Obiter dicta by Professor Gavin Brown AO
Endangered species
22 May 1997
In 1866 there was at least one smart bald-headed woodshrike in Sumatra. Odoardo Beccari wrote:
“I came across a small flock, some five or six specimens, of a beautiful bird which I had not previously seen. Having shot one of them, the others showed no fright and I was thus able to secure four specimens one after the other”.
We could perhaps congratulate ourselves on the progress of civilisation, for that mind-set is now untenable - so naively arrogant that it almost possesses a quaint charm. Sadly, a more realistic response is to accept the story as a reminder of our innate capacity for callous self-absorption.
The more imaginative may identify with the shrikes. Setting off, as I write, for an Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee meeting I am inclined to speculate that the birds held down each other’s feet.
No less a commentator than Grahame McCulloch, General Secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union, argues that a strategy for higher education needs to include, inter alia, “within individual national university and college systems, acceptance of greater differentiation of function and mission between institutions. While this may be unpopular with many union members and lower level individual institutions, it is an important defence against market impulses. Not all universities and colleges can be funded for the full range of teaching and research activities, and there will be a further concentration of scarce research resources. If unions and universities do not wish the market to be the mechanism for rationing access to scarce resources, we must embrace a planned approach.”
I accept this as a valid analysis and believe that some of the ‘noisome rhetoric’ in favour of wholesome deregulation which has so disturbed some of my vice-chancellor colleagues has been provoked by the excessive rigidity and flatness of what is presently in place.
I am a pluralist in that I believe that some element of student choice providing stimulation keeps the system honest and on its toes while I accept that income must be socialised in order to protect important disciplines where market viability makes no sense. Interestingly, this still leaves McCulloch with some common ground, for he notes that “Unions and institutions must look at State funding models which enable institutions to be funded, at least in part, on the basis of student demand and enrolment preferences.”
No doubt we differ over another pluralist view of mine. To my mind, upfront fees, though powerfully symbolic, act as something of a distracter from the key issue which is the combination of public and private subsidy for higher education.
Believing that we must urge upon government the strongest public good arguments, I nevertheless argue that university income should be supplemented from private sources. This has, of course, been a fait accompli for several years as regards overseas students and postgraduate coursework programs. Others argue that all such measures encourage government to evade its responsibilities, while I am prepared to face the risk in order to increase overall access and quality.