Criticism
In the 1990s, during the early years of the unified national system, the solution to future sustainability, as perceived by Australia’s (then) vice chancellors, was to get more money into the system, rather than to rationalize the system itself. The Australian Vice Chancellors Committee argued on a number of occasions about the level of funding provided to Australian Universities relative to those in other OECD countries.
Another problem with the unified national system was that the major source of university funding (the Federal Government, through the Department of Education Science and Training) was performance-based (calculated via a performance formula) and, because the total funding was fixed, represented a zero-sum-game. In other words (arithmetically), if all universities simultaneously boosted their performance by expending more money then, in practice, they were financially disadvantaged. If all universities simultaneously decreased their performance by reducing their expenditure on staffing then, in practice, they were all potentially in a better financial position.
Read more about this topic: Tertiary Education In Australia
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)