Last week the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at ANU , Professor Paul Thom, wrote a letter to the editor pleading the case for students to take Arts courses.
He bemoaned that there was a foolish impression about that subjects taught in Arts degrees were useless. And it is foolish. As it happens, I was taught Philopophy and Logic by Thom and have used his teachings every day of my working life (though some correspondents to the same letters column have frequently asserted that there has been a distinct absence of logic in some of my writings).
Thom’s letter marks a terrible trend in Australian universities. For a start, it has got to such a sorry stage that the Dean of the Faculty of Arts has to engage in what amounts to advertising for students. It is not quite the McArts degree, but governments have economically rationalised universities to the extent that courses which do not lead directly to a job qualification become unattractive.
It is not caused just by an obsession with jobs in a world of high unemployment. It is also caused by a climate of student-pays that encourages students to make sure they get “”value for money”, in the narrow, short-term sense. And it is a caused by government pressure on money-starved universities to get bums on seats, and the best way to do that is to invent all sorts of “”useful” vocation-oriented courses.
Some of the worse examples of vocation-based courses have been communications (sometimes journalism or media studies) and Japanese.
We now have thousands of wide-eyed BA (Communications) graduates forming hopelessly long queues outside newspapers and radio and television stations seeking jobs that just are not there. Worse, they have squandered their tertiary-education experience. At least the students of Japanese have learnt a language which is always a beneficial exercise, but the universities are now left with an over-capacity in Japanese because Japan is no longer economically miraculous as the corporate world wants granduates in something else.
The communications students are in a worse position. Communications, media studies and journalism are not a disciplines. Their study will not induce ciritical thinking in a way that the study of history, literature, philospohy, psychology, mathematics or any of the pure sciences. (Outraged Letters to the Editor from Communications students and lecturers may be sent to the address at the bottom of Page C2.)
In the absence of media jobs, these communications students would have been better equipped to find work elsewhere with a good degree in a timeless discipline.
Vocational courses age very quickly. Computer science moves much faster than the three years it takes to get through.
The extent of specialisation of university degrees these days is absurd. The University of Canberra has a Bachelor of Tourism, for heavens sake. Southern Cross has Multimedia. There are degrees in rehabilitation, social work, media and cultural studies, landscape, teaching/visual arts, urban and regional planning and so on. Most of these are not suited to the university method. They would either be better taught in short courses after a generalist degree and/or taught on the job.
There are exceptions. Universities have been teaching for the professions for centuries, notably law and medicine. But arguably these have sat in the tradition of learning for its own sake and learning a discipline rather than being slotted for a job.
Job-learning at university is the wrong approach. The corporate sector may think they are getting the state to train their people free, but it will not help the country economically in the long run. In the past 25 years, student numbers have doubled in Australia, but funding per head has not.
Universities have been deprived of money for generalist education.
A good generalist education teaches people to think in an adaptable way, so if the economy changes, the people can change, too. A good example is the recent experience of the ACT. Our central industry — the public service — was gutted in the same way that the removal of shipyards, mines and mills have hit other cities in Australia. But the ACT had a very high education rate, and a lot of that education was in broad arts, science and economics with strict vocational diet. The result has been a dramatic recovery in employment and a return once again to the lowest unemployment of any jurisdiction in Australia. The workforce was well-educated and flexible. Meanwhile in Tasmania and some cities in the industrial rust belt, unemployment goes up and stays up when the main industry goes.
The universities have also been deprived of money for pure research. Pure research is the seed of economic growth, and it cannot be channelled in expected ways. Further Australia is in severe danger of being cut out of the international research community in many fields because we are not doing enough to warrant a position in the greater international information and research exchange.
Corporate Australia imagines educational institutions and the government will do their job for them by providing detailed vocational training and applied research in the universities. But the universities are not doing those jobs as well as on-the-job training or specific applied research. The corporations only have to double up and the students have missed out on the generalist education which would make them more flexibly employable if the economy changes.
Governments are equally foolish expecting universities to pay their own way. All they are doing is selling training not education, and they are not well equipped to do that. Their teachers after neither top academics nor top practicitioners.
We are are not allocating the money or the responsibility the right way. Corporate Australia must take on a much greater role in vocational training and applied research and more government-funded effort must come from the universities in general education and pure research. Expecting the universities to do all four, while corporate Australia sits back, is a recipe for falling living standards and less fulfilling lives for Australians.