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Transcript of Speech
TRANSCRIPT OF THE HON DR BRENDAN NELSON MP
LAUNCH OF STRIVING FOR QUALITY
(NEW GENERATION UNIVERSITIES CONFERENCE
LILIANFELS, BLUE MOUNTAINS)
21 June, 2002
It’s a great privilege for me to be here . Not only because of
the importance of higher education and my responsibilities but also
because of the significance that your universities have, and are
playing and (inaudible) that you’re playing in the economic and
social development of Australia. I’d also like to say from the
outset, for those of you who weren’t there – I think it was about 3
months ago, I got on a plane and ducked down to Melbourne to speak
at a dinner for the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee and I said
with one or two exceptions, all were there. I said at the time that
I’d been told when I came into the portfolio by someone from the
media, that Vice Chancellors were a particularly difficult group
with which to deal, and there were some rather descriptive terms
that were used to describe the Vice Chancellors and I was going to
have all kinds of troubles and so on and so forth and there the
person stopped and in reflection said, oh but you have come from the
Australian Medical Association. In a sense, you’ve got a strength –
all of you who commit your life to higher education, as with my
medical colleagues, in a sense you’re all intelligent and highly
educated and (inaudible) individualistic and I don’t think you
should ever stop being that way.
But in the seven months that I’ve had the privilege to be the
Minister, I have really enjoyed my working relationship with you,
and I’ve appreciated the suggestions, the constructive criticism,
the way in which all of you individually and collectively have
handled yourselves, and most importantly – on behalf of the 19.5
million Australians who aren’t here – thank you so much for engaging
so earnestly in a debate and a discussion in a serious policy sense
about our future.
It’s interesting that we’ve got post 1986’ers, we’ve got the
Group of Eight, we’ve got regional universities and Jan advised me
when I went to the University of Western Sydney, that it would see
itself as a regional university. Some institutions that are
described as equity institutions, and already in a sense each of you
have (inaudible) the technological group of course, you’ve thought
to differentiate yourselves into groupings, and in a voluntary sense
and I think as Deryck said on your behalf earlier in the week, we
are still running a one size fits all model of funding and then
there’s policy framework for Australia’s 38 publicly funded
universities. And with that I think is emerging some general
agreement that as high a standard as we’ve got Australian higher
education, but if we’re thinking about our future, not just where
Australian universities will be for the rest of this year, and
indeed next year – but what are they going to be like 10 years from
now, or 20 years from now, long after we respectively have moved on
from our current positions. We’ve got to seriously entertain some
policy reform now.
In 1939, during his first address as the Prime Minister of
Australia, Sir Robert Menzies said to the Canberra University
College, in an address and part of the place of the university in
the modern community, laid out seven ideals of a true university. He
nominated the core features of university being firstly a place of
culture and of learning, he said it’s civilised and civilising
things; secondly a training ground for
professions; thirdly that mutuality should exist between theory
and practice; they should leave he said, a place of research, of
objectivity and unclouded minds; fifthly a trainer of character, its
graduates, Robert Menzies said, should enrich the entire community;
they should be custodians of intellectual freedom; and finally they
should also be a training ground for leaders.
If you think that was 1939 and you think that in your lifetime,
our nations inspiration and aspirations for its institutions of
higher learning really shouldn’t have changed a great deal at all.
But, perhaps to the Menzies ideals can be added the need for
universities to enrich our nations cultural and economic life. In
the era of Australian mass higher education system we also need
universities to enable students to acquire knowledge and skills that
are relevant to employers as much as they are to society generally,
and irrespective of their circumstances Australians need to be able
to both find and fulfil their own potential facilitated by
universities offering teaching of the highest quality which is
deeply rooted in both scholarship and research. Australian higher
education, as our overseas visitors I’m sure will attest, enjoy a
high reputation – not only because of its institutions, but a
distribution throughout the country and the support that they draw
from the community of this country. But especially because of those
who teach within it. (inaudible) those who commit their lives to
teaching, comprising not so much knowledge, but the art of and the
thirst for learning to make a good university a great one.
Excellence in teaching, which can transcend (and I think
translates) into an outstanding ability to transform the lives of
students – excellence in teaching should be recognised and it should
be rewarded in all kinds of ways, and neither tolerance of
mediocrity or indifference to excellence should find a home in any
university. (Inaudible) a teacher effects eternity, we can never
tell where his influence stops, and each day thousands of Australian
academics commit themselves to unlocking the potential of their
students and in doing so, have an enormous, and indeed an
incalculable impact on the future.
But quality needs to be identified, it needs to be recognised and
it needs to be rewarded. It should be at the centre of policy
formulation and the review process which will lead to reform which I
am determined to drive we’ll have at the centre of a (inaudible) on
policy, a reform that is enduring (inaudible) we are determined not
to sit on our laurels, but to do everything we can to drive that
even further.
In contemplating the future and the critically important role of
universities and emergence of knowledge based industry, ways in
which teaching is delivered are changing and you, of course, know
that much better than I, so too are the ways in which students learn
and their reasonable expectations of the experience of learning is
also changing. The amalgamation of the former College of Advance
Education and the universities in 1989 suddenly builds an
expectation of changing roles, and the (inaudible) that has involved
research both well and enthusiastically.
The standouts include those engaged in research but focussed on
key economic and social priorities of the community in which they
are based. Often, this has been the case at Charles Sturt
University, or James Cook University, they are also critically
important for the kind of research that’s been undertaken in
(inaudible). But the question needs to be asked and it needs to be
the basis, as to whether every university should strive in the
quantum and type of research that it undertakes to be the same as
every other university. The questions will emerge, and as many
others, from the document which I’d like to release this evening,
which is the second of the series of discussion papers to inform
review of higher education is a document which focuses on quality,
on quality of teaching, quality of scholarship, and quality of
research. It presents a variety of information which will challenge
the people of not just those who work for Australian universities,
but prospective students, their families, and most importantly the
communities from which they derive. I ask the question of you, of
all Australians is; can we not award and celebrate teaching and
scholarship and excellence and teaching and scholarship, with the
same enthusiasm that we do research?
Can we encourage universities to specialise in that which they
choose, being responsive to the needs of students as the first
priority? Is it essential that the research that informs the
teaching in any particular institution actually occurred in the
institution in which that particular (inaudible) is being taught? I
don’t know the answer to that, I think it’s an important question,
and of course research is a part of defining a modern university, as
is teaching and is scholarship, but I think we need to focus
especially on whether we can help universities that have an
outstanding reputation for teaching and scholarship, for which they
excel which is considered to be as outstanding as the reputation for
another institution for a different kind of research for example. If
Australian universities are to define future, it’s essential I think
that we be liberal in defining the balance of the key definition
roles that they undertake and each should differentiate themselves
from the others and that difference should be the strength of the
system. As I said earlier the bedrock of which should be quality.
The paper that I’m releasing this evening is entitled Striving
for Quality and it highlights not only new and remarkable
achievements, and that is your academics and those who teach within
your institutions, but it recognises the significant shift in the
context of teaching and learning in higher education that has
occurred over the years. It looks at the patterns of enrolment and
the engagement in higher education and how they’ve changed, the use
of information communication technology and how (inaudible)
increased, and we’re much more focussed of course on
internationalisation and that’s reflected (of course) by the nature
of the audience that we have here this evening. The paper is
intended to stimulate debate and about the variety of issues
relating to quality, as I said in teaching, in leading and in
scholarship including evaluating and monitoring academic service,
professional development and teaching and employability and graduate
schemes, online learning and the valuing and the rewarding of good
teaching. I think often, a lot of parents about to go to this I
suspect, your children will be looking for a university, how do they
decide what is a good university to which they should go, and I
think as with schools, I think mistakenly some people make a
decision on a school based on the size of the sandstone out the
front and the length of the drive up to the school, and I would
think that if we are thinking about the decisions that people make
about what sort of institutions they’re going to, and if we can
develop out of our reform program models for quality which are
measurable and which can be articulated to Australians in terms that
they understand, I would think that the regional and the so called
equity of universities will be very, very much, in fact I suspect,
even more highly competitive than they already are. At the moment
universities are often chosen by prospective students based on the
reputation that they enjoy in the community, their geographic
location, the variety of courses that might be offered, and also of
course, the affordability in or around a particular university. The
paper canvasses a range of issues, how best to manage and enhance
the status and quality of teachings (inaudible) of higher education,
scope for further enhancement of lifting the quality assurance
framework. In the context of specialisation, can responsiveness to
the needs of students be the first priority and what is the role of
teaching and advancement in and academic career, should academics be
both researchers and teachers for the whole of their career. For
example you’ll find in the paper that in the year 2000, we had
around 37,000 full time equivalent academics at Australian
universities, some 19,000 published a paper that year and 9,500
generated research revenue. So almost a half in that year were not
publishing a paper, so I think (inaudible) should involve a
definition of universities in Australia which enables us to maximise
diversification, certainly to enable specialisation and as I say
place a great emphasis, as much an emphasis on teaching alone as we
do on research. In the end, as the Minister responsible for the $6.4
billion of public funds which will be invested in your universities
this year I need to be able to say on behalf of parents and
prospective students that when they go to a university that teaching
and the quality of teaching and the emphasis on teaching is as
important, in some cases it’s even more important perhaps in some
universities than the nature and the extent of research which has
been undertaken in that institution. This notion that has evolved as
the quality of the university or the quality of an academic employed
in a university will be determined largely by the amount of research
that they do, the research revenues they bring in the institution,
the number of papers that they publish, I think is something that
needs to be very much open for public debate and something that
certainly will be out the other end of the reform process.
Just in finishing, I’d just like to say to you that this is very
much an open process, I had certainly not formulated by no means any
final ideas about the nature and the extent of reforms of Australian
higher education. I do, very much, want it to be transformational.
It’s very much an open process, there’s no fixed, final outcome that
has been predetermined. It’s obvious that the status quo is not a
responsible option for our country, and there’s been some thinking
about how universities are going to drive the development of this
nation. This is the second of a series of discussion papers, the
first as you know was a general one that covered all the issues,
this one is quality of learning and scholarship in particular. We’ll
have a paper on the TAFE/higher education interface, we’ll also have
another on governance and we’ll have another on financing. Carolyn
Allport and the National Tertiary Education Union made an excellent
suggestion and I’ve taken it up and will be producing a monograph
specifically on Indigenous participation in Australian higher
education, and exactly what is the status quo, what are the
problems, where have we got attrition rates, how can we improve
them.
The other suggestion which Millicent Pool actually put, without
realising it I think, at the meeting that I attended with the Vice
Chancellors about a month ago and what we’ll be doing in the
financing paper is including in that an analysis of the relationship
and the extent of collaboration between research institutes and
Australian universities. Because I think that one of the things that
we should certainly be looking at, especially in the regions is a
much closer relationship between stand alone research organisations
– CSIRO for example – and Australian universities, and I’ll also be
driving that.
I’ve also asked the Productivity Commission to specifically look
at the way in which universities are funded and administered in
other countries to which we would which to compare ourselves. How
are funds raised? What’s the public/private mix? What is the level
and nature of student contributions? How are resources administered
within those universities? As you know, we’ve established a
Reference Group, and I appreciate Jan and Denise and others who are
here who are participating in that. The other thing is I read the
press clippings every day, and I saw Professor Kerry Cox was quoted
in the Melbourne Age after Deryck (on your behalf) had released the
AVCC submission paper, and my admiration for not only he, but all of
you has substantially increased. He said it was put to him that the
University of Ballarat might not necessarily agree with all of the
proposals that were put by the Vice Chancellors, and Professor Cox
said in response to this, he said "Look, I’m not prepared to white
ant every policy idea because it may not suit the nature of my
university, because if I did, I would undermine reform of the entire
Australian university system." And I think that’s the way that all
of us should be thinking about this. We are Australians, it doesn’t
matter where we live or whatever our policy. Australian higher
education, as John Rickard knows I went to the Tweed Heads campus at
Southern Cross University to open it, I described university as
being the railway lines, the rail infrastructure for the 21st
century, and that’s what they are to our country. And it’s quite
obvious that the debate is not just about money, of course money is
important and where that money comes from, but the debate is as much
about defining universities (inaudible) for people to go, private
sector investment, commercialising intellectual property,
specialisation, quality and emphasis on learning and teaching which
is as great as that on research. Whatever else comes out of this
reform process, I can assure you, that it will be most certainly
about being able to provide even more opportunities for Australians
who perhaps are currently being denied this, and the cruel irony in
some of the things I’ve said to my fellow critics in this debate
about higher education is that if you want to keep low income
Australians out of Australian universities, then just maintain the
status quo, because the single most important thing that we have to
do is to seriously consider as we will the Australian Vice
Chancellors Committee recommendations, and all of the submissions
that come to us, and do so in a dispassionate, I’d suggest a
non-partisan and unemotional form, because it is about our future.
It’s as Thomas Jefferson says – "Education is the defence of the
nation" and this will be our defence against prejudicial fear of
things we don’t always understand or want, which of course is the
biggest threat to a coherent society. So thank you very much for
having me. Enjoy the rest of your evening.
[ends]
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