If we assume, for the sake of argument, that a university’s purpose is to equip people for employment, I think we run into a number of quite obvious difficulties. Certain professions - e.g. accounting, medicine, the law, engineering - have always required specialist training at a high level, which is why universities have had departments and faculties devoted to them for a very long time.

But the sort of “gold-collar” workforce the policy statements suggest we are attempting to train require what are called “generic’ or “transferable” skills. I think it can be proved that these are not teachable skills at all but personal attributes that evolve and develop - if they do at all - in variable ways and at a variable pace that is always unique to the individual. The more we try to “quantify” them, the more we get into the parallel universe of proxy variables (e.g. the possession of a particular certificate demonstrates the required level of competence in a certain field) and away from the world of actual people and actual circumstance. (Have you noticed that hardly anyone can conduct a recruitment interview nowadays? That’s because few interviewers are capable of reading a person - all they can do is check a CV against a set of criteria.)

All of which is to say that the notion that we can “train” people in anything outside a particular vocational discourse (such as accounting, medicine, the law, engineering) is nonsensical, and no university subject could justify its existence in such terms. Whatever the intention behind our current public policy settings, the reality is that we have turned our universities into certificate-generating factories, and teaching and learning is only important to the extent that it yields satisfactory results on the student satisfaction surveys.

http://www.rodbeecham.com.au

At the end of the day, you can try and lead demand, but I don’t think you can just ignore it. And if the market doesn’t follow your lead, you have to adjust where you put your resources accordingly. But try leading first!

The university’s difficulty is that its graduate entry programs are modelled not on Bologna but on elite US universities which fill their mostly much smaller intakes by recruiting nationally from a country of 200 million, while the University of Melbourne recruits not even nationally from a country of 20 million, but from a city of 4 million.

This experiment needs a decade to run to see whether it will succeed. I expect the University of Melbourne will retain its graduate entry programs long term but sufficiently modified to assure parents that their expenditure of 6 years of fees at elite private schools isn’t ‘wasted’ on getting their children entry to a general undergraduate program with only a chance of admission to a desirable professional program.

The demand-driven model for university enrolments will see - has seen - both Arts and Pure Science faculties reduced to fugitive rumps in our universities. The Faculty of Economics and Commerce at the University of Melbourne, on the other hand, is booming, because it not only attracts a lot of students but a huge number of the high fee-paying overseas students. This is not due to outstanding teaching or research, however: it is because the Accounting major qualifies graduates for accreditation from a professional body such as the CPA which, in turn, entitles the holder to permanent residency in this country. The Faculty of Economics and Commerce is angry about the Melbourne Model because the “breadth” requirement means that, instead of filling up their degrees with non-Accounting subjects from within the Faculty (i.e. Economics, Finance or Management subjects), students have to take subjects from other faculties. This is where the issue of “propping up under-performing faculties” comes in.

The Faculty of Arts would be in a much healthier position if it hadn’t seen a ten-fold increase in the proportion of administrative to academic staff since 1989. That’s a (mis-)management issue can probably be sheeted home to the puerility with which Australian institutions usually respond to the spectre of market forces (cf. the response of Australian banks to competition in the 1980s). If we’re now operating like a real business, executive salaries must, of course, double, and huge numbers of highly paid paper-pushers must be recruited and given premium office-space. The people who actually do the work of the business, however, must be bullied and punished.

http://www.rodbeecham.com.au

Fine, drop Latin and theology, absorb philosophy into the maths and remedial English departments, but for God’s sake, don’t touch physics, which IS very much central to civilisation and makes real contributions to our lives. If it were a choice between Oppenheimer and Claude Lévi-Strauss, it would have to be the structuralist to get the chop, not the bomb maker.

I add that subjects with falling enrolments - be they theology, Latin, physics or philosophy - can’t reasonably insist on being funded at historically higher levels long after their enrolments have fallen with some special pleading about being central to civilisation. These subjects have either to find a way of attracting more students or cut their staffing to be commensurate with the number of students they are able to attract.

Declining applications is an unfavourable indicator, however.

The problem is that two very different sets of issues - the introduction of the Melbourne Model, and the budgetary problems of the Faculty of Arts - have been mixed up together in an indiscriminate fashion.

The rationale for the Melbourne Model was to position Unimelb as the elite university with professional graduate education building on generalist undergraduate education. There are good educational reasons for this that have nothing to do with money. As a generalist faculty, Arts should be able to thrive in such an environment.

As a former student with even longer-standing connections to the Faculty I want to see it succeed, but supporters need to be more hard-headed about this. Ending subsidies from other faculties is only ‘unpopular’ from the point of view of the Faculty that has received the subsidies. Continuing to provide the subsidies will be considerably unpopular with the other faculties, who bring in the funds only to see it handed out to someone else. This is no way to win friends within the University.

The deline in total numbers of applications is a concern, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into a decline in first preference applications, and may have no impact whatseover on student numbers in the university or in the faculty, and hence no impact on its funding.

What is needed is for the faculty to find ways to bring in more students, and hence more funding, so that they don’t have to rely on subsidies. This is easier said than done, however.

Is there something you know that I don’t?

It seems your former role in the University’s Human Resources department has granted you a unique perspective from which to assess this debate.