Elitists threaten university quality

MOST Australians view our universities as they think of our sewerage systems. The mechanism works, for reasons they don't want to understand.

In fact, our university system works because it is founded on two very Australian values.

The first is opportunity. Education has spelled opportunity since Ned Kelly studied horse stealing. Access to university is access to success and, under HECS, university access is wide open. The second is quality. In Australia, the rich do not inhabit cloisters run by geniuses while the disadvantaged are taught by dumbbells in demountables. All our universities teach and think. Luckily. In the US, students stagger under crippling university debts. In Britain, harsh policy produces universities that cannot resource spelling, let alone research. But now, our marriage between opportunity and quality is threatened. Not by politicians but from within. Enter the university monopolists, a sort of professorial jihadist sect.

Monopolists have a simple notion. Real, quality university education is too expensive to waste on battlers and bogans from Blacktown or Broadmeadows. Instead, it should be the monopoly of a few shining research institutions for the brilliant and privileged. Others can be herded into basic academic holding camps.

The monopolists are few but fervid. Exemplars include University of NSW vice-chancellor Fred Hilmer, Group of Eight executive director Mike Gallagher, and the Grattan Institute for policy self-promotion.

Interestingly, there is little sign the powerful of Go8, let alone other universities, embrace their program. Undeterred, the monopolists flit from minister to opposition spokesman as if they have the sector in their pocket.

Would you like to save money? Want to cut red tape? Better teaching, more research and more Australian universities in the top 100? Sign here, and don't read the fine print.

Unfortunately, the fine print matters. Ultimately, it would produce a university landscape evoking a Brazilian town-planning nightmare: a handful of shining skyscrapers surrounded by miserable hovels. Guess where your kid will be? So in the interests of completeness, let's take this vision where it really ends up.

First, let's deregulate university fees. Not cautiously, with equity controls, thus putting elasticity and a little cash into the system. Do it with a chainsaw.

Worried about a general price rise? Just publicly fund private providers the same way as universities. That will keep "us" honest, through competition. And let them be called universities too. That provides a level playing field.

Concerned about research? After all, calling a dancing academy a university will not produce a Nobel prizewinner.

Well, the monopolists confide, most "lesser" universities don't really research anyway. Besides, wouldn't it be marvy to have universities concentrated just on great teaching? Better still, teaching-only institutions don't need research funding, which really should flow to big players, anyway. Invest in us and we'll rocket up the rankings.

Sounds plausible. So what happens in this mortarboard apocalypse? First, overall quality collapses. We go from 40-odd real universities to a handful, plus some pretender polytechnics.

As world rankings are determined by research, our average institutional ranking declines. At present we have 19 in the top 500. Under a research monopoly agenda, the London Olympics will look good. And say goodbye to quality regional institutions. Monopolists say they can concentrate on "rural research". Regionals know this is death by marginalisation.

Of course, regionals and outer metropolitans can struggle on, persevering in underfunded, undervalued research. But they will face the new publicly funded private providers, many with shiny new university licence plates. These will have no inclination to fund research and will undercut underprivileged universities like two-dollar shops. Inevitably, unis will be forced economically to follow into the morass of "teaching-only" institutions.

There they will join not only honest private providers whose last research was into a bus timetable, but the sort of rent-seekers that bankrupted Victoria's publicly supported vocational sector through mass courses in aromatherapy and horticulture.

Of course, the monopolists say this is only competition and keeps fees down. But the competition is not with elite institutions, whose fees can soar on the back of enhanced research reputations. This competition is reserved for universities that never realistically had the option of cashing in.

Best of all, three-quarters of our university students will be corralled into inferior institutions where they will never be taught by the woman who wrote the book or the professor who discovered the molecule. John Howard's battlers and Julia Gillard's working families, who may be dumb but can vote, will be thrilled.

All this might be bearable if you accepted that Australia's "loser" universities did no research, and lobotomising them would at least propel a handful of winners into stratospheric world rankings.

But although Australia's very best universities by definition do significantly more research than others, 51 per cent of all areas recently ranked as world class or above were outside universities commonly regarded as elite.

Worse, this research clusters around areas a little "downmarket" for university monopolists: the tropical work of James Cook and Charles Darwin; the highly applied science and engineering of the Australian Technology Network; the nursing and education of many regionals.

All these areas, vital to our future, will wither under a monopolist prescription. They are located now where they are valued. They will not be picked up elsewhere, and will drop from the academic team like a delisted player.

All this so we can have a handful of institutions ranked highly in the university equivalent of Miss World. But here's the irony: the monopolist dream won't happen. Even with the cosseting they propose, the very best Australian university will not rise to ninth, let alone first. It may just surge to 17th, while institutions educating the vast majority of university students struggle to compete with the Billy Ray Cyrus Homeopathy College. Sounds like a fair trade: our world-class university system for something less than a Miss Congeniality award.