Dawkins Revolution

The Dawkins Revolution was a series of Australian tertiary education reforms instituted by the then Labor Education Minister (1987–92) John Dawkins.

The reforms were proposed in Higher education: a policy discussion paper ('the green paper') which was published in December 1987 and announced in Higher education: a policy statement ('the white paper') published in July 1988.

Aims and outcomes

The reforms were aimed at enhancing the "quality, diversity and equity of access" to education while improving the "international competitiveness" of Australian universities, as well as a solution for the perceived brain drain. These reforms included the introduction of income contingent loans for tuition costs through the HECS, the conversion of all Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs) into universities, and a series of provisions for universities to provide plans, profiles, statistics etc. to justify courses and research. As a result, undergraduate student numbers increased dramatically as universities were given economies of scale. There were also many mergers between universities and CAEs, with some successful (University of Queensland Gatton Campus), and others not so (the University of New England and the then Northern Rivers CAE which subsequently split acrimoniously to become Southern Cross University), and others didn't proceed (Australian National University and the Canberra CAE, now the University of Canberra).

Criticisms

There has been extensive criticism of the Dawkins reforms, which have been described as the application of neo-liberal ideology to universities. Critics regard the Dawkins reforms as an attempt to reduce public funding of universities, 'commercialise' university education, and expose research to 'subjective' market pressures.

The reforms have led to a culture of "corporate managerialism" in universities, and have been related to a rise in bullying tactics among university management, a decline in the freedom of academic speech and inquiry, and a loss of academic collegiality.

Among the Dawkins reforms is the encouragement of the use of various metrics to assess and rate research output. These measures have been subjected to intense criticism. For example, the pressure placed on academics to seek external research grants, and be rated on their ability to do so, has been criticised on the basis that different fields of research require different levels of funding, and external grants may not even be necessary. University managements are accused of shifting the responsibility for acquiring funding onto academics. Academics are also critical of allegedly objective ratings of the "quality" of research output, often determined by looking at the "impact factor" of journals in which they publish (the 'impact factor' is the ratio of papers cited from a journal to papers published in that journal) - considered an inappropriate measure of research quality, as the impact factor of a journal is not necessarily related to the relevance of that journal to a given field.

Other critics, especially those among the Group of Eight, saw these reforms as "dumbing down" higher education, as college diploma students became university graduates overnight. The traditional universities were forced to compete for research funds with the newly designated and amalgamated universities, although they still continue to dominate competitive research funding.