and the conditions of a rapidly changing world.

In Australia, such developments coincided with a process of centralisation and perhaps some levelling.  Academic salaries continued to be centrally fixed and equal across all universities. ⁽³⁾  Conditions of service were largely parallel.  There was central administrative guidance, at first through the Australian Universities Commission, then through the CTEC and its Universities Council, albeit guidance complicated by the constitutional problems of federal government.

Most important of all, the Commonwealth Government assumed sole responsibility for university funding.  It did so at the end of a period of steadily expanding resources for higher education.  Had that continued, centralisation might have been more beneficial than it arguably became in a period of steady-state funding.  Centralisation had at least two results whose value, in retrospect, seems debatable.  One was that the central allocation of funds was necessarily concerned with criteria and formulae giving strong emphasis to notions of equality of treatment of institutions, with no attempt to introduce direct qualitative distinctions. ⁽⁴⁾  The other was that universities did not, in general, feel encouraged to look at diversification of sources of supply, possibly fearing that too visible an increase in the flow of alternative funds would discourage the government of the day from increasing, or even maintaining, its own funding levels. ⁽⁵⁾

THE NATURE OF A UNIVERSITY

With the creation of more universities and more varied non-university institutions engaging in teaching and/or research, it becomes more and not less necessary to re-examine the questions:  what is a university?  What are the essential characteristics which set it apart from other institutions and define the tasks which only it can perform?  And how can these characteristics or tasks justify a maintenance or even increase in social support?

There is no single, archetypal university.  Universities exist in many shapes and sizes, disciplinary and faculty mixes, with varying structures and, to some extent, purposes.  Nevertheless, it may be possible to suggest some essential features.

A university is, in the first place, a community which is self-governing at least with respect to its internal affairs.  It is a community, however imperfectly it may put into practice the implications of that word.  It is a community within which there is academic government by academics and which enjoys academic freedom in that its members are free to decide what to learn, research, teach or, in general, say about their own subject or the insights which they derive from it.

A university is also an institution which has a special dedication to knowledge, scholarship and research;  arguably in that order.  It is dedicated to the cultivation of knowledge and scholarship by its belief in the value of knowledge in its own right, by its obligation to preserve and enrich the culture of which its members are a part, and by its need to encourage the study of other cultures.  It is dedicated to research by its obligation to follow any argument withersoever it might lead and to try to broaden the frontiers of knowledge.

A university is therefore also the principal secular institution for the elaboration of standards of judgement in all fields of knowledge and scholarship and the continual examination or re-examination of the value-systems of the societies which it studies, including its own.  It is dedicated to the discussion, not merely of means but of ends.  In doing so, it has an obligation to be as detached and objective as, within the bounds of human frailty and imperfection, it can.

A university must, by definition, aspire to recognition as a member of the international community of universities and of scholarship.  Its degrees must have currency in that community and its scholars must seek -- and at least sometimes obtain -- membership of what De Solla Price has called the "Invisible College" of their discipline.  A university is therefore also dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in scholarship, research and teaching;  an excellence not to be measured on local scales or by the preferences of its own society, but in the international market place of ideas and academic judgement.

A university has an additional obligation to try to disseminate knowledge, principally to the students who attend it but, beyond, to the society of which it forms a part.  That dissemination should, as far as possible, also be disinterested and involve the presentation of contending perspectives and arguments.  Only if it can do that does it offer its students the freedom to develop their full human and intellectual potential.  It is an offer to students of an opportunity to seek knowledge, not a guarantee that they will attain it.

Beyond that, a university has an obligation to offer service to the larger community.  That service can take a great variety of forms, from the university's role as a centre for artistic effort to the provision of scientific advice to industry or of policy advice to government.

DEREGULATION:
COMPETITION AND DIVERSITY

In Australia, governmental and public support for universities has for many years had a strongly utilitarian tone.  As long ago as 1964 the Martin Committee said that "If a community devotes additional resources to education, growth is likely to be fostered in at least four main ways.  Firstly, the work force should itself become more skilled and efficient at doing a given task.  Secondly, existing knowledge may be applied more rapidly in the modernisation of capital equipment, and in the introduction of new products and of new methods of producing old products.  Thirdly, new knowledge may be acquired.  Fourthly, improved methods of management, whether at the level of decision-making or at that of detailed control, may become available". ⁽⁶⁾

Similar points have been made more recently.  In 1983 it was argued that "Higher education institutions in turn perform important roles which affect many different aspects of economic and social life as well as Government activity.  They prepare trained manpower, they are key producers of research, and they are often useful in providing advice to governments or specialists to assist government enquiries.  From a societal and governmental perspective ... do universities do as much as they might to serve the legitimate needs of government and society?  Could their resources be utilised more extensively to serve particular, agreed national objectives?  Are universities sufficiently responsive to the needs of, say minority ethnic or social groups?" ⁽⁷⁾

Such views and attitudes are also strongly reflected in current Government policies which seek to promote increased participation in higher education, with particular emphasis on the needs of women, aboriginals and the disadvantaged generally;  on the need to meet the challenges of new technology and the universities' contribution to technical change and industrial innovation and in general the universities' relevance to perceived "national needs". ⁽⁸⁾

From a political and administrative point of view, and especially from that of public finance, universities are a sub-set of two more general categories:  those of higher education and of social services and amelioration.  Problems can arise from the tensions between these roles as well as from the fact that in each category universities compete for resources with other and sometimes mors powerful groups.  As teaching institutions they compete with CAE's and other educational establishments, whose teaching the community sometimes values more highly than their own, whose staff seek parity of esteem, conditions of service and salary;  and which have in many instances moved into graduate degree work and some research.  As research institutions, universities compete with the CSIRO, Defence Science and some commercial and financial advisory services and the policy research functions of the public service.

Universities must try to cope with constantly expanding fields of knowledge.  That means, inter alia, claims for the administrative and financial recognition of, and support for, a growing number of separate specialisms.  This is difficult to achieve, given:

• CTEC-imposed limits on the size and intake of individual institutions determined not by the growth of knowledge, or the needs of disciplinary development, or even the flow of student demand, but rather by systemic ideas about desirable relativities and equality of esteem between institutions, as well as by funding limitations;
• the declining enthusiasm for innovation sometimes found among ageing university staff in the absence of young recruits;
• the combination, in most universities, of staff costs at around 85% of recurrent expenditure together with a very high proportion of tenured and immobile staff;  and the consequent real difficulties which universities experience in closing down old units in order to make room for new activities.

It would probably be better if, in future, universities were less shielded from various social and disciplinary pressures and freer to respond to them as they see fit.  That might lead to greater differentials between institutions -- for example different emphases on disciplines or groups of disciplines -- and in general greater variety and specialisation.

Given such problems, should the functions of universities be narrowed, so as to concentrate their resources and attention at the upper end of the spectrum of teaching and research or, alternatively, should they be enabled to compete more widely within the general higher education sector?  It could be argued that universities should be largely or wholly separated from the liberal arts function, which could be carried out either in CAEs or in newly formed intermediate colleges.  Such a development might allow universities to concentrate on professional and graduate training, and on higher levels of research or scholarship.  It could, on the other hand, separate them from the broad range of undergraduate teaching which has traditionally been part of their life-blood.  They would then become more akin to graduate schools, with broad, general education carried out in other places.

As against that it could be said that universities do not necessarily benefit from a tradition in which they are kept administratively separate from other higher education institutions by nationally centralised decisions on such matters as who is allowed to offer what kind of a degree.  Successive governments have increasingly seen tertiary education as a single system and have tended to apply uniform policies across higher education.  It might be preferable to abolish some of the existing distinctions, to let institutions compete more freely in the kind and quality of their offerings and to let students, employers and the community choose the offerings they want.  In such a competition it is not clear that the universities, or the general community, would be the losers.  Approaches of this sort have been urged by the Vice-Chancellor of Wollongong, who suggests that the division between universities and colleges flies "in the face of national need and common sense, putting technology and applied studies in an inferior position to other studies"; ⁽⁹⁾  and also by the Chairman of the CTEC who has spoken of the establishment of Institutes of Tertiary Education, with activities extending into all three tertiary education areas. ⁽¹⁰⁾  University-CAE amalgamations, such as that which has occurred in Tasmania, carry similar implications of "comprehensive" tertiary institutions.

If such approaches, involving greater diversity of university organisation and offerings, and a relaxation of the rules about competition between universities and colleges, are to be adopted, it will be of great importance to see that universities are not levelled down.  In the decade to 1985 Australia-wide expenditure per primary and secondary school pupil rose by some 50 per cent in real terms, while higher education declined by 8 per cent. ⁽¹¹⁾  Australia cannot afford to reduce university teaching standards, or research or equipment provision even further ⁽¹²⁾ or, given the country's geographic situation, to diminish possibilities for research and work abroad.  To achieve a comprehensive higher education sector solely be levelling up would, however, be expensive, given that the average recurrent grant per EFTS (Equivalent Full-Time Student) for universities is about 30 per cent higher than that for CAEs. ⁽¹³⁾

Given the need for flexibility, do universities benefit from a situation in which the staff salaries of universities and colleges are so highly regulated?  The present system is deeply entrenched, accords with established social preferences about equality, and tends to preserve parity of esteem between disciplines and universities.  It is true that the current system allows, at the margin, "bidding" for staff by way of facilities and conditions of service as well as, in some cases, minor salary increments.  But in general, high academic talent is spread thinly across many institutions.  In any one department, only a few positions command high salaries;  and in after-tax terms, salary differentials are often an inadequate incentive to extra effort.  Moreover, egalitarianism is comfortable.  As one observer has remarked, "Once an individual enters a tenured job classification within a discipline, there is little if anything to shake security relative to others in the same classification.  A common paymaster and centralised wage fixation for all tertiary institutions add to the pressures for uniformity of tenure and promotion, largely by seniority.  Reviews of performance are probably non-existent in the ordinary academic career course". ⁽¹⁴⁾  In addition, the result of equal wage justice across disciplines and universities has meant that in certain fields -- computing, business management, some areas of Law -- universities find it hard to recruit staff while in other disciplines staff, once appointed, immediately become immobile. ⁽¹⁵⁾

It would therefore be desirable for institutions to have much greater freedom to bid for staff at all levels, in ways which included offers of higher salaries.  Salaries and conditions of service should be geared both to merit and to the conditions of supply and demand both within and between disciplines;  probably, indeed, within faculties and departments.  Other desirable improvements include the avoidance of merely routine salary increments.  This issue is further discussed below.

A measure of "de-regulation" is likely to enhance flexibility in other matters.  Universities should be considering such issues as the following:

• a 20-year-old graduating in 1986, or a 25-year-old academic achieving tenure in the same year, will retire around AD 2026.  Many of their technical skills are certain to be out of date long before then.  What are the implications for course and curriculum design and for the universities' responsibilities for retraining graduates?
• Changes of emphasis within and between fields of study, in research and teaching, are likely to be considerable over the next decade or two.  Universities need to make sure that they can accommodate such changes.
• Changes in the technologies of teaching and research, from computer-based teaching in some areas to cheap and easy access to distant libraries or wholly new methods for data storage, management and retrieval also seem possible in the medium term, well within the working lifetime of many current members of staff of universities. ⁽¹⁶⁾

On the other hand, universities, or their core activities, must have the security to do things which are not immediately relevant or even popular.  To say, for example, that there are no agreed answers to questions of personal or social purpose, and of man's ultimate ends, or about the origins of the universe, is a platitude.  But universities are in the business of asking questions which raise difficulties or which may see irrelevant.  They examine and re-examine the issue of what kind of society might be desirable, what justice might be, what is the difference between equity and equality, and how conclusions on such things might be sought.  If universities did not attempt to help their members and students to search for answers, and to be critical, who would?  And what kind of society would it be in which answers to such questions were not continually sought by some of the better and more detached minds of the day?  In the words of the President of the University of British Columbia, "The universities are expected to serve as the "conscience of society", seeking truth and knowledge.  They remind us of the past, they inform us of the true nature of things in the present, and they are required to suggest the kind of developments that will likely shape our futures". ⁽¹⁷⁾

Universities therefore have an obligation to do more for their students than to give them technical and professional training.  They should help them to understand the difference between what to think and how to think;  and to foster intellectual depth.  They should discuss not merely means but ends, try to confront students with various possible answers to the question, "What is it all for?" ⁽¹⁸⁾  Students should learn to be as well as to do, to grow as well as to pass.  Universities must also recognise, and get the community to recognise, that no formal education can be a substitute for religion or provide students with a social conscience or make people nice to each other.

It is, perhaps, a matter of balance.  As the Universities Council has put it, "The creation, maintenance and administration of universities must be a matter of balance:  between necessary accountability and equally necessary independence;  between the need for a disciplined, rigorous testing of ideas, including those which may be initially unacceptable or unpalatable, and appropriate sensitivity to the prevailing sentiments of the community;  between the need for basic, curiosity-motivated research, and the need for effort in solving a host of practical problems;  between emphasis on vocational and professional training and the notion of cultural enrichment and the joy of learning for its own sake;  between the concept of universities as a social resource and recognition that the value of universities is not to be found solely in economics or the fulfilment of particular existing social purposes." ⁽¹⁹⁾

As institutions in a democratic society claiming substantial resources, universities have an obligation to help make their purposes widely understood and accepted.  If parents, employers or political leaders do not fully understand what universities can and should -- or, equally important, cannot and should not -- do, it is in the first instance up to universities to explain themselves.  It is not enough for such explanations to be offered by Vice-Chancellors on public occasions.  It is for the professional teachers and researchers themselves to explain what they are doing and why.

SOCIAL REFORM:
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION OR EXCELLENCE

The growth of tertiary education has made universities into big business, costing well over $1.1 billion per annum of public funds.  Growth has enabled universities to increase their influence upon society but, equally, to underline the idea of the university as an important source of social amelioration and reform.  It has therefore also strengthened:

• the idea that the chief function of universities should be the fulfilment of immediate social and economic needs, This leads, for example, to demands that teaching and research should promote economic growth and technical change; ⁽²⁰⁾
• demands that universities should be more closely accountable for their activities and finances.  That can include a call for more "relevance" in decisions about what is to be taught;
• the idea that universities should be not only useful but representative, for example in the balance between sexes in their student and perhaps staff bodies;
• the proposition that universities exist not only to provide ideas or research results but to take direct social remedial action, for instance in the relief of disadvantage or the promotion of equality. ⁽²¹⁾  The latter can lead to confusion in the public mind between the university's necessary search for excellence and high achievement, and socially suspect forms of elitism.

Universities have always, and properly, engaged themselves heavily in the fulfilment of social needs.  Their teaching and research role does so, and is irreplaceable.  The contribution which university research makes to Australian industry is great, growing and indispensable;  its importance appears to be seriously underestimated by both the Government and the public. ⁽²²⁾  Including the 3000 places planned for 1984, the student load for higher education in 1984 was about 15,000 EFTS (or 5 per cent) higher than the level assumed in the original CTEC triennium recommendations.  The assumption of that additional burden involved a significant decline in per capita funding for both universities and CAEs. ⁽²³⁾  The Universities Council has drawn attention to these various responses, such as action to widen access and support for Government policies on participation and equity. ⁽²⁴⁾  In general, it is of great importance both to the universities and to the society they serve that they be seen to be "good citizens" in helping to resolve current social and other problems, that they share in practice as well as in theory contemporary concerns about justice and the building of a good society.  The question is what more they can do consistent with the central scholarly functions of universities.

Some demands can cause problems, and a few of these may be at the root of some of the universities' social and political difficulties.  For instance:

• There is tension between the universities' own sense of responsibility and the criteria applied by Governments and the public.  Governments invariably lean towards short-term political and economic judgements and regard universities as instrumental.  Universities believe they have longer-term responsibilities, ask what is meant by "efficiency" and are wary of the extension of detailed external accountability. ⁽²⁵⁾  The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, for example, has suggested that in recent years "the constantly changing winds of policy from Canberra" have been "sometimes unpredictably variable and quite persistently ... adverse to academic achievement." ⁽²⁶⁾
• Socially remedial activities almost always increase .the dollar cost per student within universities.  That can, at one and the same time, increase the universities' need for funds and lay them open to the charge that an increasing level of spending per student is proof of the inefficiency with which they run their affairs.
• Universities may be wary of becoming closely identified with social change of a predetermined kind, especially when demands for such changes rest on assertion and general social opinion rather than on measurement and definition, and can be highly variable over time. ⁽²⁷⁾
• Universities therefore face the continuing problem of how to combine proper attention to social demands with the preservation of their other and long-term responsibilities, including the responsibility to stand aside from the ebb and flow of affairs and to be critical of all ideas including fashionable ones.

The idea that the population of universities should "represent" the social or sexual categories of society has far-reaching and obviously debatable implications.  The CTEC appears to have accepted the notion, for its Volume 1 report for the 1985-87 Triennium makes the point that "the student body in higher education reflects less comprehensively than does TAFE the composition of society.  Higher education takes in a lower proportion of students from disadvantaged and lower socio-economic groups than does TAFE." ⁽²⁸⁾  And its Chairman has said that "The equity objective is to make the social mix of graduating students reflect more effectively the social mix of the community as a whole." ⁽²⁹⁾  There is, however, no evidence that universities in general fail to recruit the young people with the greatest ability and motivation and no serious public suggestion that universities should pay less attention to academic ability. ⁽³⁰⁾  One recent study found that while it was true that universities have a substantial proportion of students from higher socio-economic and income backgrounds, "... there is a strong association between intellectual ability, as measured by IQ, and participation in higher education" and "family background variables have little direct role to play ..."  Overall, ability and the person's own aspirations dominate the explanation of participation in higher education and "... IQ dominates the explanation of the socio-economic status of the job the children aimed for ..."  Altogether "... the factors which decide whether or not a student goes on to a higher education are largely meritocratic ..." ⁽³¹⁾

Certain basic difficulties therefore arise in any search for equity and affirmative action.  That search might mean three very different things.  It might mean introducing a limited number of able persons from "disadvantaged" groups into the staff or student bodies of universities which would in other respects remain much as they are.  Or it might mean that within any given size of student or staff population, a university would be expected to allocate places on the basis of ethnicity or race or gender or the social categories of the students' parents.  That would inevitably means quotas and have far-reaching and controversial implications.  Or it might mean expanding the university system to try to accommodate those many able people who at present do not enter or try to enter but who, given adequate preparation, could benefit from a university education.

The third, while clearly desirable, has substantial resource allocation implications. ⁽³²⁾  If additional resources are not made available at various educational levels beginning in primary schools, ⁽³³⁾ there may be a tendency to veer towards the second, a tendency which could be encouraged by approaching the subject in the language of class divisions.  The resulting controversies, moreover, could be open-ended in that, as attention shifts from one kind of social taxonomy to another, institutions would be under constant pressure to change admissions and staffing systems yet again to allow for the latest versions of social classification.

In any case, group preference is in principle inequitable.  It is inequitable because, by definition, it discriminates against some other groups, and because it purports to relieve disadvantage vicariously.  If all migrants are disadvantaged, how can migrant A's disadvantage be remedied by helping migrant B?

Nor is it clear what kinds of disadvantage universities are to help remedy in what ways.  If migrants are in general disadvantaged, it is also the case that some ethnic groups provide a greater percentage of tertiary education students than their proportion of the total population would suggest.  If women are in general disadvantaged, it is not clear that universities have very much influence on the apparent reluctance of women to qualify, or if qualified to apply for entry to, engineering courses.

If affirmative action means "reverse preference", experience in the USA has shown conclusively that it damages the very groups whom reverse preference purports to help.

Staff appointments are made in relation to the needs of a particular department or school.  The question of a university-wide balance between social groupings is largely irrelevant.  Students at undergraduate level by and large select their own courses.  In enrolling graduate students any department will, in its own best interests, look for the most promising candidates irrespective of sex or family background.

Women have in any case occupied a significantly increased number of staff positions in recent years.  Between 1979 and 1984 the percentage of females in full-time teaching and research posts in State universities went up as follows:  Professors, from 2.2 to 2.8 per cent, Associate Professors from 3.1 to 4.8 per cent, Senior Lecturers from 8.5 to 9.8 per cent, Lecturers from 17.9 to 22.5 per cent and tutors from 39.7 to 44.5 per cent. ⁽³⁴⁾  (That is likely to understate the proportion of women in the total staff, since women appear to be more heavily represented in part-time positions.)

In sum, if the proposition that university staff and student bodies should contain a higher proportion of women or migrants means that there are able women and migrants, capable of being successful students or staff members but who are currently prevented by circumstances beyond their control from doing so, and who might be helped by universities to exploit their full potential, the proposition is to be welcomed. ⁽³⁵⁾  If, however, it means that a candidate should be chosen not because he or she is the best available but in order to "improve" some university-wide percentage of female or migrant participation, it would be as contrary to the interests of universities, of staff and of students as it would be demeaning to able and qualified women and migrants themselves.

If the question of equity poses broad and fundamental difficulties (as it has done for a good many centuries), so does the relationship between equity and equality, and of either with excellence.  For example, as the Chairman of the CTEC has pointed out, equality should mean equality of opportunity, and "No rational educator ... can be an advocate of 'equality of outcomes' ". ⁽³⁶⁾  But equal opportunity is difficult to define exactly and tends to mean different things to different people.  In any case, equality of opportunity at one level can imply equality of outcome at another.  The Chairman has himself advocated that, in order to achieve greater equality of opportunity at the point of entry to university, the HSC scores of students from lower socio-economic groups should be adjusted. ⁽³⁷⁾  There might be debate about the difference in principle between that suggestion and a proposition that the marks of graduates should be adjusted so as to provide greater equality of opportunity at the point of entry to jobs and careers.  Either suggestion could have significant consequences for the measurement, let alone cultivation, of excellence.

The very notion of excellence can mean different things to different people.  To a molecular biologist or historian excellence is measured by some absolute standard, by the significance of the contribution which a scholar has made to his subject.  To others it can imply the maximising of any student's potential. ⁽³⁸⁾  To others again, high quality means the removal of "unfairness". ⁽³⁹⁾

Confronted by such divergences of opinion, academics are likely to insist that the question of excellence is an intellectual and not a social or political one;  and that universities cannot abandon the rigorous pursuit of it without ceasing to be universities.

ADMISSION POLICIES:
ENTRANCE STANDARDS AND FOREIGN STUDENTS

Universities also face difficulties in relation to admissions policies and student numbers.  There has been, until very recently, a rough balance between qualified candidates for admission and places provided, ⁽⁴⁰⁾ though that assessment depends on whether one believes that the criteria for entry are appropriate, and though candidates who enter will not necessarily get into the universities or faculties of their first choice.

Enrolments can be expected to increase in future.  The Government has declared its intention of increasing participation.  There are signs that, for a variety of reasons, more young people are returning to full-time or part-time post-secondary education.  The Universities Council has projected, by 1987, a student load at universities of 139,425-145,300 EFTS or some 8,800 more than in 1984. ⁽⁴¹⁾  The CTEC expects that in 1985-87 there will be an increase of over 21,000 students in universities and CAEs. ⁽⁴²⁾  And the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wollongong has suggested that there might be as many as 100,000 new enrolments in the higher education sector by 1990. ⁽⁴³⁾  Even the more cautious figures underline the need for increased resources.

These prospects raise fresh problems in several areas.  The main ones appear to be the size and location of institutions;  admissions criteria and standards;  the composition of the student body;  the question of granting credit as between institutions and sectors;  and the desired balance between subject areas and between undergraduate and post-graduate studies.

As to the location, given the increasing specialisation of teaching, research and library facilities, especially in a period in which university numbers are limited by external decision, there seems bound to be increasing variety in the offerings to students by different institutions.  That might increase the pressures for students to attend universities far away from the family home, notably for graduate studies but also for some undergraduate ones.  Greater movement within but also between States would be desirable on educational as well as some other grounds.  It would broaden the students outlook and perspective ⁽⁴⁴⁾ and diminish the need to maintain a large number of departments catering for smaller disciplines at relatively high cost.  There would, however, be a variety of implications for inter-university relations and especially for student accommodation.

If greater student mobility between institutions is desirable, particularly at graduate student level but also in some fields of stronger or more specialised undergraduate demand, this would probably involve altering the nature of inter-university competition and letting student enrolments move more freely.  It is likely to prove desirable to let some, especially the larger, older ones, enrol more students than at present;  and therefore also to permit the growth of graduate schools without undue pressure on undergraduate admissions within existing total student loads.  That approach would tend to strengthen graduate studies efforts and diminish their fragmentation.  At the same time, at undergraduate level, it could somewhat relieve the difficulty that many intending students find in being compelled to enrol in institutions or courses of their second or third choice.  Such policies might be easier to implement if the higher education sector were to become more highly integrated, since the pressures to encourage growth in smaller institutions by limiting enrolments at larger ones might decline.

Another problem concerns admission standards.  At present, in all States and in almost all universities and faculties, the chief criteria for determining admissions standards are numerical scores achieved in school leaving examinations.  This can create difficulties such as the following:

• the organisation and methods of examination can vary in ways over which universities have little, if any, control;
• over-emphasis on examination results can lead to educationally damaging consequences, not just for individual students but for secondary school attitudes, structures and curricula;
• it is not clear that examination scores mean the same thing from one year to the next or from one State to another.  The second point may become more important as student mobility increases;
• there have been criticisms that existing selection criteria favour some socio-economic groups at the expense of others;
• there have been criticisms from professional groups that admissions decisions by examination results select the wrong people.  For example, some doctors have argued that if one is selecting students who will become general practitioners, sole reliance upon high academic scores ignores other and more important capabilities;
• the very principle of selectivity embodied in the ideas of examinations, and selection by examination results, has been challenged in some quarters.

In response to such difficulties, most institutions have begun to adopt other and complementary criteria for admissions, for instance in relation to programmes for the disadvantaged.  A variety of approaches is being explored and at the time of writing new procedures may be introduced, for example at the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Australia.  There may be some possibility for expanding systems of provisional enrolment, especially for persons with non-standard entry qualifications.

At least three kinds of issues appear to be involved.  One has to do with the fairness of selection procedures in choosing among candidates who may have equal real potential but unequal formal preparation or certification.  A second has to do with variations between areas, States and institutions.  A third has to do with the balance between various methods of assessing intending students.  As to the second of these, it may be desirable to examine the possibility of nation-wide electronic entrance applications system.  Such a system would tend, over time, to diminish any significant differences of academic performance between States and could at the same time help to limit the tendencies for State Government intervention in university affairs.

The question of a balance between students admitted by different methods of selection could create special difficulties.  If alternative forms of admission come to apply to more than a small proportion of university intakes, they could create their own problems.  For instance:

• will alternative or complementary admissions criteria improve or worsen the correlation between university entry and the likelihood of success in gaining university qualifications?  As long ago as 1975 the Universities Commission was concerned about the results if "significant numbers of students were encouraged to enrol who had very poor prospects of meeting the requirements of the courses which they entered." ⁽⁴⁵⁾
• will there be increased pressures for bridging courses for those entrants who are not well prepared?  How should such courses be funded and should they be conducted by the universities themselves?
• could there be pressures to weaken examination standards for special entrants, or in courses for special entrants?
• how are the limits on special entry to be determined and what is the appropriate mix between entry methods within any given total of enrolments?  It is not easy to see how such a mix could be determined without recourse to quotas for groups defined in non-academic ways.  Any quota approach would have far-reaching implications and dangers;
• insofar as special entry is by criteria which are not "objectively" testable, how far can universities ask the community to accept that they must be trusted to make judgements on such matters?  What review or appeals procedures might be necessary if alternative selection methods become widespread?
• insofar as special entry might bring in students requiring more supplementary or bridging courses, or more intensive tuition, that would mean greater dollar expenditure per student, with a consequent vulnerability to charges that universities were "wasting" resources;
• it may be that a higher percentage of mature or special entry students require living allowance support than is the case with school leavers.  Yet since 1974 the upper income limit for entitlements to TEAS living-at-home benefits has fallen by 40 per cent relative to the movement of average weekly wages. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

What of the composition of the student body and the balance between disciplines?  If general participation in universities is to be increased, it seems likely that the major part of any increase will come in general Arts and Science courses.  Yet given a pattern of increasing specialisation of academic work and of different emphases between institutions, the question of balance between disciplines is likely to be largely one for institutional rather than broad national decision.  For similar reasons, the proper balance between school leavers and mature age students (a category for which there is, in any case, no universally agreed definition) is likely to be best determined, within broad limits, by the institutions themselves, as is the optimal balance between undergraduate and graduate studies.

In addition, and given the volatility of current and prospective employment and career patterns, and the need for continuing education not least in technical areas, presumably universities ought to accept larger numbers of persons for mid-career retraining.  If retraining involves second degrees, questions will arise how such candidates should be considered in relation to first degree students.  If no degrees are involved, universities will need to be credited with, and financed for, more non-degree work.  There may also be questions whether greater emphasis on non-degree work affects scholarly or teaching standards, or the role of research.

There is also the question of foreign students, recently addressed in the Goldring and Jackson reports and by the Minister for Education. ⁽⁴⁷⁾  The Government said that for 1986 the same entry levels would apply to new private overseas students as was the case for 1985.  There is little doubt that -- quite apart from the question of Australian foreign aid in the form of education to persons from abroad and especially from less developed countries -- Australia could benefit substantially from accepting more foreign students.  One major difficulty with past and present arrangements for foreign students is that most of the cost of their education is borne by the Australian taxpayer.  As Professor Hughes has pointed out, "lower income Australian taxpayers are at the margin making it possible for relatively wealthy foreign families to educate their children at low cost in Australia." ⁽⁴⁸⁾  On the other hand, the numbers of potential students in East and South-East Asia and the United States, looking for overseas training, is likely to increase and "Compared to Australia's population and export needs, the opportunities are likely to be very large" ⁽⁴⁹⁾ both for export income in the form of educational fees ⁽⁵⁰⁾ and also as a stimulus to qualitative improvements in Australia's tertiary education.  It may be for these reasons that the Federal Government has instituted a scheme by which universities and CAEs will be able to offer full fee courses for overseas students, either in Australia or overseas.  It may also be worth considering whether the dollar cost to the Australian taxpayer of educational aid to foreign students would not be better spent by way of scholarships awarded on merit to such students than by the implied costs of their education over and above the overseas charge for such students.  In any case, the implications for the university system of a move towards fee-paid teaching could be considerable.

VOCATIONAL VERSUS GENERAL EDUCATION

In a period when Australian universities are moving towards greater flexibility, other questions arise.  What, for example, should be the attitude of the universities to accepting, for credit, student performance at Colleges of Advanced Education?  Should the colleges, or some of them, come to be considered as "feeder" institutions to universities?  Would the implications of junior status be acceptable to the colleges?  Would the implication that colleges were somewhat junior universities be welcome to universities?  How would those aspects of college activities be maintained and supported which are, and are meant to be, different in kind from the activities of universities?

What of the question of university teaching?  There continues to be an inevitable tension between the university's necessary cultivation of intellectual excellence, its equally necessary emphasis on the production of generally educated citizens and the need of students and society for adequate vocational training.  The difficulties in this area are enhanced by two somewhat different concerns.  One is the widespread, though not always justified, public impression that the education system is not providing young people with the desirable mix of skills and attitudes to work.  The other relates to the difficulties created for universities by their role not just as teaching institutions but as social sorting mechanisms.  As Professor Malcolm Logan has remarked "... the whole higher education system is, in a sense, a mechanism for sorting people out and allocating them to professions and jobs." ⁽⁵¹⁾  To some extent this is no doubt inevitable but insofar as it has become a principal function of the university, instead of a by-product, it may well distort some of the university's central purpose.

That Australia needs to place greater emphasis on vocational and technical training is not in dispute.  Nor is the vital role which universities are playing in this respect.  Yet the demand for closer correlation between university teaching and economic need can present its own mix of opportunities and problems.  Opportunities for more applied studies, closer links with the community and industry, and closer attention to student needs should be welcomed.  On the other hand, the demand for a close correlation between university teaching and Australian economic development could relate university structures to an undesirable extent to necessarily unpredictable future economic trends.

Nowhere are difficulties of this kind more evident than in the area of manpower planning.  In a general sense, it is no doubt true that Australia needs more engineers and people trained to use computers.  However,

• it is not clear who could take decisions about an appropriate balance between "national needs" and the demands of individual students for personal development and fulfilment;
• the demand for first degree qualifications can vary sharply from one year to the next, and in unpredictable ways;
• manpower planning can cause particular difficulties in relation to professional training.  It takes five or six years to recruit and train a graduate engineer or doctor.  No one is particularly good at predicting the demand for, say, electronic engineers five or six years hence.  Yet professional schools, whether in Engineering, Law or Medicine, cannot function effectively if student numbers fluctuate sharply from one year to the next in relation to different estimates of future demand.  It follows that the production of graduates may well be out of tune with market demand in one or several years.  It follows further that there is a potential conflict between the Government's aims for equity in the form of equal access and the aim of matching graduates to job demands.  For, in a situation of over-supply of graduates with some particular skills, who gets the jobs and how are decisions on job recruitment to be made?
• the demand for a close relationship between education and manpower planning assumes that there is a predictable connection between the jobs which students look forward to when they enrol and the jobs that might be available when they graduate;  or between the type of course they undertake and the kind of job they should be able to expect.  There is little evidence that such assumptions are sound;
• that demand assumes as settled what is a fluctuating relationship between the training received during the degree course and the post-degree training which lawyers, accountants, teachers and doctors receive after graduation;
• it assumes that universities could and should prepare students for a single career structure in an era when it is evident that more and more people will change careers and work patterns in the course of their lives, and require different skills at different periods;
• it assumes that there are settled and accepted answers to the very complex question:  what is professional training?  Should medical students, for example, be given some grounding in the legal problems of modern medicine?  Should law students be given some understanding of the scientific and technical problems they might encounter in dealing with industrial and patent problems?  For that matter, is a course in abstract logic "practical" or not for someone who might, five or ten years hence, be a member of the public service advising Ministers on policy decisions?  Is a study of literature entirely irrelevant to the life of young people who wish to understand their own society or to read poetry to their future children?  Is it certain that a course in French or Biology is irrelevant to a future merchant banker who might encounter bio-technology problems during negotiations in Paris?

Altogether, it seems likely that modern conditions call, not so much or not only for enhanced vocational training, but for greater emphasis on general education.  The reasons are several:

• the central task of universities remains, not the production of predetermined numbers of persons trained in particular and instantly usable skills, but the broad and humane education of civilised men and women who will be the citizens and voters, the parents and teachers, of tomorrow.  As early as 1957 the Murray Committee made the point that "It is the function of the university to offer not merely a technical or specialist training, but a full and true education, benefiting a free man and the citizen of a free country ..." ⁽⁵²⁾
• in an age when career prospects are more uncertain and volatile than before, graduates are likely to be better served by learning intellectual honesty, rigour in the use of evidence, respect for truth rather than mere convenience, and the general cultivation of a flexible and adaptable intellect than by training in a skill which might be outdated in a few years' time; ⁽⁵³⁾
• As Dame Leonie Kramer has pointed out "... people will work shorter hours, and probably over a shorter span in the future, then there is a very strong argument for a general education for everybody. ... For having, let us say, two years of general education." ⁽⁵⁴⁾

Indeed, it is likely that without such a broader grounding, without judgements on such things as legitimacy and purpose, technical and professional training itself will lack direction.

CURRICULA:
BREADTH AND SERIOUSNESS

If this view is accepted, other questions follow.  The first has to do with secondary school curricula.  There has been a disposition in recent years to proliferate subjects in most States and there have been pressures to accord them equal status.  Perhaps universities should make it even clearer that subjects are not equal and that some are a better foundation for university education than others.  Similarly, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney has argued that universities must make "their entry requirements fairly and reasonably reflect what is needed to take a university course." ⁽⁵⁵⁾  In some States this could come to mean separate university entrance examinations, run by the universities.

The second is an opposite concern.  Given the ever-increasing number of topics and subjects which schools of Engineering and Medicine, in particular, have been urged to incorporate in their degree studies, they have imposed prerequisites upon entry to their faculties which arguably distort secondary school teaching down to fourth form.  In most States not just those young people who enter Medical or Engineering Schools, but all those academically able young people who might wish to be eligible for entry -- even if they later choose other avenues -- are most strongly urged to concentrate on Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology from the age of 14.  They are in most cases entirely deprived of History, Geography, Literature and Art.  The results, though nowhere assessed in detail, may have been far-reaching and unfortunate. ⁽⁵⁶⁾

Three kinds of approach to a solution might be available, (in the context of the sectoral questions mentioned above, on page 5).  The first would be the institution of Intermediate Colleges -- or possibly training in CAEs -- in which some of these general shortcomings could be remedied.  This might, however, add a year or two to an educational process which is already very long.  The effects of such changes upon university participation figures, and any curricular changes, would need close examination.  One attractive variant is that proposed by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of New South Wales who has argued for a three-tiered system of tertiary education:  vocational colleges, arts and science colleges offering general education, and universities offering intensive courses, professional training and emphasis on post-graduate work. ⁽⁵⁷⁾

A second possibility would be to relegate professional training to a period following a year or two of general liberal education in Arts and Science.  Something of the kind is already done in those Law Schools where entry to Law courses follows a year of general study.  Would it be desirable to institute, say, a two year general course prior to entry for all professional schools?  It seems likely that such a solution would also mean extending first degree courses by at least one year.

A third possibility would be to change existing expectations about the content of a first degree.  At present not just prerequisites for entry but course contents are narrowly defined and liberalisation could bring substantial benefits.  Almost all Australian universities now turn out Economics graduates who have no acquaintance whatever with History or Politics or Law;  Science graduates who have no knowledge of their own societies or even the sociology of Science;  History and Politics graduates who have no idea how national budgets are formulated or about the legal structures of their society, let alone about the major scientific ideas or arguments or the age;  and engineering graduates with no concept of the likely impact of technological change on society.

Furthermore many Australian universities appear to have notably rigid course and degree structures which discourage movement or choice between departments and faculties.  Mobility and choice are more difficult for Australian undergraduates to achieve than for students in Britain or the United States.

It could be a condition for change that many professional societies and associations are also persuaded to accept such course and curriculum changes as an appropriate -- if partial -- preparation for professional certification.  Such professions would have to accept that under the new dispensation graduates would be less well prepared from a narrowly professional point of view.  But they would be more broadly educated and more thoughtful members of their professions, perhaps better able than some of their predecessors to make judgements about the relationship of that profession to the rest of society.  It should be noted that some distinguished professional schools -- the Harvard Law School, for example -- have re-examined their specialisation in just such ways in recent years.

SCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCH

Scholarship and research present universities with some of their most important challenges.  Scholarship has, classically, to do with the maintenance and reassessment of existing areas of knowledge and the transmission of that knowledge, and of the culture which it incorporates and reflects, from one generation of scholars to another.

Research, in the words of the former Universities Commission "... is an essential activity of a University.  Indeed, it is the characteristic which most distinguishes universities from other institutions of higher education ... the extension of knowledge is at the very heart of university work ..." ⁽⁵⁸⁾

The Australian community, and all recent Australian Governments, have seen research as a vital input to means for dealing with current problems.  The injection of new knowledge:  has been thought essential to hopes for industrial innovation and competitiveness, to identifying possibilities for growth, for solving problems of unemployment or pollution and for designing particular or general social reforms.  Research is now crucial to most aspects of national planning.

The result has been that universities are now expected to fulfil a very wide range of research functions, from resolving questions about the nature of the Universe to finding solutions for the immediate problems of some small local firms.  Universities are also cooperating more closely in research with industry and the CSIRO.  By late 1984 it was estimated that universities and the CSIRO were cooperating on some 170 projects with a total funding of some $1.2 m.  A number of factors have combined to make the fulfilment of these tasks by universities more difficult:

• university R & D is seriously underfunded.  In 1985, for example, the Government provided almost $24 million to the Australian Research Grants Scheme;  but the success rate for new applications fell from 46 per cent in 1984 to 26 per cent for 1985;  and the total amount sought by researchers for 1985 was almost three times the available budget total. ⁽⁵⁹⁾  In the medium term, the Government's provision of a 150 per cent tax write-off for research and development could, however, prove to be of benefit;
• the fixed size of most universities, and their internal financial and staffing rigidities in a period when the balance between expanding and contracting fields of knowledge is changing more quickly, as is the balance between undergraduate and graduate studies;
• the shortage of up-to-date capital provision, research equipment and of adequate research libraries; ⁽⁶⁰⁾
• the constraints on studentships and post-doctoral fellowships;  the declining number of graduates who can realistically hope to follow a research career in Australia;  and the increasing number of graduates who move abroad on graduation; ⁽⁶¹⁾
• inadequate and unsatisfactory links between university research and industry and government;
• the marked lack of Australian industrial effort in the fields of research and development ⁽⁶²⁾ has been a major handicap from the point of view of universities.

External and social pressures upon universities regarding the direction and administration of their research efforts can provide a valuable stimulus to new and innovative work.  They could also lead to needed reforms.  For example, the widespread public impression that the internal distribution of university research funds is often more by rote and by ration than by performance is not as erroneous as it should be.

But such pressures can also cause difficulties.  It would not be wise to fund subjects or research areas according to their popularity in the wider community.  Nor should there be too great an emphasis on research results of a measurable kind.  It would be a matter for concern if there were too great an emphasis on the soluble rather than the difficult;  on the immediate rather than the fundamental;  on the efficient transfer of knowledge to the world of commerce rather than the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge.

More outside funding for university research, and closer relations in this field between universities, industry and the CSIRO, are not merely desirable but necessary. ⁽⁶³⁾  They can increase the volume and variety of research done and attune university work more closely to community needs.  But they can also increase the complexities of managing university research.  While much public funding comes through avenues like the ARGS or the NH and MRC, whose distribution policies strongly emphasise scholarly and research excellence irrespective of field or of institution, CTEC funding tends to be proportional.  Outside industrial and governmental funding, and especially project funding, are usually specific to objectives which are by definition external to the university.  That can create difficult choices for university management in such matters as:

• a decision on what proportion of the effort of a faculty or a department should be put into problem-solving as distinct from free enquiry and the advancement of knowledge;
• decisions on the desirable balance between the freedom of the researcher and control by the institution or the outside contractor;
• the question whether outside funding should be allowed -- or encouraged -- to enhance the growth of specialised, possibly inter-disciplinary, research centres separate from more traditional and discipline-based units.

The growing importance of research in industrial and social planning has also led to the creation or growth of non-university research institutions -- sometimes ones created because universities were thought to be irrelevant in solving the great questions of the day -- with which universities must cooperate but also sometimes compete.  About this relationship two assertions can be made with some confidence:

• While some co-ordination of national research work may be desirable, an undue effort to eliminate competition and overlap would be damaging.
• Universities could suffer badly from a continued inability to recruit their proper share of the best and brightest younger scholars and researchers.  It would be in the interests neither of the universities nor of the country if it came to be assumed as natural that the best economics research was done solely in the Federal Treasury or the Reserve Bank and the best Agricultural Science only in the CSIRO.

It is also necessary to recognise the limitations on any scheme for controlling R & D, whether by a government, the CTEC or a university administration.  Administration can encourage or discourage, hamper and penalise, reward or facilitate.  It can set general research directions and its role in the provision of resources and support may be indispensable.  Yet at the core of the research enterprise, whether in its direction or in the creativity brought to it, is self-directed effort by an individual scholar or scientist, whether working alone or in a group.  Discovery -- as distinct from engineering refinement, or development or many forms of application -- is by definition unpredictable in its character or incidence.  The relationship between creativity and financial or administrative inducements is, at best, indirect.  The relationship between resource allocation to what are perceived to be socially "relevant" areas of work, and results which turn out to be socially useful a decade or two hence, is often quite obscure, and is certain to remain so.  It seems important not to allow false expectations to be created in this area.

All modern societies depend to a significant extent on the flow of new knowledge and techniques and on a supply of educated and trained people.  By many measures of international comparison, Australia falls short in both respects.  Australia is a significant net importer of technology ⁽⁶⁴⁾ and has significantly fewer people with higher education qualifications than, say, Canada, France, Japan, the US or the UK. ⁽⁶⁵⁾  Universities have a central role in changing that situation and in helping to carry out the present Government policy of increasing participation in higher education.  This process can and should be carried further.  The OECD, for example, has referred to the need for Australian universities to improve their research capacity "having regard to national priorities." ⁽⁶⁶⁾

Universities also have an important and perhaps key role in facilitating industrial and technical change through their influence on management practices, economic analyses and research results of all kinds.  It is a role which they have well recognised and are concerned to expand. ⁽⁶⁷⁾  The inhibitions on that expansion are not all on the side of universities.  Though universities can assist, they do not control the problems of industrial management in Australia and should not try.  It may well be that the present Government's policies for diminishing protection, for tax reform and for some deregulation prove to be much more effective engines of industrial modernisation, technological change and business attention to research and development than anything universities can do.

Within the limits imposed by their financial and personnel constraints, universities have in recent years given considerable emphasis to applied work of direct utility to industry and Government.  In considering how much further this trend can or should go, at least two considerations should be borne in mind:

• The low level of Australian industry R & D spending is a major constraint on the universities' ability to find resources for more applied work.
• Applied work in the end rests on, or flows from, the basic or fundamental research which is at the heart of university work.  Not just universities, but Australia, would neglect fundamental work at their intellectual and developmental peril.  As the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee has remarked "While we support more effective coupling of tertiary education research and development with commerce, industry and the community, it would be counter-productive for such coupling to be done at the cost of basic research, which is the basis for future technological developments in new and often unpredicted areas." ⁽⁶⁸⁾

It is a fundamental principle of the process of discovery particularly, but not solely, in more theoretical areas that no one can tell in advance what existing knowledge will lead to the discovery of what new insight.  There cannot be prior decisions about who needs to know of what.  To plan a discovery is, intellectually, to have made it.  To ask for a specific innovation is, by definition, to channel effort in relation to preconceived ideas.  It follows that an institution or a practice dedicated to innovation cannot plan the flow of knowledge and can only partially and fitfully determine the direction of research in relation to the supposed economic and social consequences of its results.

In any case, concepts of "national needs" or "national priorities" can create difficulties of their own.  It is not in dispute that it is for the Government of the day to design the public policy approaches to the solution of immediate social and industrial problems and to provide guidelines for the proper participation of universities in these efforts.  However, ideas about national priorities are necessarily defined by political decision, apt to be couched in terms of the presumed or desired research outcome, to focus on short-term results and in any case are likely to change more quickly than the process by which academic and research bodies are created or can redirect their efforts. ⁽⁶⁹⁾  Such concepts are therefore easier to implement in fields like public policy research than, say, in fundamental areas of medicine or in an increase in the supply of graduate astronomers.

The broad question is:  does society get value for the money spent on universities?  To that, no generalised answer can be given.  Professor Helen Hughes has pointed out that "The private and social cost/benefit structure of Australian education is not known in analytically meaningful detail." ⁽⁷⁰⁾  And in any case, different people will value differently the various things which universities do.  If there is no agreed standard of value, there is no agreed form of measurement, either.  One can only say that in general the cost per student in Australian universities seems to have gone down in real terms in the last decade and could go down further.  In relation to the alternative costs which society would have to bear if universities did not exist -- ranging from unemployment pay for many who are now students, to the consequences of research and innovation foregone -- university teaching and research are probably very cheap indeed.

STAFFING:
TENURE AND FLEXIBILITY

Staffing and finance are large and complicated subjects and a full treatment of them would go beyond the scope of this paper.  What follows is therefore confined to a few general remarks intended to round off the main discussion.

The staffing policies of Australian universities emphasise traditional ideas about equality of esteem and rewards within and between disciplines, and about tenure. ⁽⁷¹⁾  A major problem for the 1980s is how to combine what is essential in those ideas with increased flexibility.  FAUSA (Federation of Australian University Staff Associations) has restated the case for tenure in traditional terms:  "Tenure constitutes the procedural safeguard of academic freedom and individual responsibility, and as such is essential for the maintenance of intellectual liberty and high standards in education and scholarship." ⁽⁷²⁾  But at a time when even senior academics can argue that "Academic tenure in the Australian environment has led to the confusion of academic freedom with academic privilege ... and the right to the job ..." ⁽⁷³⁾ not merely reasonable tenure arrangements but the concept of academic freedom itself could depend on the willingness of the academic community to be more productive, more efficient and more responsive, and on its ability not to confuse freedom with license in the classroom, or the search for truth with social engineering.

Such an approach may partly depend on much greater willingness, not only by central university administrations but by schools and departments, to make more rigorous judgements of academic quality, whether in teaching or research.  It is, in the first instance, for the academic community itself to develop criteria and methods for such judgements, but it is important that they be seen beyond the walls of universities to be effective. ⁽⁷⁴⁾

Once made, qualitative judgements could be reflected in a variety of ways, some of which are already available.  Salary increments need not be automatic and applications for promotion could and should be more rigorously judged.  Given the extremely high level of tenure in Australian universities, ⁽⁷⁵⁾ tenure should be more sparingly granted, and after long periods of probation with probation assessments taken as seriously as appointments procedures.  Nor need tenure involve all senior ranks or attach solely to full-time staff positions.  A large range of fixed-term appointments, part-time tenure and other arrangements are possible.

It would also be advantageous to move to greater emphasis on payment by merit, as part of more flexible general salary arrangements.  This could include higher pay for able people whom a university or faculty especially wanted to attract or keep.  It could also involve allowing, even encouraging, some staff to engage in outside consultancies even if these involved substantial earnings.  The University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales, for example, have moved from an outside earnings constraint expressed in dollars to one expressed, no doubt more appropriately, in time spent on non-university purposes.

Flexibility in these matters may also help with one of the more serious problems facing Australian universities:  the recruitment of new and especially young academic staff.  In recent years the scope for recruitment has been minimal and mobility between institutions has declined sharply.  There is a shortage of young people on the staffs of most universities.  In some disciplines, and some areas of the country, there have been suggestions that the best and brightest graduates are no longer presenting themselves for appointment because they see no future in an academic career.

Most of the solutions so far attempted have difficulties of their own.  Early retirement of older staff is costly. ⁽⁷⁶⁾  Concentration upon any particular retirement age deprives universities of the services of some staff who would be valuable if they stayed and fails to cope with the desirability of moving some at a much earlier stage of their careers, when alternative possibilities may still be open to them.  Moreover, concentration upon the age profiles of departments or universities could lead, in time, to recruitment less in terms of the candidate's ability than of his or her age.

Events in other countries, including Britain and the United States, suggest that solutions will have to come in ways which include much greater emphasis on the movement of people between careers.  It may be that a young person entering upon a first academic appointment could come to regard it, not as a sign of failure but as normal, to move on to business or government or some other sector five years later.  The corollary would have to be that university appointment procedures give greater emphasis to non-academic prior experience, so that someone applying for an academic appointment at the age of 35 or 45 would have much more sympathetic note taken of his or her non-academic work.  There would inevitably be some difficulties -- for example, the absence of some traditional indicators like publications, or the differences between disciplinary areas in their ability to accept "outsiders" -- but universities could benefit from such an approach.  It might, for instance, shed new light on the vocational relevance of first degrees.

Other methods could involve much more flexible appointments patterns -- which may be especially suitable for women with children -- flexible both to fractions of a full-time appointment and as to time spent on campus.

UNIVERSITY GOVERNMENT:
INSULARITY AND DECENTRALISATION

The methods of university government inevitably reflect the values of people working in these institutions.  Over the last decade or more that has involved a shift in loyalties and identification from the university to professions or disciplines;  a stress on participatory and consensual methods of administration;  and a strengthening of trade union attitudes which tend to regard academic staff as "employees" and university administration as "management";  and which stress general, negotiated and detailed conditions of pay and service, and separate distinctions based on scholarly reputation from ones based on administrative or decision-making function.

It was predictable -- and predicted -- that such shifts would emphasise the conduct of university government by reference to the existing preferences of tenured staff.  It became, as Michael Oakeshott once wrote in a different context, a situation in which "... familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments;  to acquire and enlarge will be less important than to keep, cultivate aid enjoy;  the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise".

As a result, "The system is highly introspective and self-regarding ... It runs by its own rules and regulations, its own internal interests, its own lobby groups and alliances, its own committee decisions.  With all resources flowing from the centre, the energy that persons at 'the coal face' ... devote to innovative, entrepreneurial ventures within their own spheres of control are rationally redirected to political efforts within the committee structure." ⁽⁷⁷⁾  It was also predictable, and predicted, that as academic leadership gave way to consensus and the relative insulation of academia was maintained if not increased, so staffing, promotion and allocation decisions would become more comfortable and the responsiveness of universities to outside influence would remain relatively small. ⁽⁷⁸⁾  And while that had the advantage of maintaining stability and basic academic values in a sometimes fluctuating political and social environment, it may also have had the disadvantage of slowing down legitimate responses to the needs of students and the clients of research effort.

In those institutions where consensual government has gone farthest, it has often been found that the powers and responsibilities of central university planners and administrations in some respects increased.  But given that the reality of teaching and research happens in departments and schools, that also has been found to have drawbacks.  The solutions which appear to have been most satisfactory for those universities which have tried them cluster around the principle of decentralisation of staffing and financial responsibilities.  One interesting scheme is that of the University of New South Wales which has very largely decentralised staffing and budget responsibilities to faculties.

FUNDING:
THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT AND TERTIARY FEES

On funding, universities may be confronted by various possibilities.  In considering them, they will wish to bear in mind the axiom that certainty and continuity of funding may be even more important for large and complex organisations like universities than absolute levels.  However, certainty can be achieved in several ways.

The most obvious possibility is to continue to have universities wholly or almost wholly funded by grants from the Federal Government.  The advantages are that detailed needs may be relatively easy to convey to decision-makers through the federal public service;  that the political position of universities and their supporters is likely to be sufficient to forestall any sudden or drastic decline in funding;  and that in any case no alternative source of adequate funding is in sight.  The disadvantages are that, as the CTEC has stressed, government funding in recent years has fallen short of real requirements; ⁽⁷⁹⁾  that in a situation of declining real resources universities could find themselves purchasing institutional security at the price of penury;  that such strategies are not cost-free in terms of the possibility of interventionist government policies;  and that "Centralised funding, disbursed by a rationalistic bureaucratic process has focussed attention and energy on manipulating the governing machinery rather than performing grassroots activity better." ⁽⁸⁰⁾  The most obvious major danger in moving to any alternative system is that the federal government might diminish central provision more or less in proportion to the appearance of alternative sources of university supply.

A second possibility would be shared funding as between the Federal and State Governments.  This would represent a return to the position prior to 1972 and would be likely to result in some differences arising between institutions in different States;  probably with universities in smaller states being relatively disadvantaged.

A third possibility is to move towards plural funding. ⁽⁸¹⁾  The success of any such endeavour may well once again depend upon the willingness of the Government to make it clear that additional private funds would not result in a loss of government support.  With that proviso, a major solution to the problems of efficiency and excellence in universities may well lie in a reduction in the percentage of central government funding for universities.  Moreover, individual and corporate giving could, in addition to providing resources per se, helpfully strengthen the bonds between the institutions and important sectors of society at large.  It may be a major condition of such a development that not merely universities but academics display appropriately welcoming attitudes; ⁽⁸²⁾  and make it clear that they are both able and anxious to administer their own financial affairs effectively. ⁽⁸³⁾

A key element of any plan for plural funding is likely to be the government's attitude towards gifts to universities.  British and American precedents strongly suggest that over time a significant tax write-off provision can have substantial results.  Given the Government's provision for a 150 per cent tax deductibility for the funding of genuine R & D expenditure, it would be worth examining the possibility of a similar 150 per cent deductibility for general purpose endowment funds for universities.  Indeed, it would be interesting to examine the possibility that the Government might offer to provide, say, 1-2 per cent of recurrent funds not in dollars but in government revenue foregone in respect of such general purpose donations.  In such an event, universities might hope to attract, in "geared" fashion, a substantially greater sum than the dollar value of the 1-2 per cent of recurrent funds.  No doubt other possibilities warrant close examination.

The fourth possibility involves fees.  Universities already charge for special and non-degree courses, for example, for businessmen.  Fees for second degrees and foreign students have been discussed.  That approach could be broadened and there has been discussion in Government circles about whether it should be. ⁽⁸⁴⁾  Among the potential benefits are not merely the additional source of funding which universities would enjoy but the flexibility of planning and operation they could have in reacting directly to the demands of varying groups of students;  the change of emphasis from manpower planning criteria suggested by Federal authorities to a much simpler reliance upon demand and market forces which are, by definition, beyond the control of the universities themselves;  and the stimulus provided for research and teaching staff by the need to react more strongly to real end demand than to a set of rules emerging from -- largely centralised -- political and administrative debates.  No doubt greater emphasis on fees would have to be complemented by a broader approach to student support and scholarships.

It is not in dispute that, given the relatively large proportion of students who come from higher socio-economic groups, the abolition of student fees has tended to transfer some financial burden from those groups to the average taxpayer, whose children have a smaller chance of admission to university.  As Blandy and Sloan have somewhat unkindly put it, "In many ways the abolition of fees in higher education was tantamount to providing free swimming pools for those who could not swim". ⁽⁸⁵⁾  On the other hand, Geoffrey Brennan has argued that "... the effects of a reintroduction of fees on student numbers and composition are probably minor and the efficiency effects of any such changes are virtually impossible to assess." ⁽⁸⁶⁾

The Government appears to have set its face, for the time being, against any reintroduction of fees for the general student population.  But in the longer term, and given the problems of public expenditure which are likely to confront this country during the remainder of the 1980s, it seems unlikely that the resources which the Federal Government is able to devote to universities can be substantially increased in real terms.  That must mean either an abandonment of the declared aim of increasing participation rates, or a decline in standards, or some method of additional funding, probably including private endowment but also student-financed university education.

Within any government funding program it might be desirable to have a somewhat looser connection between funding and student numbers.  This would be desirable both in the funding of universities by government and in the distribution of resources within institutions.  Too close a nexus could tend to loosen standards in pursuit of student numbers.  One might consider, for example, a centrally suggested WSU (Weighted Student Unit) level to form a base load, in relation to which funding was granted, with add-on numbers enrolled by the university's or faculty's own choice and determined by the additional resources which it could or would make available.

There is also the question whether the university and college sectors should be amalgamated.  It is not clear that an amalgamated higher education sector could be centrally funded and administered for long.  To deal centrally with 19 universities is difficult enough.  To deal centrally with a much larger number of much more varied institutions would -- especially given the increasing tendency towards intervention and regulation by State Governments -- be much more difficult and cumbersome.  In the medium or longer term, amalgamation of sectors could therefore mean decentralisation.

It would, in any case, be wise to free universities from the major contradictions implied by federal funding but responsibility under State legislation.  Partial relief might flow from the encouragement given by current Government policy to universities to seek greater plurality of funding, provided that the tapping of "outside" funds is recognised as a long-term plan rather than a solution to immediate problems; ⁽⁸⁷⁾  and provided that it does not lead simply to a corresponding reduction in federal funds.  To date, the Government has given direct encouragement to institutions to seek outside funding. ⁽⁸⁸⁾  In addition, the levels of funding provided for increased enrolments up to 1987, which are well below average funding levels for the existing student population;  may imply that the Government is thinking in terms of base funding, leaving the universities themselves to "top up" resources in other ways. ⁽⁸⁹⁾  Yet, for all its difficulties it is also possible that a plural funding pattern could confer on universities added flexibility and independence.

Plural funding may also imply a much more fundamental re-examination of the nature of that university independence.  Broadly speaking, during the 1960s and 1970s universities sought to reconcile the institutional wish for independence, the need for adequate funding and the desire of individual academics for freedom from outside control by a combination of reliance upon Federal Governments willing to provide substantial funds while remaining non-interventionist, and sweeping tenure-type arrangements not just for the great majority of academics but for many of the component units of universities, such as departments and centres.  There has been in Australia nothing comparable to the American or British willingness to dissolve units which have come to the end of their academic life.

Some of these attitudes may be questionable in a period when State and Federal Governments are willing to be more interventionist than in the past; ⁽⁹⁰⁾  when Governments increasingly see tertiary education, as a single system and tend to apply uniform policies across higher education in ways which erode the freedom of decision of individual universities;  when at the same time there is public disquiet about the extent to which universities, and tertiary education generally, are really dedicated to the pursuit of excellence; ⁽⁹¹⁾  about the scope and consequences of traditional tenure arrangements; ⁽⁹²⁾  and even about the scope and meaning of academic freedom, once that is thought to be used for purposes which go beyond the search for truth and the right of qualified specialists to teach in good faith in the areas of their proper expertise.

At such a time universities may need to be even more careful not merely to use staff and resources efficiently, but to be seen to do so;  and to be seen to devise -- and to enforce within the university -- agreed and objective tests of their own standards on teaching, research and scholarship.  At the same time plural funding might increase the measure of self-determination of individual universities, even at the cost of accepting that departments, even universities, might go broke or close down in response to student demand or other economic pressures.

PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES:
OVERSEAS EXPERIENCE AND DOMESTIC OBSTACLES

A final possibility would be to have a university which was wholly funded from private sources.  Though no such institution now exists in Australia it may be worth considering whether such a development would not be salutary.  Overseas experience does not suggest that all private universities are necessarily excellent, but it seems instructive that there is such a high proportion of private universities, or universities with a long private tradition, among the best British and American ones.  The recent British experience in founding the University of Buckingham may deserve further study.

The formal obstacles to the creation of a private university appear to be small.  There appears to be some legal protection for the word "university" and the chief executive of such a new institution would have to seek and at some point obtain membership of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee.  The key elements are likely to be the academic standing of the initial core staff and the quality of the first courses and graduates.  The establishment and initial running costs may turn out to be much smaller than for any of the existing universities if the new private institution confines its first offerings to courses which are not capital or equipment intensive, limits the more expensive research efforts of its staff, examines the telescoping of some courses and can accept a running in period in rented accommodation, preferably within easy reach of a major established library to which students and staff can gain access.  It is, however, likely that any private institution which was set up would, in time, seek some public funding by analogy with non-government secondary schooling;  and it is certain that for such an institution to become fully accepted and established would, even in the most favourable circumstances, take a good deal of time.

CONCLUSION

In the coming years there seem certain to be more rapid shifts in relative demand from a more diversified student population, and shifts of attention within and between disciplines.  There may be greater diversity in the age structures and other characteristics of student populations, in student mobility and in demands for part-time or distance tuition.  The pressures for universities to engage in remedial activities, including social ones, seem unlikely to diminish in the near future.

There will be more rapid shifts of emphasis in research, driven by international competition as well as by changing need within the Australian research community and, not least, varying social demands for research results.  These shifts are likely to include more emphasis on applied or mission-oriented work.  Though the university community will continue to argue that resources for such things should be additional to those devoted to fundamental work, political and industrial pressures may tend to diminish relative and even absolute resource allocation to basic research.  These pressures are likely to be augmented by the universities' own increasing need to rely on non-government sources of funds.

There will have to be more flexibility of staffing and perhaps more decentralisation of some aspects of university administration.  Given conditions such as the current shortage, in many disciplines, of young people qualified and available for academic appointments, or the shifts in demand between areas of study, university staffing patterns may have to become more flexible.  They may have to cater, not merely for a greater percentage of contract staff but for more part-time appointments or for much greater lateral mobility between the academic world and other professions.

Universities will fin& themselves exposed to increasing competition, whether in teaching or research, both among themselves and from a variety of other organisations including CAEs.  There will be increasing differentiation within the university sector, in size, in subject specialisation, in the extent of graduate studies, in the degree to which universities engage in co-operation with industry.  In such ways universities will grow more unlike one another, a trend running counter to the relative uniformity of central government administration and financing of the system.

Universities may find that the period of overwhelming dependence upon central governments willing to fund but also to abstain from close regulation has come to an end.  Universities will have to look for more diversified sources of supply, not merely of resources and staff but of other kinds of understanding and support.  That will encourage universities to play a role even more closely attuned to contemporary social and economic needs and to reinterpret their historic role in the light of these new circumstances.

In general, universities would do well to ensure that they are seen to be business-like in their use of resources and that their functions and roles are better and more widely understood.  If universities must relate their activities more closely to community needs, they will equally have to improve community awareness of their own requirements and essential functions.  To do so will be important not only for the universities' relations with government, but to avoid having the wider community regard the inevitable university search for additional and non-governmental funds as a narrowly selfish exercise.  If appeals for understanding and support, whether to the business sector, to alumni or to the country at large, are to become a routine part of university administration, universities might be wise to alert the citizens and voters of Australia to the full circumstances of that change.

---

ENDNOTES

1.  Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission, Learning and Earning.  A study of Education and Employment Opportunities for Young People, Canberra, AGPS, 1982, Vol.1, para 5.4

2.  CTEC, Learning and Earning shows the decline in the income premium enjoyed by graduates cf paras 3.34-3.45

3.  The obvious exception is the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University.

4.  Indirect distinctions were, however, implied by other provisions such as those limiting entry at large universities, which encouraged those universities to be more selective and to shift more of their efforts towards graduate studies.

5.  There is no evidence that such fears, if they were held, were particularly well-founded.

6.  Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education in Australia (L.M. Martin, Chairman), Report, Canberra, Commonwealth Government Printer, August 1964, Vol.1 para 1.26

7.  Harman G., "The Erosion of University Independence:  Recent Australian Experience", Higher Education 12, 1983 pp. 501-504

8.  Minister for Education and Youth Affairs, Sen. The Hon. Susan Ryan, Guidelines to the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission for the 1985-87 Triennium, Canberra, Department of Education and Youth Affairs, 5.7.84.

9.  Dr. K. McKinnon, Reshaping Higher Education, (1983 Geelong Lecture) Deakin University, October 1983 (mimeo) p.17

10.  H. Hudson, address of 24.9.84 at the Nepean College of Advanced Education, p.5

11.  Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission, 1985-87 Triennium, Supplementary Report for 1986 and 1987, Canberra AGPS, 1985, p.1, para 5

12.  The Universities Council has already drawn attention to the serious consequences of underfunding leading to the erosion of academic standards.  CTEC, Report for 1985-87 Tiennium, Vol.1 Part 3, Canberra, AGPS, April 1984, para 2.10

13.  Broadly speaking, salary and related costs in universities are on average some 15 per cent higher than in Colleges of Advanced Education.  In addition, universities have a more expensive mix of students, given enrolments in expensive disciplines like Medicine, Agricultural and Veterinary Science etc;  and they do higher degree and research work.  By 1984, the difference may have grown to 40 per cent per EFTS, because of unplanned growth in the advanced education sector.

14.  Nieuwenhuysen, J.P. "Towards Flexibility in Academic Labour Markets?" Australian Bulletin of Labour, No.11, No.2 (1985)

15.  cf. Milne, F., Arthritic Academia:  The Problems of Government Universities in Albon, R.,;  and Lindsay, G. (eds), Occupational Regulation and the Public Interest, Sydney, The Centre for Independent Studies, 1984, pp. 193-207.

16.  These ideas go beyond the suggestions in the New Technologies evaluative study.  Professor A.H. Willis, The Impact of Technology on the Teaching Process in Australian Universities, Canberra, CTEC, October 1983.

17.  Pedersen, G., "Ethics in Higher Education", University Affairs, December 1983, p.5

18.  Depressing conclusions can be drawn from a survey of the attitudes of Australian youth released by the Department of Education and Youth Affairs.  Reported in The Weekend Australian 13-14.10.84, p.3

19.  Advice of Universities Council, CTEC, Report for 1982-84 Triennium, Vol.1, Part 2, Canberra, AGPS, February 1981, para 2.3

20.  Guidelines to CTEC for the 1985-87 Triennium, op.cit, pp11-12

21.  The Government provided $1 million for 1985 for equity projects in higher education.

22.  Expenditure on applied research in 1981 in universities was $118.8 millions and in CAEs it was $5.1 millions.  ABS, Research and Experimental Development, Higher Education Organisations, Australia, 1981.

23.  The general recurrent grant per EFTS for State universities (expressed in December quarter 1989 cost levels) was:  1978:  $7590;  1980:  $7690;  1984:  $7300.  CTEC statistics

24.  CTEC Report for 1985-87 Triennium, Vol.1 Pt. 3, para 2.1 and 2.31 pp.17, 24.

25.  There are also resource problems in meeting these demands.  The Universities Council has drawn attention to the costs for universities of their constantly expanding regulatory environment.  CTEC Report for 1985-87 Triennium, Vol.2, Pt.2 op.cit, para A1.17.

26.  Prof. J. Ward, Accountability and Responsibility:  The University Challenges of the 1980s, The Spann Memorial Oration 1984, University of Sydney 31.10.84, p12.  Professor Ward also argued that "Universities exist so as to serve on behalf of their communities the hard masters called teaching, learning, research, scholarship and knowledge ... It is not in the public interest for universities to betray the reasons for their existence by yielding to pressures on such matters as content of courses, admission of students, directions of research and academic standards".  ibid.  pp.6,9.

27.  Nowhere in government does there appear to exist any definition of what is meant by the "disadvantage" claimed to be suffered by women, aborigines, migrants, etc. nor any method by which such disadvantage might be measured.

28.  Report for the 1985-87 Triennium, Vol.1, p.6

29.  H. Hudson, Equity and Higher Education, Octagon Lecture of 18.6.85 at the University of Western Australia, mimeographed, p.1

30.  Per contra, there is considerable historical evidence to suggest that any kind of "numerus clausus", however socially defined, is bound to be inequitable and unjust.

31.  Sue Richardson, Who Benefits from Higher Education?, paper presented to the conference on Withering Heights:  A conference on the Post-Secondary Education System, Monash University, November 1984 (mimeo).

32.  The CTEC has observed that "... it is not possible to meet equity objectives at low per capita marginal funding rates".  CTEC Supplementary Report for 1986 and 1987, op.cit. p.4 para 11.  This is likely to be a very conservative statement of the additional funding needs which would arise if the university system were to be greatly expanded.

33.  Hudson, Octagon Lecture, op.cit, pp.16-17.  It is no doubt possible to question any implication that the school system, or the State, or society, can and should try to eliminate differentials due to family background, cultural differences, personal energy or motivation.

34.  CTEC Statistics

35.  The idea is, of course, far from new.  Scholarships have a long history.

36.  H. Hudson, address of 24.9.84, op.cit, p.1;  also his Octagon Lecture, passim.  Mr. Hudson has, however, spoken of "more equitable outcomes" in other passages.

37.  H. Hudson, Participation and Equity in Tertiary Education, address to a National PEP Conference, Canberra, 3.9.84, p.3

38.  Hudson, address of 24.9.84, op.cit, p.1

39.  "to the extent that an education system is unfair, it is of inferior quality ... a more equal system of higher education is by definition a higher quality system".  Senator Ryan, Calwell Lecture, 19.9.84, op.cit

40.  It may be, however, that 5,000-10,000 qualified students missed out on higher education places in 1984.  The CTEC believes that in 1985 there was an "unmet demand" of not less than 10,000 additional places in higher education.  CTEC Supplementary Report for 1986 and 87, op.cit, p.8, para 1.6

41.  CTEC, Report for 1985-87 Triennium, Vo1.2 Pt. 2 Table A2.5

42.  CTEC, Report for 1985-87 Triennium, Vo1.2, Pt.1, p.25

43.  Dr. McKinnon, Reshaping Higher Education, op.cit, p.9

44.  In the United States, the "junior year abroad" is relatively common.  Australia has yet to achieve significant inter-State movement at undergraduate level.

45.  Universities Commission, Sixth Report, Canberra, AGPS, May 1975, para 4.9, p.54

46.  Hudson, Octagon Lecture, op.cit, p.11

47.  Committee of Review of Private Overseas Student Policy (Professor J. Goldring, Chairman), Report, Canberra, AGPS, March 1984 and Committee to Review the Australian Overseas Aid Program (Sir Gordon Jackson, Chairman), Report, Canberra, AGPS, March 1984.  Also Minister for Education, Canberra, News Release M26/85 of 22.3.85;  News Release M76/85 of 25.6.85 and News Release M80 of 5.7.85

48.  Helen Hughes, Education as an Export Industry, op.cit, p.32

49.  Helen Hughes, ibid, p.19

50.  Professor Michael Porter, "Tertiary Education -- missed opportunities", Review, Winter 1984, pp.83-86.

51.  Professor M. Logan, Adapting post-secondary education institutions and staff to social and technological change.  Proceedings of the VIPSEC Seminar, Deakin University, February 1984, p.123

52.  Committee on Australian Universities (Sir Keith Murray, Chairman), Report, Canberra, Commonwealth Government Printer, 1957, para 6.

53.  It was Lenin who branded as elitist any attempt to exclude the majority of young people from a liberal education and the possibility of cultural enrichment on the grounds that it would be unsuitable for their jobs and lifestyles.

54.  Professor Dame Leonie Kramer, "The ABC of Higher Education", ACES Review, June/July 1984, p.7

55.  Professor John Ward, University of Sydney News, 27.3.84

56.  An argument might be made that this premature specialisation, by depriving individuals of a proper grounding in the elements of their own history and civilisation, could create great uncertainties about their own place in the spectrum of human cultures, render more difficult any serious appreciation of other cultures and countries and might, at one and the same time, encourage a certain cultural and ethnic prejudice and make more difficult the growth and elaboration of a genuinely Australian civilisation.

57.  Professor Michael Birt, The Future of Tertiary Education, Address of 24.5.83 to the Rotary Club of Sydney

58.  Universities Commission, Fifth Report, Canberra, AGPS, May 1972 para 10.1

59.  For some earlier comments on the declining support for researchers, see Professor B.D.O. Anderson, The Research Role of the University, in Australian Universities to the Year 2000, Occasional Paper No.2, Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, 1979, pp.29-39

60.  Capital and equipment grants were sharply reduced during the decade 1975-85.  For example, capital provision in 1975 was $220 millions.  By 1984 it was $38 millions (both in 1980 prices).  Then Universities Council has already pointed out that "the level of equipment funds available to universities now suggests an assumed average life span (for equipment) of more than 16 years -- an operational life span at least 50 per cent longer than that considered reasonable for comparable categories of equipment in the private sector".  Furthermore, "The rapid technological developments of recent years have rendered much of the equipment stocks of universities obsolete".  CTEC, Report for 1985-87 Triennium, Vol.1 Pt.3, paras 8.3-8.4

61.  A recent study by the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations suggests that an increasing number of masters and doctoral graduates are going abroad and that over 60 per cent of physical science graduates went abroad in 1982.  c.f. The Age 3.8.84 pp.1,10.  While it would be difficult to argue that Australia should try to retain all graduates with higher degrees, departures of this order raise serious questions not just for governments but about the attitudes and policies of Australian employers.

62.  This has been amply documented.  Recent OECD figures, for example, suggest that in the 12 years to 1981/82 spending by the private sector on research halved to 0.21 per cent of GDP and in the eight years to 1981/82 there was a 64 per cent drop in the number of people who were employed on research in the private sector.

63.  At the time of writing, the AVCC is negotiating with the Business Council of Australia and the Confederation of Australian Industry to set up a jointly funded scheme to support university research projects.

64.  P.J. Morris, "Australia's dependence on imported technology", Prometheus, June 1983, pp. 144-50

65.  Some figures for 1975/76 (a high point of enrolment in Australian higher education) are as follows:

Country	Av. no. of years in school	% of age groups enrolled in educational institutions
		16-18	19-24
Australia	12.6	40.2	7.3
Canada	14.2	66.0	16.2
France	15.5	54.0	12.3
Japan	14.0	74.8	14.7
U.K.	13.2	37.4	9.3
U.S.	16.7	75.7	26.7

Source:  Indicators of Education 1975-715:  Educational Statistics in OECD Countries,
Paris, OECD, 1981.

However, such figures may obscure the importance of the Australian tradition of part-time study:  in recent years approximately 45 per cent of higher education students were enrolled part-time (including off-campus students).

66.  Quoted by Senator Ryan at a graduation ceremony, Newcastle University, 5.5.84

67.  CTEC, Report for 1985-87 Triennium, Vol.2, Pt.2, op.cit, para 1.40

68.  The Australian, 1.8.84, p.18

69.  The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney has argued that it would not be "easy for universities to agree that all their research programs should be determined in accordance with someone else's judgement of national priorities, or that national priorities should govern all research programs.  In the field of research there are priorities that government may value, but it is dangerous to argue that governments have a monopoly on either wisdom or responsibility in such a matter".  Professor J. Ward, University of Sydney News, 22.5.84

70.  Helen Hughes, Education as an Export Industry, paper presented to the conference on Withering Heights:  A conference on the Post-Secondary Education System, Monash University, November 1984 (mimeo) p.2

71.  See also page 19 below

72.  FAUSA Newsletter 84/87, October 1984.

73.  Hughes, Education as an Export Industry, op.cit, p.27

74.  At the time of writing Professor Paul Bourke is engaged in an evaluative study for CTEC on whether it is possible to develop acceptable criteria for making qualitative judgements between departments and faculties.  It is of interest that in Britain the Department of Education has announced its intention of examining the performance and efficiency of universities in the light of a number of indicators such as graduate employment, Ph.D completion rates and staff-student ratios.  It is also worth reflecting that in Australia, if a young person is appointed to a tenured Lectureship at the age of 25 and if promotion from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer is merely a matter of time then, taking on-costs into amount, the grant of tenure implies a guarantee to the new Lecturer of an allocation of around $1.5-$2.0 million (in 1984 dollars) of public funds over a working lifetime of some 40 years.  To make such a grant effectively without performance tests would be difficult to justify.

75.  Though the proportion of full-time tenured teaching-and-research staff at State universities has declined somewhat since the late 1970s as a proportion of total teaching-and-research staff, in 1984 it was typically over 90 per cent.  The lowest percentage was at Wollongong (82.4 per cent) and the highest at Deakin (96.8).  (CTEC Statistics)

76.  It may be, in any event, that the pressures of early retirement could be reversed and that before long there will be calls for later rather than earlier retirement.  For some overseas views see The Economist 19.5.84, p.58

77.  Richard Blandy and Judith Sloan, In Search of Excellence and Efficiency in Australian Higher Education, paper presented to the conference on Withering Heights:  A conference on the Post-Secondary Education System, Monash University, November 1984, p.25

78.  The Chairman of the CTEC has remarked that "In my experience it is one thing to make a particular decision involving specified objectives -- it is another thing entirely to get that decision implemented effectively ..."  Hudson, address of 3.9.84, op.cit

79.  In the 1982-84 Triennium, recurrent funds made available in Government guidelines fell short by some $30m per annum for each year of the Triennium from the levels recommended by the CTEC.

80.  Blandy and Sloan, In Search of Excellence and Efficiency, op.cit, p.26

81.  See page 19 below.

82.  In some academic quarters there appears to persist a strong dependence on government and a distrust of the private sector, as well as an aversion to any need to drum up support among the mass lay public.

83.  The argument is sometimes heard that the need to appeal for, and administer, funds would distract universities from their proper academic purposes and exceed their capacities for administration and financial management.  The CTEC has gone so far as to remark that "... it would be contrary to the principal purpose of an institution for it to seek and establish a major investment operation;  many institutions are simply not geared for such activity in terms of either personnel or structure".  Supplementary Report for 1986 and 1987, op.cit, p.38 para 3.19.  Such arguments would sound exceedingly odd in Harvard or Yale or in the Senior Common Room of any Oxford or Cambridge College, or even to the management of one of Australia's older and relatively better endowed universities.

84.  The CTEC has expressed strong views against fee systems, cf Supplementary Report for 1986 and 1987, op.cit. paras 3.21-3.33

85.  Blandy and Sloan, In Search of Excellence and Efficiency, op.cit, p.12

86.  Professor H.G. Brennan, Tertiary Education Fees -- Yet Again, paper presented to Withering Heights, a Conference on the Post-Secondary Education System, Monash University, November 1984, (mimeo)

87.  The CTEC has remarked that endowment "... is unlikely to become a major source of regular income for most Australian institutions in the next decade".  Supplementary Report for 1986 and 1987, op.cit., p.36 para 3.12.  No Australian university currently has non-governmental income of more than 20 per cent of total income.  Such sources of funds are, in the main, limited to the large, established universities.  The newer institutions are, of course, much worse off.  Given the absence of any substantial Australian tradition of private university benefaction, and assuming that there is no introduction of new and significant tax write-off provisions for donors (see p.18) it might take many years for existing universities to build up significant private income from endowments and similar sources.  The total income of universities in recent years has been:  1979:  $863 millions;  1981:  $1109 millions;  1983:  $1343 millions.  Total non-government income for all universities was:  1979:  $72 m;  1981:  $110 m;  1983:  $145 m.  (CTEC statistics)

88.  Guidelines to CTEC for the 1985-87 Triennium, op.cit, p.2 column 1

89.  Guidelines to CTEC for the 1985-87 Triennium, op.cit. p.6 column 1 suggests that the Government will provide $66.8 millions by 1987 to fund 15,000 extra places in higher education.  That suggests roughly $4,500 per student.  Current average student costs for the university sector are over $7,000 per student cf CTEC Report for 1985-87 Triennium, Vol.2 Pt.2 Vol.II para A.I.14

90.  In 1981/82 the Fraser Government closed the Engineering School at Deakin University and pressed for a merger between four universities and nearby colleges of advanced education.  In 1984 the Federal Government for the first time gave directions on the funding, out of general university system funds, of a specific chair in a specific subject in a specific university.  Guidelines to CTEC for the 1985-87 Triennium, op.cit. p.7, column 1.  There have been suggestions that the CTEC should become an arm of Government and some State Governments have adopted distinctly interventionist policies.  These trends are neither very new nor unforeseen.  "There are strong pressures for greater co-ordination and central control of individual institutions, for an increased emphasis on manpower planning, for rationalisation of institutions and courses and for the development of new mechanisms of accountability ... There is a definite move towards greater government intervention in universities ..." G.S. Harman in G.S. Harman, A.H. Miller, D.J. Bennett and D.I. Anderson, (eds.) Academia Becalmed:  Australian Tertiary Education in the Aftermath of Explosion, Canberra, ANU Press, 1980, p.14

91.  The Minister, Senator The Hon. Susan Ryan, has remarked "I am not persuaded that the tertiary education sector as a whole, or many of its component institutions, have been doing all they might to either work out what they mean by 'quality' or to set about improving it."  Calwell Lecture, Monash University, 19.9.84.  Department of Education and Youth Affairs, News Release M115/84 and text.

92.  For example, Parliament of Australia, Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts:  Report on Tenure of Academics (B. Teague, Chairman) Canberra, AGPS, 1982.

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AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES:
A STATISTICAL PROFILE

• In 1981 there were 92 academic staff per 1,000 students in Australian universities;  in 1984 the figure was 86, a decline of 6.9 per cent.
• In 1983 out of the universities' total income of $1343 million only $145 million -- around l0 per cent -- came from non-government sources.  The greater part of this non-government income came from investments ($56 million) and endowments, donations and grants ($58 million).
• Australia's 172,678 university students in 1984 attended 19 universities.  The biggest, Sydney, had 18,248 students;  the smallest, James Cook in Queensland, had 2,107 students.
• In 1974, 32.3 per cent of males and 25.1 per cent of females in the final year of school proceeded directly to university.  In 1983, the figures were 25.0 per cent of males and 18.1 per cent of females.
• In 1967, 12.5 per cent of university students were aged 30 years or more;  in 1983 the figure was 25.8 per cent.
• 3.2 per cent of persons aged between 15-24 born in Australia attended university full-time in 1983.  6.1 per cent of the 15 to 24 years old Australians born outside Australia attended university.
• In 1985, expenditure per student at university (including teaching and research) was around $9,000 a year.
• Australia's oldest university, Sydney University, was established in 1850;  the newest, Deakin University, was established in 1977.

All Public Authorities:  Outlays on Education 1972/73 and 1977/78 to 1982/83

	Total Outlays		Outlays on University Education
	$M	% of GDP	$M	% of total outlays	% of GDP
1972/73	1986.1	4.6	323.9	16.3	0.8
1977/78	5795.7	6.4	784.0	13.5	0.9
1978/79	6261.9	6.1	824.6	13.2	0.8
1979/80	6793.7	5.8	883.4	13.0	0.8
1980/81	7694.1	5.8	953.8	12.4	0.7
1981/82	8709.4	5.8	1092.8	12.5	0.7
1982/83	9843.8	5.9	1197.2	12.2	0.7

Public Recurrent & Capital Expenditure:  1971-72 to 1981-82

Higher Education Enrolment by Institution:  1974 to 1984, Selected Years

University Enrolments:  Full Time, Part Time and External

University Students by Sex

University Students:  Sex and Field of Study, 1984

Field of Study	Males		Females		Persons
	No.	%	No.	%
Humanities	16,548	36.2	29,170	63.8	45,718
Fine Arts	532	39.7	809	60.3	1,341
Social & Behavioural Science	4,410	36.7	7,608	63.3	12,018
Law	5,933	58.9	4,146	41.1	10,079
Education	5,083	40.6	7,427	59.4	12,510
Economics, commerce, govt.	16,501	68.1	7,732	31.9	24,233
Medicine	6,685	57.8	4,887	42.2	11,572
Dentistry	1,011	69.8	438	30.2	1,449
Natural sciences	18,419	63.2	10,705	36.8	29,124
Engineering, technology	13,330	92.5	1,076	7.5	14,406
Architecture, building	3,057	73.2	1,117	26.8	4,174
Agriculture, forestry	2,200	71.0	898	29.0	3,098
Veterinary science	743	53.1	656	46.9	1,399
Other or not stated	705	45.3	852	54.7	1,557
Total	95,157	55.1	77,521	44.9	172,678

Proportion of 20-29 year-olds who have studied at University
by Occupation of Father (May 1975)

	White Collar Worker			Blue Collar Worker
	Professional	Skilled	Semi skilled & unskilled	Skilled	Semi skilled & unskilled	Rural Worker	Total
Sons   % of all sons   No. (000s)	30.5 12.8	21.1 27.0	14.8 17.4	8.0 17.6	4.6 14.7	5.2 8.3	9.9 97.7
Daughters   % of all daughters   No. (000s)	24.3 10.4	12.4 14.3	4.3 5.1	2.5 5.5	2.2 7.2	3.2 4.8	4.9 47.7

An International Comparison

	Prop. of Labour Force with Degree	Post Graduate Degrees awarded per million pop. in 1982	1st Degree Engineering Qualification awarded in 1982 per million pop.	Prop. of New Uni. entrants in technology disciplines
Germany	8	260	110	11.4
U.S.	19	1700	350	14.4
Japan	13	170	630	19.2
U.K.	7	380	270	15.0
Australia	8	845	150	7.0

Course Commencements by Sex, 1984

	Males		Females		Total No.
	No.	%	No.	%
Higher Degree   Doctorate (Other than Ph.D)   Ph.D   Masters   Total higher degree	26 984 3300 4310	92.9 70.9 63.4 65.1	2 403 1907 2314	7.1 29.1 36.6 24.9	28 1387 5209 6624
Bachelor Degree	22459	51.8	20891	48.2	43350
Non Degree   Post Graduate Diploma   Other   Total non-degree	2161 2260 4421	51.2 49.7 50.4	2062 2284 4346	48.8 50.3 49.6	4223 4544 8767
Total	31190	53.1	27751	46.9	58741