ALS: thoughts on freedom

Interview with Andrew Norton

Here’s a longish interview I did via email with Andrew Norton, who many readers may know from his writings at Catallaxy. Andrew is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and also works for the University of Melbourne. He wrote a paper on VSU that was published in August 2005.

You not only argue against the Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-front Student Union Fees) Act 2005, but also against the status quo. Could you summarise your position?

The whole VSU debate assumed that we needed these separate amenities or student union fees to provide student services. But this was increasingly becoming untrue even without VSU. Historically, the separate amenities fee was necessary because universities were not allowed to charge for tuition. If they were, they could have just combined the two charges. After all, what’s the point in having two fees for one bundle of services, some of which were academic, and others non-academic? But from 1974 to 2004 universities could not charge Commonwealth-subsidised students for tuition – HECS went to the government, rather than universities. The amenities fee was the only way to fund student services. In 2005, HECS was replaced with a student contribution amount that went to universities. In principle, universities could then merge all their fees into one. None of them did, because the maximum student contribution amount was too low. If the student contribution amount had been higher, the VSU bill would have had little impact.

I prefer the merging of the two fees because separate amenities fee funds have been quarantined from proper internal university budget scrutiny. While teaching has been starved of resources, student unions have kept their inefficiencies. We would not get these muddled priorities if all parts of the university had to compete for the revenue raised from students. Read more »

August 9, 2006 Posted by Sukrit Sabhlok | Education | 4 Comments