VC’s corner
campusreview.com.au
Standing strong
Professor Stuart McCutcheon.
All photos: University of Auckland
Auckland VC on how universities
have responded to new pressures.
By Stuart McCutcheon
D
uring my nearly 20 years as a
vice‑chancellor at two universities,
I have observed with pleasure the
increased participation of (mostly) young
people in our sector. As the first member
of my family to be fortunate enough to
benefit from the university experience,
I have myself been a beneficiary of that
increased participation. There is no doubt
that attending university (particularly as first
in family) is a life-changing experience and
that its effects are intergenerational.
At the same time, however, I have
watched with concern as governments
throughout much of the Western world
have attempted to pay for this increased
participation in part by progressively
reducing their investment in the education
of each student. The transfer of some
of the cost of education to students and
their families has not been unreasonable
given the significant private benefit of
a university education. However, it has
been accompanied by strong societal
and therefore political pressure to limit
tuition fees.
To some extent, this public focus on
lowering cost over raising quality reflects
our failure to persuade voters of the
benefits of great universities. In New
Zealand, for example, the forthcoming
20
referendum on whether marijuana
should be legalised will generate vastly
more public discussion than the 15-year
slide in the international rankings of our
leading universities.
Reduced investment per student by
governments, accompanied by pressure
to constrain domestic tuition fees, has
typically led to a net reduction in the
real income universities receive for each
student. In some countries, the pattern
seems to have been one of ‘feast then
famine’ while in others, New Zealand
included, it has been more ‘slow starvation’.
At the same time, our compliance costs
have risen dramatically. Some of these have
been imposed by governments – there
appears to be a law of nature that ‘the less
governments invest, the more they want
to intervene’ – and some by society more
generally. Not all are unreasonable (health
and safety, for example), but they are all
additional, typically unfunded, costs.
Universities have responded to this
pressure with what, in hindsight, has been
an extraordinary degree of change for
naturally conservative institutions. We
have typically grown our externally funded
research income (public and private,
domestic and international) by a significant
amount, sought to commercialise our
intellectual property wherever possible,