FROM THE OFFICERS
JEANNIE REA, NATIONAL PRESIDENT
False dichotomy being driven between equity/inclusion and quality/competition J
ust before addressing a 700 strong staff and student rally opposing staff cuts at the University of Sydney on 7 March, I talked with a student who was apologising that he couldn’t stay as he had a seminar that counted towards 20% of the assessment. After commenting that it was a shame there is no longer a common lunch hour, I asked about how the 20% participation was assessed. He was not sure, but observed that there was not much opportunity to demonstrate your grasp of the material as there were 80 students in the one hour class. I didn’t need to do the arithmetic to work out that over a twelve week semester, it would be a very skilled tutor that would be able to listen to each student sufficiently to make an assessment. So whilst these look like easy marks, I doubt the efficacy for student learning.
Students and staff at other universities tell me about lectures delivered in shifts, or lecture theatres that are too small for the enrolled numbers. Administrators have been assured not to worry as attendance will drop after the first few weeks! Tutorials are being renamed seminars when it becomes impossible to run a tutorial format. Students also report understanding that their tutor may be casually employed and so are reluctant to ask for further assistance outside of class time, or are frustrated because they can’t get the advice and feedback they need. While I was in Sydney at the rally, the University of Sydney ViceChancellor (VC) was in Canberra at the annual Universities Australia (UA) conference where the Vice-Chancellors, senior administrators and politicians were trying to put the pieces together. The Minister for Tertiary Education, Senator Chris Evans was asked about staff to student ratios. While he acknowledged that this was a concern and said it was on his list of things to do, he could not promise funding. Student to Staff Ratios (SSR) is a touchstone issue. There has been a 27% increase in student places since 2007, leading the Federal Government to congratulate themselves on opening up university education for many more Australians. The NTEU has always advocated for increased access to university. But we also know that universities are at breaking point, and this was even before the uncapping of places in 2012. We need to put aside endless arguments over how SSR are calculated and just translate into terms everyone can understand. Are there staff to attend to student learning and support services to ensure the promised outcomes? Also speaking at the UA conference, the Shadow Minister, Senator Brett Mason, agreed that with more places there is a need for more teachers and infrastructure. But he claimed that we can’t have increased places, the current funding model and also quality and standards. We could only have two out of three. Contributing to letting government off the hook, Chair of Universities Australia and University of Melbourne VC, Glyn Davis and Australian Catholic University VC, Greg Craven provided a complementary opinion piece to The Australian (8/3/12) arguing that if there is to be an open market on student places, ‘then universities must be able to compete, at least to a reasonable extent, on price.’ In the background of the debate over funding sources there is a rather nasty discourse developing juxtaposing quantity against quality. It seems to have been far too easy to slip from recognis2
ing the need to provide adequate support to enable students now entering our mass higher education system to succeed, to simply painting the expanded cohorts as lacking in merit and ability. Universities enrol students on the basis that they are capable of undertaking and completing their course of study. The onus is therefore on universities to provide the resources needed to ensure students can be successful. Too readily the blame has turned back on students as being the architects of their own failure, or expected failure. This is well illustrated in some sinister North American commentary that too many women staff and students are leading to a decline in standards. Presumably this is turning men off and this is further contributing to the decline. The apparent assumption is that women have not achieved their places on merit, but scraped through on affirmative action or declining entry standards. Also, these articles do not provide convincing evidence of lower standards or higher failure rates. In Australia we have similar commentary emerging about low SES background students, who seem to be labelled a homogenous mob of unconfident, ignorant and less than diligent learners. This is just unfair. In some popular commentary, they now join international students in being held responsible for an alleged lowering of standards. Meanwhile we seem to have forgotten that the standards scare, which contributed to the extensive auditing and regulatory powers of AUQA and now TEQSA, were motivated by concern with some of the private providers entering Australian tertiary education. In all the discussions I’ve heard on standards, Australia’s public universities’ staff have argued for higher standards rather than settling on a minimum and the lowering of expectations and aspirations. Sources of funding were on the agenda at the NTEU’s Australia’s Universities Today and Tomorrow Conference in late February (see p. 16). Taking a broader international perspective, one speaker noted other countries like Sweden put education levies on private industry. Others mused that tertiary education would be a good use for a super profits tax. At the very least, we must be vigilant in not allowing this false dichotomy pitching ‘quality’ against ‘quantity’. The size of the Australian higher education sector is a result of international as well as local trends towards mass tertiary education. The quality of our higher education sector is assisting in transforming our image in the region and the world. If this is to continue, government must step up. NTEU ADVOCATE vol. 19, no. 1