Opinion
Many of our sector’s workers and students would be unaware that each year there is a special Tertiary Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) conference in Melbourne. As you might hope the Minister and Assistant Minister spoke this year, as did the TEQSA CEO and Chief Commissioner, and there were panels, with senior leaders and students offering soundbites as microphones were passed round.
It was a little disconcerting to see how busy it was, with close to a thousand people packed in. As a longtime observer of governance meetings, I know it can be a bad sign if too many people show up.
Perhaps many are worried about the risks of increasing regulatory demands, reviews, expectations, and mounting compliance.
As one wag wrote, in the Slido questions, quoting Sir John Astbury (or others) “Reform, reform, reform, aren’t things bad enough already?”
One of the most fascinating sessions was a long discussion on risk. It started well with information about how, in Sutton Coldfield in 1918, the townsfolk, noting many accidents on their roads, introduced the idea of a dashed line to divide departing and oncoming traffic. An excellent example of risk management that raises the question, what specific innovations have the risk folk added recently?
It's a serious question because most of the examples of failure we face today are not the result of overlooking risk buried deeper and deeper in ever more convoluted matrices, but reflect the difficulty of managing extra work and expectations, in the face of limited resources and rising costs.
TEQSA has done a good job in ensuring that the quality of the sector is maintained and Australia’s reputation is not put in danger, but it is perplexing that we keep emphasising risks and adding more bumper bars, seat belts, indicator lights, GPS systems, and airbags, to the car, when the actual problem is that several universities have run out of petrol.
This fact became more obvious when the vision for the sector – the Accord – was mentioned. The Accord speaks of dramatically expanding access and of supporting research, but the disconnect is palpable, with a paltry number of new enabling places being drip fed across institutions, international enrolments being curtailed, and I do not recall the word ‘research’ being spoken at the meeting.
This is bewildering. Is this not the major sovereign risk we face? Without a research plan how will we boost productivity and keep up with our neighbours? Should we not learn from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China?
And why is there so much talk of the dents in the car and so little consideration of how the car works or could be modified to go faster or further?
The latest dent the Minister has noticed relates to the Quality Indicators in Learning and Teaching (QILT), the Student Experience Surveys (SES). The data are actually fairly stable but if one wanted to emphasise them and improve, one quick step would help. The sector-wide information should be released on a set date each year, perhaps on March 1. This would attract attention and facilitate budgetary planning, and an institutional response to the information at each university.
It is unfathomable that the Department is currently in the habit of just letting these uncontroversial but useful data dribble out on a random date, often a year after it was first collected, by which time the data is out of date, and university budgets and plans for the year have all been set. You will hear few people either celebrating, lamenting, or planning around the QILT, because the release of the out-of-date data always comes as a surprise.
Another dent that was highlighted relates to the recent survey on racism. Racism is a scourge and it is clear that shocking incidents still occur. It will thus be useful to learn where to target further efforts, but we must not allow the survey to frame universities as hotbeds of racism.
Universities have actually led in beating back racism. In part, this is because universities prioritise one thing: intellectual capacity, just as sporting teams care about athletic talent. Universities do not care about race. An unwavering focus on capacity is the mechanism by which universities have worked for decades to welcome people from all backgrounds. We must steadfastly keep focusing on potential, on talent and on merit as our main drivers, and keep avoiding prejudice and discrimination, and we must keep combating bigotry whenever it appears.
But overall, we should stop fixating on the dents and start working on the accelerator and filling the petrol tank. Most of us look to the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) for that. Still being formed, its task is enormous and considerable mystery remains.
One of the inadvertent highlights of the meeting was the AI-enabled closed captioning, simultaneous subtitles capturing the words spoken on stage. This illustrated, often hilariously, the limitations of AI, most notably during a discussion of ATEC itself. Laughter erupted as the presenter’s words were misconstrued as “and then Rory, I just had a little Bunny that called me outside”.
Slido was on to this in a flash, with the unforgettable query to the panellist – “Could you tell us more about the Bunny that took you outside?”
Perhaps we do need more regulation after all!
Professor Merlin Crossley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic Quality) at UNSW.