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:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)