Obiter dicta by Professor Gavin Brown AO

National support

1 October 2004]]

As I write I am about to climb on a plane. This may be better than writing as one climbs off an international flight. The last time I did that, Honi Soit [[bold||reprinted a word-processed and re-worked version of my column with a view to proving that I take hallucinatory drugs. As Joe Lyons famously said of oysters, I have no need of such adventitious aids.

The present occasion combines alumni activities in London with a brief visit to Berlin. The latter event is the opening of a major Group of Eight initiative -– the new Australia Centre Europe contiguous with the embassy in Wallstrasse. The opening forum, restricted to 40 invited participants, will develop practical ideas for enhancing cooperation between research intensive Australian universities and European partners. These European partners include not only universities but also research organisations, governments and industry.

Among the aims of the Centre are commitments to strengthen the Australian national relationship with European countries through high quality educational, research and cultural activities and to serve the interests of all Australian universities by developing a strong presence for Australian education in Europe.

Others may be sceptical of the Group of Eight's altruism in this regard, but I believe that the presentation of Australian Higher Education as a cooperative (yet competitive) venture of institutions with clearly differentiated missions provides strength over the kind of overseas marketing wherein minimal guarantees of quality form the pitch.

There may, in fact, be some tension within the Group of Eight in Berlin because the Australian National University has just launched an advertising campaign to proclaim the success of its recent evaluation exercise where, unlike the standard AUQA process, it selected the auditors and determined the methodology. Unsurprisingly, ANU outperforms the average for the AVCC and for the Group of Eight. It would be a national disgrace if that were not the case!

Commentators have already attacked the methodology and the comparisons derived therefrom. It seems to me that it is more important to congratulate ANU on one significant fact. International experts of impeccable credentials and probity are confident that the University lies in the world's top 100 and even, plausibly, in the top 50.

To me this demonstrates that earmarked uncontested government funding (which ANU has enjoyed uniquely for many decades) can be put to good use in the national interest. I have never argued that this privilege should be removed -– rather that it should be extended.

The University of Sydney, which, I argue, is the leading research performer of Australia’s comprehensive universities, receives only 19 per cent of its annual budget in uncontested government funds. The ANU report notes that the gradual erosion of its uncontested block grant threatens its capacity to undertake long term research and, by extension, points to the perilous position of every other Australian university with major research aspirations.

It is a bittersweet pleasure for the University of Sydney to be identified as belonging to the ranks of the under-privileged.