We must nurture the humanities
Peter Singer
The Age July 27, 2009
Australian universities need to do much more to fulfil their most important role: teaching students to think for themselves.
WHAT is excellence in a university? For the past five years, dividing my time between Princeton University and the University of Melbourne, I've been confronted by differences in the educational cultures of the United States and Australia. The comparison isn't to Australia's advantage. The leading American universities cherish the ideal of a liberal arts education that in Australia seems to have been overwhelmed by vocational and professional training.
When I came to Princeton, I was told that the university sees undergraduate teaching as its core mission. No matter how distinguished professors may be, or how many books they have published, they are expected to teach undergraduate courses, to participate in events open to undergraduates, and to be available for students to talk to on an individual basis. That message has been consistent with my experience there. Each term offers a feast of activities that involve the university's best minds, attended by undergraduates eager to learn more and to be stimulated to think more deeply. Each term I talk to bright students keen to use their time at Princeton to better understand the world they live in.
Yes, you may say, but Princeton is one of a handful of elite universities. Australian education is more egalitarian. Perhaps, but I've travelled to the South and the Midwest to speak at small colleges that I'd never heard of before the invitation arrived. There I have found the same commitment to education that prevails at Princeton. The academics at these smaller colleges may not publish much, but they believe in what they are doing and the students respond to it.
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s, my teachers still had time to talk to their students, either in their offices or in the cafeteria or at the pub. Tutorials were limited to 12 students. Today they are often twice that size, making it almost impossible for every student to contribute. Without those conversations, in class and out, I doubt that I would have gone into philosophy. Today's Australian university teachers are under far more pressure, not only to teach more students, but also to publish more papers, and to write more time-consuming applications for research grants that they don't really want, but which, if successful, will somehow demonstrate the value of their research. (When I tell my colleagues at the University of Melbourne that no one at Princeton tells me I should be applying for research grants, I see the envy in their eyes.)
When the University of Melbourne announced that it was switching to a new educational model, and making professional courses such as law and medicine postgraduate, I welcomed this attempt to give a broad education to young Australians before they embark on their career training. But if this model is to work, it needs the key departments in the humanities and sciences to be strong, confident of the value of their work, and enthusiastic about teaching. Instead, because the arts faculty struggles with its budget, we have seen one round of cuts after another, sapping the strength of areas such as philosophy and history.
Some of the blame rests with the government funding formula that emphasises publications and research grants rather than teaching excellence. But Australian academics in the humanities need to accept a share of the responsibility for the state of their field. In some fields, it has become fashionable to write and talk in a way that few can understand. Jargon lends an aura of expertise, but obscures the important issues that are at stake. We do not always put sufficient stress on starting our teaching from where students are, and leading them from there to the issues that it is important for them to think about. Teaching ability should play a more central role in academic appointments, and clarity of thought and expression is to be prized in all fields Philosophically, I am a utilitarian, which means that I look at the consequences before I decide what is good. But that means all the consequences, not only the impact that a university has on the gross national product. I regret that so many young Australians do vocationally oriented undergraduate degrees because they believe it will help them to get a job. Perhaps it will; if so, the problem is not with their choices, but with those of the employers. Teaching people to think for themselves equips them for a wide range of future possibilities. The British civil service recruits good philosophy students because they will be able to think and to grasp the essential elements in a new field, even if they have no background in it. New York's investment banks do the same, seeking the best Princeton undergraduates, irrespective of whether their major was philosophy, or history, or economics.
The idea of a liberal arts education goes back more than 2000 years to Plato's Academy. It holds that an educated citizen in a free society should have a grounding in philosophy, history, literature, the sciences, maths, foreign languages, politics and fine arts. We might say that it attempts to answer the broad questions that Gauguin put into the title of one of his paintings (a title that he in turn took from a Catholic catechism): Where do
we come from? What are we? Where are we going? This kind of education does not train you in a profession, but it gives you an intellectual foundation to use throughout your life, whether you decide to go into medicine, law, business, engineering, or any other occupation.
If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world's poor, the problems of Australia's indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato's time.
Peter Singer is professor of bioethics in the University Centre for Human Values at Princeton University and laureate professor in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is The Life You Can Save.
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Our Vice Chancellor's Reply Part 1
From the Vice-Chancellor
Supporting a Liberal Education
3 August 2009
Dear Colleagues,
The annual Planning and Budget Conference met late last week amid unusual circumstances - a public debate, of sorts, about the nature of a liberal education in a university.
In his article 'We Must Nurture the Humanities', philosopher Peter Singer contrasts the vocational tradition of undergraduate training in Australia with the liberal arts approach found at Princeton and elsewhere in the United States.
Professor Singer argues for an education that teaches students to think for themselves. This preference for giving students "time to better understand the world they live in" leads Professor Singer to endorse principles informing the Melbourne Model. Yet he warns that without sufficient funding for key departments in the humanities and the social sciences, the approach will fail. As a utilitarian, he proposes to judge curriculum change at Melbourne not by intention but by outcomes.
Though Professor Singer raised a broader note about education, much public discussion that followed focused on a handful of disciplines. Very few correspondents pondered how a university should distribute scarce public funds across all its academic programs.
Yet for deans and heads of division gathered at Mt Eliza, this was the central concern of the annual Planning and Budget Conference - made all the more difficult by the loss of endowment income usually available to support scholarly appointments, additional scholarships, salaries and new facilities.
Underpinning any budget discussions are the difficulties of placing relative importance on academic disciplines. There are more than 80 departments and schools at the University, each supporting academic engagement in an important area of scholarship. These disciplines are funded by Canberra at 7 different rates, which when put together with student contributions create 12 different overall funding rates.
In theory, Commonwealth funding rates together with student contribution reflect the cost of teaching. In practice, few disciplines can cover their costs using Commonwealth income.
Such are the dilemmas facing a budget conference. Melbourne's approach is to pool undergraduate teaching income and share it across the six new generation degrees. This supports courses otherwise classified with a low funding rate, and shares the returns from fee-paying international students. It signals commitment to a comprehensive university that values foundational disciplines in the sciences, arts and economics.
The 2009 PBC confirmed this 'pooling' approach as the fairest way to distribute scarce resources to undergraduate teaching. The conference provided further transitional money to Science and VCAM, support for key IT projects and a lift in the material vote for the University library as it upgrades the collection and library facilities.
Under the principle of academic governance, each faculty must develop its own rules for distributing funds across its disciplines. Most use a combination of student load and disciplinary weighting to reflect Commonwealth income, tempered by internal subsidies to support key but unviable programs.
Agreeing on a fair spread of funding is hard at the best of times. When income slows suddenly and a faculty runs into financial problems, as happened to Arts some years ago, the disruption can be wrenching. It has taken a three year program of voluntary departures, careful budgeting, strategic investment and additional University funding for Arts to regain its strong financial position.
This outcome has been assisted by the Melbourne Model, as undergraduates from outside Arts experience the richness of offerings in the humanities and social sciences at Melbourne. With some 6,600 students this year, the Arts undergraduate numbers have increased nearly 20 percent since 2004, with particularly strong growth in languages.
Our Vice Chancellor's Reply Part 2
Yet significant challenges remain. A raft of retirements and voluntary departures left the philosophy program with insufficient academics to offer an appropriate range of subjects. While philosophy teaching has been supported by staff from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, and a pool of talented postgraduates, approval and recruitment of replacement staff has proved frustratingly slow for colleagues in the program.
For Historical Studies, the issues are different. With over 1,000 students, a strong Honours cohort, and more than 60 academic staff and adjuncts listed on its School website, Historical Studies is one of the largest disciplines within the University. It supports five separate majors and contributes to national debate about identity and social relations.
Despite these impressive strengths, Historical Studies has accumulated a budget deficit over several years. A recent confidential draft budget report exploring the scale of the problem, likely causes, and possible responses to this deficit produced a public debate when the document, and the School's response, found their way to a journalist.
Yet it is hard to see how a faculty should address budget issues in any academic program other than through careful analysis and sustained discussion among colleagues. The rules of transparency and even-handedness when distributing funding within a faculty, informed by a generosity of spirit reflecting the goals of the University, provide the fairest way to resolve budget questions. Student load, funding rates and revenue projections are complex issues to resolve through the media, let alone considerations of equity within a faculty.
The 2009 PBC once again pooled funding to support a broader undergraduate education with significant breadth for every student. We operate within the confines of our own imperfections and the binds of inadequate income, but share a determination to meet the tough test proposed by Professor Singer - to produce graduates who can think and grasp the essential elements in a new field because they have not just specialist knowledge but the larger imagination made possible through a liberal education.
Glyn Davis
Vice-Chancellor
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