From time to time, I am reminded of some ironic advice given to me decades ago by the Australian playwright, Jack Hibberd, who had a great ear for Australian idioms: “never give a cliché an even break”.
I wonder, then, just who advised Dr Brendan Nelson to call his important review Higher Education at the Crossroads?
Are the universities cars, trucks or live sheep carriers? Are the traffic lights all red or green, flashing intermittently or simply absent? Will there be a massive pile up, or will the vehicles have simply run out of fuel before they get there? Are the crossroads the intersection of the past and the future? And if nothing is done to permit a way forward, will we have destroyed the future? It’s time to move on.
The Nelson Review is of far-reaching consequence for Australia’s future and may well shape history’s evaluations of him. And, indeed, of Prime Minister John Howard, since more than anyone else, he is best placed to shape the nation’s future by his determinations of which of the necessary reforms will be politically possible.
It is to Brendan Nelson’s great credit that he has displayed intelligent and liberal open-mindedness, a willingness to contemplate major reform and a commitment to the principles of quality, diversity, merit and equity. And to the notion of a fair go. A “fair go” for an aspiring university student in Australia could be summed up as her or his being able, on merit, rather than simply a capacity to pay, to secure an appropriate place in a widely differentiated higher education system in which all forms of excellence are measured against national and international benchmarks, rather than asserted rhetorically.
Predictably enough, a good deal of the debate so far has been preoccupied with higher education funding: its sources, levels and modes of distribution. Some have identified the presence of a funding crisis, others have suggested that one is imminent. No-one is sanguine about the future. Many still nurture resentment against the Labor Government’s 1995 decision to restrict indexation of Commonwealth funding to a level far below either the CPI or wages growth. The cost of salary increases has become a major problem since then. Even more staff and students have resented the Coalition’s 1996 decision to ramp up the fees students pay through HECS while simultaneously reducing net Commonwealth outlays per student, changing fundamentally the balance between the public good and private benefit value of higher education. Most were dismayed when the Tampa incident displaced education and health as major issues in the last federal election, particularly since the Coalition’s important initiative, Backing Australia’s Ability had raised hopes for acknowledgement of the crucial link between higher education, research and innovation, wealth creation and social progress.
Nonetheless, it is worth asking how an oppressively regulated system of higher education, in which the fees charged bear little or no resemblance to the actual costs of degree programs and courses, can enable the universities to play their crucial role in shaping that knowledge-based future to which so many Australians aspire.
To an extent that might not have been imagined in England in 1943 when Churchill famously observed that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind”, or in Australia, when R G Menzies later emerged as a supporter of Australia’s universities (small in size and number though they were), the notion of completing secondary school, going on to a university and contemplating, if not life-long learning, at least one degree and some postgraduate study, now shapes the aspirations of many Australians.
For some, their aspirations are limited by a merely pragmatic, instrumentalist view of universities: a degree provides a meal ticket, a narrowly prescribed set of skills, a higher salary, on average, than non-graduates earn, and a powerful hedge against joblessness. For them, a simple, brief, two-dimensional test of supposedly generic graduate outcomes may sum up all a university may represent. No-one will benefit from such naivety. It affords no basis for thinking about the future. Increasingly, though, more intelligent and sophisticated ideas about the value of higher education have emerged, better attuned to the realities of a rapidly-evolving, knowledge-based future in a world that will become more competitive and challenging than ever before, one in which one set of skills won’t serve anyone for very long. One in which competitive advantage is based on intellectual infrastructure.
In such a context, it is interesting to speculate whether any leading player in Australia’s system of higher education would have enough confidence in the place of higher education among our national priorities to write a book about the role of the Australian university and call it, as Frank Rhodes did, about the role of the American university: The Creation of the Future?
The primary focus of his book is upon America’s 125 “research-intensive, comprehensive universities”, most closely approximated in Australia by the Group of Eight: Australia’s Leading Universities. And he both criticises and celebrates their achievements. He finds compelling reasons for optimism about their role in shaping America’s future and for justifying the high aspirations the leaders of the next generations of American citizens take with them when they enrol in and complete their degree programs.
And it is because they see so clearly the central role of universities and research in the creation of the future that they embrace the cultural practice of personal and philanthropic support for the universities so that their children may enjoy the same opportunities and benefits.
Rhodes, a distinguished geologist, currently President of the American Philosophical Society and one-time Chairman of the Board of an American philanthropic foundation that has given more money to research and higher education in Australia than any Australian individual or company in our history, was for eighteen years president of Cornell, one of the remarkable Ivy League of American Universities. From his highly informed perspective, Rhodes celebrates the diversity of the American system, the legitimate and different strengths of the two-year community colleges, the liberal arts colleges on the one hand as well as those of the great private and state funded major research universities on the other. As well he celebrates the rich and creative interactions with the wider community that this diversity makes possible. He draws the title of his book from Alfred North Whitehead’s famous Modes of Thought: “The task of the university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue”.
The defining characteristics of the Group of Eight (Go8) mirror those of the 125 research-intensive universities in the USA: they are the clear first choice of Australia’s most able students, offer the widest range of degree programs up to doctoral level, they provide the primary infrastructure for teaching and research in all of the high cost, high technology areas, they win 67% of the $329 million industry-related research income, they are responsible for maintaining almost two-thirds of Australia’s major libraries and they dominate the competition for research funding and research outcomes. And they are conspicuously successful in winning more national teaching awards than other universities. Finally, and crucially, they establish the vital nexus between teaching and research, especially in disciplines that impact upon the future. A nexus that, as is the case in England and America, is simply not feasible in all universities.
Yet in terms of funding per student, the Go8 universities fall dramatically short of the funding levels of comparable institutions in Canada, Korea, the UK, USA, Hong Kong and Japan. Indeed, even by comparison with comparable leading US state universities, the revenue per Go8 student, at $12,341 is about one third of their $35,162US. See Attachment 1.
What is an even more astonishing difference between the US 125 and the Australian Go8 is that penalties for research success are inflicted upon Australia’s research-intensive universities by our existing funding mechanisms. Examining that issue will be my main task today, even though I know that anyone who asks hard questions about the role of research in defining differences among Australian universities tends to get into hot water.
But before I do just that, I’d like to review briefly the present state of research and development funding in Australia to provide a cultural and budgetary context for some recommendations I intend to make.
Five days before Christmas in the year 2000, the Go8 released a paper entitled Research and Innovation: Australia’s Future. The timing couldn’t have been worse. It had no immediate impact upon a nation out shopping or packing up to go to the beach. But we’re learning. On 28 August this year, we completed an update of our 2000 paper in order to make a submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry into business commitment to R&D in Australia. A copy of our updated data is included. Attachment 2. Both papers showed the significant roles of the universities and government research agencies in the creation of a knowledge-based economy, and the relatively very weak performance of the business sector. Since our first Report, there has been an 18% increase in business R&D in 2000 and 2001. And there have been two years of additional funding from Backing Australia’s Ability initiatives.
Yet while there have been recent increases in Gross Expenditure on Research and Development and its components, as a proportion of the gross national product, GERD is significantly lower now than it was in 1996. Projections for 2002-3 suggest we’ll still be at levels existing a decade ago.
By comparison with other OECD members with whom we compete, the index of research intensivity shows us well behind North America, Scandinavia and most other Western European nations, as well as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. The good news is that we’re 0.01% ahead of Slovenia and 0.42% ahead of New Zealand. Thank God for the Kiwis.
Let’s get back to the Crossroads paper.
Many people were surprised that the research issue occupied so little space in the Ministerial Discussion paper that initiated the Nelson Review. It occupied one of the seven sentences in a fairly bland and conventional description of the “purposes of higher education”: “It (i.e. higher education) extols the value of research, both ‘curiosity-driven’ and ‘use-inspired’. At a pinch, I could infer a link between this statement and the last sentence which asserts that higher education ‘helps position Australia internationally’.
Later on, a few lines on research crop up in a discussion of institutional specialisation, including the honest but dispiriting generalisation: “publications output and citation rates reflect well on the quality of Australian researchers. However, investments in research capability (infrastructure and expertise) in North America and Europe and parts of Asia are now of a far greater scale. We risk being left behind, especially in the new areas of scientific discovery and technological application.”
Hardly inspirational stuff. Certainly not like the creation of the future. And while separate papers on teaching, governance, finance etc were released to progress the debate, no such paper on research appeared, despite the best endeavours of the Go8 and the Australian Research Council. Is discussing research akin to walking on eggshells?
Frank Rhodes showed no such timidity in The Creation of the Future in illustrating how research can transform economies and societies.
He cites two illustrations that I have used on other occasions – I mention this pedantically in the interests of plagiarism-free discourse - . One addresses the issue of the occasionally unpredictable, serendipitous benefits of basic research; the second raises a different, equally significant idea.
“There is a story told of Michael Faraday, perhaps the greatest experimental scientist of all time. Faraday had demonstrated his latest discovery, electromagnetic induction on which the dynamo depends, to Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and was asked what use it was. “As much use,” he is said to have replied, “as a newborn babe.” (There is also another version of this story in which Faraday is alleged to have replied, “Some day, sir, you may be able to tax it.”) Years later, another British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, remarked that Faraday’s invention had generated more wealth than the entire capital represented by the London Stock Exchange. There are, it has been said, no useless discoveries; there are only those whose usefulness has yet to be discovered.”
Rhodes’ and my second example illustrates dramatically the dynamic impact of research intensivity:
“But it is one thing to claim that all this research activity is generally useful; it is quite another thing to prove that it makes any impact. Does it all add up to produce any real economic benefit? Consider the impact of just one research university: MIT. A 1997 study by the Bank Boston Economics Department, the first to measure the job impact of a single research university, is based on an intensive study of MIT. It concludes, “If the companies founded by MIT graduates and faculty formed an independent nation, the revenues produced by the companies would make that nation the 24th largest economy in the world. The 4,000 MIT-related companies employ 1.1 million people and have annual world sales of $232 billion. That is roughly equal to a gross domestic product of $116 billion, which is a little less than the GDP of South Africa and more than the GDP of Thailand.
“Eighty per cent of the jobs in MIT-related firms are in manufacturing (compared to 16 per cent nationally) and a high percentage of products are exported . . . . The MIT-related companies have more than 8,500 plants in 50 states.”
On a less ambitious scale than MIT, the Go8 last month released a brochure, The University of Queensland’s astonishingly successful Scramjet project which recently achieved the first successful firing in history of a hyper-velocity engine that will revolutionise rocket and satellite technology and, perhaps, international travel. Funded primarily by the university, in pursuit of a policy of identifying strategic priorities in research and teaching and creating infrastructures for future funding bids from a variety of sources, and overlooked by state and federal funding bodies, HyShot not only beat NASA but is now being approached by take-over bids from the USA. Once again, Australia stands to lose research-based intellectual property, created by a research-intensive university.
The present research funding dilemma is open to three solutions. The first, proposed by ARC, would be gratuitously destructive of future research such as Hyshot since the operating or core grant would be so reduced as to make it impossible to fund the essential infrastructure.
The second, to do nothing, is to perpetuate an indefensible absurdity.
The third would be to add about $385million to the annual budget for universities, allocate it according to verifiable research performance criteria such as success in winning grants, patents, publications or the like. Research-strong universities would thus no longer be punished; non-research strong universities could continue to pursue agendas other than those with a major research component, but would still win support for their areas of significant research since they, too, would make bids in a competitive process. We would thus appropriately fund the present reality rather than perpetuate a damaging myth.
Other problems will persist but they do not result from the structural funding prejudice against research that I have focused upon. The cost of teaching infrastructure, like the maintenance of major research and teaching libraries is borne to a far greater extent by the Go8 than the other universities, primarily because they are the principal providers of high-tech and professionally accredited degrees, identified within Australia as well as internationally as indices of excellence in tertiary education.
On the other hand, the importance of the Backing Australia’s Ability should not be diminished. Nor the development by individual states, led by Peter Beattie’s inspiriting “Smart State” policy which is helping create a new and, to many, wholly unanticipated future for Queensland. Steve Bracks’s later, comparable initiatives are having a major impact in Victoria and other states are following. Moreover, levels of interinstitutional, interjurisdictional and intersectoral collaboration are improving rapidly. A future worth imagining is capable of being created. But it cannot prosper if research success is to be punished. I can leave no clearer message for Brendan Nelson or John Howard: carpe diem, seize the day.
Professor John Hay
Chair: The Group of Eight. Australia’s leading Universities
Vice-Chancellor. The University of Queensland
