Page 342 - Week 03 - Thursday, 1 June 1989
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library services, communication and computer equipment, the provision of intercampus transport and relocation costs.
After five years, the amalgamation is supposed to return annual savings of about $1m per annum. That is a lot of pain but not much gain. What of the pain entailed in this amalgamation? I ask the question: How responsive will an administration which is located away from one or even both campuses, or all three campuses for that matter, be to staff and to students? It is interesting to note that "efficiency" appears to go hand in hand with reduced lines of communication between the administration of the merged institution and its clients - that is, the students and staff.
The councils of the ANU and the CCAE presently comprise 44 and 22 members respectively - a total of 66 members. The merged institution will be headed by a council, under the Dawkins proposal, of just 18 members. That may be appropriate, Mr Speaker, for a company or a corporation, but it is not necessarily apt for a large and complex institution such as a university administering a range of disciplines and semiautonomous schools. The proposed union of academic standards and commercial forces is worrisome and in my view not properly and fully thought through.
The impact of these proposals on the goals of these institutions is the most disturbing aspect of all. It is disturbing because it seeks to make uniform elements which are quite discrete and which suffer because of having to assume alien characteristics. The goals, for example, of economics teaching at the ANU and the CCAE are quite different. The process of amalgamation must entail, to a very large extent, the adulteration of the different aims of economics teaching at both those places, and indeed the impact of that proposed adulteration has been quite severe.
There have already been a large number of resignations from the ANU faculty of economics and commerce because academics at that level perceive a threat to their autonomy, to their capacity to conduct teaching and research at a level appropriate to a university as opposed to a level appropriate to some lesser institution in those terms, such as a college of advanced education. Those threats are real enough to have caused a very large leakage of academics to private enterprise, which is a matter of grave concern to me because the ANU faculty of economics has an international reputation. It is, I understand, one of the 12 most highly regarded such institutions in the world.
Mr Speaker, I have withdrawn the motion that appears on the notice paper in my name. The reason for that is very simple. It would be easy, I think, to put forward a motion to this Assembly today which carried the very clear condemnation of this place to the Federal Government of its legislation to amalgamate those institutions. That would be an easy victory. But I suggest, Mr Speaker, that there are other issues - in particular the issue of funding for
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