'Funny you should ask for that': higher education as a market.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Macintyre, Stuart
• Date: 22 March 2002

In the early 1970s I went to the United Kingdom to pursue postgraduate studies. My time at Cambridge was happier than that of Manning Clark at Oxford in the 1930s, but there was one source of minor irritation. The local shopkeepers exhibited a combination of servility towards some of their customers and summary contempt for others. Mr Flack, the newsagent, was perhaps the stingiest. At that time one of the London newspapers offered a fifty per cent refund for subscribers, and I had mislaid the previous month's receipt. Mr Flack was prepared to issue me with a new one but it would cost me twopence for his time and his stationery. (1)

If the English achieved renown as a nation of shopkeepers, they had slipped some way by the era of the three-day week. My wife sought a new seal for the pressure cooker with which we made New Zealand neck chops palatable, but no shop seemed to have one in stock. 'Funny you should ask for that,' one man told her, 'for we get a lot of requests for pressure cooker parts, but we don't stock them--you see, there's no demand'.

As with English shopkeepers and rubber rings, so with Australian universities and various fields of study: those who want to study a language, classics, philosophy, even history and literature, mathematics, physics and chemistry are told they are no longer taught because there is no demand for them. As the number of students in higher education increases, the proportion engaged in these core disciplines of the sciences, social sciences and humanities decreases.

Enrolments in the core sciences are falling both relatively and absolutely. While the number of Bachelor of Science students increased from 40,254 in 1989 to 67,327 in 2000, the number studying mathematics, physics and chemistry all fell. There were 7956 equivalent full-time students of mathematics in 1989, 6900 in 2000; 4717 equivalent full-time students of chemistry in 1989, 4137 in 2000; 2893 in physics in 1989, and 2008 in 2000. The areas of greatest enrolment and fastest growth are in computer science and the biological sciences. (2) These disciplines attract students because of their clear vocational utility, and they attract research funding because of their industrial utility. Presented with such opportunities, universities are reconfiguring their science faculties, rebadging their degrees and shifting their research effort.

The implications have been explored in a recent survey of the mathematical sciences in Australia. Between 1995 and 1999 it is estimated that there was a twenty-six per cent decline in the number of mathematicians working in Australian universities. Some of our ablest mathematicians are leaving Australia to pursue their careers, and some of our ablest undergraduates are choosing other fields of study: ten years ago there were 250 honours graduates in mathematics; now there are 150. With falling numbers of mathematics graduates going into the schools, the number of Year 12 students who take advanced mathematics is also falling. (3)

A similar pattern is apparent in the country's Arts faculties. In 1998 there were 3779 equivalent full-time students of philosophy in Australian universities. Last year there were 3628. (4) They are enrolled in sixteen universities, for philosophy is taught in only one of the newer universities that were established in the 1980s. That university is Charles Sturt, which has by far the largest enrolment; 560 equivalent full-time students, most of them police trainees who study applied ethics. The arrangement illustrates the impact of vocational training on even the most recondite of disciplines. It has benefits for both the police and philosophy, but the employment of ethicists does little for other branches of philosophy. Charles Sturt University also supports the largest philosophy department, with fourteen academics. In 1998 there were 145 philosophers teaching the 3779 students. By 2000 they were reduced to 131. Excessive class sizes had increased, while the range of subjects taught had diminished.

For the discipline of history it is possible to relate a more detailed account as thirty years ago Geoffrey Serle conducted a comprehensive and prescient survey of the profession. He found there were 320 historians with tenure in the country's sixteen university history departments in 1971, with perhaps another hundred in temporary positions, seventy-five in neighbouring university departments and two hundred or more in the other tertiary institutions. (5) This yielded a maximum estimate of 750 academic historians. By 1989, following the transformation of the colleges and institutes into universities, a gathering of heads of departments reported 450 staff members. A survey in 1994 calculated that this number had fallen to 410 and another in 1996 reported a little more than 300. The most recent, in 2000, found 300 historians in thirty institutions that responded, and a further nine non-respondents might have taken the number close to 350. (6)

The calculations are necessarily approximate, for few of the post-Dawkins universities maintain history departments and the historians they employ to teach in a variety of courses are not easily picked up by the profession's voluntary census. Some of the sub-disciplines that Serle recognized, such as educational history and economic history, are no longer taught and those who used to teach them have been redeployed in a fashion that makes it hard to identify the survivors even in the pre-Dawkins universities. Most of these older, more traditional universities have also reorganized their history departments into larger, multi-disciplinary schools, usually after an earlier loss of staff by the free-standing department. At the University of Sydney, a history department with forty-one positions in 1988 shrank to twenty-six by 1996 and now has twenty-three staff in the School of Philosophy, Gender, History and the Ancient World. At Macquarie University, a department of modern history fell from...