Our Misgoverned Universities

Given what is to come it is perhaps best to make it abundantly clear that I am in most regards an admirer of the Howard government. (See, for example, my piece on “John Howard and the Constitution” in the April Quadrant.) Nor is this, to put it mildly, the most common outlook to encounter in academia.

So on foreign policy, on trade, on defence, on liberalisation, on deregulating labour relations, on the need for a healthy degree of scepticism as regards multilateralism and multinational bodies, and on the perils of over-powerful judges—albeit not on the hostility to federalism—my views align pretty well with those of the Howard government. The criticisms to come ought to be read in that context, and not as part of some sort of kneejerk hostility to Australia’s former government.

While I am at it, let me confess to three other preliminary matters that may be thought to have some bearing on the criticisms to come. First, I very much like my job as a law professor. I am paid a good deal of money to spend a lot of time reading and writing, more or less on whatever catches my fancy. The degree of freedom to do as one wishes, especially in the more senior academic ranks (at least in law, my discipline), is quite wonderful and no doubt a privilege that few others in paid employment or who are self-employed get to enjoy. Having worked in a large Toronto law firm, where weekly records of each lawyer’s past week’s billed hours were distributed to all other lawyers—not to force ever longer working days and weeks and months, you understand, but simply to let each lawyer (and if you can say the next bit with a straight face then I suggest moving to Los Angeles and looking for acting work) “know where he stands”—I know what a great job this can be. Certainly it is not one that demands the incredibly long hours and year-round tedious attention to inherently uninteresting details that life in a big law firm requires. In a similar or at least related vein, one can far more easily travel with one’s work as a legal academic than as a lawyer. It is far easier for a Canadian (say, this native-born Canadian) to go and teach law in Hong Kong, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia than it would ever be to go and practise law in those other jurisdictions. That is not just ironic, it relates too to the fact that lawyers have the second-best union going —they are adept at dressing up self-interested anti-competitive practices in terms of the public interest. (I say “second-best” because the doctors may be even better at this.)

Second, I can put my hand on my heart and say that in my almost four years now as a law professor at a G8 university, writing a lot of op-ed pieces in the Australian and elsewhere that would in no way at all reflect the politically correct consensus in my or any other Australian university, I have never once felt the slightest pressure to rein in my op-ed writings or to adopt a view less at odds with those of the preponderance of university academics (and administrators too for that matter). This is not only a fact, one that is true even of a few pieces of mine that were critical of universities, it is a compliment to the top administrators of my university.

The final proviso I want to make clear at the start before I turn to my main argument is a sad one in a sense and is this: I have two children, one fifteen years old and one thirteen. Should either one ask my opinion I would not advise attending an Australian university. I think both would be better off attending a Canadian or (one in particular) New Zealand university. The main reason for that advice would be that my personal experience and professional observations make me think that students are better off leaving home and going into residence when they start university. This is a highly chosen option, if not the norm, in my native Canada, as well as in the United States and the United Kingdom. And New Zealand’s oldest university, and one of its two best, is situated in a small university town and relies on the bulk of its students coming from all over the country, including almost a third of whom traverse the country to come down from Auckland. Australian universities, and especially the older, elite ones, are overwhelmingly big-city commuter universities by contrast. Yes, I know they take a small percentage of students into residence, mainly from the country, but they are commuter universities. On top of that there is next to no tradition of large numbers of students travelling out of state to another university. If you are from Sydney you go to a Sydney university; if from Melbourne to one in Melbourne; and so on. University students stay at home. They commute to and home from the campus. The overall learning experience—in both a narrow academic sense and in a wider life-changing (including having fun) sense—is far inferior to going to a residence university. Given any two universities that are even remotely comparable in terms of their academic excellence, if one of the two is a residence university and the other a commuter university, students should in my view do whatever they possibly can to attend the residence one. (Nor is the differential-costs argument all that powerful once you factor in the cost of running a car to go back and forth at the commuter university and then recall that adding, say, $20,000-odd dollars to your final loan is not much at all in the greater scheme of getting a first-class all-round university experience you will always remember. What’s the difference, really, between a $300,000 mortgage on your first home and a $320,000 one?)

The lack of top residence universities in Australia is a failing that can in no way be laid at the feet of the Howard government. Indeed it is no doubt in large part a function of historical contingency. I simply signal the fact that it matters to me, and would matter (probably decisively) even were there no other major complaints to make.

Alas, however, I do have other complaints. And this takes us away from preliminaries and into the core of this article about Australia’s universities. That said, my comments and criticisms will be aimed at only one part of the universities, namely the humanities and law. Some of the practices that make little or no sense when it comes to law and the humanities may be desirable (in a least bad sense, if no other) when it comes to physics, chemistry, medicine and the rest of the hard or natural sciences. For all I know the same may be said of the business schools. So read the remainder of this article as directed at the humanities and law. I leave it to others to decide if some or all of the failings I will point out apply to other areas of the university.

In addition, I will limit myself to three broad criticisms. The first relates to the pervasive managerialism of the universities. The second has to do with the obsession with having academics apply for grants. And the last is more of a comment on two unrelated matters, the quest for diversity in the universities and one attempted Howard government initiative as regards measuring the quality of research.

Pervasive Managerialism

Having arrived at a G8 university from a sabbatical at a Canadian law school, and eleven years at a New Zealand law school before that, the very first thing that hit me like a brick wall was the pervasive managerialism of Australian universities. In my first week I was sent to a day-long seminar for new professors (that is, senior academics) whose none-too-subtle theme was that the old-fashioned notion of collegial decision-making no longer applied. Key decisions would be made by administrators and bureaucrats. What did take me a while longer to grasp was the incredible fact that my university was probably one of the least bureaucratic or managerial ones in the country. And yet judged against any other university I have worked in or visited in New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong, the USA, or the UK, this least-bad Australian university of mine was the most one-size-fits-all, centrally controlled institution I had ever encountered.

I was stunned to learn that the decision as to how often my students would be assessed was not mine alone to make. It was not even the law faculty’s alone to make. There were one-size-fits-all central rules that applied to all quarters of the university. (As an aside, if you are someone who dislikes federalism and federalist diversity then I recommend you come and work for a while at an Australian university. That will cure your love of centralism.) And there were similar one-size-fits-all rules as regards when the students had to be surveyed for their opinion of a course. (Every semester of every year in every single course, including tutorials, is the answer.) And again, the same centralism applied as regards how to deal with students seeking clarification of their marks (read “whingeing about what they scored”).

Indeed, my anecdotal sense after four years is that Australian university students are the most spoon-fed cohort of tertiary students of any country’s I have taught. Aiming for standardisation, and more especially a standardisation that caters for the bottom third or quarter in terms of ability, is what seems to happen in institutions with highly centralised administrative structures enamoured with one-size-fits-all diktats, paper policies and outcomes.

Here’s another example that applies only to law. Our best students, on average or at the very top level, are our first-degree LLB students. We draw our cohort of these students at my university from the top 2 or 3 per cent of graduating school students in the state. In turn, the best of those on graduating with their LLBs either go into practice at a large firm, or to clerk with top judges, or go overseas to study further at Yale, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford or the like. Our higher degree students (LLMs and PhDs) just are not as bright, as a generalisation. But this plays havoc for a university geared to think there is a winnowing towards better and better students as progress is made up the degree ladder. The result, under a one-size-fits-all bureaucracy, is a set of rules that make no sense for law. For instance, law lecturers are expected to have doctorates. It doesn’t matter that many of the best and the brightest law professors at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, and even throughout the middle ranks of Canada’s, New Zealand’s, the USA’s and Britain’s law schools don’t have doctorates. You see there is a university rule. (I am luckily free to say how dumb this rule is because I have a doctorate. It’s in moral philosophy, not law. But that doesn’t matter. I comply with the rule.)

I could go on, mentioning the incredible amount of paperwork that must be filled out (not just in applying for promotion but simply on a year-in and year-out basis by everyone as part of the yearly appraisals), or the pervasive sense of hierarchy, or the rulings from the centre (“increase your intake of first-year law students by 40 per cent next year”) that no law school on the planet would do itself unless forced by the centre. Instead I will finish this first section with the general observation that university bureaucracies tend to treat academics’ time as a free good. If new rules make the administrators look good—say, by tripling the number of required seminars to aid graduate students or doubling the feedback that has to be given after exams—there is virtually no tendency to stop and weigh the benefits of the new rules against the costs. You see, the costs imposed by some DVC with this or that grand title have to be borne by others, and so are pretty easy to ignore or overlook by the central powers-that-be.

Obsession with Applying for Grants

In the humanities and law in Australia there is a wasteful and ridiculous obsession with applying for grants.

Here’s a fact few readers will find credible. When academics are judged in this country one of the key criteria used is that person’s track record in getting grants. So if some Professor Smith gets a million dollars to research in some area, then the very fact the professor got that grant money will count as an output, as a sign of excellence. And this will be true whatever comes from the use of that money.

Isn’t that bizarre? It certainly is to this native-born Canadian legal academic who has worked in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States. The level of emphasis here, on how you fare in getting grants, is far higher than in any of those other jurisdictions, at least when it comes to my discipline, law.

Now this is sort of understandable in the natural sciences, physics, medicine and the like. Research in such areas is expensive. There is only a limited amount of money to go around. Someone has to decide who will get it. Combine all that with the fact that in the natural sciences the underlying thing you are researching is the external, causal world where outcomes are imposed on us humans. Gravity is real not because of the way we humans have been socialised; it is a mind-independent fact about the world, whatever a few deconstructionist English professors might pretend. (And as an aside, the test for all those who profess such nonsense is to take them to your eighth-floor window and ask them to jump.)

The point is that if your research is in an area where outcomes can be vetted against mind-independent outcomes such as whether a double-blind drug trial worked, then your ability to win a grant may be the least bad way of allocating scarce resources. Not great, but better than any alternative.

But in many parts of law, and indeed in much of the humanities, it makes no sense at all. First, in much of law there is no real comparable use for grant money. Having spent loads of time and effort applying for money, what would you do with it? Much legal research simply does not involve good or bad social-science-type investigations. So any money you got would go to what exactly? Buying your way out of teaching? Getting some student to do your work for you? Measuring people in these areas based on getting grants is plain dumb. And yet the emphasis on it here in Australia is ridiculously high. Maybe that has something to do with the cut all universities take out of such moneys?

Here’s a fact. Any Australian legal academic looking for a job overseas would be judged on his or her publications and teaching, full stop. It would be irrelevant that the Australian Research Council (ARC) had given that person a few grants.

It gets even worse for those in the humanities and law who do undertake social-science-type research. These people do have something to spend the money on. The problem is with the system that awards the money.

Imagine two different academics who are researching, say, terrorism. Let’s imagine that one wants to come at the question in a Hobbesian, “the world is a dangerous place” sort of way. The other wants to come at it from a multilateralist, “all violence is bad” sort of way. In such issues there simply are no mind-independent criteria for determining how to dole out scarce resources. It will depend who is on the body that gives out the money.

Take the ARC. It gives out money based on a number of factors. One is past success at getting grants. That might be the least bad solution to funding hard science research, but in the soft social sciences it looks more like a version of the old boys’ club. Political preferences can’t help but matter to begin with, and that is simply compounded by factoring in past success. And then there’s the whole problem of applying a hard-science money-guzzling model to the social sciences, to the humanities and to law. And on top of that again there’s the time-wasting, byzantine application process that treats the time of academics as a free good (a common failing, as noted above).

Perhaps the core-level problem here, though, is that inputs (grant money) are counted as outputs (the quality of your academic research and publications). It’s not so much double counting. It’s worse than that because it involves counting something that should not be counted at all. Grant moneys are aimed at facilitating research that might lead to publications. But it is those publications that ought to be judged or assessed.

Think of it this way. Suppose for a moment that you run a large manufacturing company. Suppose, also, that you have applied to the government and received a grant of money. Now here’s the analogy. Which is the better test of what sort of company you are? Is it what you produce with the money—the sort of cars you end up manufacturing? Or is it that you are good at getting the grant money in the first place? Does the fact that you managed to win money from the government make you a good car-making outfit?

Put differently, would any car manufacturer measure its success by the volume of grants it received from some government agency? Just to ask these questions is to answer them, you might think. It’s patently ridiculous to count inputs (grant money) as outputs (the quality of the cars you make and the sales you generate).

However, if you happen to work in one of Australia’s universities the blindingly obvious answer above is the wrong one.

This overweening obsession with getting grants from the ARC and others is one of the first things that strikes the newly arrived academic to Australia. In law, and I would say in the humanities too, it is an idiotic obsession. Meanwhile in the social sciences it is an obsession that is at the mercy of the grant-giving panel and possibly, too, what their political frame of reference happens to be (to say nothing of potential conflicts of interest). Equally egregiously, this obsession fosters income uncertainties in the universities, as no one can be sure of who will succeed, or when, in the grant-getting game. And tied to that it creates an incentive at the university level to continually build up the bureaucracy, hiring more and more people (some far better paid than the academics) to help target potential grant sources and to help with crafting the applications. (Some people might say “spin-doctoring” them.)

Here’s my blunt opinion. The Howard government should have taken on the vested bureaucratic interests in the tertiary education sector. For law and the humanities it should have swept away the whole ARC edifice and ended the bizarre emphasis on getting grants. It damages morale, feeds the bureaucracy, puts in place incentives to do things there would otherwise be no reason to do, and has a built-in bias in favour of “team” or “group” research that apes the natural science approach.

I do not think anyone could set out a defence of the status quo obsession with getting grants that could withstand scrutiny.

Diversity and the RQF

It is no exaggeration to claim that Australia’s universities are havens of political correctness. Take but one example. Initiatives (not to mention employees) trumpeting diversity proliferate. All sorts of group-based head-counting and characteristic-counting, tied to attempts to rebalance things in favour of groups deemed statistically deprived, take place. Think of it as an entrenched mandate in favour of diversity.

Of course, not all sorts of diversity are targeted. Universities are actually in the business of ideas, so you might be forgiven for thinking—if social engineering is your cup of tea—that what is really needed is a mandated diversity of ideas, including political perspectives. Perhaps the humanities and law in Australia’s universities need some sort of initiative to move towards a better statistical representation for those who vote for parties on the right of the political spectrum? (It’s ridiculous, I know, but less ridiculous than the array of other group-based, quota-seeking programs that exist.)

So what percentage of lecturers and professors in the humanities and law in Australia do you think vote Coalition as opposed to Labor or something further left? In the USA, surveys and analyses of political donations show law professors identify themselves overwhelmingly as Democrat voters (by at least seven to one). Personally, I’d be surprised if the percentage of Coalition voters amongst academics here in Australian universities reached 15 per cent. That’s way, way below the percentage of Australians in the general population who vote Coalition. Ought the university bureaucracies to take immediate steps to favour hiring only those on the right of the political spectrum, in order “to foster an institutional culture that favours diversity on campus”?

For those, like me, who object to all top-down social engineering schemes as likely to have bad (some unintended) long-term consequences, the answer is “no”. But for those who push and favour all the other sorts of diversity programs, this question ought to be a tricky one to gainsay.

Let’s leave that, however, and turn to one particular initiative introduced by the Howard government in its last term in office. This was an attempt to measure the quality (as opposed to quantity) of research output. The idea is that academics ought to be assessed on the quality of what they produce. The thinking behind this Howard government initiative, known as the Research Quality Framework or RQF, was not awful or terrible or silly. On balance I supported the thinking behind the initiative. The United Kingdom does it. New Zealand does it. Why shouldn’t Australia do it?

Of course this sort of exercise can never be anything more than a rough-and-ready exercise. Assessing quality has an inherently subjective component to it, and doubly so in the humanities and law. But the status quo involved measuring just quantity, and that is worse. If you are going to try to measure outputs in this way at all, then focusing on quality over quantity has a lot to be said for it (even conceding how subjective and imperfect it will inevitably be).

My basic support for the thinking behind this push to measure quality over quantity stemmed from my time teaching law in New Zealand. Over there the PBRF (Performance Based Research Funding) quality assessment initiative involved every academic being rated. In law a group of three or four top legal academics (with one more from overseas) sat on the panel that rated all legal academics in the country based predominantly on the four published pieces in the last six years that each person nominated as his or her own best. All the individual scores were then used to give a faculty or department average score (just add up the scores and divide by the number of people in the faculty) and that was in turn used to create league tables. In ordinal ranking terms you had the first, second, third and so on best law school or psychology department or English department in the country.

Was this perfect? No. Did it involve a big dollop of subjectivity? Yes. Did research funding follow the results? Yes. Did those who were judged top performers benefit? Yes.

My giant mistake in initially supporting the thinking behind the RQF initiative was to assume it would be anything like the New Zealand PBRF exercise. Instead it quickly descended into a chaotic bureaucratic nightmare, costing millions of dollars, just to try to get some sort of scheme proposed. (I know Australians won’t want to hear this, but why didn’t we just copy the New Zealand quality-measuring approach?)

So it was decided the RQF would not rate all academics, only those nominated by each university. (Take that as a sign for the universities to spend huge time and resources deciding who to nominate.) There was endless debate about whether “impact” would count as well as “quality”. (Take that as a chance for non-G8 universities to try to boost their scores, particularly if “impact” could become a proxy for “real life economic applications”.) Worse, it became obvious over time that the way it was going—what with lobbying from all the vested tertiary sector interests—the final data would be so opaque that it would not allow league tables to be produced. You wouldn’t be able to get a ranking of law schools or history departments or anything else.

At that point the enormous costs stopped being justified by any foreseeable benefits. It was hard to see what, if any, the benefits might be. Save for a few university apparatchiks with vested interests, no one was left supporting the RQF because it was hard to imagine that anything could be worse. I certainly thought that at the time, though with the benefit of hindsight I may have been a tad hasty. The Rudd Labor government alternative, of using “metrics” (meaning weighted citation counts), has thus far resulted in the ARC producing a law journal ranking list—they seem to have more or less copied a US list—that is so idiotic and laughable (the Cambridge Law Journal, one of the world’s best, is classified in the lowest tier, and this is but one of many bizarre rankings of law journals) that unless that list changes massively the RQF process may, just, have been better as far as law is concerned.

Conclusion

For a government that did so many other beneficial and desirable things, and governed well, this is a pretty sorry legacy.

James Allan is Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland.