School maintains its world-class activities
Professor Paul Bourke's term of office as Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies and Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Advanced Studies ended on June 1. Next month Prof Bourke will return to the Research School of Social Sciences, which he directed from 1985 to 1991, to pursue two major projects. He talks to Shelly Simonds about some of the key issues in the future of higher education.   Do you think that the current social-political climate is favourable to the research schools? Where do you see them heading?   While the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) did very well in the 1995 review we didn't get a penny of new money. Every review of every centre and school said that the resource base of the Institute must be allowed to grow - in varying proportions from 20 to 40 per cent. These recommendations were very well considered and in some cases deemed urgent. Today the government has imposed real reductions on university grants, including that to the IAS and we have the additional burden of enterprise bargaining to contend with which obliges us without salary supplementation to meet pay rises. We must have pay rises - it's unreasonable to think we wouldn't. But enterprise bargaining is really a disastrous process for universities where the capacity to achieve so-called productivity gains is largely illusory and where there are no customers to whom we can transfer increasing costs. Our efforts to bring this home have not been very successful - partly I think because the AVCC has not yet devised and put a persuasive case for the distinctive political economy of universities.   What are the biggest changes you've seen in university life during your years in academia?   Let me answer that by reference first to RSSS which over the years has shrunk dramatically. Even since I have been here, we have seen 50 or 60 of us who had continuing appointments reduced to about 20 and the total academic staff reduced by about a third. As we look around at our university system one of the most alarming things we notice is the shrinkage in opportunity for young people. For every person who gets a lectureship there are dozens of qualified ones that can't. And as retirements occur, universities are being obliged to abolish posts that have survived earlier redundancy processes. We advertise in my history program for post-doctoral fellows and we see people apply with CVs that once would have secured a senior lectureship. I've had fabulous opportunities and I've been demographically lucky in that I was born in 1938 when the birth rate was low and came to maturity in a relatively small cohort which had the baby boomers hard on its heels generating a large demand for services. But for people born in the 1970s it is a different story.   What have you accomplished during your time in Chancelry and were any of your aims not met?   I'd give a mixed account of it. I've enjoyed working with the people but, in truth, it's been an extremely difficult time for the ANU for a number of reasons, not least being the upheaval associated with the review of senior management. I hope that I've contributed by offering a considerable amount of experience in university governance. but the biggest thing that I haven't done because of the short time I held office was to get the IAS embarked on the urgent task of strategic planning. That will remain for Professor Frank Jackson, my successor.   As for the future of universities in general, do you think this government has set a positive course for higher education in Australia?   I think a huge opportunity was lost in the West Report. I think there's no doubt that the system needs another overhaul. We were hoping that the West Report might address some of the issues in research in Australia but it hasn't. The West Report took on a very simplistic market model for both undergraduate and graduate education and said nothing useful about research at all. So our hopes now reside in the government's response to the West Report and particularly on the minister's planned statement on research. I'm not overly optimistic at the moment but at the same time I'm not convinced a change of government would produce a revolution in this either. Many of the things that worry us began under the previous government, like unfunded salary increases.   In the History Program at RSSS, Professor Bourke will continue work on a book for Johns Hopkins University Press arising from his volume on "America in the 1850s" published in 1996. As head of the Research Evaluation and Policy Project, he will continue research and writing based on a comprehensive database of Australian academic publications derived from the indices of the Institute for Scientific Information.