2020 will see a world of instant communications and limitless information, a world made apparently smaller by technology. To communicate effectively using this new technology will, more than ever, require imagination, precise use of languages and well-honed skills of argumentation. To develop and use this vast resource productively will require high levels of skill in thought and creativity. To live meaningfully in this instant, virtual world will require skills in learning from and with others, in forming real relationships with real people, in comprehending humanity's past, and in contributing to human discourse. These time-honoured skills, inculcated by the study of the Humanities, will be as vital to students of tomorrow as of yesteryear, and equip them with a 2020 vision for taking on this smaller world.
This Review is explicitly about 'Higher Education'. It is, however, essential to grasp the cardinal fact that powerful scholarship -- broad, deep and sustained -- is a sine qua non for 'Higher' education. In all fields this requires the strenuous pursuit of research and research programs and necessitates, in turn, not just a firmly realistic level of financial, library and increasingly technical support, but also time aside from teaching, administration and community services. Moreover, time over a longer run than short-term regimes can provide.
If these central considerations are not at once proclaimed and effectively acted upon, there will be no quality 'Higher' education in Australia, merely an emaciated form of 'higher schooling'. Already in the unified system, the pressures of teaching large classes filled with undergraduates ill-prepared for university study, are turning our established universities into the tertiary schools we were promised would disappear. Scholarship is suffering and Higher Education with it.
The Humanities are fundamental to the quality and prosperity of Australia. The expansion of the universities since the Murray Report of 1957, and with that Australian learning and creativity, have transformed the intellectual life and international profile of this country. And the Humanities' ability to sharpen minds, to provide a broad base for further specialist or professional studies, to sustain traditions, to judge and evaluate, will remain of primary importance to our national future. But the Humanities have their very particular importance too. We Australians need to be richly informed about the development and continuing creativity of our own country; about our Aboriginal people; about our overseas heritages; our Asian and other neighbours; about language (in a society clearly suffering serious failings in literacy); and given the wide interest of so many Australians in the Arts, about these as well. But unless these disciplines are cherished and sustained, the present slide on the downward spiral presages incalculable harm. As an amnesiac loses himself from himself, so a society ignorant of its past and its traditions, its speculations and reflections, is lost and morally helpless. These are perils both President Clinton and (possibly soon-to-be Prime Minister) Blair have recognised in their own countries.
More Australians complete secondary schooling and enter universities than ever before, but our present educational curricula and philosophies are not succeeding in educating en masse a multi-cultural population. Too many students arrive at tertiary study unable to read basic first-year texts, let alone write independently about them. They are deficient not just in verbal literacy, but also in cultural literacy. School education has become narrowly functionalist and vocational: teachers are there to teach process not content; students will be 'empowered' by skills rather than by learning. In some states traditional Humanities have been rejected as too 'elitist', the cultural product of a white Anglo-Saxon ascendancy. The teaching of history, geography, literature and languages other than English has declined everywhere, but especially in Victoria and South Australia. There are entire regions in our capital cities where history and geography as well as physics, chemistry and advanced mathematics are scarcely taught at all. But universities are not the places to make good the deficiencies of schools, nor will foundation courses address the needs of those who do not enter higher education. The content of the school syllabus needs urgent review, not by educational consultants, but by the learned academies and thereby the scholarly and scientific communities they represent. We recommend that such a review should now be commenced.
The Humanities are among the most cost-effective academic disciplines. They require people and libraries, and limited technological support. Their most expensive research infrastructure needs are libraries, but those they share with all other disciplines in an institution or a community. The level of investment in people -- in sufficient teaching staff to provide effective face-to-face teaching -- determines the quality of the educational activity and its supporting intellectual life. Rising student-staff ratios are damaging both teaching and research in the Humanities. Good teaching cannot thrive without a lively research culture, but hard-pressed teachers cannot find the time and space for research and reflection that scholarship requires. Overwhelmingly in the Humanities, scholars need time and this they are attempting to fund via ARC Large grants, either through teaching relief or the use of research assistants and research associates. While there is a place for team research in many disciplines, this is being forced upon all Humanities scholars at the expense of individual work.
Similarly, the growing shortage of teaching positions is impelling senior academics to use the large grant research budget to create jobs for able young colleagues who once would have been teaching at this stage of their career. Both in paying for teaching relief and in providing research assistance and research associateships, the large grant research budget is being diverted from its designated purpose. The budgets of large grant applications have grown dramatically in the last three years, thereby reducing the number of possible recipients just at the time when the sector is calling for research funding to be spread more widely. This must damage the research culture and intellectual life of the Humanities in Australia.
We recommend the institution of competitive one and two-year exchange research fellowships, where established scholars may receive extended teaching relief and young scholars extended teaching experience on a Level-B salary.
Many scholars in the Humanities do not need large research grants: they need time and they need job security. If Humanities scholars can receive study leave and compete for short-term research fellowships, and the teaching load is more effectively shared, then research large grant expenditure can be reduced. This means that provided that institutions are still rewarded for research grants, large and small, the funding of exchange fellowships could be accommodated from the large grant budget and the equivalent of one Australian Research Council Fellowship.
Article 4 (g) of the Australian Academy of the Humanities' Royal Charter states that the Academy is 'to assist and promote the development of libraries in Australia in the field of the Humanities'. Intellectual infrastructure, particularly in the Humanities, is vitally dependent on the adequate provision of libraries for both advanced teaching and research. The situation of Australia's research libraries at present is a matter of the gravest concern. Not only is it clear that no coordinated approach to maintaining this infrastructure and to rationalising the available resources has yet been developed, but also an over-dependency on electronic sources of information at the expense of a balancing policy of collecting printed materials is rapidly emerging. The printed monograph remains the favoured technology for disseminating longer and more permanent texts. In this situation the National Library of Australia's unilateral decision to cut its collecting of overseas printed material by 60 per cent, before ensuring that other libraries can collect such material in its place, is particularly damaging. Even the 'Big Eight' university libraries have cut their acquisition of monographs in the last decade by up to 30 per cent in absolute terms, or 50 per cent in terms of acquisitions per student. These libraries, which are now planning for further cuts of up to 10 per cent per year for the foreseeable future, will, well before the year 2020, or even 2010, be unable to support world-class teaching and research. The gamble that assumes that printed monographs will cease to be primary sources of information for advanced teaching and research, and that the major international centres overseas will follow the pattern emerging in Australia is too great to contemplate.
The Academy accordingly recommends that a nation-wide review of library provision for research in Australia, with particular reference to the Humanities, be set up, to be conducted by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, in conjunction with the National Academies Forum. The AAH would act in collaboration with the National Library of Australia (NLA) and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), and other relevant bodies, to advise on a national coordinated program of library provision for advanced teaching and research infrastructure with special reference to the Humanities, until the long-term roles of printed and electronic sources of information respectively are progressively clarified.
The diversity of the unified system has brought new directions and creativity to the Humanities in Australia. The new universities formed from CAEs, former institutes of technology and teachers' colleges or established in under-privileged communities, have in many areas led the way in the Humanities and Social Science, drawing direct sustenance from the world on their doorstep. At the same time it has become impossible in all too many instances to sustain subjects of small enrolment, such as Italian or Thai. Similarly many of the new institutions are unable to provide libraries capable of sustaining their research life. Together with library and research resources, specialist teaching needs to be planned and coordinated at a state-wide or metropolitan level, over-riding the barriers and rivalries of individual institutions. These are situations where the existing market is not working. Accordingly: We recommend that non-formula funding on a competitive basis should be made available to ensure that there is in each case as appropriate basic provision for significant subjects of lower enrolment in the university system as a whole. Furthermore: To facilitate this strategic planning and spending, we recommend the establishment of state or metropolitan coordinating Humanities Centres. These should be located in the community, not on a campus, should act as communication nodes both face-to-face and electronically for students, researchers and the general public. They should be funded both by state and federal governments on the principle of 'top-slicing' (that is, non-formula funding in addition to the current funding) and be subject to five-year review. They should be charged with enhancing the research strengths of local collections and existing centres of excellence; with working collaboratively across the sector; organising regular seminars; facilitating cross-accreditation of Humanities subjects for both undergraduate and postgraduate students; and working with other state Humanities Centres and with the existing (and internationally acclaimed) Humanities Research Centre in Canberra.
First class scholarship and teaching are, by their nature, international. To maintain leading-edge research in the key disciplines and to train high quality graduates, it is essential for Australian academics to participate in the international scholarly community and to exchange ideas with colleagues in many other parts of the world, both through improved electronic networks and through face-to-face contact. Electronic communication is bringing academics ever closer to their international colleagues, but it must be emphasised that research in many areas of the Humanities will remain dependent on field-work and archival research undertaken overseas.
Over the next two decades, Australian universities will continue to internationalise provided that our academic standards remain high and our courses attractive. Similarly our students will be undertaking more of their higher education overseas, but that will become a brain-drain if we do not remain intellectually competitive. In other words, Australian universities will only attract international students if the quality of higher education is upheld. Our schools are now performing below the standard of those of many Asian countries, and if that eventually translates into our university performance, then we will not remain in the international arena as an equal player. We will become a net importer of educational product rather than an exporter.
In March 1997, Dr R. Kersten, Director of Sydney University's Research Institute for Asia and the Pacific, released the results of a study showing that directors of Asia-focused businesses "put a great deal of emphasis on the importance of ... knowledge of other cultures, ... and foreign languages -- so-called cross-cultural skills" (Financial Review, 3 Mar 97, p. 1, 4). The Humanities, primarily at the Higher Education level, provide Asian studies and cross-cultural skills. Further "Asia skills are global skills -- if you want to go global, go Asian." In that Australia is focusing more and more on its geographical neighbours, keys to the future business prospects of Australia reside in the training, skills, and knowledge that tertiary level Humanities can provide.
Australia requires cross-cultural and global skills not only for conducting business overseas, but also for supporting its tourism industry, its diplomatic corps and its defence forces. The economy is based on knowledge and that is based on culture. While culture is not limited to the realm of higher education, deeper understanding of our own culture as well as the cultures of other countries is a crucial function of higher education. Bringing out the best in Australia requires a strong, healthy higher education sector supported and encouraged by government.
The recent OECD Report, Thematic Review of the First Years of Tertiary Education Australia, explicitly notes that Commonwealth funding is an important factor in the meeting of university goals:
Increasingly, this international role is achieving a focus in the Asia-Pacific region in addition to the traditional links mainly with the United Kingdom and North America. With the substantial increases in overall resources that have been achieved through the Commonwealth funding policies, the amalgamations, and their own capacity to earn often quite substantial sums through the sale of services, the universities at the time of the review visit seemed to be well placed to rise to the challenges they have been set and are setting for themselves.
Senator Vanstone has summed up efficiently the role that the government should play in and its commitment to ensuring a strong, effective and relevant Higher Education sector equipped to meet the challenges of changing demands. In her speech on 22 January 1997 to delegates at the 15th meeting of the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation Human Resources Development Working Group in Sydney, she stated:
Our commitment to bringing out the best in Australia's workforce can be seen in the far
reaching policy initiatives of this Government. We have:
We all know the benefits this will bring. The Government is making sure Australia is ready for the challenge.
Thankfully, our Federal government has shunned the folly the British Department for Education and Employment perpetrates, "there is a limit to the number of extra graduates the economy can absorb" (The Guardian, 6 Feb 97, p. 1). The notion of `extra' does not apply. There are not 'graduate jobs' and other jobs. Higher education is a quality of life issue.
If Australia is to keep its hard-won international reputation in scholarship and teaching, it must continue to look beyond merely what's good for meeting our own needs. The country must look outwards and that may mean undertaking teaching and research that may not be precisely tailored to Australia's current economic interests. We have to build connections and exchanges with nations both in our region and right around the world, and we should draw on and enhance the linguistic and cultural talents of our extraordinary mix of peoples to do that. This engagement both international and local should embrace the wider community and the private sector, as well as the universities and their associated institutions. The Humanities thrive on being engaged with the world, with individuals and with societies, for their subject is the human -- what that means now, has meant in the past, and may mean in the future.