Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
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President's Report
Professor Stuart Macintyre
A tribute to Peter Karmel
The Academy mourns the recent death of Peter Karmel, our former president, a champion of the social sciences and an educationalist of remarkable insight and consequence. There have been few Australian economists who have exercised such a sustained influence on public policy, going back to his membership of the Vernon Committee of Economic Enquiry in the early 1960s. Appointed professor of economics at Adelaide while still in his twenties, he quickly displayed a capacity for leadership. As Principal Designate and later Vice-Chancellor of Flinders University, he initiated a bold experiment in teaching and research, and his subsequent leadership of the Australian National University from 1982 to 1987 provided strong and prescient direction of its activities.
Between those two periods as a vice-chancellor Peter Karmel recast national education. In 1973 he devised the needs-based system of Commonwealth funding for schools, fulfilling the Whitlam government's promise that all young Australians should have the opportunity to fulfil their promise. And from 1971 he chaired the Australian Universities Commission, established following the Martin Committee's review of tertiary education in the 1960s on which he also served. In this role he guided the rapid expansion of Commonwealth support for universities, which lasted until 1975 - when the government froze expenditure and suspended the triennial arrangements that enabled universities to plan with confidence. Thereafter the universities were at a standstill. Despite his best endeavours, funding remained constant in real terms up to and beyond 1982, when he departed from the Tertiary Education Commission.
The reports of the Commission during this period provided an acute analysis of the problems. With no capacity to make new appointments and provision for building works cut to the bone, universities were unable to move into new fields or even respond to changes in demand between existing ones. Piecemeal replacement of retiring staff prevented any infusion of new blood, and salary costs rose with the age profile of the incumbents. Larger class sizes affected the quality of teaching and heavier workloads sapped morale. The universities were faced with difficult choices that strained their collegial methods of decision-making, especially as the government required the Commission to operate with guidelines that hampered its effectiveness.
Throughout the 1980s there were repeated calls to improve participation rates, increase levels of skill and productivity. Report after report noted that Australia lagged behind other OECD countries in its investment in research and development; that its continuing dependence on a narrow range of commodity exports left it trailing behind competitors in the new information industries. The neglect continued until the late 1980s when John Dawkins broke the impasse with his Unified National System of higher education and enlarged Australian Research Council. With these came a new emphasis on national objectives, new methods of management, accountability and control.
Peter Karmel was an active member of the Academy and its precursor, the Social Sciences Research Council, from his election in 1952. It was at his instigation, for example, that the Academy embarked on a study of youth unemployment in 1976 as the recession began to eliminate so many of the jobs that school-leavers had been able to find in the long boom. He assumed the Academy presidency at the end of 1987, the very moment when John Dawkins released his Green Paper, Higher Education: a Discussion Paper, and in the following year the new directions were confirmed in the White Paper, Higher Education: A Policy Statement. Shortly afterwards, Peter Karmel used the Academy's newsletter to reflect on its implications. He acknowledged the imperatives. The Australian economy suffered from a deterioration in its terms of trade, a serious imbalance in its balance of payments - it was in 1986 that Paul Keating had declared that without an improvement in trade performance, Australia would become a banana republic. There was a need, Karmel agreed, to widen access to higher education and increase the number of graduates with appropriate qualifications, at a time of budgetary constraints on public funding.
His concern was with the 'highly instrumental view of education' and the 'managerialist view' of their government. The abolition of the Tertiary Education Commission meant that universities dealt with minister and his department on a contractual basis, the amalgamations creating unwieldy new universities, their swollen administrations imposing a linear management that strained collegial values. He worried also that the academic mission, that he characterised as 'the conservation, transmission and extension of knowledge' was at risk. It disturbed him that these far-reaching changes were implemented so rapidly and with so little evidence for the propositions that determined them.
Stasis
I was reminded of his observations by the directions the government has signalled recently for higher education and research. Last year I wrote about the series of reviews the Labor government set in train following its accession to office. The need for these reviews was indisputable. The Unified National System established in the late 1980s had long since lost whatever unity it possessed. An undifferentiated set of arrangements inhibited a creative response to the inadequacies of provision. HECS was attended with tight controls that failed to meet the full cost of tuition. Some universities were able to supplement their income with domestic fees; others kept themselves afloat with international enrolments, but all of them were caught in a growth trap that increased staff-student ratios and strained facilities.
The failure of the Coalition government over the past decade to increase public provision was reminiscent of the late 1970s and early 1980s, except that this was a period of growth and prosperity. The terms of trade had turned in our favour, commodity exports brought an unprecedented upsurge in public revenue - and higher education became by far the largest exporter of services. But Australia once again lagged behind competitors in its higher education participation rate and shortages of expertise - in science, medicine, education - were again apparent.
The need to reconsider research policy was equally apparent. Here too the failure of policy was clearly apparent. A proliferation of funding agencies and one-off initiatives responded to sectional interests at the expense of any coherent national strategy, while the formula for distributing research funds to universities was singularly insensitive to the practices and needs of different disciplines.
ASTEC was joined by the Prime Minister's Science Council, which in turn expanded into the Science and Engineering Council and then the Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. Research priorities were promulgated, industry partnerships exhorted, but the innovation performance remained poor. When a group of overseas examiners came to Australia's in 1985, it was struck by the narrow and instrumental understanding of science and technology policy it encountered, the extraordinary share of funds direct to medical research and the blind faith of Treasury and the Department of Finance that knowledge was 'simply another input' that could be left to the operation of the market. Would they have said differently twenty years later?
Dawkins redux?
By cruel irony, the major reviews were undertaken just as the global recession struck. The government's stimulus measures have consumed the fiscal surplus, reducing the capacity for substantial public investment on which the current government's 'education revolution' was premised. While the government is funding some major new university buildings as part of a works program, its principal device has been cash payments to consumers. Meanwhile the Department of Finance continues to seek economies in public agencies, including cultural institutions such as the National Library, Museum and Archives that support research in the humanities and social sciences. At its annual general meeting last year the Academy passed a resolution expressing concern that cuts to the Australian Bureau of Statistics have compromised the quality of its workforce surveys. The response to the letter I sent to relevant ministers was not encouraging.
We now have the Bradley and Cutler reports, and we have some indication of how the government intends to proceed. The Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations has affirmed the goal of increasing school retention and university participation: the goal is that by 2025 forty per cent of all Australians in the 25-34 age group will have a degree. She has endorsed the renewed emphasis on equity.
She also accepted the recommendation of the review that student demand should determine provision: the government funding for a Commonwealth-supported place will follow the students to the institution and course in which they enrol. We are yet to see how this will work. If the funding attached to a Commonwealth-supported place falls short of the cost of tuition, it is unlikely that universities will rush into recruitment. But if it does, then the implications for the social sciences are profound.
Similarly, if the Bradley report's recommendation for differentiating universities according to their research performance is accepted, then there would be significant implications for social science disciplines in those universities that would be restricted to a teaching role. Ever since Dawkins, it has been taken as axiomatic that research must be concentrated and selective. Whenever arguments are produced to justify the axiom, they point to the high overhead cost of laboratories, support staff and facilities, arguments that have little to do with methods and patterns of social science research, and fail to consider the distinctive relationship between teaching and research in many of these disciplines.
So far the Minister of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research has yet to make clear his view of this recommendation. We do know that the assessment of research performance, Excellence in Research for Australia, will guide his discussion of 'compacts' with the universities. We also have his announcement of an intention that public funding should cover the full cost of research, and this is particularly welcome. Meanwhile the first 'trial' round of ERA proceeds. It is to be based on a number of indicators. Indicators of quality will include the quality of the 'outlet', citation analysis and grant income. Indicators of volume will be the number of publications and research income, adjusted for the size of the research group. Indicators of application will be based on commercialisation and uptake.
The guiding principle of ERA is for a common methodology to allow comparison, but it was recognised from the outset that many of these indicators do not fit well with research activity in the non-laboratory disciplines. One of the first discipline 'clusters' to undergo the trial is Humanities and Creative Arts, which includes a number of the disciplines represented in our Academy, notably history, law, linguistics and philosophy. Their patterns of non-journal publication are not amenable to citation analysis; the ranking of their journals has limited validity and proved in any case to be fraught with difficulty. They do not conform to the indicators of application. The same applies to some other social science disciplines that will be assessed subsequently For this reason the Australian Research Council developed some additional measures. One of them is 'peer review', an abstraction that means reading and evaluating a sample of the publications. Another was a set of 'esteem factors' such as membership of editorial boards, contributions to prestigious works of reference and membership of an Academy.
Earlier this year the Minister decided that the trial round would not use the esteem factors. He did so in response from complaints from universities that it would be difficult to assemble such information at short notice. This was surprising: such is the regimen of accountability that it is difficult to imagine any university has not requested and received information about the achievements of its distinguished researchers.
Along with Ian Donaldson, the president of the Academy of the Humanities, I wrote to the minister expressing our disappointment and concern that the esteem factors will not be used this year. We did so for several reasons. First, it will dismay and discourage academics in some fields, notably the performing and creative arts, who felt that esteem would provide some recognition of their patterns of activity. Second, the absence of this component could have damaging consequences for university decisions. In the light of the first, 'trial' assessment, they will be making decisions about where to direct their support to maximise outcomes in the next, 'real' assessment. This will have such major consequences for their standing and future support, but the information they use will be incomplete.
Third, if esteem factors are not to be considered, then adequate assessment of quality in many of the humanities and social sciences will depend on peer assessment. The present intention is for a limited consideration of some of the nominated publications, which are to be no more than twenty per cent of the total. The restricted size of the assessment panel and the restricted budget with which the ARC has to conduct ERA makes it difficult to do more, yet without esteem factors more will be necessary. Such is the state of play as I write this report, and I hope that by the time Dialogue appears, these concerns will be resolved. The Minister has been particularly mindful of the importance of the humanities and social sciences, notable in his determination to incorporate them in every aspect of research policy.
We appreciate that all the more at a time when the language of higher education policy is placing increasing emphasis on a narrow range of national objectives. Bradley's terms of reference highlighted the contribution 'to innovation and productivity gains' and the production of 'professionals for both national and local labour market needs'. Its recommendation for a new regulatory agency, a natural corollary of the extension of the market in educational services, is a far cry from the generous and facilitative role once played by the Universities Commission.
There is more than a suspicion of the instrumental view of education that exercised Peter Karmel, along the managerial approach he deplored. We run the risk of losing sight of the distinctive character of the university and its distinctive mission, the conservation, transmission and extension of knowledge.
Stuart Macintyre
2009
Last modified: 2 November 2009.