Premier Peter Malinauskas must justify the SA university merger
TIM DODDFollow @TimDoddEDU 3:44PM JULY 10, 2023
The merger of the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia is nothing if not ambitious. The two universities, with the critical backing of Premier Peter Malinauskas, confidently believe they can create a very rare species – the university with ideal attributes.
They say on the one hand the new institution will be a research powerhouse, not only in academic research but with its researchers working in close concert with industry and the community to deliver broader benefits.
On the other hand, they say it will also be a university that excels in teaching, offering students high quality courses, prepared with industry input, to produce graduates who are well prepared for jobs.
And it will increase access to students from disadvantaged backgrounds to give them 21st-century skills that open the door to well-paid careers.
To get an idea of the scale of the difficulty, consider this. No university in Australia comes close to the ideal the new Adelaide University is shooting for.
For example, last week our three top research universities – Melbourne, Sydney and UNSW – reached the dizzy heights of being named global top 20 universities in the 2024 QS World University Rankings. They got there principally because of their achievements in research.
The South Australian government will spend $450 million to facilitate a merger between the University of Adelaide… and the University of South Australia. The merger is expected to create an additional 1,200 jobs and educate more than 13,000 new students. It is set to generate an extra $500 million More
And while Australian universities are trying hard to get closer to industry in teaching and research, they’ve a long way to go.
In SA, Malinauskas is ignoring this experience and swinging for the bleachers, trying to push two very different universities together to create the perfect beast.
Both government and universities are cagey about what it will cost. The government has committed about $150m in direct funding as well as the earnings of a $300m perpetual investment. The universities are saying they will be committing roughly the same amount again.
This suggests that the full cost is around $300m, plus the earnings of the perpetual investments.
However we don’t know the detail of how this will be spent. Crucially, we can’t compare what the impact would be of spending the same amount on the existing three universities in SA and sparing academics and students the disruption of merging two of them.
The merger can proceed only if the SA upper house, which Labor does not control, passes legislation to set up the new university.
In the interests of the state, the Liberal opposition and the crossbench should jointly set up a public inquiry to extract all information held by the universities and the government about the merger, and properly analyse it before any vote is taken.
Big ambition is laudable, but it must be tempered with careful and publicly available analysis.
South Australia can’t afford to get this decision wrong.
TIM DODD
HIGHER EDUCATION EDITOR