I think there is no doubt that hate crimes occur in Australia, and that it would be futile to deny that racism is a real problem in this nation.

However, there are a few issues around these events worthy of comment.

My impression, and it’s only that, is that the majority of these crimes appear to have occurred in Melbourne. I don’t think that’s because there’s a particularly high proportion of Indian students studying there. It may be higher, but there is certainly a large number in Brisbane. Is there something particular to Melbourne that may account for this?

Secondly, I wonder, above and beyond educational measures universities and others may have implemented to advise new students about safety, what can be done? The response to this, and previous incidents, seems to me to carry a demand in its wake that the government take action, but it’s not at all clear to me what action would be desirable or effective. I am sure, though, that the disavowal of racism, which cannot be unrelated to other issues in the Australian-Indian bilateral relationship, and concerns about the image Australia projects more broadly, is not helpful.

Elsewhere: Senator Sarah Hanson-Young at GreensBlog.

Update: New post.

The area that’s gotten most attention is the proposal to shake up the funding model, so that funding follows students, rather than being allocated to institutions so that they can offer places. On this, Andrew Norton unsurprisingly sees the glass as half empty, because universities aren’t free to set their own fees. Greg Craven is worried about being cherrypicked by the sandstones, because there will no longer be quotas on enrolments in sandstone university degrees.

But there are lots of other elements to this review that, as a working academic, sound pretty damn good. For instance, the report notes the highly skewed age distribution in the academic workforce, with large numbers of baby-boomer academics heading for retirement soon, and a shortage of mid-career academics to replace them, and identifies which disciplines (the humanities, nursing, and mathematical sciences) are particularly at risk. And there’s an acknowledgement of under-funding of research support, leading to a diversion of resources meant for teaching. And there’s recognition that student income support is seriously compromising the effort students are able to put into their education.

Even if the details of the solutions to these issues will properly be extensively debated, this report strikes me as a reasonable articulation of the type and magnitude of the problems in the tertiary teaching sector. Here’s hoping that the government actually responds in proportion this time, not with a half-arsed political fix like with the CPRS.

The committee’s finding is that in view of the relatively tiny number of submissions received, from the hundreds of thousands of students who are said to be affected, there can be no basis for arguing that universities are under the control of the Left and that this is reflected in course content and teaching style. If there is a Left conspiracy to influence the direction of the nation’s affairs and its social and economic priorities through the process of subverting a generation of undergraduates this is not yet evident.

It must be said that the committee processes of the Senate are not at all suited to the kind of inquiry that might have been imagined by its instigators. That is probably less important to them than the fact that the inquiry was held at all. On the other hand it might be argued that as even the most intensive specialist research would be unlikely to reach any conclusion as to the incidence of biased teaching, this inquiry has been as useful as any.

Elsewhere: John Quiggin and Terry Flew.

Of course we will continue to teach professional skills – accounting students will still learn to keep books – but we will also ensure that each of our students learns how to analyse scholarly papers, criticise research methods, solve problems and integrate information into coherent arguments.

Some universities which are not going down this route are moving to a broader focus on core subjects and workplace learning for undergraduates – in generalist as well as vocational degrees. Sometimes this is driven by a desire to find a point of differentiation – for instance with Griffith’s emphasis on social enterprise as part of its Arts degree – which is, in part, a recognition that QUT and UQ have the vocational and sandstone/comprehensive humanities angles covered in the eyes of many students. Griffith Arts students also do first year courses like “Great Books”, which must gladden the hearts of the educational traditionalists (I don’t know what’s actually on the curriculum, I should add). And at ACU, all students must do “mission” units – particularly in ethics and to expose them to aspects of the Catholic intellectual tradition (as well as fostering social responsibility).

Slattery notes that some of this is driven by the international market – including the 3+2 Bologna Process for standardising tertiary qualifications across the EU where a bachelors degree is followed by a masters degree as a matter of course. There is probably some benefit – aside from considerations of the international export market – in maintaining the standing of Australian higher education, reducing the over proliferation of degree courses (itself driven by now superceded marketing considerations) and in fostering scholarly and critical skills across all disciplines in the academy. But it needs to be noted that far more mundane factors are also important drivers of change.

Making full fee postgraduate degrees a normal expectation has obvious implications for the cost and accessibility of education, and is one way (perversely perhaps) universities are trying to make up revenue which will be lost through the Rudd government’s phasing out of domestic full fee undergraduate degrees. They can do that because of the FEE-HELP program the Howard government introduced which extends a version of Hecs to postgraduate coursework qualifications (and a proliferation of private higher education providers at both undergrad and postgrad level). Student income support, inadequate as it is, certainly hasn’t caught up with a normative expectation of five years at uni.

Similarly, the managerialist attack on disciplinary training and identification is fostered through what goes along with the massification of first and second year undergraduate classes – the culling of small and specialised courses (and often of the academics who teach them). There’s a cost advantage here for universities, as expensive senior academics who aren’t “research intensive” (or in many cases who are) can be replaced by casuals with a few massively overloaded junior academics coordinating. In some instances, UWS for one, huge first year classes are being taught in what is effectively distance ed mode disguised by all sorts of web bells and whistles like podcast lectures which are never actually delivered to any actual class – and this is web often without the 2.0.

Finally, as appears usual with the Australian higher education sector, differentiation seems to last just as long as all the other unis can rush to copy the first movers.

And the Bradley Review will be scrambling to keep up with the implications.

Incidentally, one of the problems with Julia Gillard’s super portfolio is that it’s difficult to identify what her thinking on all of this is – research policy seems to have been outsourced to Kim Carr and the venturousaustralia crew, while the rest of the Higher Ed issues are left for Denise Bradley and her review to sort out. While we can certainly do without some of the day to day ministerial interference which particularly characterised Brendan Nelson’s tenure in the portfolio (and to a lesser but still significant extent Julie Bishop’s), it would be nice to have more than waffle from the Rudd government on what’s happening to the “core university business” of teaching.

Disclosures: I knew Stephen Schwartz in his previous incarnation as President of the Academic Board at UQ when I was an undergrad rep on the board in the early 90s. And I teach at Griffith and ACU, as well as at QUT.