Opinion & Commentary
Smarter way to survive
Australia 's vice-chancellors love to complain. If it's not a lack of money it is too much red tape or, as John Mullarvey, the chief executive of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee grumbled recently, it is threats to their autonomy.
The problem isn't that vice-chancellors lack legitimate grievances. They do suffer from too little money and too much regulation. The problem is that the vice-chancellors do not have a plausible strategy to ease their financial and regulatory burden.
Only last week we saw more strategic confusion when the AVCC issued its compromise position on the federal Government's voluntary student unionism legislation.
This legislation prohibits compulsory charges for non-academic services. Plausibly enough, the AVCC believes that if it passes, universities will struggle to provide the level of non-academic services they offer now. Their compromise is to permit a compulsory charge but to restrict spending to a dozen items including health and welfare services, non-political clubs and societies, and sporting facilities.
As a matter of principle, should universities be conceding that they should be accountable to the commonwealth not only for the money it provides but also for money it does not? As a matter of practice, the compromise would expose universities to yet more bureaucratic monitoring to determine whether expenditure fits within the authorised dozen categories rather than the simple academic v non-academic distinction.
How seriously can we take the AVCC's strategies when on Thursday its chief executive lamented that universities were in "an increasingly legislated and regulated environment, requiring an unprecedented level of reporting" and on Friday it suggested more regulation and reporting?
There is a much cleaner solution to the VSU problem. The AVCC should concede that the separate amenities and services fee is an anachronism, a relic of when universities could not charge their commonwealth-supported students. Since January 1 this year, these students can be charged. The only rationale for the separate amenities and services fee is that the tuition fee price cap is so low. The AVCC should be pushing for the cap to be lifted, for less constraining regulation rather than more.
Increasing the cap would ease universities' problems across a range of issues. Obviously it would alleviate their financial problems and that in turn would make them less exposed to other commonwealth micro-managing, such as the industrial relations reforms or the learning and teaching performance fund, which work by dangling relatively small sums of government money in front of financially desperate vice-chancellors.
Despite federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson recently ruling out further increases to student contribution amounts, it is not clear that he has an in-principle objection. After all, his original 2003 reform proposal called for higher maximum prices than we have today. He supports commonwealth-subsidised private schools setting their own fees and in some cases much more expensive fees than university students pay. What the minister needs to change his mind is political support that the vice-chancellors are not providing.
As well as not using the power of argument, the vice-chancellors are not applying the more direct clout they possess.
For constitutional reasons, the federal Government has little direct authority over universities. Instead, its control is based on attaching conditions to financial grants. So universities are not compelled to take commonwealth-supported students. They could turn the annual funding agreement process into real negotiations instead of meekly accepting the fait accompli they are offered. This is hardly a radical idea. It is what businesses, unions, governments and countless other bodies do every day of the week, working through differences towards a mutually acceptable outcome.
But it is highly problematic in the higher education sector because of the universities' record in past negotiations. For it to work, their implicit threat -- not to enrol the students the commonwealth wants -- needs to be credible. Yet with the vice-chancellors' reputation for backing down quickly and for internal division, the commonwealth probably won't believe them and won't offer a better deal. The Government knows the vice-chancellors' idea of tough action is to issue a harshly worded press release and acts accordingly.
Mullarvey has argued that "university autonomy should be guarded fiercely not only by the sector but also by the community at large". But if vice-chancellors won't guard themselves fiercely, why should the community at large do so?
Andrew Norton is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
