Comments on: The Melbourne Model

By: Mushroom

Mushroom — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 14:32:26 +0000

I have little faith now in any of the hype or propaganda coming from the VC’s office. I can’t remember the last time a large faculty like Arts or Science was publicly ‘outed’ as being in serious debt and asked to cut staff across the board. Arts may have gone into the red, but I think the move to the Melbourne Model was a deciding factor in the response. Bean counters are doing the sums and coming up with bleak outlooks, despite the smiles and rhetoric from the VC. Arts is first on the chopping block because it is so easy to pillory. Would the public care if they chopped Arts out completely? Aren’t they just a bunch of post-modernists that couldn’t keep track of a bank account if you paid them?
The financial difficulties extend wider than the Arts faculty. Other faculties are also in dubious financial positions under the new Model. Medicine included. The PR consultants will be hard pressed to come up with a convincing story to cover future cuts to the medical faculty. Will they blame that Dean for mismanagement ?

Engineering may also need trimming if students don’t roll up to start courses that are not even accredited yet. In the new model engineering course they will only be exposed to teaching by engineers for two years. Why risk it at Melbourne when you can get a perfectly good, conventional, and world recognised engineering degree at Monash or RMIT?

Another issue with financial consequences is the fiasco regarding honours courses in the Science faculty. It is a dogs breakfast. Currently you can do a 1-year honours year after the 3-year B.Sc. degree, but the Melb. Model asserts that this should be replaced by a 2-year M.Sc. It has been recently proposed that each department can choose to have either or BOTH. This may seem trivial but it means a 1 year difference in entry to a Ph.D. program. Why do an M.Sc. at Melbourne when you can do a 1 year honours year at a nearby university (any of them!), and then proceed to a Ph.D. ? As I recall, a year was a long time when you are 20-something, and HECS charges are not insignificant.

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:57:13 +0000

SP - You are blurring two things here - cost over-runs that would have been pulled back regardless of other changes, and curriculum reform that is consistent with Growing Esteem.

By: SP

SP — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:20:51 +0000

Since posting those earlier comments, we have seen widespread media coverage of ‘Growing Esteem’ in the Age and Australian in mid-2007, and the general dissatisfaction with the changes has continued. A $12m debt in Arts was discovered and reported. As a response, new changes to the curriculum have been mooted by consultants (fewer majors, new alliances - in other words, cuts). Cross-university ‘invitations’ to redundancy have been issued recently. The Dean of Arts has resigned after a year, but wisely there is no reporting of exactly why and the departure has been played down. A new Faculty is slowly in creation, removing some academics from Arts. The School structure is still not agreed in a few areas - and the new degrees start in 2008!.
I stand by what I have said: too much change too quickly, and it could be that the whole exercise was about saving money from the outset rather than improving ‘esteem’ (which was already high?)?
Shame, because otherwise it is a great university. Fortunately, we are still getting on with teaching as before….

By: Mushroom

Mushroom — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:48:42 +0000

DE: MBBS at Melb. Uni. has been a six year combined degree for as long as I can remember. Other universities have managed to whittle it down to 5 years (Newcastle, Monash). We are going the other direction.

The new MD degree is interesting from two angles. It used to be a post-MBBS higher degree, equivalent to 2 years full-time research. Now everyone will have an MD just by doing medicine (as is the case in the US). Those here who already have an MD may feel a bit peeved, and all those who have the standard MBBS medical training, either at Melb. Uni., or at other Australian universities (now and in the future), may also feel uneasy by the perceived differences.

By: Damien Eldridge

Damien Eldridge — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:05:24 +0000

Mushroom, what is the alternative? If the new med sequence takes the same number of years (3 years B.Biomed. and 4 years M.D. versus what I think was 7 years for a combined M.B and B.S.) and the new option yields more revenue, then presumably staff cuts must already have been in the pipeline before the change if they are still there now?

By: Mushroom

Mushroom — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:35:32 +0000

I fully support SP’s comments. As a staff member in a different faculty, I have seen the same things. The chaos has been terrible and the future uncertain for both staff and students. I have also seen how some individuals have taken advantage of the chaos to further their careers at the expense of others.
The faculty of Medicine has done very well because it has been able to do what it wanted, extended the medical degree to 3 yrs undergrad (premed course = B. Biomed) plus 4 years post grad. A better revenue stream, but predicted not quite good enough to maintain the staff at present levels. Like the Arts faculty, staff cuts are being contemplated, probably from 2010. Interesting times ahead. What do you say to VCE students on Discovery Day this year….

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:02:30 +0000

I’m not on the top of the detail in Arts, but as I understand it some GE related changes are being caught up in changes occurring for other reasons.

But it is nothing like Gilbert, who tried to leave the university’s basic structures much as they were while generating external sources of finance to keep them going.

By: SP

SP — Thu, 17 May 2007 11:27:19 +0000

Interesting discussion. I am a victim of “Growing Esteem”at Melbourne, having left a tenured job overseas to teach and research at the University. After a couple of pleasant years of enjoying some of Australia’s finest students and colleagues, my world has been turned upside down by the hastily-announced “restructuring”. For example:
- Incessant curriculum meetings.
- A nasty power-bid by colleagues who have used GE to ratchet up their staff numbers and degree of control over budgets and decisionmaking (without any evidence of superior research performance or teaching quality).
- A new “School” (one of several) created in which - literally - the non academic staff and managers disappeared one week to be replaced by people we have never seen before, who now look only at the financial bottom-line and try to create “uniformity” in admin. structures in the Arts faculty, reporting mainly to the Dean….
- We have three individuals out of 40 or so with advanced levels of stress or on sick leave, two more who have accepted redundancy, and several who are looking for new jobs.
- Our postgrads are in revolt, as previous offers of tutoring and demonstrating have been rescinded or diminshed.

Davis et. al. have underestimated (by at least three years) the time it takes to undertake full restructuring of this scale. Surprising since he works on public sector management. Teaching and research has been severely compromised among the academics, while we are simultaneously being asked to increase research performance, look to international student markets, improve teaching, and teach into “breadth” subjects that largely provide benefits to the host department (not the lecturer, if based elsewhere). Degrees of hostility towards management and towards some colleagues has been increased across campus, largely by the decision to re-advertise many of the non-academic and management posts, and to squash together into new Schools people that were in separate Schools for very, very good reasons (longstanding animosities, incompatible teaching programs, etc). Units with less than spotless teaching and research records are unjustly targetted by Faculty and central Admin. edicts, giving them insufficient resources to make improvements. The established Departmental Big Players are asserting themselves in the grab for Graduate Schools and new positions. There is total chaos about how budgets will be allocated from 2008 (redundancies, for example, were supposed to be at no cost to the Department, but now they will cost is big $$$ to finance - this changed within 2 weeks. School Business Plans have now been requested with 2 week’s notice). Many of the new subjects that are supposed to be on offer are still in the draft stage (literally, in my case - the Uni has only just given us the development money). There are insufficient large lecture theatres on campus to teach large numbers, so we have to teach some first year and Breadth subjects twice or more a year.
And after all the hosrse-trading, moving of staff, drawing up of Business Plans, etc. the constitution of Faculties could, yet, change again. We are also, down here in the trenches, expecting whole Departments and more people to be axed. The Union seems powerless to resist.

In all of this (and this is the third restructuring I have been in, on three continents) there are winners. Law and Medecine are sitting pretty. So are Economics and Commerce. But any units that really depend on central support to retain coherence and teaching are really struggling. If universities were supposed to float in a free market, they would never have esitied in this form - but more like the University of Phoenix, where staff are expendable and teaching is entirely financially driven.

In many respects this is where Alan Gilbert was heading with UniMelb (see John Cain’s now outdated account of that phase, Off Course). It is quite extrordinary that the level of staff and student dissatisfaction seems not to have filtered through to management, or much to the media either. Actually it has to management - there was a secret poll of 800 of us recently. The responses, which we have never been shown, appeared to show a level of dissatisfaction, but how much, we do not know.

It was not broke, and if it needed fixing, this certainly did not need to involve change to established high quality teaching by Unimelb academics, and massively increased job insecurity.

Resturcturing needs to be fully participatory, democratic, and transparent. It is not. Possibly the worst restructuring I have seen in 15 years.

By: Club Troppo » Missing Link

Club Troppo » Missing Link — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 03:39:13 +0000

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By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:43:55 +0000

Damien - It’s a problem for the people who have to design timetables! But the fact that they have proliferated over the years suggests that they are certainly not insurmountable problems. ‘Double’ degrees are still possible, but they will be sequential at Melbourne rather than simultaneous (I’ll have to check this, but I think I recall hearing that if for example you did a Commerce degree at Melbourne, where economics will be taught, you could do your breadth subjects in maths (taught by Science) and then get credit for them if you enrol in a subsequent Science degree, and still finish in the 5 years it currently takes to do combined Commerce/Science.)