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:
“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)
“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)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)