Poison Ivy

The Age

Monday August 27, 2007

Denise Ryan

Academics feel the squeeze as universities scramble to transform themselves in the face of new funding arrangements. By Denise Ryan.

ANNA has almost completed a PhD and is working for the base rate of about $120 an hour as a casual tutor in the arts faculty of a Melbourne university.

A highly intelligent woman, she has already spent five years working towards her doctorate, not to mention her undergraduate study. Anna now hopes to repay her student debt and begin an illustrious career as an academic.

Her pay scale might sound high for a beginner tutor, but her university doesn't pay extra for preparation or marking, so the actual rate is much lower.

Anna's chances of gaining a permanent position at a university are slim, but she hasn't figured that out yet.

It will take a few years of working weekends to prepare course material - and of improving her job prospects by writing articles for peer-reviewed journals - before Anna realises that she is destined to be one of the army of casual workers staffing Australian universities.

Casual staff, known as sessionals, comprise about 50 per cent of university teaching staff, according to National Tertiary Education Union figures. Despite being top graduates, these wannabe academics are part of a worldwide trend where casual staff are useful, but disposable. Universities need to be highly flexible - to chop and change courses as they see fit - and Anna, despite her enthusiasm, will be the first to be laid off in any restructuring.

The word "academic" still conjures up the image of a learned, grey-haired man cloistered in an ivory tower. This stereotype is partly true - one in two people in the education sector is aged over 45, according to a 2005 Department of Workplace Relations report. And while there are many senior women in universities, men still dominate in the top jobs.

But the intellectuals of our society are not having a quiet life. In fact many say they have never felt more stressed, largely because of a growing workload and competing priorities.

Student numbers have increased while staff numbers and funding to universities have fallen. There is now one staff member for every 19 students compared to a ratio of 1:13 in 1990, according to Department of Education, Science and Training figures. The NTEU estimates Victorian universities lost more than 640 academic and administrative jobs last year and that figure does not include casuals like Anna.

Staff, already struggling to manage new pressures, such as the needs of overseas students and the provision of sophisticated online resources, are also facing an unprecedented number of bureaucratic form-filling exercises.

Many academics report a sense of being micro-managed, along with a belief that it is dangerous for the prospects of a permanent job or a promotion to question or complain.

But the biggest pressure has come from the Federal Government's new Research Quality Framework (RQF) funding model, which measures the quality of a selected amount of a university's research output to determine what research funding it might get. Many university staff see this as another onerous exercise in counting research outputs, without any extra funding. This move has made all universities put pressure on staff to document their research output of the past seven years by March 31 next year.

And it has, in a sense, pitted universities that are internationally ranked for their research against those with lesser track records, all for the same pot of money.

The focus on RQF has made the likes of Trevor, a senior business lecturer at the same university as Anna, feel depressed and worthless. Trevor has had a successful career as a businessman but he doesn't have a PhD (he was hired before it became a minimum qualification to get a job at many universities) nor a research record.

Being a charismatic teacher with strong industry links, he now realises, doesn't count for much when it comes to promotion. This is despite accolades from students in every course assessment.

The only comfort Trevor has had recently is from reading the best-selling book Tuesdays with Morrie, a true story written by a former US college student who looks up an admired lecturer later in life. A university teacher who profoundly influenced the lives of his students through his teaching.

Trevor is likely to retire over the next decade, allowing bright young things like Anna to take over. But, in the meantime, both must do research so that Anna finishes her PhD and Trevor keeps his job.

Yet their heavy teaching and growing administration loads make it hard. Neither is sure whether to ignore the 30 emails from students and administrators and lock themselves away to do research - or whether to muddle on, keeping the students happy at the expense of their own career prospects.

The Age spoke to many Annas and Trevors at Melbourne universities to determine what it is like to be a university lecturer in this time of rapid change. It used to be that academics were one of the few groups in our society who could speak out publicly, hold governments to account and deliberately spark public debate. But these days university staff say publicly criticising the system is risky.

Fortunately, those driving the changes in universities can talk on the record - and do seem to recognise the dilemmas. To an extent.

The new vice-chancellor of La Trobe University, Paul Johnson, shows more empathy for his staff than most. Despite coming from the London School of Economics, where 98 per cent of staff were research-active, he is proposing new positions at La Trobe that will further recognise outstanding teachers.

Some of his peers regard this as radical. Research is supposed to inform teaching and it is the quality of research produced that determines a university's international ranking.

Only a handful of Australian universities are ranked in the top 100 - and if the nation wants to continue to attract fee-paying overseas students, the argument goes, Australia has to do better. This is the rationale behind the RQF funding model - to reward universities that produce quality research.

But, after spending five months in Australia, Professor Johnson says some universities are not being honest about what is happening. For a start, he says, universities receive massively more revenue from teaching than research. At La Trobe, for example, 13 per cent of total revenue is from research, while 66 per cent is from teaching and the rest from allied activities. He believes other universities have similar ratios.

"Research is a loss leader. It never brings in as much money as we would want it to do but it is how a university gains its reputation. Teaching pays the salary bill," says Professor Johnson.

While most staff have contracts that require them to teach and do research, Professor Johnson estimates that when research outputs are measured as part of the new RQF funding model, about half of La Trobe's staff will not be eligible to submit.

Through a series of consultative meetings with staff, Professor Johnson is proposing different reward criteria for teaching and learning and academic administration. "Rather than all staff attempting to do one-third research, one-third teaching and one-third administration, let the staff member determine the weighting and allow them to change it over time."

Professor Johnson says this makes sense. "Across anyone's career, what they do varies. Five years ago I was 100 per cent a researcher; I'm 100 per cent administration now. It must be recognised that if you take on a big job such as being the head of a school that your research will suffer and you won't be able to do as much teaching."

Senior staff at Swinburne University of Technology are also aware that staff face competing priorities. Dale Murphy, deputy vice-chancellor (academic), is concerned that the pressure to teach, research and deal with administration will make staff less inclined to take leadership roles, such as running courses.

The new funding model is putting a huge amount of stress on the university system, he says. "RQF is forcing us to focus on the research, while still valuing the teaching. It is a fine balance for the university."

But Professor Murphy says universities such as Swinburne must increase their research if they don't want to be seen as second-class universities in the future. "Research is critical to us. It is a driver for the reputation of a university."

It is his job, he says, to drive faculties to drive staff to be more research-active. And all staff should be research-active to be informed teachers. "But we recognise that it is not everyone's forte and there will be certain teaching-only academic positions."

Swinburne's promotions policy was modified four years ago, with some staff promoted on the strength of their teaching.

The university now requires permanent staff to have PhDs but Professor Murphy admits it is hard to find staff with higher tertiary qualifications and relevant industry experience.

Across universities there is a concern that the Trevors, who came in without postgraduate qualifications, are being squeezed out to make way for staff with PhDs and little practical experience. This also means that a lot of hands-on practical tuition is being replaced with more cost-effective generic lectures to large student groups.

Sue Willis, dean of education at Monash University, says she has witnessed excellent industry practitioners feel "de-skilled and infantilised" after joining a university staff.

She has also noted the increase in class sizes. As a dean, Professor Willis says she has a bean-counting role that means it is helpful when large classes subsidise smaller ones. But the increased workload for staff is clear. Ten years ago the average tutorial class had 15 students; now, she says, it has about 30.

Professor Willis has also witnessed enormous growth in form-filling compliance work to meet government reporting requirements. As well, she says, staff are expected to provide sophisticated online learning. "It is at a level of production that we previously would have asked of a commercial publisher."

Flexible delivery has also added pressure, with some Monash tutors travelling to rural areas and overseas to deliver lectures.

RQF is a good idea, Professor Willis says, but notes that when similar measures were introduced in Britain and in New Zealand, those governments also provided more money. "This is just a rearranging of the money that is creating an enormous amount of pressure."

Professor Willis is not surprised the average lecturer is not sure what they are supposed to be doing. "Am I supposed to be answering emails, preparing the lesson or writing a paper? This tension has always existed between research and teaching but it has been exacerbated by the fact that higher education has become less well funded."

Staff at RMIT are grappling with similar pressures. Vice-chancellor Margaret Gardner says the average university lecturer has a "huge" workload, mostly because staff-to-student ratios have risen.

She acknowledges the tension between finding time to do research and be a good teacher. That is the reason, says Professor Gardner, that she has been emphasising "heavily" to government the need for more funding.

Australian universities are competing internationally with so many less people than other OECD nations, she says. "If people understood the range of things that our staff are doing . . . the many skills they deploy doing world-quality research and dealing with complex student bodies . . ."

Since becoming a university, Professor Gardner says, RMIT has increased its investment in research and its support for staff to be successful researchers. There is an expectation that academic staff will teach and do research.

However, she says the university recognises "different strengths", that some people are better at research while others are more engaged with industry.

Many staff at former trade schools-turned-universities can't understand why the focus is on research ahead of student needs.

As one lecturer at Victoria University put it: "We have got this mishmash of 36 universities across the country all trying to be 'real' universities. People are generally horribly confused about what they should be doing and what the community considers to be valuable. They are running around like chooks with their heads chopped off."

Another senior lecturer at RMIT said it might be better to devote Australia's limited research funds to finding a cure for cancer rather than forcing all university staff to turn out "low-quality research which won't count towards RQF anyway". After RQF research outputs are totted up, there is a suspicion the money will again go to universities with existing research records.

These sentiments may sound like heresy but the Group-of-8 universities, comprising eight research-active universities, including the University of Melbourne and Monash, made similar points in its report Seizing the Opportunities.

The Go8 report describes RQF, as proposed, as poor public policy, because it doesn't provide extra resources and is an onerous process of assessment with a low quality bar. It notes that $650 million a year in research monies is at stake. Further dilution of research funding, rather than concentration, it states, will cause Australia to fall further behind the world's leaders in research.

It further states that universities that are not performing research at a high standard by international benchmarks should not be given incentives to stay active in those fields. Rather, they should be encouraged to focus on what they do best.

Professor Willis, speaking as the head of the Australian Council of Deans of Education, says she has been surprised by the strategic direction of some universities. "I don't think there is that much money to justify the amount of time, effort, energy and stress that you have to go into to get RQF funding. It doesn't seem to me that there is enough (funding) to go around."

There isn't, says Simon Marginson of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne. He confirms that federal funding as a proportion of total higher education funding dropped from 57 per cent in 1996 to 41 per cent in 2005.

Australia cut public funding per tertiary student by 30 per cent in real terms between 1995 and 2003. In contrast, 15 of 23 OECD nations increased funding per student during this time.

More than 15 per cent of total higher education income in Australia comes from foreign-student fee revenue. And herein lies the catch. Foreign students are increasingly looking at international research ranking tables to decide on a university. If the second-tier universities stick to "what they do best" and leave research to the Go8 universities, how will they survive?

They won't, says Professor Johnson at La Trobe University. "The Go8 paper Seizing the Opportunities might be better named Seizing the Money because that is what the objective is. It is precious of the Go8 to say, 'we don't want to be challenged'. Research is about being challenged all the time."

Professor Johnson says there are excellent researchers at other universities who can clearly do as well as those at the University of Melbourne.

The US has top universities such as Harvard, he says, but it also has many other universities that are world-class in one or two areas. "That is what you would expect in a competitive environment, that universities build up particular strengths and there is a lot of diversity in the system."

Professor Murphy at Swinburne says rhetoric from the Go8 universities is about securing the funding. "There is a lot of good research in other universities," he says.

Which is surprising given how much time academics spend doing grant applications trying to get funding. Jill Blackmore, professor in education at Deakin University, says universities used to be funded to do 40 per cent teaching, 40 per cent research and 20 per cent administration but since 1989 research funding has been distributed on competitive grounds. "These days academics spend a lot of time applying to other bodies for funding and doing research submissions," she says.

Over at Deakin, the conflicts are the same. "A lot of academics and teachers feel very alienated because of the dilemmas they face in their job. The layers of administration, marketing and technological demands are controlling them more and more. It is a volatile and difficult time to be an academic," Professor Blackmore says.

Professor Blackmore says it is increasingly difficult to play the role of the critical intellectual who can make government accountable. "If you speak out you don't get any contracts or tenders," she says.

"Young graduate with a PhD is chuffed to be asked to front classes on an hourly rate. This wears off when they realise they are being exploited."

Matt McGowan, state secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union

"Australian universities are competing internationally with so many less people than other OECD nations."

Professor Margaret Gardner, vice-chancellor, RMIT

"The Go8 paper Seizing the Opportunities might be better named Seizing the Money because that is what the objective is."

Professor Paul Johnson, vice-chancellor, La Trobe University

IT'S ACADEMIC: HOW UNIVERSITY LIFE IS CHANGING

Deakin: As at all universities, staff are feeling pressure from the competing priorities of teaching, research, academic leadership, administration and fostering community links.

La Trobe: Plans to cut undergraduate courses and ask more academics to focus on teaching as part of a new approach to turn around the $7 million deficit it posted last year.

Melbourne: The arts faculty has cut its staff budget by 12 per cent, with more than 100 casual, older and non-research-active staff likely to lose their jobs. Under its new Melbourne Model, the university is reducing the number of undergraduate courses from 96 to six and professional courses will move to postgraduate level.

Monash: Like Melbourne, Monash already has an international ranking based on its research.

RMIT: RMIT aims to increase its research outputs and is lobbying government for more funding.

Swinburne: The university aims to grow in size, lifting its budget by 9 per cent a year until 2015 on the back of a nearly $400 million investment in buildings and research equipment.

Victoria: Staff have a higher number of official student contact hours (up to 14 hours a week) than their equivalents at many other universities but are now expected to also significantly increase their research outputs.

© 2007 The Age

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