128 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus American university governing boards and the importance of finding the "right" governors, but he never steps back to consider the need for a new governance arrangement for the new university he believes will emerge in the 21st century. Why shouldn't faculty and students be represented on American research university governing boards? While I obviously have serious concerns with Duderstadt's failure to deal with any of these issues in depth, I came to appreciate this book because of the challenging questions that it raises. It is best viewed as an attempt by an obviously articulate, intelligent higher education leader to inform an American audience about a wide range of very serious issues confronting the American research university, but the book could have had much more impact if Duderstadt had gone a step further towards engaging the reader in some of the very complex issues that he only superficially explores. ty ^ Government of Australia, Senate Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education References Committee. (2001). Universities in Crisis: Report into the Capacity of Public Universities to meet Australia's Higher Education Needs. Pages: 440. Price: $35.00 AUD (paperback). Reviewed by Robert Pike, Queen's University. Imagine a federal Senate committee report entitled, "Universities in Crisis," which contains a copy of a letter sent by the minister responsible for higher education to the president of the committee of the most senior university administrators in the country blaming him for claiming that there is a crisis; and then going on to prove, to his own satisfaction, that no crisis exists. This is followed by a reply from the president which, after giving a long list of reasons why a crisis does exist, says that the country's best universities are not among the top 75 in the world, and probably not the top one hundred. Such are two documents appended to this Australian Senate report, and in order to make much sense of them, The Canadian Journal of Higher Education Volume XXXII, No. 1, 2002 129 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus we need to be aware of a couple of points. First, the Australian federal government is the dominant force in funding and monitoring Australia's 37 predominantly publicly-funded universities, and a few non-university institutions. Although each university claims a measure of autonomy to run its own affairs, the overall system is markedly centralized, and markedly subjected to government regulation. Secondly, the Australian Senate is an elected body, and has a majority of members drawn from the opposition parties (notably, Labour and Australian Democrat) so that any report which it prepares, critical of the policies of the neo-conservative Coalition government, can easily be subjected to accusations of partisan politics. This report is very critical and uses the letter from the president of the Australian Vice Chancellor's Committee (AVCC) to bolster its own case, whilst the government's denial of a crisis, especially since aimed directly at the president, is described in the report as "intimidatory" and "completely inappropriate" (p. 4). Such seems to be power for the course in the Australian political process, and the universities are undoubtedly the losers. So is there a crisis in Australian higher education or not? In the course of its inquiry, the Senate Committee listened to 219 witnesses and received 364 submissions, drawn from a wide range of individuals and organizations, and held 14 public hearings (clearly not a process, which could be easily replicated in Canada's more decentralised university systems). Most of this evidence pointed a severe deterioration, in the order of 20%, in the public funding of the universities since the mid 1990s and with this, a decline in faculty numbers in vital disciplines, a severe relative deterioration in academic salaries, and the erosion of the basic infrastructure of the system, not least in library services and scientific equipment — which have also been badly hit by the weak Australian dollar. In addition, in line with government policy aimed at increasing the private component of university funding (Australia is now in fourth place amongst OECD countries in the private component), greater focus has been placed on attracting more full fee-paying international students; on a series of entrepreneurial ventures — some of them rather dubious — and on a scramble to adjust programmes to meet market demands at the expense of the established disciplines. In the words of the report, The Canadian Journal ofHigher Education Volume XXXII, No. 1, 2002 130 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus "universities are being transformed from public, albeit autonomous, institutions, with a primary role of providing education and research for the longer term benefit of the broader Australian community, into institutions increasingly concerned with meeting the short-term, and overwhelmingly economic, needs of the market and ensuring their own financial survival. Many are now conceiving themselves as 'entrepreneurial universities' with an ultimate goal of financial self-reliance and, in some cases, global ambitions [but with an outcome of] "debilitating competition" (pp. 14-15). Since private financial sources have not nearly balanced the government funding cuts, the term "crisis" is, therefore, probably appropriate. But since much of what has been pointed to above could be equally applied to Ontario's cash-strapped universities, the root causes are not purely an Australian phenomenon. Not purely Australian perhaps, but the federal government's policies for funding the Australian universities do seem guaranteed to create severe structural problems. Universities are allocated a quota of indigenous student positions to fill (defined as fully-funded), and if they exceed these in terms of enrolment, the number of students over the quota result in public grants to the universities at a much lower marginal rate. At the same time, some positions can be kept open for full fee paying students who are often those with academic credentials which would not otherwise give them admission (this is aside from international students); and, at a time of severe financial constraint, the temptation to offer courses likely to appeal to such students is strong. Indeed, the focus on market demand — putting on courses, often vocationally-oriented, likely to attract enrolments — is intended to scrape every full and marginal dollar from public and private sources, but the outcome has been an often disastrous decline in resources for the liberal arts and sciences which the Committee deplores; and which was recently queried in an OECD study of Australian higher education (p. 22). For example, there has been a decline of 29% in physics staff at Australian universities since 1994, despite little change in overall enrolments (p. 8). And in many universities, courses in Asian languages are declining precipitously (nine out of twelve such languages taught at Monash University in Melbourne were not offered in 2001). Worst hit are many of the The Canadia?i Journal of Higher Education Volume XXXII, No. 1, 2002 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus 131 smaller regional universities with limited enrolment potential. Witness the state of the Northern Territory University "which no longer teaches English Literature and Philosophy, barely provides Engineering or Mathematics and has virtually abandoned Anthropology" (p. 149). The Senate Report deplores these trends, just as it deplores the government's tendency to boast about increases in university enrolments during its mandate whilst conveniently ignoring reference to the marginal funding policy. However, lying behind this mutual hostility are, in the last resort, incompatible views of the role of the university sector. As noted above, the report sees the sector's main purpose as public institutions working for the longer term benefit of the Australian national community; thus, for example, it takes a distinctly uneasy view of the 280 commercial ventures which the universities have entered into in order to raise private funds, and singles out some of these ventures — notably Melbourne University's move to establish a private satellite university — as the risky use of public funds. (By contrast, the government seems to look with favour on any private activity which will reduce its financial commitments to the system). The report seems on firm ground when it complains that many of these ventures are less than transparent in their activities; that they could lead to questionable activities (e.g., the University of Melbourne could arrange to have some courses only taught at the private satellite (p. 253); or could result in faculty bending to the privacy concerns of commercial business partners, then it is on excellent ground — witness the Nancy Olivieri case at the University of Toronto as the archetypal Canadian example of the latter. Yet, for all that, the report sometimes seems out-of-touch with reality in its suspicions of university outreach into the international arena. As a case in point, Monash is implicitly criticised for its stated plan to be an international and global university by 2020 (admittedly, a bit ironical in light of the present cut in its language courses); a criticism which would leave most North American university administrators quite bemused. On the matter of international outreach, reality also comes to the fore in the almost unique role played by the Australian universities in educating students from other nations. The proportion of international students in Australia is higher than in any other OECD country except Switzerland, The Canadian Journal ofHigher Education Volume XXXII, No. 1, 2002 132 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus and has risen from 6% of total student load in 1990 to 17% now (p. 73). The proportion of university income derived from international student fees was nearly 7% in 1996 compared with just under 3% in 1990 (p. 46). Most of the students come from Asia, and patently — as Melbourne University's establishment of a private satellite campus indicates — they are seen as a vital source of much-needed revenues, bringing $A531 million to the universities, and estimated $A2.9 billion in total to the Australian economy. Not surprisingly, in the light of the extent of this "intellectual export industry," the report walks warily in offering criticisms, but they should, nonetheless, be required reading for any other university system which wants to follow Australia's path. To wit: there is no clear evidence that the revenue to the universities is actually greater than the costs, because of the special needs of the international students involve considerable expense: (1) the students enrol mainly in commerce, business and engineering, thereby increasing the difficulties of the arts and sciences, as noted above; (2) international students are a finite resource and will find other venues if the quality of Australian higher education cannot be maintained, including — as is now happening in some Asian countries — expanded university facilities at home; and (3) a peculiarly sensitive problem, the possibility that some faculty attempt to keep poorly-qualified international students in residence through "soft marking," that is preferential assessment of their work. The actual extent of this problem is hard to assess, but it has been a hot topic in the Australian media, and one tenured Australian academic who publicly criticised his own university for soft-marking was actually fired (see pp. 73-78). Beyond all these criticisms, however, and the bottom line, is the view to which the report subscribes, that international student fees should not be treated as a substitute for adequate public funding, since they are used to support new or additional functions whilst the traditional functions languish. This is an argument which is hard to gainsay. I was travelling in Australia when this report was published. The media gave it fair attention, but the federal government dismissed it out of hand as, in essence, a one-sided polemic. It is far from that, though the Canadian reader can gain more from the report's general commentaries and arguments than from its numerous recommendations which are The Canadian Journal of Higher Education Volume XXXII, No. 1, 2002 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus 133 largely system specific. In sum, the following are particularly useful: its account of sociological research on access to higher education in Australia; its fine overview of the contribution of regional universities to their communities; the interesting description of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) which allows most Australian undergraduates to forego paying tuition fees until they have their degrees and are in employment; and, as noted, the commentary on international students and on education as an export industry. Beyond that, the report offers a vision of the role of the universities in community and nation which is fast fading in the face of the ideologies of privatisation and globalisation, but is overall far more scholarly and thoughtful than the government's focus on cost-cutting. But, do beware its generalisations. When Canada is contrasted to Australia as a country which is reinvesting in higher education, along with the United States and Britain (p. 316), I look at the current massive budget cuts in my own institution, and wonder where all that reinvestment is hiding itself. 4* Levin, John. (2001). Globalizing the Community College: Strategies for Change in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: Palgrave. Pages: 272. Price: $35.00 USD (hardcover). Reviewed by David John Schleich, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. Canada signed on to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) back in 1994. One of those services was education. Focused on 'pro-competitive regulatory reform' the even more recent GATS negotiations included, once again, education. John Dennison one year later in his landmark study of Canada's community colleges, Challenge and Opportunity, identified the "value-added quality" accruing to the educational programs of community colleges "when their curricula became more internationalized and, hence, more marketable" (p. 196). Professor Dennison knew that community colleges would "expand to include the sale of curricula and other products and services into foreign markets." The Canadian Journal of Higher Education Volume XXXII, No. 1, 2002