Australian universities: Moscow on the Molonglo.(Universities)

THE SOVIET SYSTEM crashed in 1985, thanks Principally to Mr Gorbachev. I shall call it the "Moscow system". It became clear--at least to those to whom it had not been clear before-that the Soviet central planning system had been a failure. There was apparently no one left to defend it. Thus, it was a surprise that, just after that time, a mini-version of this system, with all the mentality that goes with it--but applying only to higher education--was apparently being constructed in Canberra. I shall call this little capital city "Moscow on the Molonglo", the Molonglo being the river that runs through Canberra, and which was dammed to make the Canberra lake.

THE DAWKINS REVOLUTION

BEFORE ONE CAN analyse and criticise, one must understand what has happened. Hence one must begin with history. From 1987 until now there have been seven Commonwealth Ministers of Education, but just two of them made revolutions, namely John Dawkins, who was Minister for Employment, Education and Training in the Hawke Labor government from 1987 to 1991, and Brendan Nelson, who became Minister for Education in the Howard Coalition government in 2001. I begin, then, with the Dawkins Revolution.

Insofar as a revolution can have legs--at least for exposition--it had five legs. First, there was the abolition of the so-called "binary system". Higher education had consisted of two parts, namely the nineteen universities proper, and the others--namely fifty-seven colleges of advanced education and technology institutes. The first were meant to be for "academic" education and research, and the latter for more practical or vocational teaching. In total they had roughly equal numbers of students. Now all became universities or parts of universities. They became parts of what was called the Unified National System.

Second, most of the smaller colleges--and that was almost all of them--were required to merge with each other or with some university so as to make larger units. If they had below 2000 students they could not be part of the new Unified National System (and so might not get Commonwealth financial support), and even student numbers below 5000 were thought undesirable. In the language I am familiar with from US corporate developments, there was a "mergers and acquisitions" boom. For some this was an extremely painful and dislocating process, as it often has been for private companies. Transition costs in such a revolution cannot be ignored. When it was all over, the Unified National System consisted of thirty-six (later thirty-eight) universities.

These two developments--the end of the binary system and the amalgamations--were radical structural reforms and have not been reversed. The consequences, good and bad, are with us now. No one has done a thorough analysis of why this happened and what the effects have been. Such an analysis should be done.

Have there been significant benefits from economies of scale--as was predicted in the 1988 Dawkins policy statement--and to what extent have they been balanced by higher managerial costs and other disadvantages of large scale and conglomeration? I have looked at some cases, mainly in Victoria, and each university seems to have its own story. And to what extent has it mattered and been beneficial that the staff of a former college of advanced education has been expected to "do research", since it was now part of a "university"?