Degrees of difficulty
Universities are struggling. Staff see livelihoods at risk, students see disruption, and managers see balance sheets collapsing. Everyone is right — which is precisely why nobody is happy.
Clark Kerr, the renowned president of the University of California, once joked that a university is “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over car parking”. He was doubtless correct. Apart from their title, the professor of neurosurgery has little in common with the professor of cultural studies. Their disciplines are worlds apart, their priorities often clash, and yet the president must somehow reconcile them — while also placating governments, students, unions, alumni, and employers.
This is the predicament facing vice-chancellors, who are the equivalent of presidents in British and Australian universities. Some vice-chancellors are announcing job cuts amid declining revenues. Staff unions are mobilising, newspapers are lamenting, and politicians are hand-wringing. But anyone who has run a university knows the arithmetic is unforgiving.
For decades, international students have been the Australian higher education sector’s financial lifeline. They paid higher fees than local students, they kept the lecture theatres open, and they provided revenue for research. Governments were perfectly content to let universities balance their budgets this way.
Then came COVID, followed by visa slowdowns and sudden policy reversals, and the business model that had sustained entire institutions was suddenly crumbling. Vice-chancellors were left holding the bag.
Universities have lofty purposes, but they are also businesses. They purchase equipment, consume supplies, and employ labour to create products and services, which they sell at a price. If their income fails to exceed their expenditures, then universities go broke. In short, they have all the characteristics of a normal business.
Yet to many academics, treating a university as a business is a kind of heresy. Suggest that revenues must match expenditures, and the vice-chancellor will be accused of ‘neo-liberalism’ or some other thought crime. But accounts, unlike ideologies, must add up.
Balancing the books is harder than it looks. Academic research is expensive, and most research papers are rarely cited. Teaching is costly too, structured around one of the shortest working years in the economy. Long, languid summer breaks leave expensive buildings standing empty. Imagine a hotel that closed for a third of the year but kept all staff on full pay. And productivity gains are virtually unknown in universities. It takes the same amount of time to deliver a one-hour lecture today as it did centuries ago when universities were founded.
The Australian government does not make the vice-chancellor’s job easier. Universities are Australia’s most over-regulated industry. Ministers turn over frequently; I dealt with 15 of them during my career. Not one could resist tinkering with the system.
One week, universities are told to produce job-ready graduates; the next, to defend free speech; the next, to be commercial innovators or regional job creators. Tertiary education ‘commissions’ are created, disbanded and then created again. The rules change constantly, funding formulas are rewritten, and reporting requirements multiply.
Universities are like Lego in the hands of a child — forever pulled apart and reassembled in new shapes, never left to settle. Is it any wonder, then, that vice-chancellors fall back on the only lever still available: staffing levels?
It is not that they enjoy cutting jobs. Quite the opposite. Vice-chancellors know each redundancy means hardship for colleagues and disruption for students. But ignoring financial reality does not pay the bills. Unlike governments, universities cannot print money.
Of course, staff will protest, and their unions exist to defend their members. But the public should not confuse understandable dismay with evidence of managerial malice. Vice-chancellors are not villains twirling moustaches while gleefully slashing budgets. They are closer to airline CEOs: everybody insists on cheap fares, no cancellations, and world-class service — but nobody wants to pay what it costs to deliver them.
The truth is, we cannot have world-class universities on the cheap. If we want institutions that produce cutting-edge research, train skilled graduates, and contribute to national life, we must allow them to raise the money they need. Pretending otherwise simply guarantees another cycle of boom, bust, and recrimination.
Right now, staff see livelihoods at risk, students see disruption, and vice-chancellors see balance sheets collapsing. Everyone is right — which is precisely why nobody is happy.
Clark Kerr once observed that of all the organisations ever created, the university is the hardest to manage. Having been in the job, I can confirm he was right. Vice-chancellors walk a tightrope between competing, often contradictory, demands. They will never please everyone. But unless we let them make hard decisions — even unpopular ones — universities will soon have no staff, no students, and plenty of free parking.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Australian Financial Review.
Speaking of neurosurgeons and cultural studies it seems to me that there is a very complex relationship between the two.
Please check out this reference the author of which was a brain surgeon and teaching professor.
http://www.alphabetvsgoddess.com
Check out his other books too especially Sex Time & Power
I do wonder if universities will actually survive at all, at least looking anything like their present form.
From their early manifestations from religious/semi-religious institutions, to hallowed, elite stone bastions open only to the wealthy family type, their raison d'être circled around preparing attendees for the life of a studied 'gentleman', skills in political and mercantile control and something that may loosely be referred to as 'art for art's sake'. Preparing the vast majority of students for simply 'a job' (beyond the Public Service perhaps) was not what they were conceived for.
Then came the post WWII years, and while places were still hard to attain financially (Bursaries anyone?) the need for recovering/growing nations to build and grow led to what most of us have become familiar with in the last 50+ years and would now (until COVID) call 'normal'. Sweat and achieve high uni entry scores and have a better chance at getting a well paying, professional 'job' to set you on the solid financial path to success, career, family, fame or whatever it is that young people think a uni undergraduate degree, Masters, PhD etc will give them.
Meanwhile by the early 2000s it became apparent that these attainments and credentials did not always lead to positions and success - many found themselves unable to compete at their chosen career, many found that they actually didn't want to pursue that career and in fact felt that they had wasted their time. TAFE enrollments had plummeted (GOVT fiddling and wrong messaging), young people whose temperament would have been better suited to a trade became lost at sea with a mountain of student debt against their name. Meanwhile the decades and decades of experience and skills of TAFE teachers and tutors were lost with retirement and redundancies - these are things that are very hard to replace and are now desperately needed.
So now, post COVID, it seems to me that universities find themselves stuck in sort of phantom zone, sweating and panting like an addict who can't quite fathom how to pivot to a new way of life without letting go of the fix they have become so used to getting - the international student income (before that they were used to govt money and private fees). Yes, they are a business and always will be but that doesn't mean that they have to keep doing WHAT they've been doing for the last few decades in the FORM that they have been doing.
Perhaps they need to go back and NOT try to be everything to everyone. Perhaps they need to embrace what has been forced upon them - become more elitist again, focus on smaller numbers of students, have fewer academics, teachers, lecturers, tutors. Concentrate on selected courses and areas of research, reduce real estate holdings and free up capital, be smaller and more nimble.
Federal Governments, no matter what persuasion, need to recognize that they must increase funding massively. Relying on a dodgy honey-pot of international money has proved to be a lazy and unreliable system that produces graduates that don't automatically benefit Australia. If income is a university's sole preoccupation then they may as well just stay in the real estate business and expand on that hugely, and/or move into online gambling.
I haven't even gone into the massive changes that IT and Ai are/will be making in the learning space. Already with lectures being churned out online we find there is student disengagement and disassociation from the human/social element of their course - while this will accelerate, on site campus engagement with real, live humans is absolutely necessary to form a balanced graduate, this must be maintained.
So, smaller campuses and bureaucracies, targeted and specialised courses that fit the 21st century, the end to the idea that university alone is always the answer to everyone's career idea and having serious, dependable government funding that says Australia backs its unis 100%.
When something is regarded as too big to fail, it already has.