International Higher Education, Fall 2001

Globalization and Its Discontents: Dilemmas Facing Tertiary Education in Australia

William G. Tierney and Craig McInnis
William G. Tierney is the Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education and director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, University of Southern California. Address: Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis, WPH 701, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90026, USA. E-mail: <wgtiern@usc.edu>. Craig McInnis is professor and director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne. Address: University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Melbourne, Australia.

Australia provides a good example of the problems facing public universities in an era of globalization. Unlike some countries that are still developing a system of tertiary education—or the United States, where private institutions are partially buffered from governmental regulation—Australia has had a fully developed public postsecondary system for over a century. In the recent past, the country has committed universities to serve the general citizenry rather than the elite for whom the system originally was designed. However, in the last ten years, after a period of expansion in which the system moved toward mass participation, public funding has declined significantly for Australia’s 38 universities. A decade ago most institutions received over 90 percent of their funding from the federal government; today no university receives more than 50 percent from the federal government.

Such a drastic reduction in government funding has necessitated calls for dramatic changes in Australian tertiary education. There has been a concomitant scramble to recover funds, primarily from capturing full-fee tuition from Asian students. However, in surveys and interviews of academic staff over the last year we have found great concern about the future. Faculty have experienced an almost psychic exhaustion with the increase in workloads while they try to serve new revenue-generating populations, improve the quality of the institution, and maintain a viable research capacity.

In spite of the severe fiscal constraints that each university faces, we have found little evidence that any government of the future will reinvest in tertiary education in a manner akin to a decade ago. We also are concerned over the near obsession that individuals have about the necessity of generating revenues, to the point of neglecting core business. In an era of dramatic reduction of funding, institutions need to be primed for organizational change or they will not survive. An institution’s participants are unable to create the conditions for change unless they first understand the barriers to change. Accordingly, our purpose here is to examine what we believe are key roadblocks to change that retard organizational reform.

A key precept of academic life is that universities ought to be immune from political interference. Such an assumption does not mean that tertiary organizations are free to be nonresponsive to societal needs or unaccountable for their performance. Organizations that serve the public good must be a willing to ensure that quality improvement is ongoing and measurable. However, due to changes in system-level management of higher education, Australian universities have become too much like government agencies, while at the same time being exhorted to act as free agents in the marketplace. Lacking is a strong sense of a coordinated system of responsive self-directed organizations. Rather, universities encounter political intrusion, a lack of coordination, and a disincentive for innovation. Alternatively, when universities are forced to make up the shortfall in public funding with entrepreneurial activities but are limited in their options by government regulation, institutional dissonance is inevitable.

Burdened by excessive government policy directives and regulation, a system is at risk of becoming a political football in a process that obscures the strategic choices of the institution. Yet lack of coordination from the center presents problems as well. How many universities in each region or capital city ought to offer degrees in education? How many universities ought to have an engineering faculty? An entirely unregulated system in which institutions may offer whatever they wish does not increase system effectiveness or efficiency, in a system as small as Australia’s. Here the states have the potential to play a role, but for some time now their position has been somewhat ambiguous, and their financial contributions minimal. Universities need to have finite and unique visions, rather than expansive ones geared toward simply adapting to the marketplace.

Australian universities appear to be attempting to undertake similar activities and to fulfill similar missions. True, the University of Melbourne has created a private university and other institutions are building campuses in different countries in Asia, but the similarities are still generally greater than the differences. Furthermore, despite the preference of government for modified state intervention, it remains to be seen if universities can be dissuaded from pursuing the goal of comprehensiveness in their profiles and imitating market leaders.

Institutional differentiation does not get defined by the nature of its funding; funding gets defined by organizational mission. A clearly defined mission revolves around two key issues: (1) what are the institution’s curricular offerings and style of teaching and learning; and (2) how does one define a productive member of the academic staff? In a system that has clearly differentiated missions one would not see the proliferation of the same kind of degree offerings or the same pedagogical format. When institutions have differentiated missions, the explicit expectations of academic staff will be clearer and vary by institution. A clear mission statement would enable an institution to marshal its activities in a particular direction. At best, currently, differentiation occurs only in the sense that some universities, for example, may have their staff teach more and others may hope to expand their operations in Asia in a particular manner. But the choices are less strategic and more driven by a concern for generating capital than by a philosophical consensus about the nature of the university.

High-performance systems encourage experimentation and innovation. (See the 1999 book by William G. Tierney, Building the Responsive Campus: Creating High-Performance College and Universities). Such organizations differ from others that are structured around a repetitive series of activities that, in a stable environment, enable the system to function effectively. Australian universities need to become more innovative because their environment is no longer stable.

A system that encourages creative activity is not one that rewards all institutions similarly and sets mandates and targets with regard to enrollments, tuition funding, and productive activities. Rather than pursuing a "one size fits all" approach, government needs to loosen its hold on monitoring and evaluation. Institutions should increase their concern for improvement based on beliefs about institutional purpose. In a high-performance system a governing body focuses less on preventing bad things from happening and more on making good things happen. Rather than a punitive model, one develops an incentive-based model. Currently, Australian tertiary education is in danger of being mired in a system of checks and balances that depresses the entrepreneurial spirit. This rigidity is a problem for Australia in the global economy as higher education has become a major export and is crucial to the national economy.

We are currently in a period of greater pedagogical ferment than at any other time in a generation. The Internet and web-based learning have facilitated changes in teaching. Much research has been generated on how to evaluate good teaching; breakthroughs are happening with regard to the measurement of learning. There is increased evidence not only on how much a student learns in class, but also out of class, so that the entire university environment might be thought of as a learning community.

Unfortunately, while pedagogical conversations about teaching and learning are common in Australia, little or no serious debate about the nature of the undergraduate curriculum is taking place on a sustained or systematic basis. Indeed, considerable confusion exists about the purposes and structure of the master’s degree. The reason why curriculum is not being discussed is that most of the energy has been focused on either meeting new governmental requirements or creating new markets to generate capital. Fiscal needs have been placed ahead of those that are more central to the life and maintenance of the university. To offer a sequence of courses in Pakistan or to try to get students from Sri Lanka to study in Australia, for no other reason than because a market exists that will generate income, is to reduce academic life to a business; in the long-term such a strategy will call into question the raison d’etre of the university. If students are simply consumers and the curricula is just another product, then one might well ask whether a business might offer such services and products more efficiently.

The problems we have outlined here, while significant, are solvable. If Australia is to continue to offer an effective system of tertiary education in a global environment, the problems demand clever solutions. The onus is on the universities to come up with the solutions.