Comments on: Melbourne Uni’s $265m slush fund won’t save job cuts

By: perspective

perspective — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:20:17 +0000

Hang on, we are talking higher education here, not road repairs. Do we want an Australian education system that gives us a good chance at competing with the world? Do we want to maintain our culture or just import more USofA cast-offs? The VCA are protesting the changed circumstances that were brought on by Brendan Nelson (who cut the VCA funding) and Glyn Davis (who wants them to be nice melbourne models). Who monitors quality, and who makes it clear things are not going well? Looks like it the users, as the public are kept in the dark about what is going on.
The Arts faculty disaster was a certainty given Glyn Davis’ change in cross-subsidising of faculties. One would think that the university represented a single entity, and one could justify moving funds around to keep the swings and round-abouts going. Why should a VC deliberately change the internal funding to ruin a once world class faculty. He is now trying to eliminate Land and Environment (which one would think this is rather important in Australia).
If we wanted to save a lot of money, then close them all down as a complete waste of resources. And if the people who use or teach in these institutions are very unhappy, while the top manager is not responsible to anyone for his/her performance, what kind of a system have we got?

By: Gavin Moodie

Gavin Moodie — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:25:35 +0000

Jim

I think the issue is far simpler. The annual funding for each creative arts place is $10,317 from the Australian Government + $5,201 from the student in the form of their HECS payment = $15,518. The Victorian College of the Arts therefore has to teach its students for $15,518 per student per year. If that means cutting staff to get within budget, so be it. I don’t understand why the Victorian College of the Arts should be different in this from other University of Melbourne faculties and most other university conservatoriums and creative arts academies.

By: Jim Wright

Jim Wright — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:12:35 +0000

I would not like to say that Gavin Moore and MichaelT are wrong, but their thoughts do need some qualification. The business model adopted by Melbourne University views education as a “product for sale”. That is OK in principle, I suppose, but the delivery of that product depends almost entirely on the lecturers and other professionals working there. If the lost jobs were in this area and greater pressure was thereby put on the remaining staff, then the product is being devalued. If Melbourne Uni does not see this as a problem, it might as well go online and sell cheap degrees like so many odd institutions in the USA.

By: MichaelT

MichaelT — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:17:01 +0000

Like Gavin Moodie I don’t see a problem here either. On a conservative estimate, $100 million in extra donations might give you maybe $5 million p.a. in revenue which you might only be able to use for specific development purposes it was raised for.

No university in the world would use this kind of (totally hypothetical at this stage) money to stop up shortfalls in recurrent expenditure in faculties that are spending more than they earn.

No university in the world would run down the endowment it already had and spend its capital to pay people’s salaries, thereby reducing its income into the future in perpetuity.

These criticisms are quite muddle-headed.

By: Richard Wilson

Richard Wilson — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:26:42 +0000

I have been watching this unfold for two years now. Melbourne University appears to be adopting the University of Chicago model of funding where individual Chairs are subsidized, or is it “compromised”, by corporate donors, albeit in the guise of tax free foundations. Once a university becomes little more than a mouthpiece for Big Corporate (and probably not even Australian Big Corporate), we will see a new breed of academic shills emerge mouthing the corporate party line whenever directed in order to protect their funding. This is what I believe the US public is subjected to daily on US cable TV.

I am pretty sure I don’t want that to happen here and hope that others feel the same. It seems to me that this practice is slowly destroying the US as a stable democracy and is making the long suffering public more and more angry and resentful of the scant regard for their opinions paid by their so called representatives.

Back to Australia; first cab off the rank may well be education because education is already a major focus for Melbourne U. Watch the foundations (you didn’t even know existed) emerge from the woodwork and offer support for Chairs in this area with the goal of leveraging some business advantage not too far down the track.

By: Gavin Moodie

Gavin Moodie — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:03:36 +0000

I don’t see the problem here. The University of Melbourne, like all responsible institutions, has to match expenditure to curret revenue. If additional revenue from philanthropy or elsewhere (the most likely is a sizeable share of the government’s ‘sustainable research excellence’ fund of $300 million annually) is gained in the future, then future expenditure may be increased accordingly.

Davis has been as critical as most other vice chancellors of the present and previous governments’ higher education funding and policy generally. But the vice chancellors’ club Universities Australia has been advised repeatedly by government relations experts that they don’t do their cause any good by constantly carping about inadequate funding.