Like the grumpy old academic, I went to university, on the public purse, in the 1970s. (in the UK).

I also sense that education 'revolutions' since that time have demonstrably de-valued the system overall: academics are now significantly less empowered, and despite being required to work harder, longer, without tenure, are unable to convince fee-paying students to do anything like the volume OR quality of work expected in times past.

The Foreign student 'market' has been totally buggered. It was not designed to represent $3b (or thereabouts) of value to the system, nor was it expected that it would materially alter the offering of courses, the marking of courses, or the standards to pass them. All I think can be held to have happened.

I dont entirely understand why this is so. I think more people writing about it is good, and more reflections from people inside the system, leaving the system, or with memories of how it used to be are also good.

A common fault I see today, and I include myself in it, is to seek solutions well before a problem-statement has been fully worked out. If there IS a problem with the post dawkins revolution (and I think thats demonstrably true), then fixing it from this distance in time is going to require a LOT of work: its entrenched at a level which makes significant players in government and, the governANCE bodies (ie Vice Chancellors, and senior (tenured) academics and researchers, and the ARC) reluctant to alter things.

I leave the comment with a question: Why is it, that so many senior academics in Australia were trained in the British system, at universities which performed mutual self-assessment at undergraduate degree level with external examiners, yet Australian Academics refuse to countenance their peers from inter-state assessing their course contents, and marking regimes?

Why is it that even though they do this for PhD candidature, (after all, real money in research demands truth and high standards..) but won't do it for the commodity teaching?

"the emperor has no clothes..."

Btw, what I hear from family and friends in the UK is that the introduction of the Australian fee model has totally (morally) bankrupted their system, and the last standout is Scotland, where english students flee, en masse, seeking an education their parents had, but appear unwilling to permit them to achieve themselves.

-G

Perhaps not the most pressing issue, but it is instructing comparing VC salaries with, say, the UK

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/full-list-of-vice-chancellor-salaries/story-e6frgcjx-1226385103740
The VC of Oxford University collects a meagre 424 000 pounds (661000 AUD) which compares rather unfavourably with 1200000 AUD for the VC of Macquarie.

Well I dearsay if we didn't pay them so much they would all run off overseas - but presumably not to the UK.

However to this common plod it strikes me the culture is a little similar to the HSU - an overweening sense of entitlement.

For a decade, on a casual and contract basis, I had the privilege of teaching highly intelligent young people as much as I could muster about health sociology, disability, occ health and safety and a variety of associated subjects. My teaching survey results were always excellent because I was openly political about my approach to the subject matter. This approach was anchored in democratic theory and a commitment to producing citizens fit for a vigorous democracy.

There was little institutional or personal support for such a dangerous project as promoting democracy within institutions whose social relations of production could only be described as feudal at best and Sadean at worst.

Responsibility for the dominance of managers and bean counters in the tertiary sector lies entirely with staff who have, for two decades now, watched goggle eyed like an endangered species stuck in a tree as the tide of neo-liberal muck has crept higher and higher leaving only the promise of superannuation as a safe refuge.

And then came Unisuper. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

What a joke.

(ARC grant-application consultant): it's simple ... a three-pronged solution.

(1) One-way lectures have little place in the current technological and social environment; they were looking worn out even in the 70s and 80s with the advent of photocopiers and video players. Automate almost all lectures, for online consumption by students in their own timeframe. Face-to-face should be for two-way tutorials or one-to-one critical contact, and even then shouldn't always require student (or staff) attendance on campus.

(2) Support the acquisition of writing and research skills for UGs and PGs with centralised units that are properly funded. Excellence in that is a key part of the business model for the clever society, and of the marketing model for attracting second-language imported students. Standards are pretty disgusting at the moment.

(3) Balance low research output with higher teaching load on a systemic basis (I know I'll offend people by saying so, but the bullet needs to be bitten, that the teacher/scholar combo needs to be approached with much greater flexibility ... it was always a wobbly notion in some fields).