Excesses of central planning by bureaucrats threaten the future of Australia’s Higher Education system, Universities Australia Chair Carolyn Evans will warn in a speech today.
The incoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne will call on the Federal Government to “consider legislative protection for university autonomy” against demands for more regulation, including from “many inside universities and university unions.”
Laws protecting university autonomy are needed to “make clear what it is that governments cannot and should not interfere with to help stem the tide of government overreach.”
“The creeping regulation over years, the creation of new federal bureaucracies seeking to impose their agendas and their judgment on our work, the populist backlashes from the left and right when they don’t like something we do – all this is creating an ever-narrower space for freedom of both institutions and individual faculty and students,” she will tell the National Press Club audience.
Professor Evans will also challenge the central-planning approach now in place with the establishment of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC), warning, “humans generally, businesses and – especially – governments, are not at all good at predicting the future needs of the workforce, even in much less turbulent times than these.”
“It wasn’t so long ago that we were being told that we needed more and more graduates from every discipline who could code – quite different IT skills will be more urgently required.
“We have tech companies looking for employees with arts and humanities background who can bring the creativity and lateral thinking to the table. Some of the more manual jobs young people are being urged into may well be totally transformed or even destroyed by robotics.
“Can a central planning authority ever move at the pace required, with the certainty needed to meet this task? History tells us: no.”
In contrast, Professor Evans will suggest that while universities will make mistakes, “some will try something innovative that succeeds beyond all expectations, some will spot coming employment needs that everyone else misses and cater to them, some will pioneer new forms of teaching, create new knowledge and research breakthroughs.”
But if ATEC gets it wrong, “then every single university will make the same mistake.”
“There is a place for regulation, for accountability, and a reasonable debate to be had at where the limits of university autonomy end and how accountability for public money is overlaid.
“But I fear at present, there is no debate at all – just an endless sense that whatever regulation seems expedient can be introduced and that it will not prove a menace, “ she will warn.