Crunch time for our universities

Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge has asked for good ideas on how to boost collaboration between universities and business. “We want our high-quality research to better translate into the breakthrough products, new businesses and ideas we need to grow our economy and improve our society,” Mr Tudge said last Friday in his first major speech on higher education. His department’s consultation paper points out that Australia lags internationally in commercialisation of research, campus start-up companies and innovative projects that draw together university researchers and corporate staff.

None of this comes as a surprise. What’s new are the threats — and opportunities — confronting our universities. The complacency of universities about their over-reliance on fees from international students has been shaken by COVID-19 and the deep diplomatic chill with China. Huge public debt and the need not to burden the private sector-led recovery after the pandemic mean governments cannot and should not plug the hole in higher education finances. The sector has long had a weak grasp on political reality, but a new assertiveness from university chancellors, many with strong corporate backgrounds, also may help create conditions for some fresh thinking about the path ahead.

Universities have been fixated with research of the kind that bumps them up the international rankings, which in turn attracts the fee-paying students from overseas who subsidise the costs of that research. In some cases the result truly is world-class research, but it’s by no means always clear that the work rewarded by rankings is of high quality, let alone utility. There is lively debate about the gaming of university league tables, the failures of peer review, academic fraud and the inability to replicate key findings.

This has to be kept in mind when universities respond to Mr Tudge with their familiar complaint that research never gets sufficient support come budget night. Their argument is that unless research is properly funded in the first place, there won’t be much to commercialise. They make the legitimate point that in promoting applied research, we shouldn’t lose sight of the inherent value and often unpredictably useful nature of basic, curiosity-driven research.

But something has to give. We have too many universities all posing as comprehensive research powerhouses. There are pockets of excellence scattered across research fields and institutions. Strategic rationalisation, not simply crude mergers, is long overdue. With the right policy and incentives, in the next decade there could be a reconfiguration with competing, more specialised university models — some heavily committed as industry hubs, some teaching-focused institutions — and a more rigorous curation of basic research alongside more successful commercialisation. Australia has some standout areas such as health and medical research, earth sciences, marine science and solar power engineering. We need a clearer delineation between strategic strengths, sovereign capabilities and areas of mediocre quality and less significance where research funding can be diverted.

The social sciences and humanities need close attention. They are still home to some first-rate scholarship but the rise of “grievance studies”, reducing complex societies to crude power struggles between identity tribes, has corrupted standards and made higher education a source of cultural conflict, not social remedies. Universities are in denial about this, but the government should consider better uses for the funding consumed by low-value activist research, and offer incentives for liberal arts programs.

When it comes to commercialisation, it’s true the universities are not alone in having to do better. Australia’s private research and development is weak, and that’s unlikely to be entirely because of unreceptive universities. Mr Tudge’s expert panel will need to think about intellectual property law and the tax system, as well as measures to help develop research ideas to the stage where the commercial world can take over. None of this is easy, and it will require clever policy, effective incentives and patience at a time of distracted government.