Hi everyone.  Just a quick one today, an incomplete follow-up to Tuesday’s blog on rankings.

One of the points I made on Tuesday was that several universities – and specifically, nearly all of the Australian ones apart from ANU – have made enormous strides in the rankings over the past 20 years, and this had been done largely in the absence of any funding boost.  A few of you were quick to point out that in fact there has been a funding boost, just not from public sources: instead, it had come in the form of international student fee dollars.  Which, OK, fair enough, but it doesn’t invalidate the larger point I made about the importance of institutional management and culture.  In fact, in some respects it strengthens it.  A comparison with recent Canadian practice shows why.

For starters, it takes a certain amount of institutional gumption to do something new like attempt to teach an entirely new student population the way Australians have, and moreover to be the first institution to do so.  Looking for big dollars from international students is now a banality, but it wasn’t 25 years ago when Australian universities first started down this path.  They were, in this sense, true innovators and it took a significant shift in institutional culture (preceded in many ways by a general change in governing structures a few years earlier, a process described in Marginson & Considine’s The Enterprise University, which is an excellent read if you ever get the chance) for this to take place.

But what is maybe most interesting about the Australian experience is not that a few institutions became suddenly good at acquiring money – institutions are generally pretty good at acquiring money because being rich is step one to being prestigious – but rather that they had some rather specific ideas about how to spend this money.  And that use was: research, in large amounts and in very strategic fashions.

Now, a number of Canadian universities think they are pretty research-intensive, but for sheer focus on research, none of them (with the possible exception of U of T) have the kind of laser-like focus on outputs that Australian universities have.  Back in 2014, when it seemed like Australia was on the verge of deregulating domestic fees, partly so as to permit government funding cutbacks but partly also to generate higher overall revenues, I visited a number of research universities and had discussions that went like this:

Me: “what are you going to do with the extra money?”

Them: “Invest it in research”

Me: “Why?”

Them: “To rise in the Rankings.”

Me: “Why is that important?”

Them: “Helps attract more international students”

Me: “And why does that matter?”

Them: “More money!”

Me: “And what will you do with…

Them: “Research!”

It was a perfect circle.  An academic Ouroboros.

But where it gets interesting is how new money raised from international student fees translates into research focus in Australia.  Canadian universities have, for a few years now, been experiencing Australian-like levels of international student fee income, but they are absolutely not producing the kinds of advances in research outputs that we have seen in Australia.  No doubt, there is a time lag between new funding and measurable scientific output, but I am pretty sure that the collective measures to strengthen research in Canada have been absolutely nothing like those taken in Australia: the almost complete lack of movement of big Canadian institutions in the rankings over the past 20 years are testament to this (though, not dropping down the rankings the way many second-tier American institutions are doing is not a bad outcome).

So, what’s different?    I posit two reasons.

• Decentralization of money and control.  In Australia, the money from international tuition is controlled by the university administration.  In Canada, in large part, this money flows to faculties because responsibility-centred management (RCM) budget models have been all the rage in Canada over the last few years.  In Canada, RCM systems have created incentives for faculties to go out and chase students and thus receive money, much of which (as far as I can tell) has been spent on new faculty hires.  But there has not been, again, as far as I can tell, much emphasis on outputs: that is, there has been no push to make sure money is being spent in a way that increase outputs.  In Australia, on the other hand, where the centre keeps control of the money, it can invest that money directly into internal research projects, and in particular, create big pots of research money (often interdisciplinary research money) which can help shape deliberately shape a university’s research profile.  In Canada, the closest any institution comes to getting that kind of money for research is by winning a CFREF competition which is kind of hit and miss.  And more to the point, it’s not under the control of the university. In Australia, universities are strategic actors in research.  In Canada, they mostly aren’t.  That’s a huge difference.

• Tenure.  In Canada, tenure is more or less absolute once you get your associate professor stripes.  In Australia, getting “permanent” status as an academic is quicker than it is in Canada (usually three years) but “permanency” doesn’t mean quite the same thing as here.  Institutions have wide discretion to get rid of individual for poor performance on annual reviews, or indeed to get rid of whole programs if they so choose without any of the “exigency” clauses that all Canadian institutions have.  A more precarious workforce?  Yes.  But also, a more nimble university, able to reallocate money across fields of study – say towards areas with sudden rising research prominence – very quickly.

To be clear, I’m not saying here that everyone should rush off to emulate Australia.  I think there are some clear downsides to the Australian approach that Canadians might want to avoid.  All I am saying is that there are trade-offs that derive from adopting certain management styles and institutional cultures, and the Australian example should give Canadian academia at least some reason to wonder whether we’ve made the right ones.