IRU stands up for teaching, research links

The Intensive Research Universities grouping has defended the link between teaching and research.

‘There is ­significant value in providing open access to university education for all who think they will gain from it.’

The Innovative Research Univer­sities grouping has defended the link between teaching and researc­h in a discussion paper launched today that hits back at calls by policy experts for major reforms.

The paper, Towards a Tertiary Future, rubbishes the notion of creating institutions ­that focus on teaching and that do not undertake research as “Cheap and Nasty U”.

“It is not clear why we would want to encourage such institutions, and it is very clear they should not be considered universities,” says the paper, written by IRU executive director Conor King.

The paper comes as debate over higher education policy steps up and two significant reform plans from policy experts are on the table: a call from the Business Council of Australia for major change; and a promise by Labor of a major review of tertiary education if it wins the next federal election.

Universities fear that reform will result in money being transferred away from higher education to the vocational sector, particularly TAFE colleges, whose funding has been decim­at­ed over the past decade, mainly by the state governments that run them.

The IRU paper says cutting funding to higher education will make it more difficult for univer­sities to enrol greater numbers of poor students who, despite the major expansion of student number­s in universities, are still not well served.

It says: “The IRU has consistently argued there is ­significant value in providing open access to university education for all who think they will gain from it. We have repeatedly challenged wrong assumptions that univer­sities should provide only for an elite group while others receive a less intensive skilling.”

In the IRU paper, Mr King says all universities should continue to be funded to do research. He is particularly scathing of a proposal from two former senior federal education bureaucrats, Robert Griew and Jessie Borthwick, now both working for the Nous Group consultancy, to allow a new category of teaching-only universities. This would involve separating the funding of teaching and research, and awarding the research component of the current teaching funding to universities on a competitive basis.

The paper says the Griew-Borthwick “proposition is to both remove the ‘research’ element from base funding (from the federa­l government) and reduce student charges, so that the resulting institution would have perhaps two-thirds of resources of a university, albeit with a lower respons­ibility, to churn out ­almost-ready graduates selected from those with fewer options”.

Mr King says a key feature of the current commonwealth grants scheme for universities, the one that allows some of the funding provided to teach each studen­t to be used for research, is important to retain.

He says this “flexibility” in the system allows universities to ­decide how best to use revenue to respond to their particular challenges and achieve their goals. “Removing the broad funding to provide the full outcomes expected of a university would only send them along the path that TAFEs have been sent,” the paper says.

The IRU’s strong response to the Griew-Borthwick plan is not surprising given that the seven IRU uni­versities, not top-tier researc­h institutions, could suffer if the federal government funded research and teaching separately.

The seven IRU universities are Murdoch, Flinders, La Trobe, Western Sydney, Griffith, James Cook and Charles Darwin.

Under the Griew-Borthwick plan, released last month in a Nous paper titled Diversity in Australian Tertiary Education, they would risk losing research money that is now guaranteed.

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