As Donald Trump attempts to sign the Department of Education into oblivion and Australia gears up for an election certain to result in tougher clamps on international enrolments, Deakin VC Iain Martin said it is time to re-examine the social contract that universities have with the Australian public.
In a wide-ranging interview with Future Campus, Professor Martin said universities needed to recalibrate their engagement with community.
“We’re probably at a bit of a tipping point in terms of the debate around why do we have public universities? What is their role? What is the balance between further education, higher education? ” Professor Martin said.
“Social license or an understanding of why Australia has public universities across the wider community is absolutely pivotally important at the moment.
“We have to recognize most of the Australian public see our primary responsibility as a sector is to educate Australians.”
Professor Martin said the higher education system had not changed much since the Dawkins reforms, but expectations of its role in the Australian community had.
“We’ve got a system that was largely set up with Dawkins, where 12 or 13 % of school leavers went to university; to a system that morphed and evolved and creeped and strained its way to 50 % of participation.
“We’ve been our own worst echo chamber at times. So many compartments of society have become their own worst echo chambers that we need to find a way of going out and engaging with those communities who perhaps wouldn’t normally be in the debate, wouldn’t normally be thinking about … what actually happens there. Globalization, old industries fading away, new industries coming up, (people) have either felt left out or left behind.”
“You certainly absolutely saw that with Brexit. I think you’ve seen the same with so many elections subsequently. I think in many ways, the election of Trump in the US is a macro manifestation of the same phenomenon.
“I think that goes beyond social license into the deep politics of social contract, which is what are we prepared to pay for to have the society that we need and where the universities fit in that. If I look at education, what’s the role of education? How much are we there to provide the workforce for tomorrow? And how much are we to provide a thinking education to provide the workforce for the next 10, 20, 30 years?
