Unis 'must crack world's top 50', says Christopher Pyne

AUSTRALIA must catapult at least eight of its universities into the global top 50 within four years, Chris Pyne will argue.

AUSTRALIA must catapult at least eight of its best universities into the global top 50 within four years, opposition education spokesman Chris Pyne will argue in a key policy statement tonight.

"Our universities have fallen in international comparisons in the last six years," Mr Pyne will say in the David Davies Memorial Lecture, delivered in Brisbane at a Liberal Party function.

Mr Pyne complains that only two of the research-heavy universities from the Group of Eight figure in the top 50 ranking run by the Times Higher Education magazine, whereas there were six in 2004.

"We need to at least get the Group of Eight universities back into the highest 50 ranked universities worldwide in the next four years," he says.

Mr Pyne also commits the Coalition to presiding over a new world-class university focused on minerals and resources.

"It is surprising that Australia does not have one specialised world-leading university that focuses almost exclusively on research in this area," he says.

As well, he says, the principle of higher education as an end in itself will be the centrepiece of Coalition policy.

He says government policy is obsessed with targets and percentages for graduate numbers and risks imposing a "narrow vocational training" approach on higher education.

His speech is an assault on the so-called Dawkins legacy, under which all 38 universities are assumed not only to teach, but to research across all disciplines.

He says the definition of a university must be recast to encourage a divide between serious research institutions and those that should focus on teaching.

He says the successful dominance of research funding by the Group of Eight -- which includes the Australian National University, Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland -- "doesn't really alter year to year".

Many of the 30 universities who win only a minor share of the research spoils are "predominantly teaching and not research-focused," he says.

Higher education commentator Andrew Norton, from the Grattan Institute, said: "If he's saying these teaching-only universities should be pushed out of the research funding system, he's picked himself one almighty brawl.

"I imagine his National Party colleagues would have something to say about it."

Universities in the regions with good research in only a handful of fields would resist exclusion from the funding system.

Asked last night whether he was proposing a concentration of public money in just a few leading research universities, Mr Pyne said that the precise means to encourage specialisation would be worked out in government.

"I'm not the least concerned about spreading research among all 38 universities," he said.

Merit and not "local politics" had to decide, he said.