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Interview

The University of Rupert

Interview with Peter Lewis

National Tertiary Education Union president Dr Carolyn Allport on News Corp's move into tertiary education and the Universitas 21 experiment.

News Limited has been in the news in the last week with their proposal to deliver on-line education. Can you just outline that they are on about and what the concerns of the NTEU would be?

News Corp is a partner with a consortium that includes the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland and the University of New South Wales. Eighteen universities internationally are part of "Universitas 21", and it will be this organization which will accredit on-line courses delivered by News Corp. A specialist IT organization, maybe Microsoft, will provide the IT framework for the on-line delivery.

Now, the interesting thing about this partnership is that it is almost impossible to find out what the Memorandum of Agreement is between the partners - or more particularly at the moment, between News Corp and Universitas 21. So one doesn't know exactly how these arrangements for on-line delivery will eventually be encoded, but it seems from information that has trickled through the press so far that News Corporation will purchase and deliver course content via its Internet inter-active satellite and television services and they will pay royalties to the accrediting universities involved in Universitas 21. In that sense, what NewsCorp is buying is a series of highly lucrative brand names that attach to particular courses.

There are many reasons why such a consortium might emerge now and why NewsCorp might be prepared to go with Universitas 21. One of the most important reflects NewsCorp's own corporate agenda, particularly with respect to accessing the Chinese market. There are three Chinese universities who are partners in Universitas 21, along with universities in Europe, the UK, Canada and the US. NewsCorp might have one agenda in terms of not just on-line education but also access to media more generally in China, recognising the size of that market.

So you are concerned that they are actually going to use education as a way of leveraging into new markets?

It seems that that is an important component of New Corporation's commitment to this consortium. One of the reasons we have seen mergers and amalgamations, and consortia, developing in the information and communications technology area is that they see a conflation of all of the mechanisms of communication in the future. So the notion that what happens on your computer screen is currently different from what happens on your radio, is currently different from what happens on your television, is different to what happens in a newspaper will disappear in the future. IT organizations want to connect to what is seen to be the core framework for the information economy. And that is education. We are not just seeing this with universities. We are also seeing it in North America with respect to delivery of school education

Is your union opposed to the idea of on-line education per se?

Of course not. I think that information technology has an enormous democratising potential and an ability to enlarge the accessibility of education, either to people who are living outside major metropolitan areas, people who aren't able to fit in with the schedules of current bricks and mortar delivery - and people who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to leave the home or who have responsibilities in home and community. NTEU has union policies that support that potential and embrace the capacity of information technology in the education area.

One needs to understand that from our viewpoint there is far too much cargo cult if I can use an anthropological term attached to that potential. We need to understand how it actually works and whether it can deliver quality education; how it might operate in a global economy; and more importantly, how much will it cost and who is reaping the rewards. That affects the nature and the operation of universities. So what we are doing at the moment is asking a series of questions, and one might say that we are informed by a degree of cynicism that we hear from our members all the time.

We do have a principal concern that stems from the relationship that universities have with corporations. Now we are not automatically opposed to these things. We have been supportive of Co-operative Research Centres in universities and, in fact, universities should relate much more to their community. But the particular examples that have already taken place within our sector raise a whole series of questions about universities' ability to negotiate with corporate partners; to ensure that the rewards that the universities receive are of sufficient magnitude to support the investment that universities have made, and ultimately that the public have made in universities. Let's look at the example of Melbourne IT, a company developed by Melbourne University and floated on the stock exchange in December 1999. Melbourne IT is a situation where, in our view, the corporate world walked all over the university. $79 million was returned to the university from the float, which is a small amount given the company has quadrupled its float value. But none of this money has gone into the operation of the public university.

So the degree to which universities have the capacity to play with corporates; the degree to which the public interest that is attached to universities is protected and enhanced; and the way in which the relationship with corporations actually impacts on issues of governance, financial probity and, more broadly, intellectual freedom, are issues that we are concerned about and that we are constantly asking questions about. It is interesting in this Universitas 21 and NewsCorp operation. As I said, we don't know what is in the Memorandum of Understanding, but where there have been consortiums overseas, usually the on-line deliverer is the person who expects to hold the copyright. In this case, NewsCorp would hold the copyright.

Now, that is a problem, because the nature of on-line delivery and the ways in which copyright is signed over to media companies has meant that there has been little recognition of moral rights. In other words, you might assign the copyright to NewsCorp. You might be compensated accordingly, depending upon the actual negotiations, but what our members are concerned about is that NewsCorp, having got that copyright, can change your work; change your argument; change the way in which you have prepared the material; and still market it under your name with the brand of your university. People are concerned that there has been no negotiation around that issue of moral rights and international reputation, because for our members that is what is at stake. They work in an international world they have for some time. Their reputation is at the heart of their ability to attract research funding; to seek support for other research projects; and to continue to develop their teaching and learning strategies.

So there is a concern that academic rigour may come second to being able to market a course that's available in nice bite-sized chunks a sort of convergence of education and media marketing entertainment.

That's right: education as entertainment almost. Now, there is nothing actually wrong with people getting information from a wide variety of sources, but if you are asking the question: What is it that we can best do in universities in order to enhance our role in the global economy, based on information and knowledge? I think what we are looking for and what many business organisations say that they want, are skills that are connected to intellectual rigour.

For example, it is more important that someone is trained in analytical reasoning, in communication strategies, and in broad problem solving, generic skills. These are things that can, in a university context, come from an intellectual engagement and a rigour that sits underneath that. In some cases it doesn't really matter what you are talking about. You can have an intellectually rigorous conversation about whether God exists or not, just as you can have an intellectually rigorous conversation about whether Dolly the sheep is a good thing. Either way, you are developing those generic skills, and in an environment of fast changing, industrial forms, economic forms and so on, what you need are highly transferable skills. That's the message that is coming. And so, in a sense, the marketing of courses in a way that creates them more as entertainment, and doesn't ensure that rigorous standards are maintained, actually undermines the capacity of people to utilise that education to the best of their abilities.

I imagine the other issue is that you almost can pick up a boutique degree from any elite university in the world and wear it like you would a designer handbag?

Yes. I think that's right, and there have already been questions in the US for some time about whether one university degree necessarily means the same as another university degree. That raises a more general question of how you ensure in a global world that you have appropriate quality assurance processes and how do you reflect that in international agreements or international regulations. You can't be assured, unless you have quite tight regulations nationally, that you will have systems where a global partner has to actually register or be accredited.

At the moment the Universitas 21 NewsCorp venture is accredited through participating universities. How would that happen in the future? Currently we have a new protocol for accreditating universities in Australia, which all the States have signed up to, and which is actually much stronger than what we have had. That protocol does go to overseas operations of existing Australian universities, but whether it would actually go to a consortium like Universitas 21 is a moot point. I suspect it doesn't. And these are not issues that are only applicable to higher education, it is the whole issue of balancing national regulation with international agreement or protocol, or perhaps even issues about best practice. But you need to have some mechanism at that level other than "buyer beware" for providing effective information to prospective students.

To what extent do you see this move by universities towards the corporates as being a reaction to Federal Government policy, and what should a national government be doing at this time to safeguard educations standards?

Commentators have suggested that the Australian universities that are part of Universitas 21 are seeing this as an opportunity to pick up more funding in an atmosphere where the government has said no more Commonwealth funding. You have to seek funding from outside. So it is true I think, that Australian universities signing up to Universitas 21 is a reaction to the funding crisis. The Commonwealth Government has said in its recent White Paper on research that all new money will have to come from the private sector, from business. And given that business expenditure on R&D has fallen to catastrophic low levels, I'm not quite sure how the Government thinks that that process will actually happen, let alone what the costs might be to a public university.

It is important for any future government to recognise that if they, as a national government, want to enhance Australian participation in the global world and to use our comparative advantage in education to maximise future economic growth, then public investment is essential to that. If they allow private ventures to be the only vehicle through which universities can engage with the new global economy, then it will not be Australians who will reap the rewards. It will be other people, other multinational companies, but it will not be our universities and our economies. There are some real issues there that a national government has to tread carefully around. After all, they are elected by people in Australia who will be more concerned with what is happening to them, rather than people overseas, so MPs are caught by political accountability.

On the other hand, the government should also be more prepared than is currently the case to support international agreements that actually enhance the cooperation of universities internationally, but not from the point of view of the free trade agenda. That's all our government signs up to now anything that deregulates trade and that doesn't actually provide for any sense of national engagement or national investment. And I think that part of government policy needs to be turned around.

The other thing that is completely missing from this debate is the notion that we also have some responsibility towards countries that are currently cut out of the information economy. There seems an assumption that everybody is equally involved in these things, and they are not of course. Most of Africa is cut out of the global network, given problems with the electricity grids. There are some e-mail networks there but not enough to sustain information-based economy. That is also true in many areas of Eastern Europe, some parts of South America and in more isolated areas of Asia. So there are global politics involved in the way in which first world consortia are seeking to export education to many of these countries that currently don't have the capacity to sustain it. We need some ability to monitor the degree to which these programmes are actually sustainable in areas such as China where News Corp and Universitas 21 will no doubt be operating in the future.

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»	Fiji Faces International Union Blockade
»	Workers Return to Dump Reith's Third Wave
»	Budget Raises More Questions than Answers
»	Teachers Finally Achieve Satisfaction
»	FairWear Campaign Targets Uniforms
»	Rio Tinto Appeals for Industrial Peace
»	Beer Hike Sparks Worker Concerns
»	Libs Fail to Block Family Friendly Laws
»	No Joy For 'Back Door' Pete
»	Angry Truckies Converge on Border
»	Unions Dues Test Case Looms
»	Why Solidarity Messages Mean Something
»	Radio Free East Timor Rocks

»	The Soapbox
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»	Neale's Spot On!
»	Silence on the GST

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