Accord must address ‘what Australian universities are for’

Australia’s higher education review must focus on the broader purpose of a university sector that has become “preoccupied with thinking internally”, a Sydney conference has heard.

Sharon Bell, former deputy vice-chancellor of Charles Darwin and Western Sydney universities, said the Australian universities accord’s terms of reference must not be allowed to prevent consideration of the sector’s responsibility to address the “existential questions of our time”.

She said “community” risked becoming an afterthought in a review focused on issues such as accountability and governance. “Accountability is very important, [but] it doesn’t exactly spark the imagination,” she told the Engagement Australia Conference at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

The sector faces a “real challenge” in opening up the accord conversation, she said. “What is our legacy? How are we collectively addressing those existential issues? How can we take what looks like a fairly utilitarian accord concept and turn it into a truly transformative process?”

Professor Bell said post-war Australia, “not a wealthy country at the time”, had managed to find the resources to educate its neighbours’ citizens through the Colombo Plan. Now, international students were viewed as a “market” that helped bankroll the sector.

“How is it that we were able to do that then – thinking of others, thinking about our region [and] our place in that region – whereas now we seem to be preoccupied with thinking internally?” she asked.

Verity Firth, pro vice-chancellor of justice and inclusion at UTS, said the accord was an opportunity to “start speaking bravely to government”. Professor Firth said a decade of “not being particularly valued” by the previous government had left the sector with a sense of “timidity” and defensiveness.

“We do need to turn it around because we are at a particular moment in history where we need to have our voices heard,” she said.

Kelly Pearce, first assistant secretary of the federal Department of Education, said the review’s terms of reference were “big” and could “fit anything”. She urged people to use the accord to assess whether the Higher Education Support Act (Hesa), the key piece of federal legislation governing universities, adequately reflected “where we are now” and “what we want going forward”.

But Paul Harris, executive director of the Innovative Research Universities mission group, said the Hesa had been amended more than four times a year since 1988. He said the sector should use the accord to reassert universities’ role as public good institutions.

“Over the last few years, we’ve seen more of a focus on the private benefits of higher education and research. We’ve seen it through JRG [Job-ready Graduates] with the shift from public funding to the individual student. We’ve seen it in the way government funding has shifted away from public education institutions towards private schools. We’ve seen it in a shift in research to a really strong focus on research commercialisation. And we see it in how we talk about international education as an export industry in a market.

“We need to think about our role as public institutions in delivering public value…and what the right public policy is for that public value.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com