Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
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President's Report
Professor Stuart Macintyre
Funding
Since August I have been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following in the footsteps of a number of Fellows who have held the Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard. The circumstances for teaching are remarkable: the students are highly engaged, the class sizes intimate, the facilities superb. The libraries hold just about any Australian publication I look for among their seventeen million volumes.
Harvard, of course, is very rich. It has the largest endowment of any university - one that reached US$34.9 billion dollars at the end of the 2006-07 financial year - but Yale and Stanford are not far behind. The aggregate value of the top 20 university endowments in the United States is US$164 billion dollars.
At the same time the cost of a university education continues to increase at a much faster rate than average earnings. Tuition fees average US$24,000 a year at a private college (US$33,709 at Harvard), more than US$6000 a year for an in-state student at a public college. There is considerable talk in the Congress that since the universities enjoy tax privileges, they should use their endowments to reduce fees. Some of them do, though their spending from investment funds remains around 5 per cent while for the past few years the return has been well above 10 per cent. Congress also pays attention to the American equivalent of HECS, the public loan scheme, as well as the practises of private loan companies. A few universities have been embarrassed by details of their cosy arrangements with private lenders. For that matter, I have been struck by the press attention given to allegations of kickbacks to universities from Study Abroad agencies.
The chief argument over education here concerns No Child Left Behind, a euphemism for the Bush Administration's compulsory testing and reporting of student outcomes from Kindergarten to Year 12. Workers in education have drawn attention to the fragility of the test instrument, school principals to the dire consequences of adverse outcomes. Congressional Democrats seem always on the brink of challenging the Gradgrind assumptions of No Child Left Behind.
The Administration, meanwhile, insists that measuring outcomes is the only way to force improvement. Furthermore, it suggests the same principles should apply to universities. Again, the argument is that education providers need to demonstrate their efficacy by providing objective outcome measurements of generic skills (the word 'content' has acquired an oddly pejorative connotation of obsolescence).
Thus the Secretary for Education, Margaret Spellings, has proposed that all colleges 'should measure and report meaningful student learning outcomes', and that this should be a condition of accreditation. Her proposal proved to be a test too far. Both the universities and the accreditation agencies protested against the attack on their autonomy, and the Administration backed off. While the new President of Harvard gave an appropriate rebuff to this incursion in the course of her inaugural address, it is some way removed from the concerns of my colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. They experience the pressures on higher education differently. Contrary to widespread assumption, the endowment funds of Harvard and other wealthy universities are not a common fund: most of them are tied to particular purposes. The higher fees, meanwhile, drive many students towards professional careers with high returns. Hence the social sciences, the sciences and humanities, feel themselves the country cousins. The University of Texas at Austin is a wealthy institution, so it came as a shock to read an associate professor of women's studies there quoted in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article about the Social Sciences Research Network's online clearing house: 'Most of us... have so little money to travel to conferences these days. We just don't have the kind of ongoing interaction in our academic work that is available to our colleagues in the law school, the business school, etc.'
I try to explain to my colleagues that indigence and neglect are relative conditions, though I'm not sure if that brightens their mood. Certainly, my efforts to explain the provisions for research in Australia surprise them.
Yet there is a striking similarity between higher education and research in Australia and the United States. In both countries there is a deafening political silence. The contenders for the Democratic nomination have all sorts of concerns about the way the country is going, but universities are not one of them. And from what I read online of the federal campaign in Australia, it is the same on both sides of the Pacific.
The American universities are less concerned to catch the politicians' interest. They are used to greater autonomy, and as various state legislatures began to impose new demands on them, they sought increased autonomy by reducing their dependence on public funding. In Australia, on the other hand, the interference in universities has increased as the proportion of public funding has diminished.
That leaves unresolved issues of public access and public interest. Reconciling public access and private provision is a vital task, but so too is sustaining the social science disciplines that contribute to public policy and inform public life. I look forward to exploring further how that is done here.
Stuart Macintyre
2007
Last modified: 2 November 2009.