Some quite understandable movements have gained hold in public life in Australia seeking to change attitudes and to change priorities in public funding. Broadly, they seek a better deal for groups of people who have been repressed or marginalised. Some have sought changes to they way Australian authorities approach foreign policy, foreign aid, public health and legal aid. Often, those groups have sought and received most succour from the people within Australia’s universities. The universities, for long the haven of dissent and challenge in society, promoted, joined in and welcomed the the changes.
Now the universities find that the very changes people within the universities supported are being turned on the universities themselves. Equalitiy, non-discrimination and gender-equity are suddenly being applied to education. Suddenly, we had a clash of ideology among people who otherwise were allied in favour of change. The underlying culture of universities was under challenge by new political correctness. Equality of outcome had no place in a culture of pursuit of excellence. Positive discrimination had no place in a culture of judgment on merit. Study of ephemeral phenonema had no place in a culture of academic discipline. Worse still, pursuit of knowledge had no place in a political culture that worshipped mediocrity.
The early 1990s has seen the social idealism of the 1970s implode. The radicalism of the 1970s that sought great changes in government is now faced with the consequences of its own folly on the the campuses in the 1990s.
Academic excellence, pursuit of an academic discipline and selection on merit and ability were the dirty words of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They represented dangerous elitism, conservativism and repression of minorities. The universities needed to be opened up to equal opportunity and equality of outcome _ read: mediocre input and mediocre outcomes.
Government, too, has jumped on the bandwagon. In the dying moments of the last parliamentary sesssion last year, the coup became law in the form of the Hinger Education Funding Act. It stripped away funding through the states to each university so each university could pursue its own teaching a research priorities. In its place is a new system of funding. Under it Parliament can only allocate a lump sum for all the universities. The Minster then determmines how to slice that cake among the 35 universities according to their “”educational profile”. That phrase is an Orwellian misnomer. It means “”the Minisiter’s social and political agenda”. The universities are made to compete for funds against each other according to their ability to satisfy the criteria of what the Minsiter sees as a desirable “”educational profile”.
This is a most insidious turn of events. It undermines academic freedom, which is one of the fundamental elements of a liberal democracy. It undermines the abilitiy of a university to pursue what it sees as the demands of students in its catchment. And it undermines the fundamental function of a university: to educate. the university’s view is supplanted by the Minister’s view.
It is the culmination of several years of changes for the worse in Australian tertiary education, spearheaded by the former Minsiter for Education, John Dawkins. He had presided over a misguided process of amalgamations of universities and the promotion, in the process, of various colleges to universities. Those promotions altered the focus from vocational to academic training in those institutions. The result was for TAFE to fill the gap, with mixed success. The TAFEs are now doing what colleges used to do and now there is a need for another level to come underneath to fill the role formerly filled by TAFEs. Why, instead, didn’t the Government just say no to the equality-driven social engineers and proudly admit that Australian universities were for an intellectual elite who would pursue excellence and help drive Australia to international competitiveness.
The process was partly driven by a desire to move people from the dole queues into education and partly driven by a desire to centralise decision making with the Department of Education in Canberra. A lot of the justification for that was that Canberra provided the money so it should decide how it was spent. A more appropriate answer to that would be to say that the Commonwealth should not raise the money in the first place, or having raised it should hand it to the states untied.
Thee new arrangement does not give a line-by-line allocation to each university. Allocations are not visible and debatable. Instead, the fate of each university’s funding is in the hands of the minister. Allocations are only visible after the event, when it is too late. With the best will in the world and with the wisest Minister, this is a sad turn of events.
In a democracy, it is wise and sound for universities to be accountable to the will of the people. In Australia’s case, that is best achieved by making funding accountable through both the Federal and state Parliaments. Under the new arrangement neither the state nor the Federal Parliaments will get much of a say. The Federal minister will dictate how much money from the pool goes to each university and the minister will determine that, not according to academic excellence, but according to “”educational profile”, a concept that embraces all sorts of social, political and economic ends.
It is perhaps an irony that the very students and academics who rightly sought changes in society to help the underprivileged should see the changes they sought be applied for political reasons with such a broad brush to undermine the very academic freedom and pursuit of excellence that put them in the position to demand the societal changes in the first place.
With four weeks to go in the election campaign, academics, students and others who espouse academic excellence and learning must seek commitments from both major parties and the Democrats to automony for each of Australia’s universities and ac ommitment to academic and educational excellence in Australia’s tertiary institutions.