A leading education adviser to both Liberal and Labor Governments has attacked the trend under Labor to amalgamation and centralised control of universities.
Professor Peter Karmel said, “”A reversal of recent trends is essential in the long term interests of Australia.”
He rejected the cult of bigness which had little merit for undergraduate teaching. He said the present system would “”steer universities towards a centrally determined set of values and priorities”.
Professor Karmel, chairman of the board of the Institute of Arts at ANU and former vice-chancellor of the ANU, has been on numerous government educational and economic advisory committees since the 1960s. He was giving a speech to a conference for student organisations interested in education policy in Melbourne a copy of which was made available last week.
He said governments had to subsidise higher education and its subsidy determined the overall size of higher education in the nation. He thought the Government’s assessment that enrolment in higher education had gone high enough was right. It was about 560,000 and now took in 35 to 40 per cent of each age cohort coming through (considering mature-age entry). TAFE and other post-secondary education had to be built up.
However, Professor Karmel attacked the changes under the former Minister for Education, John Dawkins, which culminated late last year in the passing of the Higher Education Funding Act. That Act provides that each university had to submit an educational profile to the Minister who would then divide the total funds made available as a lump by Parliament among the 34 universities. He could enforce the educational profile if necessary.
Professor Karmel said before the Dawkins era, the language of higher education used the term “”sector”. Now it used the word “”system”. It was more than a change of words. “”Sectors” meant a collection of independent institutions with common characteristics. “”System” meant a centrally organised and controlled system.
He cited enforced mergers, profile negotiations, money for programs with centrally set controls, rules for the way institutions governed themselves and a stream of policy papers from the Commonwealth as signs of the centralised system.
National priorities in a democracy changed. Politicians had short- or medium- term horizons affected by party considerations, so they were unsuited to setting specific determined priorities.
Professor Karmel thought it ironic this was happening at a time when the break-down of the command economies of Eastern Europe had proven that central planning was inefficient and unworkable.
Universities would achieve their purposes better by setting their own priorities within broad parameters. These were preserving, transmitting and extending knowledge, training highly skilled people and critically evaluating society.
“”A university can hardly be the conscience and critic of society if it is expected to behave as an arm of government policy,” he said.
The national system had promoted uniformity and had concentrated research in fewer larger organisations. However, the economies of scale for libraries and a critical mass of research staff, though important, did not mean that quality could not be achieved in smaller institutions.
Centrally determined “”quality” would concentrate on the measurable, but there were some indefinable and unmeasurable aspects of quality, notably in intellectual, literary and artistic skills “”which are the essence of universities”.
The Minister for Higher Education, Peter Baldwin, rejects criticism that the new arrangements reduce autonomy of universities. He says from 1994 universities would have control of their own capital funds.
He says the university vice-chancellors and the states have supported the changes.
Referring to an article a week ago criticising the changes, Mr Baldwin said, “”Only paranoia akin to the League of Rights could see anything sinister in recent changes to the Higher Education Funding Act.”