Update 18/12/2023: The enacted student support guidelines remove the interference in academic judgment discussed in this post. The changes are highlighted in the relevant parts of the text.
——————————————————————————————————————–
The current government, and the Accord review that it commissioned, have – with the exception of ministerial approval of ARC grants – taken an interventionist approach to higher education policy.
My commentary has focused on micromanaged allocations of student places (eg here and here). While these policies are misguided, the allocation of funding is within the historical scope of the Commonwealth’s higher education powers. However there is also a pattern of actual or proposed interference in matters previously left to academic or university judgment. This is unusual in a country where university autonomy over academic matters has mostly been respected.
Curriculum matters
Next year a new loan scheme will begin for business start-up programs, STARTUP-HELP. Unusually, its legal guidelines include detail about required course content. Normally universities are self-accrediting within standards enforced by TEQSA, an organisation deliberately designed to be at arms length from government.
The content requirements (below) don’t seem unreasonable in themselves, and were perhaps necessary to identify what exactly STARTUP- HELP was supposed to cover. The bigger practical problem here is that this loan scheme is unnecessary. But the precedent of the government directly regulating course content is not one I like being set.
A possible more broad-ranging crossing of academic boundaries is in the recently released draft action plan on gender-based violence in higher education. The highlighted section below suggests that promotion of the action plan’s worldview should be included in university curriculum. Academics should be respectful in the way they teach, but in my view course content should be decided between them and the relevant approval processes, not mandated by government.
No clear enforcement mechanism is stated, but it would probably be via a new National Higher Education Code to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence. Implementation of this will, according to the action plan, be ‘initially within the Department of Education’. So potentially academic matters determined by the Department rather than the university or TEQSA.
Decisions on students
From 1 January 2024 the Job-ready Graduates policy of depriving failing students of Commonwealth support will be replaced with a new system that fines higher education institutions instead. They could be liable for a penalty of $18,780 per failing student, if the institution has failed to comply with a mandated student support policy.
The draft student support guidelines spell out what this could include:
[Update 18/12/2023: The enacted student support guidelines remove the interference in academic judgment:
…end of update.]
The relevant ‘non-academic issues’ are not defined. Confusingly, the Higher Education Guidelines 2023, which the student support guidelines would amend, define non-academic matters (as opposed to ‘issues’) as ‘matters which do not relate to student progress, assessment, curriculum and awards in a course of study’ (emphasis added). So non-academic issues are about student progress but non-academic matters are not.
A broad definition of ‘non-academic issues’ is a problem when combined with a mandated requirement to proactively offer an ‘academic adjustment arrangement’, also not defined.
For example if a student is struggling academically due to spending long hours in paid work it is, in my view, reasonably within the scope of academic judgement to refuse an ‘academic adjustment arrangement’, or to make only minor concessions, such as short deadline extensions.
The 50% pass rule let students off if their failure was due to circumstances beyond their control, which seems like a reasonable requirement for ‘academic adjustment’. This could include traumatic events such as those covered in the action plan on gender-based violence (and indeed the plan mentions academic adjustments).
The draft student support guidelines also include a broader requirement to offer ‘flexibility in relation to assessments’ to students identified as needing support, seemingly for any reason.
[Update 18/12/2023: The enacted student support guidelines remove the interference in academic judgment:
…end of update.]
The distinction between ‘academic adjustment arrangements’ and ‘flexibility in relation to assessments’ is not clear. But the issue is the same – these matters should be decided by academics rather than bureaucrats.
The support for students policy and the 50% pass policy have the same problem – forcing a default decision when a contextual decision based on the judgment of academics, and possibly other professionals involved in student support, would be better. A contextual decision could take into account the specific circumstances of the student, whether concessions given to the student are fair to other students in the course, the incentives created by the concession, and workload considerations for academics and other university staff.
Andrew Norton 
University governance over academic standards assumed that that control was exercised by academics themselves, but that has not been the case for the past 30 years in Australia, although it previously had been, and it still is in university systems that continue to be governed by their own academics, including VCs elected from and by their own institutions. Ordinarily, within such systems, the academic quality & standards are considerably higher than they now are in Australia. Here, those standards have quantifiably declined in multiple ways over which academics no longer have effective decision-making influence, but are instead unilaterally caused by often academically unqualified university management. If we are to ensure the best quality of higher education in Australia, then this is not the way to do it. TEQSA is itself not academically competent, any more than the Minister or Cabinet would be. TEQSA’s determination of such standards is therefore minimalist, and has not prevented the continued decline in such standards. It would be desirable for TEQSA in consultation with academic specialists in each discipline and, as appropriate, the respective professional bodies, to determine the minimum mandatory course content for every degree with which every university must comply, requiring that every graduate has mastered (and not been passed merely to maintain pass rates and rankings and funding) everything they should know in order to exercise a career in that discipline, and without knowledge of which they are incompetent and may put people’s lives at risk or fail in their responsibilities. These matter, because the competence or otherwise of every professional in every discipline sphere in every university in the country determines the quality of service they provide to the community, and when no university can now guarantee that their graduates are as competent as the community expects them to be – starting with our doctors, whose curricula have been decimated under corporate management, and people’s lives are put at risk by such sub-standard education, and which the accreditation processes also cannot influence, then we should all be concerned. The current government interventions mentioned here fail to address the problems at their roots. Likewise, the reasons for students’ failures are not apparently being recognised and addressed, either, and simply fining universities is unlikely to compel them to improve the support services they provide – or rather have not provided – to every student requiring them, or to improve preparation of students for university already in high schools, let alone address the extraneous stresses upon students like having to work to support themselves and being unable to afford accommodation or food or accessing appropriate mental health care when nobody in this country can, or even asking whether every graduate will ever get a career job in their chosen area (including STEM) when the economy does not generate even a fraction of suitable jobs and probably never will … typically, it is the symptoms rather than the causes that are being targeted here. That is, tragically, the ‘Australian way’.
LikeLike
Given the ongoing and widespread student dissatisfaction with institutional responses to gendered violence, I think universities have forfeited any right to complain about external oversight of this particular work.
Using academic autonomy as some kind of defence here undermines the value of academic autonomy more widely.
LikeLike