Universities Australia grows a spine

ATEC discussion paper gets a resounding smackdown.

In recent years, the university sector has behaved as if it had little choice but to nip around the edges of poor government policy. Consequently, it has had to wear bad ideas like the Job-ready Graduates funding package in the vain hope that cooperation on that might result in better outcomes down the track.

Not this time. In its response to the government’s discussion paper on the establishment of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC), Universities Australia has delivered one of its most full-throated rejections of government policy proposals, ever. https://universitiesaustralia.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/UA_ATEC-submission_final.pdf.

What is ATEC and why does it matter?

One of the most welcome recommendations of the Accord Universities Review was the establishment of an independent authority to oversee the structure, strategic planning and operation of the higher education sector. The creation of ATEC was one of the more tangible results from a review that made sweeping recommendations for reform without ever talking about where the money would come from.

Numerous submission to the Accord Review argued that successive governments had made such as mess of the tertiary education system, that we needed an independent authority to take control of its planning so that it did a better job of serving the national interest. That interest had been sidelined in recent decades as universities were pushed around by governments with short term political objectives and who never really wanted to fund them anyway. As universities were forced to compete, to corporatize, and ‘behave more like businesses’, they moved further and further away from their core business as national educational institutions.

When that didn’t turn out so well — as it did in the pivot towards international student income– government rebuked them for following their directions and then considered how best to punish them.

Along the way, the nation was losing its capacity in knowledges it needed. For just one example, the gutting of foreign language programs across the sector, a consequence of falling enrolments and government funding structures, has repeatedly threatened Australia’s ability to respond to changes in the international political and economic landscape.

The value of an ATEC was that it provided some protection for the system against its two biggest threats — short term and poorly informed government policy on the one hand, and unilateral market-driven decisions by individual universities that impacted the national knowledge base, on the other. To do this effectively, ATEC had to be independent of the sector and of government.

The ATEC Discussion Paper

The government’s recently released discussion paper on the design of ATEC presented itself as an implementation of the Accord recommendations. It was nothing of the kind. It proposed that ATEC should be housed within the federal Department of Education, hiving off many functions that were already being performed there — mainly administrative and monitoring activities. It proposed appointing four commissioners (one full time, three part time), but ruled out considering anyone who had been employed in higher education in the last five years. This, ostensibly, was to defend against conflicts of interest from within the sector.

This is a particularly disingenuous part of the proposal. The assumption that anyone who has been employed by the sector recently could not be trusted to serve as an independent commissioner is patently ridiculous, but the intention behind it is clear. The government would rather that nobody from the university sector was directly involved in its reform and planning for the future.

If this proposal was endorsed, we could have an ATEC run by someone with an administrative background in government or business but no direct understanding of the sector.  This would not be an independent strategic planning body informed by deep historical knowledge of higher education. ATEC would merely be another layer of administrative oversight interested primarily in monitoring the implementation of government policy.

Universities Australia is not having it

Universities Australia’s response to this proposal tells us that they have finally had enough. Clearly viewing it as a grab for further power by government, and resenting its deliberate sidelining of informed voices from within higher education, they have highlighted its failure to provide for ATEC’s independence.

Rather than continue to nip around the edges of a government initiative, this time they have proposed a total reset. UA’s response calls for the current design to be scrapped, and for the government to undertake a properly staged process of advice and enquiry to determine what the sector needs and how best to meet those needs.

Good. The UA response — and there are others which take a similar view https://humanities.org.au/news/strategy-capabilities-collaboration-the-future-of-tertiary-education/–should be applauded for resisting such a cynical attempt to neutralise a crucial instrument of reform.

It really is past time for the university sector as a whole to stand up for itself and to rearticulate its core purpose of serving the public good — something, notably, that incoming WSU VC, George Williams, has done in his first public speech https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrO.E8bDKhmmzkIjyI36At.;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzQEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1722317979/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2ffuturecampus.com.au%2f2024%2f07%2f29%2fim-george-and-im-here-to-help%2f/RK=2/RS=D9RUCAa5nD4PKhtmuGdGVXAITmI- . With few friends in government or the media, there is little point in holding back when confronted with bad policy and, in this case, bad faith, from the federal government.

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