The protracted process of institutional consolidation revealed limits to the Minister’s authority. He expected amalgamations to be arranged by the beginning of 1990 but had to accept lengthy delays. He leaned heavily on uncooperative states and institutions, but did not get his way in a number of instances. It soon became apparent that the rules he promulgated to bring about consolidation would not be enforced. Several of the established universities that held out were under the 5000 EFTSU specified for a broad teaching profile and some specialised research, but none cut back on their range of activity. A number of new universities that began with fewer than 5000 EFTSU nevertheless embarked on research while introducing new courses. Nor was any restriction enforced on universities below the 8000 EFTSU required for comprehensive research. Even before the rapid growth of the Unified National System rendered these stipulations redundant, they were quietly abandoned: at the beginning of 1991 Peter Baldwin, the junior minister to whom Dawkins had handed responsibility for higher education in the previous year, made clear that he would not pursue any further amalgamations.1
Membership of the Unified National System came with a number of conditions. When Dawkins invited institutional heads to join, he required their explicit commitment to improve decision-making; strengthen planning and accountability; implement a research management plan, a staff management plan and an equity plan; and adopt selection principles that allowed students to transfer from technical and further education. In addition to these stipulations embedding equity and efficiency in the university’s operation, there was the educational profile that set out its mission, goals and activities. Negotiated annually with the Commonwealth, the profile constituted a funding agreement, and in entering it the university was required to give ‘due regard’ to national objectives and priorities. In this way greater institutional freedom was to be combined with increased accountability.2
Under protest, the vice-chancellors accepted these conditions of membership. Complaining of government intrusion into academic decision-making, they became accustomed to annual visits from Canberra officials for profile negotiations. Each year the Commonwealth issued instructions on the information that was to be provided in the educational profile, for this was its principal mechanism for directing higher education. But it was a blunt instrument. A profile visit lasted just one day, and from 1991 the meeting was cut back to just two hours for many universities.3 There was little opportunity to consider at any length the multitude of plans and reports on performance, and evaluation of the various components of the profile was in any case subsumed into a holistic funding agreement. For that matter, undertakings given on joining the Unified National System were grudgingly implemented and imperfectly realised. If Dawkins had prevailed in imposing a radical new order on higher education in 1988, the universities shaped its execution.
Shortly after the Hawke government came to office in 1983, the new Minister for Education and Youth Affairs wrote to the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC). In her additional responsibility as Minister assisting the Prime Minister on the Status of Women, Senator Susan Ryan had recently introduced a bill to prohibit sex discrimination, and she was preparing a Green Paper on affirmative action for women. Now, as Minister for Education, she asked the AVCC to collate information on the current policies of its members. Although some vice-chancellors pointed out that affirmative action might be in conflict with their university Act, they had very little to report. And in the following year, when the AVCC was asked to participate in an affirmative action working party chaired by Ryan, it issued a press release which conceded that there was a dearth of female academics, especially at senior levels, but insisted that the under-representation would take ‘many years’ to correct. Besides, universities could not compromise on appointment by merit.4
Later in 1984, the AVCC representative on the working party asked all nineteen universities for information on their arrangements. The responses used many variations on the ‘dog ate my homework’ story. Just one had a formally designated equal opportunity officer, although four reported that they used advisers on gender inequality and several others said they were advertising for an officer. Few had established committees to deal with discrimination, and the measures most described to encourage females in masculine-dominated areas of study showed clear signs of hasty improvisation.5
It was understandable that Ryan lacked sympathy for the men in charge of the country’s universities. In 1983 women occupied 17 per cent of academic posts but they made up just 2 per cent of the professoriate and 46 per cent of tutors and demonstrators. There was ample evidence of overt and covert discrimination, of the obstacles that women encountered in academic careers and the patterns of masculine preferment, yet universities complained of unwarranted interference and persisted with customary methods of appointment and promotion. With the passage of the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act of 1986, they were required to appoint an equal opportunity officer, develop and implement an affirmative action plan, and report on outcomes, but in the absence of provisions for enforcement the Act secured only perfunctory compliance.6
The Minister used a different strategy to pursue greater equity in educational provision. At a time of high youth employment the government wanted more students to complete secondary school education and go on to further study or training. It increased financial assistance to secondary and tertiary students from low-income families. A Participation and Equity Program allowed disadvantaged schools to develop more attractive courses and provided universities and colleges with funds for pilot programs to widen their intake. The program helped lift the school retention rate from 36 per cent in 1982 to 53 per cent by 1987, but the shortage of higher education places restricted opportunities for disadvantaged students who completed Year 12 to proceed to college or university.7
Ryan’s successor made much of this failure. He used it to justify his recourse to a charge for higher education in order to finance more places, the deferred and income-contingent repayment of the charge accompanied by an expansion of living allowances for needy students. His White Paper put equity at the forefront of the Unified National System, but did so in a different register: ‘The current barriers to the participation of financially and other disadvantaged groups limit our capacity to develop the highest skilled workforce possible and are a source of economic inefficiency.’ While Dawkins argued that growth would open the doors to those denied opportunity and enable the benefits of higher education to be shared ‘more widely and equitably’, he also acknowledged that ‘growth alone will not be sufficient’. Rather, there had to be a coordinated national approach to achieving equity objectives. So while the government would continue to fund specific initiatives through the Participation and Equity Program, a statement of national objectives would be developed and institutions would be required to specify their goals, strategies and measures of performance as part of the educational profile. This incorporation of equity into the core funding arrangements was new and attracted international attention.8
The first equity plans that institutions submitted as part of their 1988 profiles varied widely in coverage and content. Some, especially colleges, were able to build on existing practices while others could offer just pious statements of intent. After receiving advice from the Higher Education Council (HEC), Dawkins issued guidelines in early 1990. A Fair Chance for All (that title taken from a chapter in the Green Paper) identified six groups as ‘disadvantaged in gaining access to higher education’ and set goals for lifting their participation. Universities were to examine the composition of their student population, identify under-represented groups and formulate a plan to remedy the deficit. The six categories of disadvantage had been formulated in 1984, but several were modified here. They were ‘people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds’, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, women, people from non-English-speaking backgrounds, people with disabilities and people from rural and isolated areas.9
There were special programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and they will be considered separately, but the goal here was a 50 per cent increase of enrolments by 1995. Enrolments of people with disabilities were to double by the same year, and there was to be an increase of female students in ‘non-traditional areas’ of study as well as in research higher degrees. The goals for the other three groups were less numerically precise. All universities were to develop special entry arrangements for socioeconomic disadvantage by 1992; those with a significant number of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds in their catchment area were to conduct tertiary awareness and support programs by the same year, as were universities in rural and isolated areas and those offering distance education.10 In a subsequent exercise the equity groups were given a tighter definition and the indicators refined to distinguish between access (commencing enrolments), participation (all enrolments), retention and success.11
As with other policy documents of this time, A Fair Chance for All set out goals, strategies and accountabilities with a plethora of focusing and targeting. Statistics were available for women, Indigenous students, those with disabilities and from a non-English-speaking background, although, since the information relied on self-identification upon enrolment, it was not always accurate. A new measure had to be devised for socioeconomic disadvantage and rural and isolated areas. Postcodes and census data were used in both instances: students living in the lowest quartile of places ranked by wealth, employment and educational attainment were deemed socioeconomically disadvantaged; those in towns where the population was under 25 000 were classified as rural. But this method failed to discriminate between rich and poor living in the same locality, or a student living hundreds of kilometres from the nearest college and one from Armidale with an established university on his or her doorstep. A similar difficulty bedevilled the non-English-speaking category, which lumped together language groups with high and low rates of participation, while the inclusion of women stretched the rubric of educational disadvantage to cover a majority of all students. A more serious limitation was that in fixing six specific forms of disadvantage the equity strategy promoted fragmented strategies (how were the needs of an impoverished Aboriginal student from the bush to be met?) with little regard to the underlying causes of deprivation.12
Professing their commitment to equity, the universities raised a host of objections to the procedures set out in A Fair Chance for All. The numerical indicators were arbitrary and misleading; the goals for increased participation penalised institutions that began with a higher base; provision for students with disabilities would burden them with additional costs, and the support programs placed additional strain on resources.13 Slowly and unevenly, they fell into line with DEET’s reporting format, established their equity committee and put a senior academic administrator in charge of an equity office. These arrangements brought a concentration on projects and initiatives that yielded immediate, quantifiable results. The professional equity practitioners were ill-placed to convince those in charge of universities that equity was core business.14
There was substantial progress with three disadvantaged groups. Female participation rose in all fields of study, including ‘non-traditional areas’ (although women remained distinctly under-represented in engineering) and higher degrees. Students from a non-English-speaking background improved from under-representation to over-representation by 1993. Students with disabilities remained under-represented over the decade, although this category expanded from impairment of vision, hearing and mobility to include various ‘learning’ disabilities. The mixed results for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are considered below, but there was very little progress with the other two groups, students from rural and isolated areas and socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Rural and isolated students remained static during the 1990s at about 20 per cent of enrolments out of a population share of 28 per cent; more of them were in sub-degree courses, fewer in fields such as medicine, law and business studies, and fewer again in postgraduate programs.15
The disadvantages of class were seemingly intractable. There was no increase on the 15 per cent of students classified as socioeconomically disadvantaged, and again they were concentrated in less prestigious courses with lower entrance requirements. They made up 25 per cent and more of enrolments in some regional universities in 1996, 24 per cent at Victoria University of Technology and 23 per cent at the University of South Australia, but just 4.8 per cent at ANU, 5.9 per cent at the University of New South Wales and 6.9 per cent at the University of Sydney.16 These students were more likely to defer their HECS payments and several studies found that the need for financial assistance with living expenses far outweighed the deferred cost of tuition. Apart from the importance of family income in determining who could afford to attend university, encouragement to obtain a qualification exercised a strong influence. So did prior education at a time when private schools insisted on their entitlement to public funding and used it to augment their advantages. A proportional distribution of university places would have required a reduction in the participation of the socioeconomically advantaged—and no equity program ever contemplated measures to bring about equality.17
The government assisted universities’ equity programs with annual allocations, initially to support specific initiatives and subsequently on the basis of progress towards equity goals, but the amounts were tiny—just $3 to 4 million annually or 0.1 per cent of the operating grant. The outlay on Indigenous programs was more substantial, rising from around $20 million in 1989 to nearly $80 million by 1996. An Aboriginal Participation Program had begun in 1985 with the creation of specially funded places and backed by a dedicated scheme of financial assistance for Indigenous students. Along with measures to improve school participation, the program lifted the number of Indigenous students in higher education from just 881 in 1980 to 2565 by 1988.18
Following consultation in 1989, the Commonwealth, states and territories adopted a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy with the aim of achieving the same participation rates as other Australians by 2000—a goal that remains unaccomplished to this day. Universities were to develop an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy with the involvement of the local Indigenous community, and this became another component of their educational profile. The magnitude of the task was made clear in the equity guidelines set out in A Fair Chance for All. First, there was to be an increase in bachelor degree enrolments. Little more than a third of the Indigenous students at the end of the 1980s were undertaking degree courses, for most had not completed Year 12 and were studying in diploma or non-award courses. Second, graduation rates had to improve: the rate of Indigenous completion was half that of non-Indigenous students. Finally, more were to be attracted to the fields of law, business, medicine and health. Nearly two-thirds of enrolments in 1988 were in Arts and education, and to achieve ‘self-determination and self-management’ the government wanted more to be trained for professions that advanced welfare and economic development.19
Over the following years the Commonwealth increased the number of specially funded places (which came with a premium for the cost of support services) and were accompanied by additional allocations for Indigenous initiatives. Universities adopted a number of strategies: special entry schemes, bridging courses to prepare Indigenous students for degree programs, supplementary subjects to assist them with their courses and personal tutors to work with them. This university support was provided through Indigenous education centres, which grew to employ a significant number of Indigenous staff and served as familiar places to reduce isolation. Some centres took on an academic role, teaching Indigenous studies subjects and undertaking research—the University of South Australia went further with a Faculty of Aboriginal and Islander Studies. Elsewhere the preference was to embed Indigenous teaching and research within established academic programs. One approach ran the risk of creating an enclave, the other of fragmentation. The goal of ‘mainstreaming’ equity was difficult to reconcile with the maintenance of cultural identity.
Those who worked in the centres complained of the absence of Indigenous perspectives in university curricula and a lack of acceptance of their own capacity to develop and teach higher education subjects. They complained repeatedly that the centres were denied their proper share of the Commonwealth’s support funding and made strong representations to administer these funds—representations that the government resisted on the grounds that it was for universities to determine resource allocations in accordance with their strategies.20
The number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students rose to 6956 by 1996, when they constituted 1.2 per cent of all domestic enrolments against a presence in the national population of 1.7 per cent. More worrying was that they were over-represented in commencements, so that their under-representation in participation indicated disappointing rates of success and retention. The Indigenous students were predominantly female and concentrated in regional and newer universities; a little over half were enrolled in bachelor degrees, and the proportion in professional courses improved only slightly.21
The slow progress here was not for want of expenditure or university effort. Rather, it was indicative of a more general weakness in the approach taken to equity. Universities undertook equity programs as a form of special assistance ancillary to the way they conducted their academic activity. The paradoxical effect of mainstreaming equity was to create a regimen of monitoring and accountability that took responsibility out of the hands of academics and over to specialist units of professional staff.22
Similar problems bedevilled attempts to remedy the gender imbalance of staff. In 1988 women made up a little over a quarter of the academic workforce but were still concentrated overwhelmingly in junior positions; 49.9 per cent of staff below the level of lecturer were female, 7 per cent of those above senior lecturer. There was a similar imbalance in the non-academic workforce: here women were in a majority, but most worked in clerical and support roles with very few in senior administration. Nearly all universities now complied with the affirmative action legislation and reported annually on their equal opportunity strategies. The proportion of female academics rose, most markedly in humanities, social sciences, education, law and business studies, but progress at senior levels was slow. By 1996 women held 36 per cent of academic positions but just 14 per cent of the senior ones. They were less likely to be tenured, more likely to be working on a part-time basis.23
Fractional appointments were offered along with maternity leave and other arrangements designed to accommodate women’s career patterns. They formed part of universities’ equal opportunity strategies, which included development programs, mentoring, gender awareness training and provision for gender balance on appointment and promotion committees. As with equity, the strategies were formulated and monitored by a central unit, although in this case staff networks and unions played an active role. But old ways died hard in the absence of an institutional commitment.24
When Dawkins brought employment, education and training together in the same portfolio, his intention was to strengthen the country’s skills base. At that time there were three principal paths for post-secondary study: the university, the college and the institute of technical and further education (TAFE). The first two, which comprised the higher education sector, had nearly 400 000 students enrolled in degrees and diplomas; the training sector consisted of more than 200 TAFE institutes with more than 900 000 enrolments in courses that ranged from recreational and adult education to vocational training in trades, commerce, technical and service occupations. Partly because of the size and complexity of the TAFE sector, partly because the states provided most of the funding and were unlikely to surrender control, Dawkins restricted the Unified National System to universities and colleges. He had plans to shake up the training system was well as higher education, but that would take longer and was pursued separately.25
Yet TAFE could not be left to one side if Dawkins was to achieve his goals of increased participation and improved equity. A significant number of TAFE students undertook two-year diploma courses that met the definition of higher education, some funded by the Commonwealth accordingly, while some colleges were dual-sector institutions that offered TAFE as well as higher education. The Green Paper suggested that TAFE institutes could build on this involvement and serve as a provider of higher education in smaller regional centres or form partnerships that would allow them a greater role. To this end the Commonwealth offered to explore cost-sharing arrangements with the states. They declined.26
The Minister’s other objective was to facilitate greater movement from TAFE to higher education. Although not a new idea—the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission (CTEC) had pushed it most recently in the Review of Efficiency and Effectiveness—this was taken up strongly in the Green Paper. Some colleges and universities had arrangements to accept applicants on the basis of TAFE qualifications and grant exemptions (or credit) for subjects they had already covered; others considered such applications on a case-by-case basis and required those they admitted to take the whole course. The Green Paper condemned their costiveness as a denial of opportunity and a waste of investment. Provision of a system of transfer with credit for prior study became a condition of membership of the Unified National System.27
Control over entry was a fundamental tenet of institutional autonomy, long enshrined in the principle that the university alone could determine who was capable of undertaking its courses. The practice at this time was for Australian universities to select from school-leavers on the basis of their Year 12 results (in a process administered by a state admissions centre). Students who embarked on TAFE training usually did so before completing secondary education, so they did not have Year 12 qualifications and had to be assessed on the basis of academic equivalence if they subsequently sought admission to a university. These judgements were made at the faculty level and, especially in older universities, there was a pronounced reluctance to recognise non-university qualifications, let alone accept TAFE subjects as a substitute for their own. Colleges followed a similar practice of selection on merit but were more willing to create pathways for non-school-leavers.
Following CTEC’s call for a national system of credit transfer, the AVCC and Australian Committee of Directors and Principals (ACDP) formed a working party to develop explicit guidelines. The expectation in the White Paper was that all institutions would publish their policies for recognition of prior study, specifying the credit provided for work done in TAFE, and where necessary provide bridging courses or modify the degree program to facilitate the entry of such applicants. The response was disappointing. After Dawkins complained that the sector had paid only ‘lip-service to the need for improved credit transfer’, he had the National Board of Employment, Education and Training (NBEET) commission several reports.28
One examined course structures since inconsistency of terminology, length, workload and assessment was an obstacle to movement between institutions. Another considered admission practices. It found wide variation. Adelaide, Melbourne and the University of Queensland neither gave guidelines for entry from TAFE nor specified credit for TAFE qualifications; other prestigious universities insisted that TAFE subjects were not equivalent to the ones they taught, and that in any case the competition for places in faculties such as medicine and law left no room for such applicants. There were numerous arrangements between particular higher education and TAFE institutions, but just as bilateral treaties impede free trade, these special pathways disadvantaged other TAFE students. The goal was a national system of credit transfer in which all institutions codified their policies and applied them automatically. If necessary, there should be a subquota within course intakes for students transferring from TAFE and avenues for them to appeal against rejection.29
When Peter Baldwin assumed responsibility for higher education, he took a more conciliatory approach and arranged for the AVCC to conduct a jointly funded project on credit transfer. The intention was to begin with guidelines for business studies, computing and engineering, to be implemented in 1993, and then work towards a comprehensive coverage—with this expectation, there was talk of a national tertiary admissions system and a credit agency or ‘bank’, such as was used in Britain and other countries to facilitate credit transfer.30 The optimism was mistaken. Some universities declined to participate in the pilot project and, shortly before the AVCC circulated the working party’s draft guidelines for comment, Frank Hambly warned that the final responsibility for granting credit would remain with each university and, even if credit was given, that did not guarantee the recipient a place. Although a senior officer of the Department insisted the 1988 stipulation that all members of the Unified National System must operate a system of credit transfer was ‘non-negotiable’, several universities refused to accept the guidelines.31
The government proceeded to establish an Australian Credit Transfer Agency in 1995. It kept a record of all institutions’ practices, using this information to advise applicants on institutional practices, but had no powers to ensure that its advice was binding. The number of commencing students able to convert TAFE qualifications into credit towards a university degree rose from 923 in 1990 to 4737 in that year, still only 1.9 per cent of all commencing students. These numbers were insufficient to secure the Agency’s survival. The acceptance of students on the basis of TAFE qualifications also remained very uneven: in 1996 Swinburne admitted 24 per cent of its intake from TAFE and Edith Cowan 18 per cent, Melbourne just 2 per cent and Sydney 1 per cent.32
Changes in the country’s training system added impetus to the question of credit transfer. The impulse here came from industry organisations and trade unions, both of which had strong representation on the council of the National Board of Employment, Education and Training (NBEET) responsible for vocational training, the Employment and Skills Formation Council. The Business Council of Australia (BCA) had weighed into the debate on education in 1986 with a call for schools to give more attention to preparation for work. In the same year the ACTU sent the joint mission with the government’s Trade Development Council to Europe to investigate how manufacturing industries there achieved success. The subsequent report, Australia Reconstructed, gave a glowing account of post-Fordist production methods and flexible work organisation. A chapter entitled ‘Labour Market and Training Policies’ emphasised the importance of empowering workers through constant renewal of skills.33
The two peak bodies found common ground in advocating a competency-based approach that would bridge the divide between education and training. Education had long been understood to mean development of the individual as an end in itself, using a broad and liberal curriculum. Hence the disciplinary orientation of the Year 12 school curriculum, which formed the basis of entry to university where courses in the humanities and social sciences and natural sciences were again based on academic disciplines. Such courses, with their emphasis on systematic bodies of knowledge and disciplined approach to intellectual inquiry, were regarded as the best preparation for professional careers. Training, on the other hand, was concerned with instruction in specific occupational skills. Although Australian universities had taken on a range of vocational courses, the champions of a competency approach thought them unresponsive to the needs of industry; apprenticeship and the training system, on the other hand, was seen as too narrow and rigid, failing to develop the flexibility and enterprise needed for success in the modern economy. These attributes, in turn, required a more flexible and enterprising training system that instilled a broader range of capabilities and concentrated on outcomes rather than formal instruction. Competency was to replace credentials as the measure of achievement.34
The Industrial Relations Commission gave a boost to the competency movement as it began to overhaul industrial awards. In deciding a national wage case in 1988 the Commission put structural efficiency at the centre of the wage system, tying wage increases to productivity improvement. Thereafter it simplified a complex hierarchy of job classifications into a smaller number of bands defined by the level of skill, and included a training provision in awards to create more varied and fulfilling career paths.
Dawkins pursued the shake-up of the training system through a series of intergovernmental initiatives. Following a statement on Improving Australia’s Training System in April 1989, he convened a meeting of state and territory ministers, who agreed to adopt competency-based training and established a National Training Board to develop appropriate standards. The Board devised an Australian Standards Framework with eight levels of competency. Level 1 was the base level of a competent worker, rising to Level 8 for senior professionals and managers. The Training Board determined Levels 1 to 6, leaving those that applied to higher education, Levels 7 and 8, to a different agency.35
In 1990 the ministers endorsed the report of a committee chaired by Ivan Deveson, chief executive of Nissan Australia, entitled Training Costs of Award Restructuring. There was to be an open training market in which TAFE institutions competed with the training programs of business companies, professional organisations and private providers—with procedures for accrediting these alternative providers that soon proved too lax. The market was primed by the introduction in the same year of a training levy on businesses (initially 1 per cent of their payroll, rising to 1.5 per cent). Dawkins went further in 1991 with a plan to take full financial responsibility for TAFE so that the Commonwealth could determine policy for the states to administer. When they rejected this takeover, the Commonwealth threatened to establish an alternative system of institutes of vocational education, but settled in 1992 for a compromise: the states agreed to maintain their investment in vocational education and training in return for increased Commonwealth funding. An Australian National Training Authority assumed responsibility for oversight and allocation of the Commonwealth funds.36
Meanwhile the ministers of education had commissioned a report from Brian Finn, chief executive of IBM Australia, on the future development of post-compulsory education and training. In calling for nearly universal participation of young Australians up to the age of 19, the Finn committee identified six areas of competence deemed essential to employability: language and communication, mathematics, scientific and technological understanding, cultural understanding, personal and interpersonal skills. The BCA and ACTU endorsed these recommendations. A crucial champion was Laurie Carmichael, a lifelong autodidact who had spent more than forty years as a union activist. Now assistant secretary of the ACTU, he was instrumental in arranging the Accord and the driving force behind Australia Reconstructed. As chair of the Employment and Skills Formation Council and an influential member of the Finn committee, Carmichael produced a report on entry-level vocational education, again based on competencies and work-based training.37
Yet another committee chaired by Eric Mayer, who had been chief executive of National Mutual, developed the Finn committee’s competencies into a more generic set of ‘key competencies’: collecting, analysing and organising ideas and information; expressing ideas and information; planning and organising activities; working with others; using mathematical ideas and techniques; solving problems and using technology. This concession to higher-level intellectual abilities was criticised by the ACTU as ‘too academic’, although it left unresolved the problem of how such key competencies were to be measured.38
The reorganisation of the training system was messy and protracted; the head of the Australian National Training Authority conceded that there were ‘too many committees and working parties’.39 It was developed as a form of industry policy, using the tripartite structure of government, business and unions, with little involvement of higher education or even the TAFE sector. But there were two aspects that directly involved universities. The first was the application of competencies to their courses and awards, the second the difficulty that arose when they were asked to accept applicants who did not have TAFE qualifications but instead sought recognition of their competency-based training.
The development of Levels 7 and 8 of the Australian Standards Framework was allocated to a new National Office of Overseas Skill Recognition, whose primary role was to determine the equivalence of professional qualifications obtained outside Australia, and a number of professional associations decided to use the same competency standards for recognition of domestic qualifications. This caused little difficulty for such professions as nursing and engineering, but was resisted strongly by more prestigious ones such as medicine and law.40 Some vice-chancellors were unperturbed by the competencies, some conspicuously hostile. The most outspoken was David Penington of Melbourne, who saw the movement for competency-based education, with its promulgation in Australia Reconstructed, as ‘the modern equivalent of a workers’ council’. It did not help that Laurie Carmichael condemned his ‘mystical academic friends who believe you can only learn to think in a way bestowed by them in universities’. With the convergence of work and learning, he predicted, ‘such academic witchcraft will finally disappear’.41
As the controversy built during 1992, the AVCC expressed grave doubts about the application of competencies to the university sector. Bowing to its pressure, Peter Baldwin commissioned a report from Simon Marginson on their suitability for science and humanities courses. Formerly a research officer for educational unions and now working in Melbourne University’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education, Marginson was emerging at this time as the country’s most acute policy analyst. He had already criticised the claim that improved skills would ensure improved productivity, for this postulate of human capital theory assumed that an improved supply of labour would call up the right pattern of capital investment. He also understood that the generic competencies, while apparently broadening vocational education, were still defined in terms of employers’ needs and could not provide an adequate description of educational outcomes. Besides, the modular structure of training was quite different from the sequential and cumulative character of university courses, and the relationship between the discipline-based knowledge of Arts and Science faculties and employment was far more complex than the linear model of education and work implied.42
Marginson’s rigorous affirmation of the educational mission proved persuasive—before Peter Baldwin passed responsibility for higher education to Kim Beazley in March 1993, he announced that competencies would not be used for higher education.43 In their place would come something different, an Australian Qualifications Framework that standardised the nomenclature, length and articulation of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Introduced in 1995, this increasingly prescriptive code undermined the self-accrediting status of the university as an institution able to determine its own courses and awards, but fell some way short of confusing educational outcomes with levels of competency.
That left the question of whether universities would accept applicants on the basis of key competencies. Credit transfer was relatively straightforward since the university could examine the transcripts of applicants’ prior studies; what came to be known as ‘recognition of prior learning’ required assessment of an individual’s ability to complete the course. There were pathways in most universities from industry training to a very restricted range of professional courses. To go further and accept applicants on the basis of the skills they had acquired in the workplace, let alone determine how much credit they should be given for such prior learning, involved academics in time-consuming testing and evaluation. The AVCC prepared guidelines that would assist universities to make such judgements, but its cooperation was dependent on cost recovery and Commonwealth legislation precluded charging any fee.44
The Commonwealth pursued credit transfer through a sequence of methods. Initially, it was a condition of membership of the Unified National System; subsequently it was to be part of the education profile; then the AVCC was to prepare national guidelines, and for several years NBEET conducted forums for enthusiasts to extol its benefits. None of these devices broke down the barriers between universities and TAFE—indeed, the restriction of the Unified National System to higher education created a new binary divide. TAFE was powerless to withstand the competency movement and damaged by the opening up of training to alternative providers. That universities were able to resist these changes became an additional point of differentiation between education and training.
‘Academic staff are part of a national industry’, the White Paper stated, and for that reason there had to be a system of management to improve the performance of the higher education workforce. In keeping with the rhetoric of workplace reform, the White Paper asserted a congruence of interests: higher education would gain increased flexibility and productivity, while academics (and general staff) would enjoy greater opportunities for advancement and reward. To this end the White Paper set out a number of expectations. Institutions were to increase the proportion of non-tenured appointments, provide staff development and training, and make regular assessments of performance with procedures for dealing with unsatisfactory performance; they were encouraged to compete for ‘high-quality staff’ with additional remuneration and entitlements.45
None of these devices was novel. As universities searched for greater efficiency and effectiveness over the decade of the steady state, they had to do more with less. They made fewer permanent appointments and more temporary ones, became increasingly prescriptive in their statements of duties, no longer relied on old hands to introduce newcomers to customary practices but codified them, ran induction programs and offered training in academic skills. These changes were introduced gradually, however, and with due regard to the sensitivities of a salaried profession. They began a process that redefined the career expectations of those entering academic employment but at least initially impinged more lightly on senior academics.
The professoriate enjoyed a substantial measure of autonomy. If the days of the ‘god professor’ had passed, there was still an attachment to the idea of the university as a community of scholars who undertook their work and conducted their affairs with a minimum of management. By management these traditionalists meant the directives that came from central administration, for they were accustomed to academic self-management. Such self-management, moreover, was restricted to the upper ranks of a markedly hierarchical profession since it was those academics at higher levels who directed the activity of those under them.
An academic career began with appointment to a lectureship and then confirmation of tenure. Promotion was needed to become a senior lecturer, determined by a committee of the more eminent members of the academic profession, and a small minority gained further promotion to reader. Professors were customarily appointed separately by external advertisement, and a small trickle of internally promoted ones did not alter their exalted status. The CAEs had a flatter career structure that culminated in principal lecturer, but college teachers also enjoyed tenure, for security of employment was seen as a necessary condition of academic freedom and a lifetime commitment to a highly specialised academic discipline. That left a growing number who were employed to undertake research on fixed-term contracts as well as temporary and fixed-term lecturers and a large body of tutors and demonstrators, increasingly hired on a part-time or casual basis.
In 1987 there were 16 000 full-time equivalent academics in higher education with tenure and half as many again without; but these numbers measured full-time equivalent staff and a head count would have revealed a much higher proportion without job security. The increasing recourse to such untenured appointments disadvantaged those entering the profession—especially women, who were concentrated at the lower levels—but left the advantages of those with established careers intact: all but eighty-four of the 3644 principal lecturers, readers and professors in 1987 were tenured.46 A requirement by the Minister that the proportion of untenured senior posts must double within two years was hardly onerous, but it was accompanied by other changes to employment conditions that dispelled the illusion of academic self-management.
The changes were embodied in an industrial agreement between higher education employers and employees ratified by the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission in June 1988. In the previous year the Commission had granted an increase of $10 a week for all award wages and offered a further increase of up to 4 per cent in industries that reached agreement on measures to improve productivity. As they negotiated the higher education agreement, the vice-chancellors and principals sought greater managerial powers, including assessment of academic performance; the academic unions resisted. Since the 4 per cent increase would need to be funded by the Commonwealth, Dawkins was able to impose the changes to staff management he set out in the White Paper. Hence he had a provision for dismissal in the case of unsatisfactory performance inserted in the award, effectively abrogating the protections offered by tenure, although he was unable to obtain a provision for redundancy. He sided with the employers to introduce regular assessment of performance, with the unions in specifying that it would be used for purposes of staff development.47
The industrial tribunal anticipated the formation of the Unified National System by bringing universities and colleges into a common award. This caused less difficulty for the colleges, which were used to government regulation of their affairs and familiar with state industrial tribunals, than it did for the universities for whom such external regulation was new—although the vice-chancellors and principals could at least agree on strengthening their hands in staff management. The two principal academic unions were also working from different perspectives. Many members of the Federation of Australian University Staff Associations (FAUSA) saw external regulation of academic work as a threat to tenure. The leaders of the college-based Federated Council of Academics (FCA), on the other hand, were closer to Dawkins and the union movement, and saw advantages in the restructuring of higher education. The two organisations would join other unions representing general staff to form the National Tertiary Education Union, partly to augment their bargaining power in the Unified National System and partly to comply with an ACTU directive to form industry-wide unions with a minimum of 10 000 members. FAUSA was close to this number, the FCA had around 7500 members, and jostling for the upper hand delayed amalgamation until 1993; but long before then the two organisations were joined in industrial action against the system of appraisal used to assess academic performance.48
Much of the argument over appraisal turned on its form and purpose. The practice originated in business, where it had two uses: to provide constructive feedback to employees and as a formal system of evaluation that determined rewards and sanctions. There was also recognition in the business management literature that conflation of these two uses reduced the efficacy of both.49 Most universities appraised performance for promotion and confirmation of tenure, but only a handful conducted regular appraisals of tenured staff.50 Since that was now to be standard practice, the academic unions argued for a ‘formative’ appraisal, one that would be used to facilitate career development. Some vice-chancellors, on the other hand, pressed for a ‘summative’ form of appraisal to provide them with a management tool.
The agreement ratified in 1988 as the Australian University Academic Staff (Conditions of Employment) Award specified that all academics should have a supervisor responsible for assessing their performance; if it was judged unsatisfactory there was to be an improvement plan, and if that failed there was a process that could culminate in demotion or dismissal, although the agreement stated that the primary purpose was to provide assistance to academics. In response, universities developed an appraisal system that required all staff to submit an annual report to their supervisor (usually the head of department) ahead of a meeting where the record of activity was discussed; following that discussion the supervisor made a written evaluation. The unions opposed combining formative appraisal with assessment of performance and raised a host of objections.
The dispute became entangled in negotiations for a new agreement following the decision of the (reconstituted) Australian Industrial Relations Commission in August 1988 in a new wage case, which reiterated the need for greater structural efficiency. Lengthy negotiation followed and led in 1991 to a new award. This revised the classification of academics (from a base grade, Level A, for assistant lecturers to professors at Level E) with clearer guidelines for casual and untenured employment as well as procedures for probation, confirmation and promotion.51 A subsequent award created a similar career structure for administrative staff, classified in ten ascending levels according to their skills and duties.
This failed, however, to resolve the dispute over appraisal. The 1991 award included a provision for appraisal on a trial basis. David Penington, who was president of the employers’ Australian Higher Education Industrial Association, wanted to tie appraisals to salary increments and promotion—and unsettled some of the more conciliatory vice-chancellors when he advised the shadow minister on how to deregulate the sector’s industrial relations. Penington interpreted the Commission’s decision that there should not be automatic progression up the salary scale as justifying summative appraisals, but the Commission confirmed that the purpose of appraisals remained staff development. This disagreement was not resolved until 1993, when the Commission accepted the employers’ view that progress through the classification levels implied periodic reviews of performance.52
Very few institutions conducted appraisals before 1988. Case studies in 1987 of seven (unidentified) universities and colleges that did use it as a management tool found scepticism and resistance. It was regarded at a metropolitan university as a ‘bureaucratic procedure’ with ‘few, if any consequences’; staff at an institute of technology complained it was ‘conducted vindictively’, and there was anger at a provincial university’s reliance on ‘trivial objectives capable of measurement’ at the expense of ‘the essence of academic work’.53 Three years later, only fifteen members of the Unified National System had implemented appraisal procedures.54
Practices varied. In a national study conducted in 1991 on universities that did conduct appraisals, only half of the academics submitted a written report and just three in five had a formal meeting with their supervisor. The attitudes of those who commented on the experience ranged from hostility and resentment to apathy and ‘grudging acceptance of a necessary evil’. A subsequent review of the system used at the University of Melbourne, an early adopter, found that a quarter of the academics surveyed believed the appraisal assisted them to develop their careers. Junior and untenured staff were more likely to recall discomfort in their meetings with supervisors: one stated it was conducted in an ‘atmosphere of judgement and fear’. Senior academics were less bothered: one observed that it was ‘totally ineffective but harmless’ and another that, since his head was unable to provide any practical assistance with a crushing workload, the meeting was ‘a futile waste of time’. Although departmental heads were trained to conduct appraisals, many were reluctant to pronounce judgement on close colleagues and took refuge in anodyne evaluations. There were very few reports of unsatisfactory performance.55
The system of staff appraisal was superimposed on a variety of existing practices. Some departmental heads had provided career advice and assistance on a regular basis; some intervened only when a member of the Department neglected teaching duties or let research run down; some turned a blind eye. The principal safeguard against slack performance was peer esteem. Expectations set by colleagues created an atmosphere of common endeavour that worked well in successful departments, whereas abuses went unchecked in less successful ones. Appraisal introduced a formal, rule-bound procedure conducted on a one-to-one basis behind closed doors; it used a common template that failed to capture the nuances of academic practice, and the knowledge that the written report was to be placed on record inhibited frankness. This was a lowest common denominator method of staff management.
Performance appraisal was an early instalment of what would become a systematic regimen of performance management, one that used increasingly detailed instruments to prescribe expectations and measure outcomes for every aspect of employees’ duties. A mechanism designed to improve accountability for the self-directed nature of the academic profession grew into an elaborate system for constantly monitoring behaviour. Perhaps most damaging was the withdrawal of trust in academics, for the loss of trust was mutual. A national survey conducted in 1993 found widespread cynicism within the profession—only 9 per cent agreed with the proposition that the new procedures were improving performance—and suggested that passive resistance was common. Academics had deeply embedded beliefs and values that were not responsive to invigilation; 80 per cent of the respondents said they were motivated not by rewards and penalties but by an intrinsic interest in their vocation. As one disaffected academic later put it, ‘If you are so smart, why are you under surveillance?’56
If universities were to fulfil the objectives of the Unified National System, they needed a greater capacity to make and implement decisions. This required a strategic approach to planning with clear lines of accountability and ‘strong managerial modes of operation’ to ‘remove barriers to delegation of policy implementation from governing bodies to chief executive officers’.57 Here was another paradox of neoliberalism: in empowering universities to take control of their fortunes, the government prescribed how they must conduct their affairs.
The first task was to purge governing bodies of the encumbrances of a deliberative forum so that they could govern decisively. The councils (or senates) of Australia’s universities were large and diverse—more than thirty members was the norm, more than forty not uncommon. State governments appointed some; graduates, staff and students elected others; there were additional co-opted members, typically from business and the professions, while the vice-chancellor and other university officers served ex officio. Without providing any evidence, the White Paper claimed that these assemblies suffered from a number of defects. First, there was a tendency for the elected members ‘to see their primary role as advocates’ rather than as trustees who had a responsibility to act in the best interests of the institution. Second, they misused their membership by intervening in operational matters—as John Dawkins had done as a student representative on the University of Western Australia’s Senate. Third, there were too many of them for effective operation; the White Paper took company boards as a guide and said ten to fifteen members were appropriate.58
Since the composition of governing bodies was determined by state legislation, Dawkins expected new statutes giving effect to amalgamations would take the opportunity to reconstitute the councils and senates. The New South Wales government did so in 1989, when it reduced the governing bodies of universities there to between nineteen and twenty-four members.59 Dawkins himself was able to cut ANU’s Council from forty-four to twenty-three, but elsewhere he made little progress. Colleges and institutes were used to smaller councils, and those that became universities carried them over—hence there was a council of twenty at Curtin, twenty-one at Edith Cowan, twenty-two at Queensland University of Technology and twenty-four at the University of South Australia. The governing bodies of established universities remained largely unchanged—there were forty Council members at Melbourne, thirty-nine at Monash, thirty-six at the University of Queensland and thirty-five at Adelaide.60
It was not until 1995 that a new Commonwealth minister, Simon Crean, established a Higher Education Management Review with terms of reference that included ‘the role, composition and responsibilities of governing bodies’. The chair of the committee conducting the inquiry, David Hoare, was a merchant banker, and his report applied a corporate model of what were now called ‘governance arrangements’. A governing body had three primary roles: ‘external accountability, strategic planning oversight and performance management’. It was appropriate for it to include a range of ‘stakeholder groups’ (another corporate neologism) from within and beyond the university, for that gave ‘credence to the decision of the Council’, and the presence of staff and students provided ‘a check on the material presented to the Council’.
But the review committee found a lack of appropriate skills, a poor understanding of strategic issues and fiduciary responsibilities, and a worrying imbalance of interest and commitment. Meetings were sometimes dominated by university members; the elected staff and student members were inclined to pursue the vested interests of their constituencies and even use the governing body as a ‘court of appeal’ against decisions made within the university; there were vice-chancellors who would not raise important issues at Council meetings, even in confidence, because they feared that certain members would divulge them. The committee repeated the recommendation that a council should consist of between ten and fifteen members and added that external, independent members should outnumber internal ones.61
By this time the states were ready to comply with the corporate model. In 1996 South Australia set a maximum size of twenty members, two-thirds external; Victoria prescribed no more than twenty-one, again with two-thirds from outside, in the following year, and by 2000 the only university with a governing body larger than twenty-six was Queensland.62 With rare exceptions, vice-chancellors readily accommodated these reductions, for one effect was to remove some of their most knowledgeable critics. The attenuated provisions for university representation typically allowed for just one member drawn from the academic staff, one from the general staff and one from the students. As the Hoare committee conceded, they alone had the first-hand knowledge needed to assess the reliability of information that university officers brought before the Council.
A further expectation of the Unified National System was that the governing body invest its vice-chancellor with the powers of a chief executive officer. That designation appeared in the existing statutes of all nineteen established universities, although they specified the executive officer’s responsibilities differently, and every one allowed delegation of authority.63 The composition of these leaders was already changing as the demands of the office increased. Back in the 1970s vice-chancellors were recruited from the professoriate with a preponderance coming from Melbourne, Sydney or British universities; they served long terms and rubbed shoulders in city clubs with leaders of business and professions. This closed circle included some outstanding figures—David Derham of Melbourne and Bruce Williams of Sydney imposed their authority with a deep understanding of the academic mission—but was not conducive to change. By the 1990s vice-chancellors were drawn from a much wider range of universities, where they had typically served an apprenticeship as a deputy or pro vice-chancellor; the average tenure was falling, and they might well move on within a few years and ply their trade elsewhere. When the vice-chancellors appeared before the remuneration tribunal in 1991 to seek increased salaries, they argued for a break in the traditional nexus with academic salaries on the grounds that they were not academics but chief executive officers.64
The White Paper foreshadowed assisting institutions to review their management structures, and the Minister asked the HEC for advice on how this might be done. There was no need as most universities undertook their own reviews, sometimes using consultants (the Boston Consulting Group prospered from its higher education clients) or drawing on external advisers (so that Peter Karmel assisted La Trobe University to restructure its administration).65 The result was a new system of executive control concentrated in the office of the vice-chancellor. The executive group consisted of the vice-chancellor, deputy and pro vice-chancellors and senior administrators such as the registrar and business manager who met, typically on a weekly basis, to exercise oversight. Older universities included officers of the academic board, but the policy role of boards shrank as collegial decision-making was pushed aside as too cumbrous and too attached to the status quo. The new management structure grouped faculties, schools and departments into a devolved one-line budgetary system, with the deans and executive officers holding a large measure of control over the allocation of resources.66
There was a proliferation of deputy and pro vice-chancellors. Some universities had one or two of them in 1987, but four had become the norm by 1996.67 They were responsible for particular areas of activity, such as research or teaching, although bound by the principle of cabinet solidarity to uphold all decisions taken at the executive level—that was one reason why animated debate dwindled at the academic board. A similar transformation occurred at the higher levels of administration. With pardonable exaggeration, a reforming vice-chancellor likened the old order to ‘an English village of bygone days—a place with its smith, and its baker, some gentry and some hobbledehoys’. The registrar, the bursary, the librarian, ‘every one with a special job and all knowing their place in the hierarchy—just the thing to maintain order and harmony in a stable rural environment’. Borrowing, and often recruiting, from the private sector, the new senior administrators were professional managers with more specialised skills, driving constant business improvement.68
The AVCC underwent a similar transformation. In 1988 it recruited its first public relations officer and appointed Vin Massaro director of planning and development. When he left at the end of the year to become registrar of Flinders, John Mullarvey was lured from DEET, where he had been head of the higher education planning division. An executive group of vice-chancellors was created and the chair—now designated president—was authorised to make public statements without circulating them in advance. So too was Frank Hambly—now executive director—although he was warned not to comment on amalgamations! With the move in 1991 from rented offices on Northbourne Avenue to purpose-built premises in the Canberra suburb of Deakin, the AVCC secretariat increased to thirty-five to service standing committees on planning and development, research, education and public relations as well as meetings of the deputy vice-chancellors in charge of research, and later those handling academic and international portfolios. A gentlemen’s club had become an effective vehicle for the government’s dealings with the sector.69
In parallel with the new corporate form of management came strategic planning. Universities had little experience of this business practice before 1987 since the CTEC had done much of their planning for them. Now, if only because a plan was required as part of the educational profile, they were plunged into the cosmology of vision statements (one irreverent chan cellor cracked that his vice-chancellor used that term because he could not spell ‘hallucination’), missions, goals, strategies and key performance indicators. The early efforts were rudimentary: goals were defined so broadly as to be meaningless, strategies consisted of low-level activity lists such as promoting, discussing and seeking more information. Even in 1995 the Hoare committee found that many university plans lacked consideration of the ‘operating environment’, deployment of resources and systematic monitoring of performance. Part of the difficulty was that, like many management innovations, this one was taken from a different setting and applied uncritically with a surfeit of jargon. An American critic observed that many such practices were taken up by higher education just as the business corporation abandoned them.70
John Dawkins’ instinct was to impose change; his successors were more inclined to let the logic of his Unified System run its course. We have seen in this chapter that many of the changes he announced with such fanfare in 1988 were stillborn, and subsequent chapters will discuss others. The insistence that all universities adopt a research management plan, for example, was subverted since most universities devised a rubric that encompassed their existing research with a broad description of how they supported it. For that matter, Don Aitkin’s boast that the Australian Research Council would concentrate its support on a select list of national priorities proved empty. The White Paper announced that the Commonwealth would shift to a performance-based funding model, but the development of appropriate performance indicators proved too difficult, and a standard formula for teaching load remained the principal determinant of the operating grant.
More generally, the battery of requirements that were imposed on the universities taxed the capacity of the new government machinery. With the abolition of CTEC, the Department assumed a policy responsibility it was ill equipped to handle. When universities met DEET officers in early profile visits, they found it necessary to explain many aspects of their operation. The voluminous information provided in the educational profiles piled up with little evidence that it was put to use. Similarly, NBEET produced more than a hundred reports in its first three years, many of them commissioned investigations or discussion papers that had negligible effect.71
Even the Minister’s efforts to palliate critics of government intrusion were rebuffed. In bedding down the operation of the Unified National System, he directed the Higher Education Council to undertake a number of tasks. An early one on course length and nomenclature, seeking the consistency that would eventually lead to the Australian Qualifications Framework, caused particular affront. Members of the AVCC were critical of the Council chair, Gregor Ramsey, who had abandoned CTEC to join the Minister and whose peremptory manner was sometimes attributed to his background as a college administrator. When the AVCC’s executive brought the volume of Council requests to Dawkins’ attention, Brian Wilson thought he was ‘clearly troubled by the revelation’.72
In any event, the Minister decided late in 1989 to establish a charter of institutional autonomy and academic freedom that would lay allegations of government interference to rest. It was to be developed by a working party that included Brian Wilson and would guarantee the independence of universities in teaching, research and appointments as well as ‘the right of staff to research, inquire, speak and publish’.73 To Dawkins’ evident surprise, there was a groundswell of opposition to such a charter. Peter Karmel, on behalf of the four learned academies, argued that any bill of rights conferred by such a charter ran the risk of limiting freedoms not listed; his preference was to reinstate an independent buffer body, but the AVCC did not want to return to the tutelage of CTEC. The unions were keen to see a charter of academic freedom, but the AVCC thought their formulation extended into industrial matters and would restrict its members’ institutional autonomy.74
The working party had other concerns. It could see that aspects of the Unified National System (the clawback of research funds, the educational profiles and national priorities) had reduced institutional autonomy but was not sure how to balance autonomy and accountability. Besides, Dawkins’s intention to embed the charter in Commonwealth legislation raised the problem of conflict with state laws. There was unease in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, which had recently made provision for academic freedom in new higher education statutes, for the idea that academic freedom was something granted by government implied that it could also be removed. In May 1990, shortly after Dawkins handed higher education to Peter Baldwin, the new Minister for Higher Education made it clear that the government would not persist with a charter unless there was agreement. With the AVCC now firmly set against it, he abandoned the proposal.75
As chapter 4 noted, one of Dawkins’ advisers believed he was taken aback to be given the education portfolio in 1987. The evidence suggests otherwise. There has never been a minister responsible for higher education with his strength of conviction and clarity of purpose. Impatience rather than reluctance characterised his tenure, for he was anxious to implement his sweeping changes so that he could move on to new conquests—and in 1988 he was already discussing with Paul Keating a change of party leadership that would create a vacancy at the Treasury.76 When Dawkins gave up direct control of higher education in April 1990, Frank Hambly believed that he had accomplished what he set out to do. ‘There is no doubt that John Dawkins has won’, he told a group of public servants. ‘Australia now has the kind of higher education system which he envisaged’, so that he could ‘virtually abandon responsibility’ for it and leave his successor to administer what he had created. His intention, Hambly reported, was to allow the junior minister to look after amalgamations and research funding while retaining oversight of the budget, appointments to NBEET and its councils, and ‘major policy issues’.77
Hambly might have misjudged Dawkins’ intention, for it has been suggested that he saw Baldwin as a rising star and encouraged him to take initiatives; there is very little evidence of Dawkins restraining his colleague, even on major issues.78 The new Minister for Higher Education had been an engineer before entering politics, was thoughtful and had an impressive grasp of detail. He decided very early that there needed to be some respite from the constant upheaval. Hence he would ‘step back and give the universities more scope to make their own arrangements’; further amalgamations would not be imposed by ‘bureaucratic fiat’, nor would competencies. His respect for university autonomy and conciliatory relationship with the AVCC caused tension with senior officials in the Department. In a major policy statement late in 1991 Baldwin indicated that there would be ‘significantly less involvement by the Commonwealth than in the recent past’; university autonomy had to be balanced with public accountability, but it was important to provide resources ‘in a way that does not induce a culture of compliance by institutions to government prescriptions’.79
Baldwin could also see that the universities were struggling to cope with the rapid growth of student numbers. With students spilling out of lecture theatres, unable to find a seat in the library or arrange a meeting with a teacher, questions were being asked about the quality of higher education. His task was to persuade the Cabinet to provide additional funding, and he did so by proposing the new mechanism of quality assurance that would distribute an additional $70 million a year, equivalent to 2 per cent of the operating grant. The nature of this ‘quality assurance and enhancement program’, which operated for three years, will be considered in chapter 7. Its immediate effect was to stimulate universities to improve their procedures.
Baldwin was Minister for Higher Education for two years before moving to Social Security in early 1993. Kim Beazley, who had succeeded Dawkins as Minister for Employment, Education and Training in December 1991, assumed responsibility for the sector until the end of 1993 when Simon Crean inherited the portfolio. Beazley, a lecturer in politics before election to parliament, showed more interest in school and vocational education than universities. Crean, a former president of the ACTU, was principally concerned with the training system. We shall see that these two ministers made modifications to the funding arrangements, lifted the rates of repayment for HECS and increased opportunities for universities to generate fee income, without disturbing the structure of the Unified National System. From their point of view it was working satisfactorily and universities were quite capable of looking after themselves.
By then the universities felt the same. Back in 1988 they had criticised the dismantling of CTEC and lobbied strenuously for NBEET to be strengthened so that it could be an independent source of policy advice. A year later, when Peter Karmel called for the reinstatement of such an arm’s-length body, there was no enthusiasm. By late 1993, when the government commissioned a review of NBEET and its councils, the AVCC felt that the advisory structure was too large and diffuse. It still hankered for a separate body for higher education through which it could exert a stronger influence, but had no desire to revert to the older arrangement whereby CTEC maintained a close control over their income and expenditure, building programs, course proposals and so much else.80
One reason for the change of attitude was that NBEET’s limited policy capacity as an advisory body without operational responsibility meant that it and the Department often called on the AVCC to provide assistance. Indeed, the lack of confidence in NBEET’s capacity to speak for the sector led the government to rely heavily on the AVCC for endorsement of its policies.81 Another was that for all their complaints about the new regime, the universities had entered on a path of self-management and acquired a taste for it.
How was this transformation effected? The prescriptive conditions announced in the White Paper and set out in the Minister’s letter of conditions for membership of the Unified National System encountered considerable resistance. From time to time there was talk of imposing financial penalties on universities that defied these stipulations, but nothing came of such threats.82 Inducements proved far more effective. One form of inducement was financial. Discretionary allocations to assist with the cost of amalgamations helped secure a number of mergers. Competitive grants for equity initiatives, Aboriginal participation and educational improvement attracted a flurry of activity. These special-purpose grants made up a very small proportion of the operating grant, but the effort universities made in the three rounds of quality assurance demonstrated the potency of such inducements.
Beyond financial incentives, there was another and far more powerful inducement for institutional change: competition. There had always been institutional rivalry for status and prestige, but it was contained within a limited number of universities with different catchments, course offerings and traditions, and moderated by an aversion to unseemly boasting—until 1987 there was an agreed AVCC code that set strict guidelines on advertising.
The creation of a new and enlarged Unified National System upset the established patterns, triggering greater competition to attract students and research income. Universities competed on the basis of demand for their courses, the employment outcomes of their graduates and national surveys of student satisfaction. With the introduction of HECS, students were encouraged to think of their choice of institution and degree as a commercial decision—and annual publications such as the Good Universities Guide informed them of the best buy. The opening up of a larger pool of research funds to national competition made success in securing grants a measure of a university’s standing. It was the competitive nature of the Unified National System that enabled government to step back and allow the universities to work on themselves.