This week saw the interim release of the Australian Universities Accord. The accord aims to “drive lasting and transformative reform in Australia’s higher education system” – a worthy goal. The interim report reminds us of the fundamental public good of higher education and its transformative potential for individuals, communities and the nation. It applies a critical lens to the sector and suggests that the existing system lacks the “institutional resilience and metabolic rate required” to successfully tackle our national priorities.
The interim report calls for five priority actions to be immediately considered while further large-scale consultations are underway. The five priority actions are:
- Extend visible, local access to tertiary education by creating further Regional University Centres (RUCs) and establish a similar concept for suburban/metropolitan locations.
- Cease the 50% pass rule, given its poor equity impacts, and require increased reporting on student progress.
- Ensure that all First Nations students are eligible for a funded place at university by extending demand-driven funding to metropolitan First Nations students.
- Provide funding certainty through the extension of the Higher Education Continuity Guarantee into 2024 and 2025 to minimise the risk of unnecessary structural adjustment to the sector. Interim funding arrangements must prioritise the delivery of support for equity students to accelerate reform towards a high equity, high participation system.
- Through National Cabinet, immediately engage with state and territory governments and universities to improve university governance, particularly focusing on:
- universities being good employers
- student and staff safety
- membership of governing bodies, including ensuring additional involvement of people with expertise in the business of universities.
Personally, I am moderately happy with what I have seen so far about the Accord, especially since the majority of my university’s students are from regional and, most often, low-ses backgrounds. While my opinion is that it goes nowhere near far enough, I think it is a step, perhaps a glance, a hat tip, in the right direction. Taking a step back and reflecting on how the sector aligns with its core purpose is a useful exercise that can break through the crust of stagnant thinking that develops over time. I was also pleasantly surprised that one of the five priority action areas recognised the current employment conditions at Australian universities and noted an immediate need for change.
The report touches on the psychological well-being of students, staff, workloads, conditions, rigid workload arrangements, remuneration, wage theft and even the complex industrial agreements and government policy around funding arrangements. It acknowledges a need to address these issues if the sector is to attract and retain the highly-skilled workforce that is required now and into the future. Based on my observations over the last 17 years, I couldn’t agree more. However, as someone who sits in that uncomfortable, often unwelcome and almost always misunderstood space between education and technology in a university (we call it the 38th parallel), there are some intrinsically entangled challenges (dare I say sacred cows) that give rise to some cynicism about the future. Dragging the Australian Higher Education sector away from the corporate/commercial path it is on is not going to be easy.
Limited funding and increased demand have driven the pursuit of efficiency improvements across all parts of the typical university (not a bad thing in theory). However, the myopic pursuit of efficiency gains has, in many respects, come at the expense of effectiveness. We now have any number of departments, all clearly delineated by function, we have vast student administration systems, learning management systems, library systems, HR systems, payroll systems, project management systems, customer relationship management systems, timetabling and accreditation systems, we have large marketing departments that flood the airways with aspirational messaging, we have entire areas dedicated to policy development, we have student communication departments dedicated to the messaging to our students and so on, and so forth. All of this is aimed at or was justified by, improving efficiency.
We have all of this “stuff”, but we find ourselves with a tertiary education system that “values assessment over engagement, learning management over discovery, content over community and outcomes over epiphanies” (Morris & Stommel, 2018). We find ourselves with a tertiary education system that has become “economically rational” at the expense of its role as a vessel for public good (Hil, 2015), and lacks the systems, tools and methods to measure its value and quality in valid and reliable ways (Bain & Zundans-Fraser, 2017).
References
Bain, A., & Zundans-Fraser, L. (2017). The self-organizing university. Springer.
Hil, R. (2015). Selling Students Short: Why you won’t get the university education you deserve. Allen & Unwin.
Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2018). An urgency of teachers: The work of critical digital pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy.
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