The Australian Sociological Association (TASA)
Submission to the Senate Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education References Committee Inquiry on 
The capacity of public universities to meet Australia’s higher education needs

Introduction 

TASA: The Australian Sociological Association welcomes the opportunity to make a submission to the Senate Inquiry. TASA (est. 1963) is a professional body representing sociologists and social scientists who work and study in the tertiary education sector, government and non-government agencies and the private sector, particularly as consultants and social researchers. This submission is made on behalf of the TASA membership and is authorised by the TASA Executive Board. 

The Senate’s Inquiry on ‘the capacity of public universities to meet Australia’s higher education needs’ is an important step towards broader debate, however this submission will suggest that the question assumes that there is a pre-given consensus about Australia’s higher education needs. This submission makes no such assumption, and so its format draws only on the first two areas identified in the Inquiry’s terms of reference, namely, the adequacy of current funding and the effect of increasing reliance on private funding. Its primary aim is to provide the Committee with comments about the situation of universities based on specific sociological analyses and, secondly, to emphasise the important contributions of sociology and the social sciences to Australian public universities. 

The submission agrees with a widespread view that public universities are suffering from a lack of central and equitable funding but suggests that this is fundamentally related to the absence of clearly-defined objectives for universities. The principles of education and of ‘disinterested’ research do appear now to be less important to administrations than their corporate needs for private funding. The outcome sought by this submission is for the Committee to recommend a broader inquiry into the purposes of universities and higher education in general, and into the organisational means to ensure that they can fulfil these objectives.

The role of sociology and the social sciences

A significant cohort of students undertake sociology subjects in Australian universities. As of March 2000, DETYA figures indicate there are approximately 10 500 students studying sociology, including 443 Ph.D., 200 Masters (Research and Coursework), and 250 Honours students. This compares very well with other disciplines as sociology has one of the largest student intakes in the social science and humanities field. Only 'Communication' has more undergraduates, whereas History and English have more Honours and Ph.D. students, but fewer undergraduates. Many professionals like nurses, teachers and social workers undertake sociology as part of their courses, and in faculties or studies such as law, business management, geography and industrial relations, sociological theories are also included in their curricula. This widespread reliance on sociology is because it is the principal discipline of organisation theories.

Sociological research has informed public policy and wider public debate for many years. While sociological approaches are philosophically and politically diverse, a major strength of all sociology is the recognition of the social condition of diverse positions and views. Sociologists have been at the forefront of debate and substantive research on the ‘new genetics’, genetically modified foods, globalisation, the ‘information economy’ thesis, indigenous issues, sexuality, youth suicide, homelessness, hate crime, substance abuse, domestic violence, poverty, environmental degradation, and public sector restructuring. Moreover, sociology contributes to the knowledge and skills of many occupational groups such as social and market researchers, journalists, public policy analysts, teachers, health professionals, social workers, aid workers, and public and private sector managers. 

A number of sociological works have played a key role in public policy and public debate, such as Lois Bryson and Faith Thompson (1972) An Australian Newtown: Life and Leadership in a Working-Class Suburb, Robert Connell et al. (1982) Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division, Rosemary Pringle (1988) Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work, Michael Bittman (1991) Juggling Time: How Australian Families Use Time, Michael Pusey (1991) Economic Rationalism in Canberra, Sherry Saggers and Dennis Gray (1991) Aboriginal Health and Society, Jocelyn Pixley (1993), Citizenship and Employment, and Kevin McDonald (1999) Struggles for Subjectivity: Identity, Action and Youth Experience. Moreover, based on citation index reports of academic publications, Australian sociology ranks fifth in the world in both number of publications and citation rates, behind the US, UK, Canada and Germany. 

Supporting sociology and the social sciences
Sociology and the social sciences have considerable influence in the production of well-rounded graduates and professionals. They make significant contributions to innovation and have provided numerous analyses of the concept of information economy of key relevance to this Senate Inquiry. A broad social science education contributes to creating a workforce which is educated in social skills, which is able to create better ways to work, to devise solutions to problems, and to analyse the social implications of technological and economic developments. 

TASA calls on the support of all political parties:
•	for a comprehensive university funding strategy that does not privilege one sector of the university over another 
•	to increase the funding of sociological teaching and research 
•	to address deteriorating staff-student ratios and the lack of resources for support services for students and staff. 

Sociology heightens our awareness of the social, not just the individual, and in doing so makes a practical contribution to the design of technology and policy which is more successful than otherwise would be. Sociology and the social sciences generally play key roles in promoting social justice, cultural diversity, critical thought and an informed citizenry, which are the preconditions for a creative, open and innovative populace. The disturbingly low rate of citizens who are informed about Australia’s system of government, which was the main conclusion of the McIntyre Report (Report of the Civics Expert Group, 1994, 'Whereas the People: Civics and Citizenship Education in Australia', S. Macintyre, Chair), points to the universities' role in fostering informed public debate and a democratic public sphere, in contrast to ill-informed prejudice. The changes in higher education have reduced the capacity of academics to engage in public debate and therefore reduced the level of accountability of public institutions. This is caused by both increased private funding and also increased pressures. Public intellectuals are important to the health of society. 

The adequacy of current funding arrangements and the effect of the increasing reliance on private funding and market behaviour

While this Senate Inquiry is very welcome, a major problem with the Higher Education sector today is that its purposes are ill-defined. It is beyond the scope of this submission to elaborate beyond saying that a thorough review of the purposes of public universities with broader terms of reference than those provided here, would necessarily provide more coherent answers to the questions raised by the Committee. That is, the Committee’s questions about the efficacy of the sources and the adequacy of the current funding cannot be assessed without a definition of the purposes of public universities and whether these purposes complement or contradict other parts of the Higher Education sector. The basic question is ‘adequate for what’? We hope that the Committee is drawn to call for broader debate and here offer these brief provisional points about the purposes of universities.

Universities are fiduciary institutions
This formal, legal role is an impersonal relation of trust between students, funding bodies and the ‘general public at large’. Public universities are, by definition, accountable to the sources of public funding. However, with their present mix of specific but limited private corporate funding, general tax revenue, private fee paying students and the vast majority of students paying through the Higher Education Contributory Scheme, the Federal Government pays the majority of costs (more or less, depending on the university), but does not specify the accountability structure. Universities are tax collectors of HECS, yet the growth in contributions (long term and by reducing the cut-in point) has not improved funding. The failure of the Federal Government to provide decent funding, as HECS payments rise, raises serious accountability questions. Nor are there clear guidelines to vouchsafe that HECS students have the same educational experience as full fee-paying students, for example. With the abolition of the National Board of Employment, Education and Training, which might have considered these serious questions, the Australian system has no clearly defined purposes beyond the immediate ‘needs’ of the government of the day and the individual ‘needs’ of the corporate university administrations. These needs are not necessarily the same as publicly defined, democratically-agreed purposes that would permit an assessment of whether universities fulfil their fiduciary responsibilities to students and the general public. 

We call on the Committee to consider:
•	the restoration of the National Board of Employment, Education and Training as an independent body to ensure that Higher Education fulfils clearly-defined, democratically-decided objectives. 

For example, an assumed but usually implicit purpose of universities is in long-term human capital formation, however, the market approach implies that students and their parents are perfectly-informed, labour market analysts. Also, the ‘market’ only provides signals of labour market trends of the past. This can lead to expensive investment of money and students’ time, efforts and hopes, which may be unnecessarily wasted. In the USA, studies show that the integration of the university into the political economy is most pronounced in the professional schools (medical, business and engineering), and any ‘dislocations’ in the economy can have dramatic impacts on an ‘entrepreneurial university’. For example, a decline in Minnesota’s medical clinic trade led to efforts by the University of Minnesota to dismember its medicine faculty. Equally geology schools across Australia faltered after the 1960s mining boom collapsed. 

Today, there is some confusion about the meaning of ‘information economy’, which leads to a lack of specification about whether there are particular skill shortages that universities should be rectifying. Thus, there is considerable difference in the growth trends and dynamics within the service sector, between personal services (particularly health care), and ‘knowledge based’ services where the former would stress training in interpersonal skills and the latter training in cognitive skills.

We suggest that there are two main purposes of universities that would enable them to fulfil their fiduciary or trust role to students. First, universities provide certified general training that is appropriate to the growing range of professional roles and tasks that apply formally acquired knowledge. Second, they transmit as a general social resource what various sociologists call ‘the critical intelligence’ of the society, and in contemporary times, such a society is not defined by purely ‘national’ boundaries. Both purposes are met through the professionalism of academic research and scholarship, a point which will be developed in due course.
 
The capacity of universities to manage and serve increasing demand
Sociology is a discipline based in humanities and/or social science faculties, so the remainder of this submission will speak to the experiences of the social sciences. Universities are no longer elite arenas, and this is welcome, however there is a tendency here and elsewhere to regard them merely as mass centres for routine certification of basic competence. If that is an aim, then meeting even that requires more funding than at present. The credo of ‘doing more with less’ has had a damaging impact on the quality of the university learning environment. The erosion of funding levels has led to over-crowded classrooms and higher staff-student ratios, erosion of library resources and has undermined the provision of adequate support services for postgraduate students and staff research. The simple fact of the matter is that universities require more funding – a fact supported unanimously by the AVCC, NTEU, NUS and CAPA.

Online teaching is not a panacea
While the use of new technologies such as the Internet, microwave links and CD-ROMs have obvious benefits in the university sector, particularly in overcoming the tyranny of distance for some students, they are not a substitute for quality teaching or a solution to funding problems. For over 100 years new technologies have been publicised as the key to distance education and to providing efficiency. These include the postal service, television and radio. All of these have been failures because distance education, per se, cannot incorporate the basic element of education as a social process. In the same manner, much of the rhetoric of ‘flexible delivery’ and the ‘online university’ is a similar form of technological determinism. That is, it assumes that the technology is itself a ‘prime mover’ that is inevitably progressive, and that the mere presence of the technology shapes both the quality of educational delivery and access to it. A bad idea is not improved by being delivered on-line, and even IBM advertisements are belatedly recognising this point.

Many assumptions about electronic delivery also ignore the expense, time and expertise required to devise on-line learning courses. High quality on-line teaching is as time consuming (if not more so) than face-to-face teaching. Another problem with on-line learning is the reduced ability to control student fraud. Furthermore, a focus on on-line learning assumes a preference by students for such content delivery. Yet student surveys consistently report that students prefer face-to-face teaching and interaction with fellow students, and certainly do not want on-line teaching to be a substitute for it. This submission suggests that on-line delivery may erode not only the quality of the learning experience, but also lead to falling academic standards among students.
Therefore, this submission suggests that:
•	the notion of the On-line University should be rejected. 

Institutional autonomy and flexibility
The Committee rightly raises the issue of autonomy. It is necessary to consider the forms of autonomy that universities require. If autonomy from immediate, short-term needs of the market and government of the day is important, this is because without it, universities could not fulfil their fiduciary obligations to students and the public in general. We note here that the decline in government funding and consequent pressure on universities to source funding from the private sector can have serious repercussions for the autonomy and flexibility of the educational project of university administrations. 

The temptation to ‘run universities like a business’ and enter into patron relationships with ‘industry partners’ can undermine the rationale for universities, as they become beholden to service their ‘payers’ and do industry R&D ‘on the cheap’, effectively subsidised by the public purse. The formation of ‘private/corporate arms’ is a case in point, as it becomes impossible to separate business functions from core university functions. It is one thing to facilitate relationships with industry, but quite another to encourage dependence on industry funding and the meeting of corporate objectives, which ultimately detract from the independence of university teaching and research. It is also counterproductive to fostering creativity, the development of new ideas and scientific advances, as these cannot be predicted by market signals of past ‘successes’. Such an environment can also have serious consequences for academic standards. This situation highlights the pressing need for a fundamental inquiry into the core functions of universities, called for by this submission. 

Therefore, we urge the Committee to consider:
•	the question of the purposes of universities through a wider inquiry into the core functions of universities.

The quality and diversity of teaching and research
Concern with declining academic standards within the universities has been growing over at least the past ten years. While we agree that there is considerable room for improvement in the quality and diversity of teaching and research, the key focus of this submission is the basis of quality in universities. Quality arises when there is a strong relationship between teaching and research.

Canadian experience shows that neither parents nor students want a ‘Microsoft University’, rather their benchmark remains a Harvard, an Oxford, Yale or Cambridge. As a benchmark, such an aim highlights what this submission has referred to as the fiduciary nature of universities. A relation of trust between students and universities is created and maintained through the fact that such benchmark universities ‘buy’ a different thing to what they ‘sell’. Thus, a ‘leading’ university like Harvard ‘buys’ academics’ achievements and their likely reputations in high-risk fields of scholarly and scientific advances, and it ‘sells’ a highly respected education. These research achievements can only be evaluated over the years by peers in each academic’s field, usually outside the particular university. This is what an ‘international reputation’ means. 

However risky this is for administrators, their ‘renting’ of academics’ reputations ‘promises less risk that students will get out-of-date or wrong teaching’, as Arthur Stinchcombe (1990) suggests. Thus students, governments and any private funding source, pay the universities to pool the research risks which in general provide a ‘reliable certification of competence and up-to-dateness’. This relation of trust assumes that university administrators are indeed employing the likely research and scholarly innovators in all the main fields. The alternative is to employ teachers who are admirably efficient or even inspirational at teaching a curriculum. However, as in many under-developed countries’ universities, which cannot afford to employ sufficient numbers of academics on research criteria, their curricula can be 30 years out of date and sometimes not even soundly based.

Therefore, without adequate funding for research, academics may have to rely on outdated or insubstantial material, which has a ‘multiplier effect’ in undermining the quality of future graduates. This argument also explains the reluctance of academics to be strictly 'loyal' to their university in their administration’s competition for students. Academics have no reason to criticise their colleagues at neighboring universities when they are involved in collaborative research and maintain close scholarly and collegial relationships. Indeed, much of the 'promotion' money spent by administrations could be reduced if the same faculties across a city agreed not to advertise aggressively.

As noted earlier, there is a danger in universities being dependent on corporate funding. Reliance on the private sector narrows the issues to be researched, the permitted time frames and even the outcomes. The minimisation of both governmental and corporate interference in the research and teaching process has been one of redeeming features of national research grant systems administered by bodies such as the ARC and NHMRC. 

Furthermore, the notion of students as ‘customers’, whether by a voucher system or not, assumes they are ‘informed consumers’. However, given the logic of being a student and not a customer, it is likely that ‘buying’ or ‘shopping’ around for an education may become more literal than intended. The current debate over academic standards, with allegations of bribery and coercion to alter student grades or latent pressure to pass students, at the very least highlight potential dangers from ‘marketisation’, consumerism and the increasing reliance on private funding, which can lower academic standards. 

Current funding models within universities, particularly the predominance of student numbers at the level of schools/departments, often leaves a mere component of funding that acknowledges the research output of a department. This fosters a competition for students within the university and detracts from collegiality and interdisciplinary relationships. Moreover, such competition may place pressure on staff to reduce standards or offer less substantive content to attract large student enrolments. These techniques, in the long run, reduce the trust of students. As stated before, university administrations have a fiduciary responsibility to hire professional, scholarly and/or scientific leaders in academic research, to foster the new generation of these leaders, and to provide adequate means for academics to maintain their research and to devise the most appropriate, contemporarily relevant and accurate curricula. When nearly all academic funding occurs through the competition for increased students, academics must perforce reduce their time spent in either pure or applied research.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this submission suggests that Australia’s higher education needs are in urgent need of public redefinition. Public universities remain the main, and in some respects, the sole sources of innovation and ‘disinterested’ research in Australia and the region. But if universities are further corporatised, higher education can only stagnate and lose its moral integrity. 

Specific proposals of The Australian Sociological Association:

•	A comprehensive university funding strategy that does not privilege one sector of the university over another.
•	An increase in the funding of sociological teaching and research. 
•	Restoration of university funding by the Federal Government to address deteriorating staff-student ratios and the lack of resources for support services for students and staff. 
•	Rejection of On-line universities and recognition that good teaching is based on contemporary independent research assessed by international peer review. 
•	Restoration of the National Board of Employment, Education and Training as an independent body to ensure that Higher Education fulfils clearly-defined, democratically-decided objectives.
•	A wider inquiry should be established to investigate the core functions of universities.

References

Garnham, N. 2000, ‘”Information Society” as Theory or Ideology’, Information, 
Communication & Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 139-152.
Phelan, T.J. 2000, ‘Bibliometrics and the evaluation of Australian sociology’, Journal of 
Sociology, 36, 3, 345-63
Sociological Perspectives, 1998, Journal of the Pacific Sociological Association, Vol. 41, 
Special Issue: ‘The Academy Under Siege’.
Stinchcombe, A L. 1990, Information and Organizations Berkeley, University of 
California Press, California.

Submission authors and contact details

Jocelyn Pixley
Ph: 02 9385 3744
Email: J.Pixley@unsw.edu.au
School of Sociology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052

John Germov, Vice President of TASA
Ph: 02 4921 6315
Email: John.Germov@newcastle.edu.au
Web: www.newcastle.edu.au/department/so/tasa
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, The University of Newcastle, NSW 2308