Powerful forces at work on a merger that does not add up
By Geoff Hanmer
8:58PM June 27, 2023

The proposal to merge the University of Adelaide with the University of South Australia is an idea that has been promoted by former Labor senator Chris Schacht for many years.

There are dinosaurs in SA Labor who believe the University of Adelaide is a child of the Adelaide Club, which Schacht and some others see as enemies of the Labor Party and the working class.

Not only is this not true but the University of Adelaide has the highest percentage of low SES students of any Group of Eight university.

As some senior people in the ALP have observed, Peter Malinauskas had an armchair ride to the position of Premier. The Opposition Leader, Liberal David Speirs, has not yet laid a glove on him and seems to have no idea how he might do so.

This is giving the Premier the idea that he has carte blanche to break his pre-election promise on universities, which was this: “Labor in government will establish a university merger commission to chart a path. It will include the leadership of the three universities and be headed up by an eminent commissioner with higher education experience.

“Its task will be to determine how the state can be best served by the university sector. Should the independant (sic) commission determine that a university merger is in the interest of the South Australian economy and the welfare of the people of the state, then a merger will be a first-term priority for a Labor Government.”

Malinauskas has decided to move straight to a merger of UniSA and the University of Adelaide using a carrot-and-stick method. The carrot is the provision of secret and probably ­illusory funding, the stick is the prospect of a university merger commission, which is what he promised. This is not a very good stick, but both university councils and vice-chancellors have been totally pliant to date.

Why are they so pliant?

David Lloyd, the vice-chancellor of UniSA, is regarded as a favourite to be inaugural vice-chancellor of the combined university. Some believe that University of Adelaide vice-chancellor Peter Hoj is well positioned to be the chancellor.

It is also possible that the current University of Adelaide chancellor, Catherine Branson, may end up as South Australian governor in 2026. This is speculation, but there must be some powerful forces at work.

Malinauskas’s pre-election statement said: “The harsh truth is that each of our universities alone are too small and too undercapitalised to make it into the list of top international universities.”

The harsh truth is that the Premier was wrong. In 2023, the University of Adelaide made it to No.88 on the Times Higher Education world university ranking, just behind the University of NSW at 71 and far ahead of its fellow Go8 member the University of Western Australia at 131.

The only “successful” merger the Premier and his consultant chums can point to is the merger, in Britain, of the Victoria University of Manchester with its close partner the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology 20 years ago. It cost at least £85m in 2004 money, about $250m today. This is a lot of cash, equal to the “concerning” deficit in the most recent SA budget.

There is no obvious source for these funds. The federal government can’t very well give the state a chunk of cash and then not hand out any to the other states, and the state government is already projecting deficits far into the future.

The likely outcome is that the bulk of the merger costs will be funded by the existing institutions, which will weaken the combined university, not strengthen it.

While the University of Manchester merger might be instructive, the decision of the London School of Economics and Imperial College to leave the University of London should give pause for thought. If the LSE, with 13,500 students, can be a world- class institution, then surely both the University of Adelaide, with 22,000 full-time equivalent students, and UniSA, with 24,000, can go it alone. Only one university in the top 10 and seven in the top 50 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities have more students than the University of Adelaide.

The merger is deeply unlikely to attract more domestic students, from SA or interstate, which is the underlying financial premise of the merger. If scale alone guaranteed success, then RMIT – one of the five largest universities in Australia with about 54,000 full-time equivalent students – should be high-performing. It is not.

If we want a successful SA university sector, and the state government has some cash, for goodness sake just give it to all three universities. If the success of the Smart State policy in Queensland is any guide, that will at least have a chance of doing some good.

Adjunct Professor Geoff Hanmer is the managing director of ARINA, an architectural firm specialising in strategic planning of university campuses. He is a professional fellow at UTS DAB and the associate director (professional development and programs) ARC ITTC for Advanced Building Systems Against Airborne Infection.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/powerful-forces-at-work-on-a-merger-that-does-not-add-up/news-story/cdca5f1608260f0c6b7fd4ed5d6ad716