Familiar bugbears irk University of Melbourne’s departing Glyn Davis

Glyn Davis is still making the same points about the higher education system he made long ago.

University of Melbourne’s Glyn Davis has long maintained that certain structural problems hold back Australia’s tertiary education sector. Picture: Stuart McEvoy.

As he prepares to step down after nearly 15 years in the spotlight as vice-chancellor of Australia’s most prestigious university, Glyn Davis is still making the same points about the higher education system he made long ago.

Our universities are too ­uniform, Davis says.

We have the largest, on ­average, universities in the world measured by student numbers, and this is an outcome that ­nobody planned or argued for.

We don’t have the desirable, “student-centric” public system that ­notably exists in California, where students can easily move from community colleges, with their complete but lower level qualifications, through to high level ­research universities.

Davis still backs fundamental reform of the higher education system. Speaking to The Australian as he enters his last weeks as the University of Melbourne’s vice-chancellor, he says governments in Australia need to ask the right questions and heed the lessons that have been learned.

We have to start with basic principles, he says: “Ask what is the purpose of a university. Ask what principles should apply.”

He would like to see the ideal system but the path he imagines doesn’t look easy. He acknowledges there are difficult questions to be resolved.

Will courses be funded by the government at their real cost so universities don’t need to use a complex system of internal cross-subsidies to stay afloat and so smaller specialist universities will be viable? And who will get access to ­university education? Will it be universal or will there be a rationing mechanism?

Policymakers will also have to look at how private providers are brought into the ­system.

“We need the public space to have this discussion carefully and in a considered way, and arrive at a set of rules that command enough bipartisan support that we can implement them.”

Ideally universities should be able to design their strategy around a government policy with the confidence that the policy settings will not change again in a hurry, he believes.

The problem is that our higher education funding system “swings in pretty spectacular ways”, Davis says.

As outlined in his book The Australian Idea of a University, published last year, the reforms Davis backs include a single post-school education sector that delivers to students something like the Californian experience.

He also backs funding each course according to its cost, and there should be, Davis believes, new public higher education institutions that are not required to conduct research, as universities must do at the moment.

Finally, there needs to be a body that is set at a distance from government, a tertiary education commission, to set the relative rates of funding for courses and offer more stability in policy than universities now enjoy.

Davis laments that Australia seems unable to achieve even straightforward changes that would offer more diversity for ­students.

Asian countries are starting to do it better. Lingnan University in Hong Kong, for example, is a small public liberal arts college. The government has decided it wants such an institution and told it: “That’s your mission, we don’t want you to morph over time into being a big, comprehensive institution,” Davis says.

“Importantly, they are given the funding to pursue their mission. They’ve produced the first liberal arts college in Asia.”

“It’s hugely successful, it’s ­attracted a really good international reputation. Why can’t we do that? What’s special about Hong Kong which says they can do it and we can’t, under our current settings?

“But it’s the reality of the Australian funding system that the reason we are all so big isn’t ­because we want to be, but it’s the only way to be viable. If you want to be a substantial research powerhouse, you need minimum scale because of the way we fund research through teaching.”