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- OPINION

Cuts in university funding are a matter of degree

It's sad that the educational institutions that demanded their students' souls for several years at a stretch are selling their own.

THE LAST WORD by Julia Baird

Kerry Packer, Susie O'Neill, Yahoo Serious, Leo Schofield, Michael Jackson and Kermit the Frog. What do these characters have in common?

They all have been awarded honorary doctorates.

That's right. It's Dr Frog and Dr Serious to you.

So it was joyous news this week that the University of Sydney proposes to stop handing out honorary doctorates to folks just because they are well known, wealthy or would look good in cap and gown.

The chairman of Sydney University's honorary awards review committee, the Labor MLC John Hatzistergos, said they needed to demonstrate "you can't buy a degree at this university". Frankly, the whole system of doling out these faux degrees to a rapidly growing number of "trophy patrons" was getting a bit dodgy.

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No-one could object to someone with a lifetime of intellectual, creative or even humanitarian work behind them, such as Nelson Mandela or Judith Wright, being honoured.

But when it comes to pop singers, politicians and sportspeople, that's a different league entirely, and has more to do with marketing than higher education.

And ladling them out to businessmen who donate money to universities is beyond the pale.

At best the system is arbitrary, at worst corrupt.

Our once proud public universities, with their commitment to excellence, scholarship and rigour, are now forced to stoop to clumsy PR campaigns to boost their profile, and, they hope, their income.

They may be trying to draw prestige by aligning themselves with famous people, but by handing out doctorates willy-nilly, with a flurry of press releases, they are devaluing the degrees and the institution and making a sham of academic pursuits.

So thumbs up to Sydney Uni for leading the reform.

I admit that I'm biased.

I have just handed in a PhD thesis in history at Sydney University, which took me six long, long years to research and write, juggling full-time and part-time jobs. It had a massive impact on my life, and carved into relationships, holidays and work. For the past two years, it has occupied almost every breathing moment.

I will always be proud that I finished it.

I had no idea, when I took it on, what a monumental and monstrous thing it could be.

I've seen people go completely nuts in the process, living on little cash and knowing that at the end of the journey there is little chance of a job in academia. Or a job full stop.

Almost everyone I know who has finished one advises others not to do it, and takes a long time to trip back to normality. We nod knowingly to each other about the journey to thesis hell and back.

Why do people take a substantial salary cut to beaver away on their own for several years? Because of a belief that original research is critical to a democratic culture. And that ideas are important, and should be informed by painstaking attention to detail and an awareness of the complexity of evidence.

And, because the most basic of prejudices are fuelled by misinformation, social change can be prompted and shaped by material that addresses these misconceptions.

So of course it is going to sadden us that the same institutions that demanded our souls for several years at a stretch are selling their own.

The real problem is not PhDs, but the fact that universities are so starved of funds that PR has become all important in the desperate search for money.

All students who have attended universities in the past 10 years have watched them deteriorate before their eyes.

Generation HECS began forking out for their degrees in 1989, and the more we have paid the worse it seems the universities have become. Grotty, rundown buildings, crowded classes and exhausted lecturers.

The more we have paid in HECS (and fees), the less the Government has contributed.

In 1988, it paid universities $12,050 per student. By 2000, this was $10,367.

The Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee says public investment in university teaching and learning per student - except for a period in the early 1990s - has been declining since 1983.

The head of the AVCC, Professor Ian Chubb, estimates $1billion of public funding to university operating grants has been cut from the system since the 1996 election. And it shows.

Lucky we have Dr Frog on the job.

jbaird@smh.com.au

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Cuts in university funding are a matter of degree

Source: geocities.com/sun_day1080110801