The planned merger of Curtin and Murdoch universities highlights the major changes facing Western Australia’s higher education sector. WA Business News convened a boardroom forum to discuss the current issues and future outlook for the state’s public universities.
Listening to the vice-chancellors of Western Australia’s public universities there is no doubt what they see as their biggest problem – the Federal Government, and Education Minister Brendan Nelson in particular.
Curtin University vice-chancellor Lance Twomey said there had been many changes in recent years.
“The worst of them for me is the extraordinary increase in red tape,” he said.
“It’s quite strange really because when Brendan Nelson came in, the very first thing he said to us was that he would remove most of the red tape; the unnecessary reporting, the requests for the same information in slightly different forms.
“We complain bitterly about this but it doesn’t seem to get us anywhere at all.”
The University of WA’s deputy vice-chancellor, Margaret Seares, believes university funding has become highly politicised.
“The number of medical schools bobbed up overnight around Australia, but only in marginal seats,” Professor Seares said.
“We sit in the safest Liberal seat, which is Curtin, and we honestly think the only way UWA is going to get any more [funded] places from the Commonwealth is to be in a marginal seat.”
Edith Cowan University vice-chancellor Millicent Poole said Dr Nelson initially had been consultative but in the past year it was “policy on the run”.
For instance, she said the decision to scrap the full indexation of university grants would send most universities broke if it continued.
Professor Poole predicted “enormous disruption” from planned changes to research funding, which would result in a three-tiered structure that favoured research-intensive universities (such as UWA) and leave Edith Cowan as a teaching-only university.
However, she said the biggest issue was that “WA is just not on the radar”, either on the east coast or internationally.
Murdoch University’s pro vice-chancellor strategy, Gary Martin, said: “We will have to change quite radically over the next five to 10 years if we are to offer comprehensive courses.
“Increasingly, courses like physics, mathematics, some of the sciences, Asian studies are becoming unviable to run because of small numbers.
“We support those areas because we think they are important but we don’t receive sufficient funding.”
He said funding of regional campuses was another problem.
“The Commonwealth funding to establish such campuses doesn’t actually cover the cost, yet a lot of the new funded places we have been given are for regional campuses,” Professor Martin said.
The universities say they find it hard to respond to the funding changes because of “micro management” and excessive regulation by the Federal Government.
“It regulates us enormously; we are not free to run as if we were a private university,” Professor Twomey told the forum.
Professor Martin said the universities also faced a more competitive environment.
“The Commonwealth tells us to grow internationally as a way of increasing our income but at the same time there is significant deregulation that allows a lot more private providers to come into the market,” he said.
“On top of that, our traditional markets for overseas students, Singapore and Malaysia, are setting themselves up to be international centres of excellence and preferring that their students stay home.”
WA’s share of the international education market has fallen from 14 per cent in 1994 to 9 per cent presently and Professor Twomey would like to see more government support.
