The Sydney University I am retiring from this week is very different from the one I joined in 1979.
A time traveller arriving from 1979 would first notice the digital revolution transformation. Then only a small minority of students submitted typed work, and there was an army of secretaries for academic and administrative typing. Although we complain about the oppressive volume of emails, computerisation has brought huge gains in productivity and efficiency.
The second thing to astonish our time traveller is how much Sydney University has grown. In 1979 it had 17,345 students; in 2009, this had increased to 47,253.
The size of the student body makes even sillier the Howard government's obsession with abolishing student unions, the only aspect of universities that seemed to animate that government during its 11 years in power.
One benefit for a time traveller jumping straight from 1979 to 2010 is that she would not only have been spared the Howard government's ideological hostility to universities, but also the upheavals under John Dawkins in the Hawke government.
Dawkins wanted to end the binary system of tertiary education, and also to reduce the money going to the sector. It was desirable to end the old system where the differences between universities and colleges of advanced education and teachers' colleges were increasingly blurred.
But Dawkins wanted to do it all immediately and with no extra funding. His method was reform through creative destruction, the idea that change could only be achieved by breaking through existing logjams.
The number of universities almost doubled within a couple of years, and small stand-alone institutions were absorbed into larger ones.
The subsequent era of amalgamations and multi-campus institutions was tailor made for a new generation of opportunists. There was great scrambling for position. There was more competition, but often it lacked transparency and accountability, and the blurring of the quality of degrees from different institutions made it more, not less, difficult for students and employers to gauge the relative worth of institutional offerings. John Dawkins was better at breaking eggs than making omelets.
Dawkins's other innovation was to introduce HECS fees for students. This was done with the sleight of hand so beloved by the Hawke-Keating governments. It began with a tiny amount, with the government saying why get excited about such a small sum, and then it increased steadily and substantially over the following years.
The public justification of HECS is always in terms of equity - that university graduates earn more than non-graduates on average, and therefore should contribute to their own education. But its primary role has been to cover declining public investment. And declining government spending has been the most constant feature of the last several decades.
Government funding of tertiary education peaked in 1975 at 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product. By 2004 - despite the increased numbers of students - that proportion had almost halved, to 0.8 per cent.
Among 18 developed democracies, between 1995 and 2004 the international average was for governments to increase public funding of universities by almost one-third. Australia was the only one to cut its funding.
This leads to our time-traveller's nastiest surprise. Greatly increased class sizes and burgeoning staff-student ratios combine with the increased anonymity of ever larger institutions to threaten the human scale and sense of community that should characterise campus life.
Many essential characteristics remain the same. The university still has high-quality students; there is much excellent research and teaching being done. But if real public funding were still at its 1979 level, there would be much more. Systematically and substantially reducing public funding is not a formula for excellence.
Rod Tiffen was professor in government and international relations at the University of Sydney.
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7 comments
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- Commenter
- MJ
- Date and time
- March 18, 2010, 9:59AM
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- Commenter
- CK
- Date and time
- March 18, 2010, 12:47PM
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- Commenter
- turn the lights back on
- Location
- Sydney
- Date and time
- March 18, 2010, 4:29PM
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- Commenter
- JR
- Location
- Attending one of the new, dumbed down,multi campus universities
- Date and time
- March 18, 2010, 11:27PM
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- Commenter
- JayneM
- Location
- Sydney
- Date and time
- March 18, 2010, 8:24PM
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- Commenter
- kiwi33
- Date and time
- March 18, 2010, 7:44PM
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- Commenter
- University employee
- Location
- Sydney
- Date and time
- March 19, 2010, 2:25PM
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