Australian University Accord inquiry can’t allow blank cheque to ‘deserving rich’

Greg Craven

Everyone knows at least one anti-social person, usually a Victorian. No right or wrong; unfeeling towards others; manipulative and remorseless: they are locked in cupboards at Christmas.

Anti-social organisations are less obvious, but welcome to Australia’s elitist universities. Their sole test of policy is self-interest; governments and students exist to be manoeuvred, and their record is studded with costly rent-seeking.

Just now, the tertiary buzzards flock mangily in the sky. The Universities Accord Inquiry is under way, and the only policy imperative for these mortarboard scavengers is money. Lots of it. In fact, all the money in higher education, and then some more.

The Accord Inquiry is a rare chance to gorge. If everything is on the table, the Group of Eight want to be squatting next to the casserole. Their problem is that the interim report of the inquiry, led by Professor Mary O’Kane, contains some challenging ideas.

Notably, it wants most to ensure participation in the university system, increase student numbers and assure good learning, teaching and university experience. To the tertiary aristocracy, participation is next to prostitution. Why have an elite institution if you have to admit plebs?

The best possible way to prevent pay this would be to charge your own astronomical fees. Unfortunately, despite frenzied urgings, no government was dumb enough to give the G8 this licence to print money.

‘With their well-heeled student populations, the sandy fossils offer equal opportunity between Mosman and Brighton.’

Next best has been argue you cannot do university without a stellar ATAR. That way, you can exclude peasants by dubiously manipulating huge notional entry scores for your own institution. while insulting lesser universities with lower ATARs.

This is most fun with courses like nursing and teaching which actually require a vocation as well as a number. The current shortage in teachers and nurses is down to dumb ministers thinking in sandstone. The idea that universities will be judged on the quality of experience, teaching and learning excites the vapours of a second-string Jane Austen heroine. Student experience within prestige universities is on par with reviews of Mongolian cattle trains. Other universities do well by unfairly taking teaching seriously.

As to equity, spare me. With their well-heeled student populations, the sandy fossils offer equal opportunity between Mosman and Brighton. Special recruitment drives for Indigenous or low socio-economic students can be engineered for bolshie ministers.

Naturally, the aristocrats of education did everything to prevent the opening-up of universities to hundreds of thousands of new students 15 years ago. If they had their way, your kid would never have got a spot.

Disappointingly for university rack renters, the interim report supports international students, but for cultural enrichment and intellectual diversity, not as cash cows.

Pity, because our elites will milk them dry, despite the grisly lesson of market collapse during Covid. Their argument is that the government just does not give them enough money. No amount of money would satisfy the Gang of Eight.

Just as non-U is the report’s emphasis on combining academic qualifications with skills, degrees with TAFE certificates. Yuk. The only person with a skill at U. Syd is the contract plumber. Science cannot be diluted by practicality.

Mary O’Kane and Co certainly support research, but want irritating things like proper measurement, not just a label saying, “Made in the Land of Eight”. The panel even vaguely suggests research one day might be funded at full cost – sandstone-speak for no limit – but there is no promise.

There are two areas, however, where the inquiry does dangerously fan predatory hopes.

The first is in canvassing the idea of a “teaching only” university. At present, all Australian universities must both teach and research. Like exercising intestinal functions and walking at the same time.

The university hegemons are desperate for institutions that only teach, because then they could devour the liberated research funding. In fact, they would prefer there were only a very small number of universities doing research – say, eight – so they could consume the whole research pavlova.

This also would eliminate the nasty problem that inferior universities often outperform sandstones in their special areas of research: like James Cook in all things tropical, ACU in philosophy, and Tasmania on the Antarctic.

But the real challenge for both sandstones and sandy concretes like Monash is that universities by definition do both teach and research, talk and think. Any institution that does not research is simply not a university.

As its students will find out. Pretend universities give pretend degrees with pretend prestige. Their graduates are a second-rate commodity and are valued accordingly.

Irony of ironies, even if elite universities did succeed in dry-gulching their brethren, they would never see an extra dollar. The largesse would be swallowed by the government to fund more worthy projects, like another nuclear submarine or six more referendums. Financially, our university geniuses are thick as solid blocks of redwood.

The second frolic of the review is keenness for a new, independent Tertiary Education Commission to oversee the sector free of government interference. This is an orgasmic dream of the sandstones, because they would populate it with “right-thinking” colleagues.

A real concern, though no sane minister would put the wolverines in charge of the chicken coop. Nor would they allow a commission to dole out funding. It will be the minister who gets sacked for financial disaster, so why put your fate in the hands of ravenous partisans?

The Australian university system is due for a review, and most of the inquiry’s ideas are worth considering. Just no blank cheques to the deserving rich.

Greg Craven is a constitutional lawyer and former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.