Appendix: Some Indicators of Diversity Between Australian Higher Education Institutions

Notes:

* In the 1999 Federal budget, medical places were allocated to James Cook University at Cairns, and Charles Sturt at Wagga Wagga. n.a. means data not available.

Uncontested private income includes donations, bequests and income from university properties and assets.

1. DETYA Higher Education Student Collection
2. Index representing the range of fields of study offered at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 20 is the highest possible score indicating that all 10 broad fields of study are offered at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
3. DETYA Higher Education Staff Collection..
4. Research income includes national competitive grants funding, other public sector funding, and industry and other research funding as reported in the Financial Research Data Collection; research staff and research-only teaching and research FTE reported in Selected Higher Education Staff Statistics.

Footnotes

1. This paper was prepared for the Senate External Strategy Committee, University of Western Australia, August-September 1999.
2. On academic professionalism as a force for conformity, see van Vught, F. (1989) Government Strategies and Innovation in Higher Education, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
3. Clark, B. (1998) The entrepreneurial university: demand and response, Tertiary Education and Management, vol.4, no.1, pp.5-16; and Clark, B. (1998) Creating entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation, Oxford: Pergamon. For Clark's view on more general issues of diversity, see Clark, B (1996) 'Diversification of higher education: viability and change' pp.16-25 in Meek, V L, Goedegebuure, L, Kivinen, O and Rinne, R (Eds.) The Mocker and the Mocked: Comparative Perspectives on Differentiation, Covergence and Diversity in Higher Education, Oxford: Pergamon.
4. See Meek, V.L. and Wood, F.Q. (1998), 'Introduction,' pp.3-20 in Managing Higher Education Diversity in a Climate of Public Sector Reform, Evaluations and Investigations Program Report 98/5, Higher Education Division, Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Canberra
5. For example, Commonwealth of Australia (1998) The Characteristics and Performance of Higher Education Institutions, Occasional Paper of the Higher Education Division, Commonwealth Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Canberra; Commonwealth of Australia (1999) Quality of Australian Higher Education, Higher Education Division, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Canberra; Meek, V.L. and Wood, F.Q. (1998) Managing Higher Education Diversity in a Climate of Public Sector Reform, ibid.; Marginson, S. (1999) Diversity and convergence in Australian higher education, Australian Universities' review, vol.42, no.1, pp12-23; Marginson, S. and Considine, M. (forthcoming) The Enterprise University: Governance, Strategy, Reinvention.
6. Marginson (1999), ibid.
7. Close examination of the table might also suggest that some universities are 'outriders' which might fit better in other clusters (especially on particular dimensions), or that there are sub-clusters within these clusters, or that they could be clustered in different ways.
8. Maling, J M and Keepes, B D (1998) 'The Australian higher education system - diversity: sought or neglected?', pp.29-44 in Meek and Wood (1998) ibid.
9. In Bradby, E (1939) The Universities Outside Europe, London: Oxford University Press.
10. Such a pool of venture capital funding should be established as a new pool of funds for higher education. Alternatively, it could be established through a modest amount of new funding to be distributed to each university as matching funds for a proportion of funding (say 3%) withheld from operating grants (a new cost to government of 3% of total operating grant funding). To access these funds, universities would need to demonstrate that they were contributing some of their own funds for innovative purposes, together with funds from commercial or other partners and/or from student fees to cover the cost of innovative courses.
11. See, for example, Marginson, S (1987) Free market education, Australian Universities' Review, no.1, pp.12-16; Marginson, S (1993) Education and Public Policy in Australia, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press; Kenway, J, Bigum, C, Fitzclarence, L, and Collier J (1993) Marketing education in the 1990s, Australian Universities' Review, vol.36, no.2, pp.2-6; Watkins, P (1993) Centralized decentralization: Sloanism, marketing, quality and higher education, Australian Universities' Review, vol.36, no.2, pp.9-15.
12. See for example, the arguments for vouchers in a market system in Karmel, P. (1998) 'Funding mechanisms, institutional autonomy, and diversity' pp.45-65 in V L Meek and F Q Wood Managing Higher Education Diversity in a Climate of Public Sector Reform, Canberra: Evaluations and Investigations Program Report 98/5, Higher Education Division, Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs; and the proposal for a "SuperHECS" system in Miller, P W and Pincus, J J (1997) Funding of Higher Education in Australia: Performance and Diversity, a submission to the Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy. Dr Miller is from the Department of Economics of The University of Western Australia, and Dr Pincus is from the Department of Economics of The University of Adelaide.
13. Marginson, S (1998) 'Competition and Diversity in the Reformed Australian Higher Education System', pp.81-96 in V L Meek and F Q Wood Managing Higher Education Diversity in a Climate of Public Sector Reform, Canberra: Evaluations and Investigations Program Report 98/5, Higher Education Division, Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs.
14. See Habermas, J (1984) Theory of Communicative Action Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (T McCarthy, trans.), Boston: Beacon; Habermas, J. Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (T McCarthy, trans.), Boston: Beacon.
15. A point made beautifully by Sir Humphrey's praise for the administrative efficiency of the hospital without patients in Yes Minister.
16. Rawls, J (1971) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
17. Nozick, R (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic.
18. Aristotle (1973) The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H G Greenwood. New York: Arno Press.
19. Iris Marion Young (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
20. In a technical sense, of course, legal institutions are like individuals: for example, they can be sued, own property, and so on, like legal persons.
21. There is not space here to deal with the differences, tensions and interconnections between injustice in relation to individual persons and institutions treated as if they were persons. Arguably, the right of persons to just treatment is justified by a theory of morality and legal theory of human rights, and it is not uncontroversial to suggest that the same rights extend to institutions constituted under the aegis of the state.
22. Karmel, P. (1998) 'Funding mechanisms, institutional autonomy, and diversity' pp.45-65 in V L Meek and F Q Wood Managing Higher Education Diversity in a Climate of Public Sector Reform, Canberra: Evaluations and Investigations Program Report 98/5, Higher Education Division, Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (see especially pp.57, 61-2).
23. Connell, R W, White, V and Johnson, K M (1991) "Running Twice as Hard': The Disadvantaged Schools Program in Australian Schools, Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press, pp.36-7.
24. Note that Connell et al include power, credentials and cultural goods among their list of "social assets". According to critiques of distribution theory, they should not be treated distributionally. Marginson's argument about "positional goods" (referred to in our discussion of the dilemma of diversity and competition) helps to clarify this issue.
25. Perhaps prefigured by the shift from the Australian Universities' Commission to the Commonwealth Tertiary Education System in 1979.
26. The 'clawback' of direct research funding and the establishment of the research quantum as a component of operating grants was a particularly bitter pill for many of the new universities to swallow.
27. Marginson, S (1999) Diversity and convergence in Australian higher education, Australian Universities' Review, vol.42, no.1, pp.12-23.
28. Meek, V L and Wood F Q (1998) 'Introduction' in Meek, V L and Wood F Q Managing Higher Education Diversity in a Climate of Public Sector Reform, Evaluations and Invetsigations Program Report 98/5, Higher Education Division, Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Canberra, p.15.
29. And still exist today in the binary system of higher education and vocational education and training - a distinction also being blurred by overlap and articulations, as happened between CAEs, institutes of technology, and universities before the emergence of the Unified National System.
30. Karmel, P. (1998), ibid.
31. Meek, V L and Wood, F Q (1998), "introduction', ibid.
32. Miller, P W and Pincus, J J (1997) Funding of Higher Education in Australia: Performance and Diversity, a submission to the Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy.
33. Karmel, P. (1998), ibid.
34. Clark, B. (1998) The entrepreneurial university: demand and response, Tertiary Education and Management, vol.4, no.1, pp.5-16; and Clark, B. (1998) Creating entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation, Oxford: Pergamon.
35. Boyer, E.L. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, New Jersey. The specific quotes from Boyer in the paragraphs that follow are from Chapter 2 'Enlarging the Perspective', pp.15-25. For more information about Boyer's views, readers may wish to consult the Boyer website:
36. http://notes.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf/webform/images/$File/boyer.txt
37. In his (1995) Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield, 'Professing Education in a Postmodern Age', Wilfred Carr referred to the history of universities to draw conclusions about the values and customs necessary to the conduct of university life. He mentioned the formation of the medieval universities as a key point in their history, in a way which gives force to our description here of the university as a "small world": "Of course medieval universities did not emerge fully formed. They began as little more than spontaneous gatherings of students and teachers. As the number of students and teachers multiplied, these gatherings began to adopt certain customs and unwritten laws. In time, they formed themselves into academic guilds and eventually began to develop a form of corporate existence and adopt a type of organisational structure known as a universitas, a medieval term denoting a plurality of persons - whether carpenters, bakers or whatever - who gathered together for purposes of mutual assistance and protection. So historically, the word 'university' had no connection with 'the universality of learning'. It simply defined an aggregate of teachers and students who had gathered together to pursue the common life of learning.
38. "Like our own modern 'new universities', the original medieval universities adopted the structures and practices of the dominant institutions of the time: in their case, the church, the monastery, and the guild. From the church, they took the idea of an organisation which transcended national boundaries as well as a fetish for mysterious ideas and colourful dress; from the monastery, they adopted the idea of a self-governing community which made its own rules and developed its own way of life; and from the guild, they adopted the idea of a community of individuals bound together for mutual support and with the authority to determine its own membership" (pp.8-9).
39. Boyer regards some of these as reflecting general obligations of good citizenship rather than the special obligations of scholarship, and aims to emphasise the latter.
40. Lawrence Stenhouse (1979) defines research as "systematic enquiry made public" (in 'The problem of standards in illuminative research', Scottish Educational Review, vol.11, no.1, p.7).
41. Alasdair MacIntyre (1990) refers to an intellectual tradition as "an argument extended through time" ( in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth, p.12).
42. Collegiality in its normal operations is often a primary source of isomorphism, often favouring established practices and practitioners against innovation; see van Vught (1996) 'Isomorphism in higher education? Towards a Theory of Differentiation and Diversity of Higher Education Systems', in Meek, V L, Goedegebuure, L, Kivinen, O and Rinne, R (Eds.) The Mocker and the Mocked: Comparative Perspectives on Differentiation, Covergence and Diversity in Higher Education, Oxford: Pergamon, especially pp.44-45.
43. Kuhn, T S (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
44. Clarke, B. (1996), ibid.
45. With the obvious caveat that universities should be working within the orbit of their framing objectives, as defined in their Acts, and within academic values and norms.
46. Miller and Pincus (1997), ibid.
47. The 1999 Green Paper on Higher Education Research and Research Training - New Knowledge, New Opportunities - goes some way towards distinguishing 'application' and 'discovery' research, aiming to create mechanisms to support both. It aims to add more certainty in discovery research by proposing to fund larger research programs of longer duration (competitive Large Grants) and to reinforce Centres of Excellence (formerly Special Research Centres and Key Centres). It aims to be more open to recognizing matched resources coming from business, industry and the professions (via rewarding research income, including consulting income leading to innovation), but threatens to replace the flawed Composite Index (which included a small - 20% - but somewhat skewed component for research publications) with a measure of research income (including some kinds of consultancy income) which may also be flawed and discriminatory from the perspective of some fields of research. (A key problem to be addressed is how research outcomes can be directly recognized rather than depending solely on research inputs - though research income may be an indirect measure of outcomes, in the sense that income is positively correlated with researchers' track records.) There is an attempt to provide greater stability in infrastructure funding by rolling some such funding into operating grants, along with the former ARC Small Grants Scheme, but this may not be sufficient to meet genuine infrastructure needs, especially for more established institutions with major programs in expensive areas. The approach to supporting continuing discovery research through operating grants and major new projects through competitive funding proposed in the Green Paper seems broadly justified, but there are many difficulties of detail to overcome if the general intention is to be achieved without side-effects that will be discriminatory between fields of research and between kinds of institutions. The linear model of research-development-commercialization bedevils the Green Paper, portraying the overlap as if discovery research were the principal source for application (linkage) scholarship; while this is often so in areas of emerging applications and new technologies, new developments and technologies often emerge from application research which uses well-established knowledge from different fields in new ways, resulting in innovations in technology and practice. Further work is needed to clarify the nature of and relationships between 'discovery research' and 'linkage' before accepting the Green Paper proposals about how they might best be funded. Meek and Wood (1998) ibid.
48. In 1997, The University of Western Australia proposed an approach based on broad fields of research to the West Committee on Higher Education. This approach deserves further consideration.