Professors’ Forum
Response to the Vice Chancellor’s paper:
“CSU: A University for the Next 25 Years”
and to “No Research at CSU”
Prepared by
Stephen Kemmis, Margaret Alston, Ben Bradley, Lyn Gorman, Bill Green, and Denise Jarratt
on behalf of the Professors’ Forum
Executive summary
 The Vice Chancellor’s paper ‘CSU: A University for the Next 25 Years’ addresses the university we
are not more than the University we are. It does not provide a realistic view of the University we are,
nor of the future we can reasonably and feasibly attain. It sees the University too much in terms of
the rhetoric of possibilities for higher education policy. It is constructed as a response to a possible
way of funding universities being contemplated by the Commonwealth, and mis-describes the
University by adopting that particular policy discourse. Moreover, the paper understands the
University too little in terms of our existing, proven capacity and growing potential to contribute
through scholarship to
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research and discovery in our disciplines
the application of knowledge in the practice of the professions
the critical transmission of knowledge to students and graduates through our teaching and
their enhanced capacities as scholarly, autonomous lifelong learners, and
engagement with the communities we serve in our region, nationally and internationally, to
serve and support people, cultures, society, industry and the environment.
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As a rhetorical device, ‘CSU: A University for the Next 25 Years’ offers its readers a binary choice
between a future for the University as a ‘research-intensive’ or a ‘teaching-intensive’ university. The
opposition is false, and, in the view of the Professors’ Forum, the real future of CSU will be at neither
of those poles. A realistic analysis of the nature and future of the University would not rely on this
rhetoric of binaries. In the view of the professors, the University has strengths in teaching and
research, and will continue to develop both.
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The paper ‘No Research at CSU’, released at about the same time as ‘CSU: A University for the Next
25 Years’ suffers from the same polemical tendency. While accepting that the University must
change its positioning in the league tables included in the paper, the professors believe it was illadvised to release the paper in its current form. It is dispiriting and disappointing to new staff who
see their own and the University’s future far more positively than the way it is projected in the paper;
it may have a negative influence on potential applicants for positions at the University; and it does
not fairly represent, still less encourage, the strategic growth in research and research capacity in the
University.
Preamble
The Professors’ Forum considered the Vice Chancellor’s paper ‘CSU: A University for the Next 25 Years’
as taking a view on key current issues in the policy context of Higher Education reform driven by
Commonwealth debates about the future of the sector. The Vice Chancellor’s paper clearly takes a view
on some core values to which the University should continue to hold allegiance. The Professors agreed
that among the enduring things crucial to our conception of what it means to be a university in Australia
are the following core principles, which should guide the University over the next 25 years:
1. The commitment to free enquiry and the maintenance of the indissoluble link between teaching
and research.
2. Community obligation: a sense that our University – though perhaps not all universities, as
defined in their Acts – has a commitment to the region, which we would define in terms of
connection to, communication with and contribution to the well-being of our region in terms of its
people, society, cultures, environment and economy.
3. Professional obligation: a sense that our University serves a number of (not all) particular
professions through teaching, research and other forms of service, recognising that our
graduates need to be able to perform with credit in both regional and non-regional contexts
4. A global dimension: a sense that our research and programs for student learning should
incorporate global dimensions by incorporating global issues of regional significance, by
including international partners in our areas of research concentration, and by preparing our
graduates to be good global citizens.
The following summarises comments made on a number of issues raised in the Professors’ Forum
discussion of ‘CSU: A University for the Next 25 Years’ and ‘No Research at CSU’.
1. The rhetoric of binaries
The Vice Chancellor’s paper is polemical. It uses a rhetoric of emotionally-charged alternatives to drive
its audience towards preferred solutions. An example is the opposition between a future for the University
as a research-intensive university and a teaching-only university. The evidence of our current and likely
future performance in the next five years is that neither of these will be an accurate description of what
the University will be. More importantly, there are clearly more alternatives in policy and practice for the
University to aspire to and achieve. One of these is to continue to build our strength as a strong learningintensive university, reinvigorating programs and offerings to changing circumstances and changing
times, particularly reaffirming our strengths as Australia’s leading, multimode learning institution with a
strong IT capability and emphasis on self directed learning. This strategic view has been characteristic of
the University throughout its existence. Equally important is that the University continue to develop our
research capacity and performance, as it has done with great vigour in the last five years, but now at an
accelerated rate.
Achieving such a future position emphasises the need for change both in our approach to student learning
and in our approach to research. It places renewed emphasis on building and extending particular
capabilities and strengths that are already part of the University’s culture. We need to recapture a leading
position on our IT capability, reposition our teaching emphasis around dimensions of self-directed learning
and critical reasoning, and build strategies through which we can accelerate research inputs and the
quality and quantity of research outputs.
The probable trajectory of the University’s future development envisaged by the professors thus lies on
neither path of the rhetorical binaries offered in the Vice Chancellor’s paper. A feasible and productive
future – continuing our pursuit of excellence in teaching and research – will be made by drawing on the
University’s experience of change for development as we address the opportunities offered despite a bleak
policy environment in Australian Higher Education in the coming few years.
2. The harnessing together of excellence and access
Charles Sturt University prides itself on providing access to higher education for the people of our region.
About 70% of the on-campus students who come from our region take their first jobs in the region; about
20% of our on-campus students from elsewhere take their first jobs in the region. In these terms, we are
a crucial resource for our region. For many, particularly in recent years of drought, ours is the only
university to which they have reasonable on-campus access. This must continue to be a crucial element
of our responsiveness to our region.
This commitment to access is in no way contrary to a commitment to excellence in our teaching or
research. Indeed, as the Vice Chancellor’s paper suggests, the commitment to excellence is crucial to
our work as a University of first choice for students and the people and professions of our region. The
professors thus viewed access and excellence as complementary dimensions of our role as a university, not
as opposed so that an advance in either is necessarily at the expense of the other.
Further, the commitment to excellence in regional research and teaching is not incompatible with
excellence in work in the disciplines as measured by the international standing of Charles Sturt University
researchers and their publications. Indeed, only by having teachers and researchers with such standing
can the University feel secure that it does indeed offer both access and excellence to the people and
professions of our region. The notion of global-regional engagement might better capture our
understanding of ourselves as a University committed to regional engagement within a global framework.
Communicating with our region about our excellence and relevance to regional needs is what, in the long
term, makes the University sustainable. Improving communication with the region will allow us to
continue to attract an increasing proportion of first-preference applications from outstanding school
leavers and mature age entrants in the region.
It was suggested that, at a time when student fees are rising and regional economies are threatened by
drought, it may be necessary for the University and its benefactors to find increased funding for
undergraduate scholarships to support disadvantaged students in the region.
3. A teaching and/or research-intensive university?
Or a learning-centred university?
Teaching driving research?
The Vice Chancellor’s paper argues that the University must be a research-intensive university in the
terms offered by current debates about reform in the sector. In the view of the professors, we should not
resile from being a first-rate teaching-learning university, with strong research informing its teaching and
serving its community and the relevant professions. We may wish to argue that we are already excellent
in teaching, but this quality is yet to be assured and secured. It is, however, a core commitment of the
teaching staff of the University.
The University is also largely defined by the areas in which we teach – defining where we intend to
contribute to the development of our regional communities and the professions we serve. These, like our
key fields of research, are primary indicators of what our University can and should be for our region.
Developing our research strengths by developing cross-disciplinary connections
Some of the University’s research strengths are in fields where student numbers are currently relatively
low, and innovative efforts may be needed to build enrolments in these fields. Currently, our selected
areas of research concentration are not neatly matched to our areas of student concentration. With
continuing strategic development of our staff, and with the assistance of the University’s strategic
workforce planning initiative, research will continue to develop in areas of student concentration.
As a complement to this strategy, leading researchers in areas of the University’s research concentration
might be encouraged to contribute to teaching and learning in cognate or related disciplines, and to
research development, in areas where students are concentrated. One such innovation might be the use
of cross-disciplinary connections to strengthen relationships between teaching fields in the University – as
could be fostered through the Institute for Land, Water and Society to build connections between the
natural and earth sciences and the arts, humanities and social sciences.
It was argued that the University and its benefactors might seek additional funding for research
scholarships for students working in areas of research strength in the University.
Considering excellence in teaching
The professors took the view that the University should continue to consider the questions of what and
how to teach as crucial in determining whether or not ours is a first rate University in teaching. At a time
of rapid technological change, developments like on-line education are becoming widespread and
Charles Sturt University needs to continue to be a leader in innovation in such innovative work, frankly
evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of new approaches against criteria including student
achievement and staff satisfaction.
It was agreed that a number of case-accounts of exemplary innovations in learning and teaching in the
University should be identified for study. Professors were invited to nominate examples which might be
further discussed in the Professors’ Forum and elsewhere in the University. (A Working Group led by
Professors Bradley and Alston is considering the matter.)
A note of caution was sounded about what excellence in teaching might mean. For example, it was
reported that in a recent course review an industry representative complimented the University on the
quality of graduates’ work in areas taught in the course while suggesting, on the other hand, that some
graduates were less competent at learning for themselves beyond the boundaries of the course
curriculum. Teaching our students to learn, and to be scholarly, autonomous, critical, lifelong learners
must therefore be a key indicator against which to test the quality of our teaching.
Why research matters
The Professors’ Forum believes that research matters deeply to our University. It is at the core of our
academic values, alongside teaching, not a supplement or adornment to our work. What counts as
significant research is currently grossly distorted by the language of ‘DEST points’ that counts books,
chapters, refereed articles and significant performances but not other indicators of research productivity.
Of course the University must be accountable within whatever regime of significance the Commonwealth
regards as most worthy, but not in those terms alone.
The University’s researchers – the professors among them – do not undertake research in order to
accumulate ‘DEST points’ and thus enrich the University. They do it to contribute to theory in their
disciplines; to practice, applications and technologies in the work of the professions; to policy and
understanding in the public sphere and in the wider communities we serve; and to our teaching (through
research in our fields, research on our teaching, and research by our students). There are famous
researchers in Australia’s history who have been paid by the line for writing the history of mining
companies. In general, Charles Sturt University researchers do not wish to be paid by the line, either by
commercial interests or by governments. They want their research to connect with, communicate with,
and contribute to their disciplines, professions, students and teaching, and the communities they serve.
Some of these contributions come through books, some through reports for government agencies (many
not countable in the ‘DEST point’ system), some through engagements with students and their
development as professionals and as citizens, and some through (global-)regional engagements that
address cultural, social, personal, environmental and economic issues and concerns. Without hubris, we
see ourselves as a knowledge-resource, building new knowledge for these different audiences.
Our research matters not solely because it produces a quantum of ‘DEST points’ which adds to the
budget of the University, but because it is in our minds, hearts and identities as researchers to make
scholarly contributions to our disciplines, professions, students and a wider public. The professors hear
the complaints of many colleagues who find the all-pervasive language of (DEST-point) productivity and
quantification off-putting, to say the least. For these members of our staff, research is not a game but a
vocation. They ask why anyone should engage in research if it is valued wholly and solely in the
discourse of DEST points and the currency of dollars in the University’s budget. They feel undermined by
the paper ‘No Research at CSU’ which appears to agree with the Commonwealth that the only research
that matters is the research that produces DEST points. They feel that research itself is distorted when
the work is too much directed towards producing particular kinds of research outputs – the game of
producing DEST points.
The professors hope for more research at CSU, and more research that matters to the disciplines, the
professions, students and the global-regional communities we serve. They recognise the crudely pragmatic
value of producing more DEST points and thus more government support for the University’s research.
But they reject the notion that the value of the University’s work will be measured by that narrow yardstick
alone.
The professors recognise that the system of DEST points as a basis for the distribution of Commonwealth
research funds is a system contrived and designed to serve the interests of some researchers and some
universities at the expense of the interests of others. They also recognise that the University can ill-afford
to ignore the way the Commonwealth measures us. But they understand clearly that the current system
of measurement has been constructed to produce a particular kind of outcome – over-emphasising what
the disciplines themselves and what particular powerful players in Australia’s research industry most
value as if this were what is most valuable to the world, Australia or our region.
The system of DEST points is not the sole or principal criterion by which to measure the research
development of the University. To build our research performance and our new researchers, the University
needs a much more substantive sense of what our research is and why it matters to the key audiences for
our scholarship in the disciplines, the professions, our student body and the communities we serve. We
are not playing at being researchers, and being a researcher is not merely a role or a function. Research
is, in the deepest sense, at the heart of our work. The paper ‘No Research at CSU’ takes little account of
this, nor does it offer improved ways to enable our researchers to connect and contribute more effectively
to the key audiences for our scholarship through work that we believe – and they also believe – is worth
doing.
Many in the Professors’ Forum believed that ‘No Research at CSU’ was dispiriting for our best
researchers and our emerging researchers, who believe their work is building our University. As
importantly, they believe that promulgation of the paper would deter potential applicants from applying for
positions at the University, or encourage good researchers in the University to seek positions elsewhere,
since the paper characterises ours as a University in which ‘no research’ is thinkable. In the view of the
professors, it was ill-advised to promulgate the paper – a stick without a carrot, an expression of
pessimism that provides our University with no “resources for a journey of hope” (to use the phrase
coined by British cultural theorist Raymond Williams in his 1983 book Towards 2000, London: Hogarth
Press). The promulgation of the paper does not connect with – is incompatible with – the views of
University researchers about why their research matters. And, in terms of their contributions to the
University and beyond, their research does matter.
4. Accepting or challenging the Commonwealth’s definition of who and what
the University is and should be
The professors acknowledged that, although almost all Australian universities are currently created under
the legislation of the states and territories, the Commonwealth to some extent defines the structure and
regulation of the Australian higher education sector. It is timely, as the Vice Chancellor’s paper does, to
recognise that there may be new entrants to the sector and new entities that may become eligible for
Commonwealth higher education funding and other support for teaching and research. The
Commonwealth higher education policy context is not the only context in which our University operates,
however.
Equally, it must be asserted that Australian universities in general, and Charles Sturt University among
them, also define and direct themselves against whatever regime of regulation and accreditation is in
force at any time. These regimes have changed and evolved in the sector over the last twenty years or
so, and will continue to do so. The Vice Chancellor’s paper prudently alerts the University to some of the
possible costs and consequences of changes currently under way but does little to assert that our
University has continued to grow and develop because it has been responsive to changing
circumstances. The successes of the University in opening up new ‘markets’ by developing strong
working relationships with the professions (for example, in librarianship and policing) demonstrate how
the University has grown and developed by transforming itself to make new opportunities, and that it
should continue to develop transformative responses to changing circumstances. Identifying the sources
and dynamics of these innovative capacities within the University may be as important to our future as
identifying new threats posed from without.
University initiatives on strategic workforce planning, on staffing and workloads, and on the redesign of
course architecture are making a significant contribution to the development of the University’s strategic
capability, and have the potential to make the University significantly more responsive to changing needs,
opportunities and circumstances. Taken together, these three initiatives are also likely to have a
significant impact on the University’s research productivity, both in quantity and in quality.
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A changing generation of academic staff is likely to bring enhanced research capacity;
changing the allocation of academic workloads may increase staff time available for research;
and
changing course architecture will further enhance staff time for research productivity both by
more efficient teaching (fewer subjects offered to the same number of students, especially at
senior levels of the University curriculum) and by greater concentration of teaching around key
disciplines (thus building communities of practice able to sustain critical debate and collaborative
research in these fields).
Discussion
Our University is a legal, social, cultural entity as well as being a political entity. It has agency and
influence in the network of administrative-economic systems with which we interact. The Commonwealth
is one of those, and very important, but not the only agency crucial to our future. We have financial
strength and capability derived from sources other than the Commonwealth – as international programs
like the new campus in Canada demonstrate. And we have resources for research from a variety of
sources, not just the ARC or NH&MRC and other National Competitive Grants Schemes.
The University has responded adaptively, constructively and imaginatively over the years to increased
competition and declining public resources, and it will continue to do so. What needs to be emphasised
here is not the general or abstract capacity to adapt that the University has demonstrated, but that it has
adapted by seizing real and substantive opportunities to extend its capacity to serve its students, the
disciplines, the professions and its regional and broader communities. For example, by seizing a series
of opportunities over the years, we now teach more of Australia’s librarians than any other university.
Similarly, by seizing opportunities, we are the lead university in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and
Public Ethics. And we continue to make new opportunities through the designation of new research
centres and institutes (like the Institute for Land, Water and Society, Centre for Research in Complex
Systems, and the Centre for Research in Professional Practice, Learning and Education) and new
communities of scholars (like the Research in Vocational Education and Training Group).
Moreover, our University is connected in a very real and material way to the key audiences for our
scholarship. We have real, not just abstract or generalised, connections with people in our disciplines
(the scholarship of discovery), the professions (the scholarship of application), our students (the
scholarship of teaching) and the regional and international communities we serve (the scholarship of
integration). These are not merely relationships with ‘clients’. They are relationships of mutual
dependence. Because others depend on us as we depend on them, they are relationships which give us
the means of survival in our disciplines, professions, and in relation to the development of the people of
our region. Our being in real, human relationships with these groups is a resource for us as it is for them,
in terms of our identities (as members of the University, our disciplines and our professions and as people
of our region), our society, our culture and our economic and environmental well-being. Threats to our
survival are also threats to their survival – as, for example, when we consider the affordability of higher
education for our students, and whether our fees put university study beyond their means, or when we
consider the effects on our rivers and catchments if we do not do the natural and social scientific research
that can show us how to use our catchments sustainably.
These relationships of mutual survival have local roots and international branches. The regional roots of
our University must be deep, and our branches must spread internationally (through teaching and
research) to expand and enhance the relationships through which the University will survive and thrive,
and as necessary supplements for our survival as a resource for our region.
The voices of the people with whom we interact in our region and our international partners are already
galvanised in our support, and perhaps they should be more so. Perhaps we need to take these partners
more fully into our confidence to enlist their influence in our support in demonstrating to government that
the allegedly ‘neutral’ rules of the national higher education and research systems are not ‘neutral’, but
that the rules and systems must grasp and respond to the realities of human, social and ecological
survival, including survival in our region. This is nothing new at all in the politics of regional Australia, and
it will continue because regional and remote Australia is essential to Australia in every sense – socially,
culturally, economically and environmentally. In the end, administrative-economic and political systems
cannot ignore the regions, and they will not. Politicians and officials leading those systems need informed
advice and a clear estimation of what is at risk in policy proposals that threaten the regions.
In one way, the Vice Chancellor’s paper outlines some of the risks if we see ourselves as Canberra
appears to want to see us, and we need, as a University, to remind Canberra of how we see ourselves
differently from that view. We are a resource for our region and we are understood as a resource by our
region. Those developing and maintaining the administrative-economic systems of higher education and
research should be invited to understand what we are really doing, not just how our work can be counted
and measured according to the management and compliance regimes invented and reinvented from time
to time in Canberra.
Charles Sturt University has made a close self-critical analysis of many of our ways of working, among
them analyses of academic staff work and workloads, course architecture and staffing conditions that
permit greater levels of involvement in research. Nevertheless, contradictions remain. A decade ago,
academic staff in Australian universities felt that they worked in collegial and non-alienated work
environments where individuals and Faculties had great control over their own teaching and research,
subject to a regime of management and accountability far less demanding than the regimes now in place.
The Professors’ Forum welcomes the University’s initiatives in working towards creating more enabling
conditions for staff in research and in administration. At the same time, the professors note that progress
is not uniform over the variety of dimensions of academic work in the University today.
The Forum regards this period of discussion and reflection as helping to identify strategies to move
forward in the organisation of work, advancing student learning capacity and advancing research
excellence and international prominence. We are at a critical phase in defining strategic principles to
guide decision-making at all levels, and the accountability of all. As those principles emerge from our
reflections, they will need to be widely promulgated in the University to guide the achievement of our
vision of the future of the University. And they should emerge as principles, not rules; they should be
enabling for staff decision making not disabling because bureaucratic and hierarchical; and they should
attract the assent and commitment of all staff because they show us how best to realise our academic
values, not because they offer us still more comprehensive organisational procedures with which to
comply.
A commitment to academic values and a zeal to see these values realised in practice is more likely to engage
the interest and enthusiasm of the University community than polemical appeals that we not become a
teaching-only university (if ever there are to be such things). The two papers, ‘CSU: A University for the
Next 25 Years’ and ‘No Research at CSU’ smack of panic. There is no doubt that we are passing through
a historical moment when the Commonwealth government aims to be muscular in higher education
policy. It may make decisions and legislation which will be destructive for us. It may create conditions
hostile to our work and to our region. Government needs our advice about the consequences of its
proposed policies more than it knows. We cannot and should not make ourselves as those proposed
policies see us. We will all be the worse for it if we do – students, staff, the disciplines, the professions
and our region.