Blind eye to the telescope: Academics and their politics

Since the late 1980s Australia¿s universities have been subject to a process of farreaching policy change. In 1987-88 the Hawke-Keating Labor Government began to make major changes to what had been a fully publicly funded system of higher education. A partial user-pays principle was introduced in the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) in 1988. HECS was designed to fund a major increase in the number of Australians gaining access to higher education, a strategy that in numerical terms achieved impressive results: in 2005 over 900,000 Australians - and overseas students - were in a higher education institution. The introduction of HECS foreshadowed a major reduction in the level of Commonwealth support for universities which by 1996 was 53 percent less in real terms than it had been in 1983-4. Continued cuts to the base level of Commonwealth funding continued under the Howard Government after 1996. Universities have been subject both to continuing cuts in Commonwealth operating grant funding and a significant increase in both the scale and detail of accountability and reporting requirements imposed by the Federal Government. In consequence of these funding policies, universities have been forced to raise more revenue in their own right. This has been made possible by the availability of significant numbers of full-fee paying overseas students and since 2003 by government allowing universities to enrol full-fee paying domestic students.