Anecdotal and apocryphal evidence, though of no probative value can certainly be very illustrative. A story doing the round at the Australian National University several years ago when the Faculty of Economics was coming under fire for failing some sixty per cent of its first-year students is an example. The story goes that the faculty was coming under fire at the University Council for concentrating too much on research and not enough on teaching. If only the teachers would do more and better teaching, fewer students would fail, it was said. To which one council member is reputed to have replied that perhaps the faculty could learn teaching methods from those who taught women’s studies, where the pass rate was almost 100 per cent.
The important point is that the quality of teaching is extremely hard to measure. That is the case because the reciprocal quality of learning is equally hard to measure. How does a government measure and then improve teaching standards without facing the cynicism exemplified by the response to difficulties faced by the ANU’s Faculty of Economics? The Minster for Higher Education, Peter Baldwin, has decided to spend $5 million a year trying to find out. He has chosen Dr Don Anderson to chair the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching.
Much of that money is to be spent on showing how modern technologies such as radio, television, computers using CD ROMs and the like can be used to improve teaching. Dr Anderson thinks this will free university teachers from the tyranny of lectures. He thinks the lecturing method is antiquated and owes something of the lecturer’s need to be prominent and in a position of power. There is a germ of truth in this if the university lectures are in fact formal lectures with more than 40 students where interaction is impossible. Alas, this is becoming the case, certainly in first-year courses. It was not always the case, certainly in later years. The lecture was more a large seminar. Most of the talking was done by the lecturer, but much was done by the students. It worked in the Socratic tradition.
That it is not the still the case is largely due to the fact Mr Baldwin’s Government has filled universities with young people who otherwise be on the dole queues largely created by his Government’s policies. Moreover, having thus filled the universities it has failed to provide enough money to ensure decent staff-student ratios and proper library services to meet the demand. Further, it was his former senior Minister, John Dawkins, who converted a dozen vocationally oriented colleges of advanced education into universities. The colleges, their teachers and their courses were never designed nor intended for such a role.
Small wonder, then, there is a crisis in the quality of university teaching in Australia. And the answer to it lies, perhaps, as much in a decline in the quality of the people learning than in the preservation of traditional university methods. The Government that Mr Baldwin serves in caused the teaching crisis by creating universities that should not be there and filling them with students who should not be there. His $5 a year would be better spent hiring a few more lecturers.