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INDUSTRY & RESEARCH for outcomes and also for quality education. And then there is a significant difficulty that the sector has in terms of managing its largest cost space, which is staffing, due to fairly restrictive employee bargaining agreements that exist across the sector which are actually largely out of step with what you would find in the private sector.
So whereas in the public sector you move through a much more flexible, agile way of working, the tertiary sector also has the same pressure to move towards that but doesn ' t really have the flexibility from an executive point of view to be able to do that.
You ' ve mentioned that there is increasing student demand but not enough public funds to support such an increase in student numbers. The Grattan Institute’ s work has indicated though that around one dollar in every five of their public funds that is meant to go toward teaching actually goes toward funding research. If this is the case, do you believe universities have to take some of the blame for that funding shortage for teaching? It’ s shared responsibility. However, the bulk of the activity of the universities [ is ] largely still as teaching institutions, and it is the government who basically demands that research be a significant part of that. In order for a university to call itself a university, there has to be a research component, a significant research component, to the work that they do. And so with that gives universities mixed messaging neither, so it’ s important to conduct research but also important to have quality student outcomes and provided spaces.
So I think the balance between research and teaching is still to be reached, and I think there is a sense of tension between both sides of the house, if you like, in terms of teaching research as a relationship. But both are intrinsically important.
And you also mentioned that there are restrictive workforce structures that need changing so that universities can basically move along and adapt to new environments. Could you elaborate on that? The classification systems for example of who can work at a university, who is an academic. What does [ being ] an academic mean? Who are the professional staff and what does that mean? There ' s very little flexibility across being both, for example. You can have people who are employed on the professional staffing basis but actually could be highly qualified academics in their own right. However, currently it’ s very difficult for those people to have those kind of roles where they are, if you like, a little bit hybrid or mixed.
And while there is a significant need for universities to be more engaged with the private sector and more permeable in terms of having outreach, but also in-reach from the private sector into universities – that isn ' t enabled by some of those restrictive current industrial agreements which very, very strictly regulate who can be an academic, who ' s professional staff, and perhaps don ' t go as far as saying,“ Well, there ' s a third type of employee here which is kind of a mixture of both, or is it something that we haven ' t really thought about yet?” There ' s a lot of emphasis that goes into those EBA ' s of describing who ' s in and who ' s out, what they do and what they don ' t do.
I guess that the main point here is that at this time we really need to be driven towards a more flexible way of thinking about the world of work that occurs in universities and what is the best way to stretch ourselves in order to meet the demands for students and also for research.
So would you say that most enterprise bargaining agreements in universities are outdated? There is a need to take a good look and to really test whether the industrial instruments are fit for purpose and really come at it with a much more open-minded view about what ' s required out of the agreement rather than how do we protect what we have. There tends to be a protectionist approach that is taken rather than a progressive and forward-looking approach.
Education minister Simon Birmingham appeared to signal possible cuts at the recent Universities Australia conference. So, with universities having to likely operate under an even tighter public funding environment, how might they secure some alternative revenue streams? Alternative funding models will become a reality in the future and this is where the report [ talks about ] innovation and finding new solutions and also the ability to establish meaningful and functional links back to industry. And what that basically means is how do the universities set themselves up [ to prosper ] in an environment where their research products become able to be commercialised, able to be utilised to reach more people and to have further impact? In order to that then you need to start thinking much more commercially about what universities do and much more prospectively about the application of one’ s research into the real world and into industry. I think finding new income streams can probably come from the application of the research products.
But also it will come from innovative ways to access more students both here and oversees by really looking at delivery framework – for example, online delivery – and moving towards true digital delivery, so it’ s not just that you have lectures online or that you can access some content on the internet. It’ s actually that whole system, the whole learning process [ being able to ] occur digitally thereby really opening the opportunity to have significantly wider access to students both here and oversees and to make the value proposition compelling, or more compelling to a wider audience or to a wider number of people here and around the world.
So, you’ re saying that diversified funding streams are more important than ever for the future of higher education? Diversified funding streams that are underpinned by true innovation I think is something that the sector is still [ yet ] to actually define. If you read a lot of strategic plans of many of the universities, that word‘ innovation’ is very present, at the very front and centre of mind. However, they are still very much in their infancy in trying to actually define in a differentiated way what innovation means for themselves in a more competitive environment and in an environment with shrinking income and shrinking resources.
What else did this report show you? [ It shows ] that our universities are doing quite well for where they ' re at. I think sometimes we ' re quite harsh on ourselves and on our system. Certainly, we need our researchers [ to constantly be striving to improve what they’ re doing and thinking of new ways to be better ], but undertaking this last piece of research and looking into the actual outcomes that are being had in the sector, I think we do well with what we have, and the real critical aspect is how do we continue to do that in the face of decreasing funding or changing funding arrangements, and also [ determining ] the best way to position the tertiary sector internationally going forward. ■
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