Davis essay

In March 1966 the first students arrived at Flinders University. They were typical of their time. Men outnumbered women two to one. Most lived at home with their parents, their background overwhelmingly middle class. A survey in the first years of the new institution confirmed that Flinders students were not politically radical. A slim majority indicated support for the government of Harold Holt. Only a handful opposed American and Australian involvement in Vietnam. If conservative about political change, Flinders students did not forgo commencement day pranks, with a mock Russian submarine being pushed into the university lake. Four decades ago, most students starting at Flinders were destined for teaching or the public service.
Though Flinders students were much like Australian tertiary students elsewhere, their new university was anything but typical. As founding vice-chancellor Peter Karmel told a meeting at the Adelaide Town Hall, ‘we want to experiment and experiment bravely’. Out went faculties and departments, replaced by Schools of Social Science, Biological Science, Physical Science, and Language and Literature. Students, it was hoped, would cross disciplines, in a university committed to a coherent intellectual and social experience. Even when the university began to teach medicine in 1975, the course was designed so that students would take majors in other faculties. Many chose the humanities and social sciences.

Innovation extended from subject matter to teaching method. The School of Language and Literature introduced the then novel practice of continuous assessment, with teaching delivered through now unimaginable tutorials of just three or four students. Flinders students could take Australia’s first undergraduate course in Spanish, along with other subjects not offered at the University of Adelaide.
Flinders staff were expected to share decision-making. No God Professors reigning over departments – a participatory system of government would prevail, during which decisions were taken, as David Hilliard’s book on Flinders recounts, ‘often at wearisome length’. However exhausting, the approach created a sense of community among staff. Numbers were sufficiently small that everyone could know the vice-chancellor. Flinders recruited widely, with many young academics establishing families in a new city.

The new university differed from the old universities in other ways. It was located well away from the city centre, in what Premier Don Dunstan unkindly described as a ‘suburban paddock’. This paralleled developments in England, where new universities were intended to be self-contained communities rather than intermingled with towns and cities. And, importantly, Flinders was financed in part by the Commonwealth government. While colonial and state governments established Australia’s original universities, forty years ago Canberra was emerging as an increasingly important player in higher education.

Talk of diversity
The conscious attempt to be different in the early years of Flinders suggests interesting contemporary parallels. Then as now, there was much talk about the need for greater diversity within the university sector. This was apparent in books published about Australian higher education in the mid-1960s. The introduction to one complained that ‘our universities are much too alike, without sufficient variety or flexibility’. A paper in another book compared the uniformity of Australian universities to the diversity of American universities, pointing to the benefits of greater specialisation.

These authors knew well the historic reasons for this lack of diversity. Before the late 1940s, each state had just one university. As the sole representative of tertiary education, it was obliged to meet accumulated expectations about what a university could and should do. Institutions became comprehensive as disciplines were added to meet growing demand for educated workers. With science and technology becoming important for Australian society, nineteenth-century teaching institutions turned slowly into twentieth-century universities carrying out both teaching and research.

The idea that specialisation might be desirable was circulating widely during the early postwar period. What is now the University of New South Wales began in 1949 as the New South Wales University of Technology, the first institution with an explicit mission. The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised that the new university should take the ‘burden of routine instruction’ away from the University of Sydney, allowing it to conduct more ‘original research’. The Victorian government proposed that a second university in Melbourne also be organised around science and technology.
In both cases, plans for specialisation were soon overtaken by increasing demand for more general forms of university education. UNSW and Monash University – which took its first students in 1961 – quickly became comprehensive universities. Each soon resembled in basic organisation, courses offered and academic mission the original universities in Sydney and Melbourne. Only the architecture was genuinely different, and not always to happy effect.

This lack of genuine difference was disappointing to many who championed diversity. At a 1965 seminar on the future of higher education, the first vice-chancellor of Monash, J.A.L. Matheson, was reported as saying: ‘I speak … as one who has tried – who indeed came to this country with the avowed intention of trying – to produce a university different in character from the other university in the city in which Monash is located. Instead of this I now find myself vice-chancellor of a university that is disappointingly like the University of Melbourne.’

There are, of course, worse disappointments.

If UNSW and Monash frustrated early hopes, the 1960s provided a second opportunity to instil difference. A decade of new institution building began with Macquarie in 1964, and eventually included La Trobe, Newcastle, Flinders, Griffith, Wollongong and Murdoch. Yet despite the rhetoric of diversity, this was not diversity in the American understanding of the term. The new institutions all adopted the orthodox Australian view that universities are both teaching and research institutions, with qualifications from bachelor degree through to PhD, and a range of disciplines tending to the comprehensive. Institutions originally determined not to teach professional courses soon found themselves offering degrees in medicine, business, law and engineering. Interdisciplinarity became a residual aspiration rather than a thoroughgoing point of difference. Universities such as Flinders and my institutional home for nearly twenty years, Griffith, quickly joined UNSW and Monash in approaching the Australian norm. The system has produced, across Australia, a set of institutions remarkably even in quality, course offerings and research ambitions. Consistency has proved more valued than difference.

Diversity in non-university higher education
While diversity did not take hold in the university sector, the story was different elsewhere in higher education. From our starting point in 1966 until the start of the 1990s, the non-university tertiary sector supported an array of institutional types: colleges, institutes, conservatoria. Some were multidisciplinary, but many specialised in fields such as nursing, teaching, agriculture or the arts. Institutional size varied from vast, multi-campus enterprise players, such as RMIT, to small colleges with just a few hundred students. Ownership and governance were equally diverse, from autonomous institutions to units within state education departments.
This plurality reflected different histories and purposes. In the university sector, governmental and community expectations weighed heavily on a very small number of institutions, each obliged to be all things to all people in their state. In contrast, the non-university higher education sector had space to be different, and grew to occupy a wide range of niches.

As our story opens, this set of non-university tertiary institutions had caught the interest of Commonwealth ministers. The 1960s saw unprecedented demand for higher education, a demand that grew with few interruptions for the next generation. How to provide for so many new students? One answer, adopted in many nations, was to insist on a distinction between universities on the one hand, and technical training on the other – between a few research institutions with a commitment to fundamental discovery of new knowledge, and many more institutions committed to the training of workers requiring high levels of expertise. The non-university sector would become a cheap but effective way to expand higher education. This could be presented as a form of specialisation, as Sir Leslie Martin argued in his influential 1964 report to the Menzies government. For Canberra, the distinction between expensive university education and more economical technical training offered a compelling financial rationale. As Prime Minister Robert Menzies told federal parliament, unless there was a move away from what he called ‘the traditional nineteenth-century model’ it would not be possible for government to meet the demand for university education. The outcome of the Martin Committee became known as the ‘binary divide’, a formal split between universities and non-university institutions, most now organised under the title of college of advanced education (CAE). In keeping with financial exigencies, new Commonwealth money favoured advanced education over universities, and places in the non-university higher education sector expanded rapidly. In 1968 university students outnumbered CAE students two to one. Just a decade later, enrolments were almost equal.

Whitlam government: diversity among students
The binary divide endured through the Whitlam governments of 1972 to 1975. Like its coalition predecessors, the Labor government was concerned to expand access to higher education, and did so by expanding further the role of Canberra. Following the premiers’ conference of 1973, the Commonwealth took on full financial responsibility for higher education. Tuition fees were abolished the following year. Universities, once funded through a combination of student fees, state and Commonwealth subsidies, now found themselves dependent solely on annual grants from Canberra.
The consequences would take years to unfold. In the long run, financial dominance by the Commonwealth would impose uniformity on institutions on both sides of the binary divide. But in the mid-1970s this was well into the future. The times offered exciting prospects for universities. In the last Whitlam budget and the first year of the Fraser government, Commonwealth funding for each student undertaking tertiary education hit a peak never again matched. With free tuition, there was an expectation that participation would broaden, with tertiary education open to people of all economic circumstances. Institutions might remain alike, but the push for diversity could instead focus on the student body.

The Flinders class of 1966 was dominated by males drawn from the middle class. Four decades ago, the professions were mostly still men’s work. Indeed, the proportion of women among Australian university students in 1966 was only slightly higher than in 1946. A study of the period found that half of all university students were the offspring of fathers who worked as professionals or managers, though less than twenty per cent of the male population in the relevant age groups was so employed. A quarter of Australian men then worked in unskilled jobs, but they fathered just eight per cent of students.

In principle, free tertiary education from 1974 should have made campuses more socio-economically diverse. So the available information is surprising. It suggests that children of fathers with professional or managerial backgrounds actually increased their share of all higher education enrolments in the decade after free education was introduced. That is, free tertiary education and the expansion of available places largely benefited those already likely to attend university. This outcome is a lesson about the sequence of reforms. In the mid-1970s, overall school retention rates were about thirty-five per cent, and much lower for young people in working-class families. They lacked the academic prerequisite for attending university. Hence the benefits of expanded and free education went to middle-class families.

While the student body did not become significantly more diverse, free tertiary education met some of its goals. The absolute number of people from blue-collar backgrounds increased. Free education probably also contributed to greater female involvement in higher education, with women becoming the majority of students by 1987. As always, however, the problem is assessing cause and effect. Did free education allow daughters to follow sons to university, or did this trend simply reflect school retention rates, with female rates of Year 12 completion exceeding male ones from the late 1970s?

The Whitlam era, then, left hopes for greater diversity with an ambiguous legacy: tightened federal control of higher education but more generous funding, a welcome concern for greater student participation but pursued through a policy instrument that did not meet the fond hopes of its authors. In the decades that followed, such diversity as survived in 1975 would vanish as the Commonwealth imposed uniformity on Australian higher education.

Diversity’s institutional demise
Though the binary divide between universities and colleges of advanced education prevailed through the Whitlam, Fraser and early Hawke years, the distinctions were not always clear. As early as 1972, Peter Karmel, then heading the Australian Universities Commission, described the Australian higher education system as a ‘continuum of educational opportunities’. CAEs offered higher degrees, and carried out research, though not funded for it. They adopted titles and procedures from universities. Yet status remained with universities, and this became a point of contention for CAE staff. The dominant model of the university, combining research and teaching, proved more attractive than the possibility of creating distinctly different institutions around technical training and professional skills.

In 1975, barely ten years into the formal binary system, the first breakout began. The Gordon Institute of Technology and the Geelong Teachers’ College were transformed into Deakin University. This was followed by mergers between universities and colleges in Townsville during 1981, Wollongong in 1982, and in 1986 with the creation of Curtin University from the Western Australian Institute of Technology. When John Dawkins, Commonwealth Education Minister from 1987 to 1991, came to review higher education policy, systemic division was already under challenge.
The original Dawkins 1987 Green Paper suggested the binary divide ‘not be set aside lightly’, but acknowledged that differences between differently named institutions had ‘blurred’. In practice, funding levels rather than mission now divided Australia’s various tertiary education institutions. Dawkins wanted to expand access for students to the system, and sympathised with CAE claims for university status. His challenge was how to pay for system expansion.

The policy solutions adopted by Dawkins still define much of our higher education system. Free tertiary education would end, with students now subject to a Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). The additional income would support system growth and common funding rates for institutions. The binary divide would be abolished, allow-ing all institutions to become universities.

To create efficiencies, a new minimum size requirement would be enforced. Dawkins announced that the Commonwealth would only support institutions with a minimum of 2000 full-time students. Twenty-one institutions failed to meet that threshold, and though some argued for continued independence, their arguments were rejected in a subsequent White Paper.

By the time the Dawkins wave of mergers concluded in the early 1990s, sixty-three higher education providers had become thirty-six universities, many with multiple campuses. Flinders University absorbed the Sturt campus of the South Australian College of Advanced Education. Of the many small institutions flourishing in 1987, only three survived into the mid-1990s: the Australian Maritime College, the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education, and the Victorian College of the Arts. In the past twelve months, two of these three have succumbed to the ‘logic’ of the funding system and will merge with larger institutions. Batchelor, with just under five hundred student places allocated for 2006, is the sole survivor of pre-Dawkins days.

Several long-term threads of higher education thinking and policy-making influenced the move to a national uniform system of higher education. First was the now dom-inant role of the federal government. In 1987, Canberra provided eighty-three per cent of university revenue. It could force sweeping restructures across the entire publicly funded sector, even though most institutions were based in state or territory law. Second was the desire by Dawkins to improve access. School retention rates were rising, creating an annual shortage of tertiary places. To ensure equality of opportunity, the minister needed universities in many communities. New funding rates would allow former colleges to reinvent themselves as part of larger, multidisciplinary institutions. Third was the drive to status. Only one model commanded prestige: that of research institutions offering teaching. The normative power of this ideal type, and the prospect of competing for research funds, made college staff willing accessories to the Dawkins changes.

Universities may have been less enthusiastic, but once amalgamations began, vice-chancellors joined the scramble to acquire real estate. Some state governments imposed geographically coherent solutions on amalgamations, while others deferred to local deals. Thus, while the Queensland government consolidated former colleges into corridor institutions serving the north, west and south of Brisbane, the Victorian government of the day adopted a more laissez-faire approach. As a result, the University of Melbourne sits only a few hundred metres from campuses of both Monash and La Trobe universities; the outer suburb of Bundoora is home to two university campuses replicating similar facilities; and a university based in Geelong has its largest campus in eastern Melbourne.

Finally, Dawkins wanted consistent national standards. An expansion of provision improved opportunities for many young Australians, but equality of experience would be eroded if a clear hierarchy of institutions emerged. Hence student fees were reintroduced as a flat charge set by Canberra. The middle class was not permitted, as they could with private schools, to invest greater sums in their children’s higher education. The universities they attended could not increase status through higher funding.

Evaluated against the objective of improving access to higher education, the reforms of 1987–91 proved a significant and sustained success. Minister Dawkins delivered the largest expansion of tertiary education in the nation’s history. In the years since, hundreds of thousands of Australians have accessed courses which might once have been unattainable. University campuses have become a familiar sight in most Australian towns and cities, and overall participation in higher learning has risen sharply. Access initiatives lifted the number of indigenous Australians going to university, while women and people of non-English speaking background achieved rates of participation at or exceeding their percentage of the population. Benefits flowed too in socio-economic terms; an Australian Council of Education Research study con-cluded the proportion of children of unskilled manual workers going to university nearly doubled between 1980 and 1994.

Dawkins was not principally interested in nurturing diversity within the higher education system. Indeed, he achieved his primary objectives at the expense of specialisation. The unified national system eliminated difference, taking out numerous small specialist institutions. Subjects too expensive to run, or seen as insufficiently rigorous for a university, vanished along with the workforce of dedicated staff nurtured by colleges to pursue excellence in teaching. John Dawkins gave Australia a much larger higher education system than before, but one less varied than at any time in the postwar period. By 1990 the now standard model of an Australian university had emerged: large, comprehensive, multi-campus and research-based. Institutions varied in size, but not in purpose or ambition. Locked into a common funding system and rigid Commonwealth regulatory framework, Australian universities converged.

In 1995 indexation to cover wage increases in universities ended, leaving institutions to face an annual cut in real funding per student. Faced with a pressing need to replace lost income, Australia’s public universities responded by increasing student-to-staff ratios and recruiting full-fee paying students, first from overseas and later locally. Institutions expanded courses attractive to fee-paying students, such as business and management, while quietly closing the worthy but expensive. Financial pressures reinforced similarities across institutions. Given the very few options open to institutions facing annual budget cuts, the strategies adopted by public universities differed in detail but not in overall direction.

Though government changed hands in 1996, policy did not. The successors to John Dawkins retained the logic and regulatory mechanisms they had inherited. Though Brendan Nelson, education minister from 2001 to early 2006, expressed doubt about the wisdom of imposed uniformity, his legislative initiatives imposed still tighter control. Canberra would decide how many Commonwealth-supported students could be enrolled at each university and what disciplines they were to study. Courses and campuses could not close without prior permission. Nelson established incentive programmes in teaching, workplace relations and governance, each pushing universities toward common processes and goals. In his final weeks as minister, Brendan Nelson steered voluntary student unionism legislation through Parliament, so ending the ability of universities to charge amenity fees that supported a distinctive package of student services on each campus.

Legislation introduced by Nelson also imposed a more rigorous set of funding rates, ending a number of anomalies supporting local difference. An institution profoundly affected by these changes was one of the last surviving small specialist institutions, the Victorian College of the Arts. Some years earlier, the VCA had negotiated a rate of funding to reflect the high cost of studio-based teaching in the visual and performing arts. With rigid application of the Nelson template in place of this negotiated rate, the VCA faced a shortfall of nearly $6000 per student, or around one-third of its operating budget. Faced with urgent complaints from the VCA and its supporters, Nelson did not rethink the funding model. Instead, he imposed a unique funding condition on the University of Melbourne: the university, not Canberra, must find the missing funds to sustain the VCA. This effectively imposed a tax on all other University of Melbourne courses to support another institution, and created an untenable position for everyone involved. So from 2007 the VCA will become a faculty of the University of Melbourne rather than the independent ‘university of arts’ sometimes evoked as a government aspiration. The ownership anomaly may be resolved, but the levy on other courses remains; the Commonwealth funding model forces costly disciplines to find homes in larger institutions with access to fee-paying students. Only a complex set of internal cross-subsidies keeps alive important but unprofitable courses.

The slow rebirth of diversity?
Many critics have described Brendan Nelson as the heir to John Dawkins; both ministers used Commonwealth financial and legal controls to shape and control public universities. The comparison is neat but not always helpful. The Dawkins reforms were marked by a single-minded policy consistency, while two distinct and contradictory philosophies ran through the Nelson years.

As economist Max Corden argued, one philosophy that Dr Nelson favoured was complex bureaucratic controls whose consistent application reduced diversity – creating ‘Moscow on the Molongo’, in Corden’s memorable phrase. The other Dr Nelson emerged as a market-oriented supporter of private higher education providers. His initiatives to assist the private sector have encouraged an expanding new sector of academies, colleges and institutes. As in 1966, there is now a university sector marked by uniformity, and a higher education industry outside, populated by numerous niche providers.

The key policy instrument in reviving diversity has been FEE-HELP loans. Like HECS, this provides funding for tuition fees, to be repaid through the tax system when students begin earning a salary of $38,000 (a challenge for those part-time students already in employment). Approved providers can offer FEE-HELP places. These include all existing public and private universities, and an emerging group of private higher education providers. Some forty-five private providers, along with three TAFEs accredited to offer higher education courses, now offer FEE-HELP places. The number is growing rapidly, and already outnumbers public universities.
FEE-HELP providers are a varied group. There are many theological colleges, along with multidisciplinary institutions offering teaching with a religious perspective. There are colleges offering courses in business and technology, natural medicine, psychology and psychotherapy, hotel management and various other forms of specialised training. Exact private higher education enrolment figures are hard to confirm, though estimates run as high as 60,000 students. Official Commonwealth statistics confirm that in 2005 non-university private higher education institutions enrolled around 10,000 students on FEE-HELP support, with a sharp increase likely when 2006 statistics become available. This may still be a small percentage of total higher education enrolment, but it shows an important emerging market for styles of higher education outside the traditional Australian university model.
Yet while small, locally operated colleges represent the immediate competition to public universities, the more significant contributor to diversity may arrive from overseas. The rise of American for-profit higher education is a signal from the future. The most famous for-profit university, Phoenix, offers vocationally-oriented courses to working adults. There are no large campuses with libraries, laboratories, spires, cloisters and gargoyles, just convenient teaching locations in shopping centres or office blocks, along with online courses. Phoenix keeps down costs by avoiding research and focusing instead on students as customers. It may never compete in the teaching of philosophy or ancient Greek, but it is very good at what it does. More than 200,000 American students enrolled at Phoenix seem to agree.

We should expect that Australian students will be interested in similar opportunities for low-cost, job-ready training. As at Phoenix, many attend university to improve their employment prospects. Already, one of Phoenix’s competitors in the United States for-profit education market, Kaplan University, has arrived in Australia, taking over Tribeca Learning and its courses for the financial services industry. Adelaide is host to Carnegie Mellon University from the United States, the first foreign university to operate in Australia. Media reports suggest Britain’s Cranfield University may follow Carnegie Mellon into South Australia. Carnegie Mellon offers American rather than Australian degrees. For foreign entrants, offering home-country credentials bypasses some of the more onerous accreditation procedures imposed by Australian governments. In a global economy, we can no longer assume a local degree will be preferred, even by Australian students. Major Australian employers are familiar with qualifications from other countries. More than 60,000 Australians in professional or managerial occupations leave Australia on a long-term or permanent basis each year. For them, an American credential may be an advantage.

Thus forty years on, Flinders University and its fellow public universities face a world which might puzzle those first students and their lecturers alike. The students of today are more likely to be female than male, from a much wider variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, choosing a more varied range of careers through education provided by a bewildering array of private and public providers.

Those who enrolled at Flinders in 1966 hoping for a bold experiment might be disappointed with the university they find forty years on – an excellent institution to be sure, with a fine national and international reputation, but now hard to distinguish from other public universities. Strict regulation and financial exigency have imposed a conformity that seems sharply at odds with the contemporary preference for choice and difference. The Australian insistence on just one type of public university has forced Flinders into a now all-too-familiar pattern. And yet this national consistency, created for a closed system in which student demand outstripped the supply of places, is now part of a global market for overseas students and faces private and international competitors at home. Who would have thought in 1966 that four decades later the outpost of an American university could be found a short drive across town?

Adapting to diversity
And so to the policy challenge we now face. More diversity among our public universities was an aspiration sought but quickly surrendered as a technology university turned into UNSW by the late 1950s, and Monash soon followed the same path. Striving for difference was lost again as innovative research universities such as Flinders, established from the 1960s, were reshaped in more conventional form. The conditions for diversity were challenged in the 1970s with a federal takeover of higher education funding, and overwhelmed in the 1980s with the invention of a uniform national system. The system in place since provides little leeway for universities to strike out from the norm.

Yet if Australia’s public universities are to survive and flourish in a global market, a more flexible policy environment seems essential. In a competitive world, thirty-seven public universities all offering a very similar form of education is, at the very least, a high-risk strategy. Our institutions need scope to specialise, to find distinct local identities, to emphasise their most promising research and teaching strengths, to become famous for distinct subject matter, languages of instruction, innovative curricula and delivery, campus life or international reach.

In recent months, this yearning for difference has become a political consensus. Education Minister Julie Bishop accepts the case for loosened federal controls, and has accommodated institutions seeking to rethink their mission. She has argued that diversity among institutions gives students greater choice, increases competition and excellence, and encourages innovation. Indeed, in a recent speech the minister declared the Dawkins era at an end. The shadow minister at the time, Jenny Macklin, expressed similar views. A White Paper published by the ALP criticised the common funding rates at the heart of federal regulation: ‘The Government’s insistence on funding every university at the same rate per student’, it argues, ‘is the basic constraint on diversity in the system’.

Yet a change in thinking alone will not allow a hundred flowers to bloom or a hundred schools of thought to contend. It is hard to create diversity within a system designed to be uniform, consistent and closely regulated from Canberra. There are at least five major policy and legislative changes required if the public university system is to embrace real difference.

First, universities need flexibility over student numbers. Instead of the Commonwealth determining in advance the load for each university, and punishing those above or below their targets, universities should be able to negotiate changes in load in response to varying demand. Such deregulation could embrace the balance between disciplines, movement out of existing disciplines or into new areas, and alter-ing the balance between undergraduate and postgraduate students. Allowing universities to set their own student profiles, within agreed bounds, means trusting the universities rather than DEST officials to understand their local market and to respond accordingly. It can be achieved within the constraints of present overall budgets. During 2006 Minister Bishop has allowed institutions to begin this process, while Labor has proposed a formal mechanism, a negotiated compact between Canberra and each university, acknowledging different roles, missions and circumstances.
Second, government needs to rethink the way it funds student places. On current rates, some fields of study are not viable except in large institutions which can provide cross-subsidies. Until income reflects real costs, there will be little scope for specialised public institutions. Under the current régime, a university dedicated to providing Commonwealth-supported places in the arts, health sciences and many other valuable disciplines would quickly become insolvent. Review and reform of the Relative Funding Model that sets the rate for funding of individual courses is long overdue.

To achieve funding rates that match costs, a third area of change is allowing public universities to set their own fees. Private providers can set their own price, and public institutions can charge whatever the market will bear for fee-paying international and domestic students. But for Commonwealth-supported places – still the overwhelming majority of Australia’s university students – the price charged through HECS has no relation to the cost of providing a course. This is one of the last industries in which meaningful price signals are outlawed by legislation.

Allowing universities to set their own fees makes politicians nervous. Labor, for example, has advocated even more control over price, by abolishing fee-paying places for Australian students. Ministers fear a public backlash should fees rise. So instead, students pay for inadequate funding in unseen ways – in larger than desirable class sizes, overcrowded facilities, run-down buildings. Yet the flight to private providers suggests students would prefer to pay for a quality education.
Since government wants to influence choice and availability, a fourth reform would be to use existing and future investment in more creative ways. The Commonwealth could support community engagement through third stream funding, for example, so allowing universities to compete for a broader array of programmes than just teaching and research. It could also invest more heavily in student support, to ensure that Youth Allowance, travel concessions and other benefits are available to students struggling to stay afloat financially while undertaking full-time study.

Finally, Canberra must surrender its close control of universities, since these regulations entrench conformity. There is no reason to believe the federal government possesses unique wisdom on governance or industrial relations, yet it imposes detailed, intrusive and complex rules limiting strategic choices in both domains. Universities should set their own staffing profiles in light of agreed mission, and bear the risk of getting this wrong. If Australia is to develop a University of the Arts, or a Caltech equivalent, it will happen because an existing public university sees the opportunity and is allowed to evolve in that direction. Micro-management from Canberra is the enemy of variety.

Conclusion
Three times in the past forty years, ministers of education have embraced bold higher education policy moves: the joint efforts of state and federal governments in the 1960s that created a string of universities, including Flinders; the free education and system expansion triggered by the Whitlam government; and the further expansion, a unified national system and HECS under John Dawkins. Each move has been a considered response to Australia’s current and likely needs in higher education, with significant long-term effect. The opening of the system to private providers may, over time, be judged a fourth important juncture in higher education policy. But this latest reform remains unfinished business – a private sector is allowed scope to compete, but public institutions remain bound and constrained.

Forty-one years after those first students reached Flinders, we need a similar bold moment of experimentation. If government allows public universities to set their own profile within agreed budget parameters, to charge students according to the real costs of courses and to take responsibility for their own management, institutional diversity and student choice will follow. It is an approach well tested in other parts of our society once run as public sector monopolies. After many false starts, we need a world safe for diversity. We might treasure the past, but it is time to shape the future.