Bulletin

Issue: March 2005

Comment

Risks for our education system at home and abroad

The Vice-Chancellors of, and more than 100 senior officers from, Australia’s Innovative Research Universities network, IRU-A, held their inaugural meeting at La Trobe University during February.

With research performance and innovation as their key identifying characteristics, the IRU-A’s six internationally recognised, student-focused and research-intensive universities cover five states: Flinders, Griffith, La Trobe, Macquarie, Murdoch and Newcastle. Including more than 140,000 students and 13,000 staff, these universities were established during the 1960s and 70s as research-driven universities with comprehensive disciplinary coverage, strong commitment to innovation and inter-disciplinary focus.

Among guests at the meeting were the new CEO of the Australian Research Council, Professor Peter Hoj, and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Professor David Eastwood who was the international guest speaker. La Trobe University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Michael Osborne, opened the meeting. In this modified text of his address, he warns that increased polarisation between teaching and research universities in Australia, and declining investment generally, could pose risks for our education system at home and abroad.

The proposition is now widespread that, in the near future, the Government will move to divide universities into two distinct groups – on the one hand those that engage in both teaching and research, on the other those whose primary, if not exclusive, role will be in teaching and learning.

This is a dangerous dichotomy in that, internationally, research is surely an intrinsic and automatic attribute of a genuine university. It may also prove to be an exceedingly foolhardy division for Australia to make generally, unless there is a radical change from the currently narrow evaluation of research performance and achievement largely on the basis of the amount of funding a university receives from the ARC and the NHMRC. The use of such narrow criteria could mean that some universities in the IRU-A group, despite their very strong showing in independent evaluations of the world’s leading universities and despite their acknowledged research strength in international reviews, might see their status in Australia imperilled.

Of course, winning public funds through competition is an important criterion for research capacity, but it is not the only one and, as should be obvious, the amount of funding attracted relates very much to the kind of research undertaken. A university strong in Humanities and Social Sciences but lacking a Medical Faculty, for example, would almost certainly not elicit the level of funding attracted by a long established university with a Medical School – but that does not necessarily, or even probably, mean that the former is an ‘inferior’ research performer. Indeed, one of the great misperceptions of the day is that whole institutions rather than particular entities within them can be characterised as possessing research capacity and quality. In reality, no institution in Australia (and probably few, if any, in the world) can claim research strengths across all fields of study.

Professor Osborne: drawing a line between teaching and research creates a dangerous dichotomy.

A requisite for any plausible system of evaluating research strength is, as in (say) Britain, a process of expert peer review subject by subject. Account needs to be taken not just of attraction of funds, but of several other qualitative indicators such as the number of academicians, the presence of active Research and Development Parks and Research Centres, the level of expenditure on library facilities, the strength of citation indices, and a record of publications. (The last are currently acknowledged in Australia, but at ridiculously low level and without critical evaluation by peer review, meaning that quantity counts rather more than quality.) A comprehensive exercise, providing genuinely expert assessment, subject by subject, must be the indispensable feature of any convincing evaluation of research capacity. I have no hesitation in asserting that all IRU-A members, indeed all universities professing research strengths, would warmly welcome this kind of exercise.

It is instructive to consider the evaluation of the top 100 universities in the British Research Assessment Exercise [RAE] system. A striking feature is that the top 10 universities comprise a mixture of old and new institutions. Still more striking is the strong performance of many newer universities in the research arena as assessed by peer review. Purely for illustrative purposes I reproduce here the most recent data for three large and long established universities in Britain (Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds) and three newer universities (Warwick, York, Lancaster – the last two founded in the 1960s synchronously with La Trobe University):

It is possible that such a comprehensive analysis would produce similar results in Australia. Indeed, the data provided by at least two of the recent international surveys (the British and the Swiss) indicated that, in terms of research citations, some IRU-A universities out-scored some of the so-called GO8 institutions whose research prestige in Australia, whilst incontrovertible, is certainly magnified by undue reliance on the simple criterion of attracting research income.

Such independent data are significant, and they certainly render risible the frequently voiced apprehension that research funding is in danger of being spread too thinly. I would suggest that the real danger is that funding may be accorded too thickly and uncritically to too few so that newer institutions may be squeezed out, despite their manifest capacity and excellence in many
fields of research.

In the competitive world in which we live, we cannot afford to restrict to a tiny number the universities to be recognised as research-based. The crucial challenge is to increase that number and to support all those that demonstrate capacity and excellence.

We also need to accept that genuine research excellence is unlikely to be evidenced across a whole institution, as opposed to parts of it, and that recognition (and support) should be afforded to research productive elements, not uncritically to whole institutions.

Australia has an outstanding record for higher education internationally – hence its capacity to attract international students – but we cannot afford complacency. In particular, we need to reverse two trends that, if not arrested, will lead to decline. First, urgent action is required to ameliorate student/staff ratios in Australian Universities. Currently they are in excess of 21:1, with obvious implications for quality education. In Britain, by contrast, only one of the top twenty universities has a ratio above 16:1, and most are considerably lower. This is a damning statistic.

Secondly, Australia is now beginning to lag in investment in its universities in contrast to sundry Asian neighbours. How long before our declining facilities reach a point where our universities are no longer attractive to international students, on whose recruitment most now have a serious dependence? How long, indeed, before better endowed universities in Asia not only compete for international students but act as a magnet for Australian students? And how long before that starts to have an impact upon the research performance of Australian universities?