Editorial: Universities: Let state pay up or shut up

New Zealand has probably never had a university leader quite like Auckland vice-chancellor John Hood, who leaves soon to take charge of Oxford University. When he was recruited from the business world six years ago, universities were at a low ebb, resenting the challenge of economic restructuring to their finances and philosophy, struggling to maintain standards with greater numbers of school-leavers seeking tertiary qualifications and demanding value for the significant fees they now faced.

Academics had retreated to their cloisters, taking little part in the great changes to national life apart from exercising the universities' statutory role as "critic and conscience", at which they were rather ineffectual during the years of reform.

Dr Hood would be the last to claim he singlehandedly turned around even one university, Auckland. He pays tribute at every opportunity to the wealth of talented people he found there. But he tapped the talent and managed to engage it more constructively in national life. He did several other things besides.

He rescued the university's financial position, which was dire when he arrived, he improved the campus and inaugurated a new business school. More importantly, he strengthened the university's international benchmarks to see that its standards would bear comparison with the best in this part of the world. When our tertiary institutions were assessed for performance-based research funds last year, Auckland University won the highest allocation.

But from an outside vantage point, Dr Hood's greatest achievement was the reconciliation of town and gown. Some of the cream of Auckland business gathered to mark his departure by launching an academic endowment fund in his name.

The Hood Fund will give able Auckland scholars opportunities overseas and bring leading thinkers and lecturers to this country on visiting fellowships. The trustees aim to raise $10 million and it is testament to the city's regard for Dr Hood that nearly half that had been promised before Wednesday's public appeal.

That night he spoke of the declining proportion of university income that comes from the taxpayer. Student fees are not the only private source. Research grants, private endowments, royalties on intellectual property, the direct supply of services and joint ventures all add up to the point that direct Government funding provides only about a third of the modern university's revenue.

How galling, therefore, that as the Government's financial contribution proportionately declines it has claimed a greater right to control what universities can do.

This Government has changed the basis of its tertiary grants so that they depend less on the choices of students and more on the decisions of a politically appointed national panel, the Tertiary Education Commission. Dr Hood has been one of the leaders of the attempt to resist the threat this policy represents to autonomy and academic independence.

Academics will be quick to point out their independence may also be threatened by reliance on corporate contributions and research with a commercial return, which is true, although there is no suggestion the Hood Fund grants will be allocated other than objectively by a selection committee with impeccable credentials.

But Dr Hood offered the launch a vision of universities guaranteed still greater independence by the gifts of grateful alumni. Some US universities draw more than 80 per cent of their income in annual contributions from former students. This is a practice we could develop.

The generation that received a university education 20 or more years ago here should feel extremely fortunate when they compare the fees they were charged with those that governments, largely composed of that same generation, ask of students today.

It is fair and healthy that students make a significant private contribution to their higher education. But those now enjoying the private benefits of an almost entirely publicly funded education might consider it timely to put something back.

An alumni culture could finance truly independent universities that could select students on merit, support those without private means, and give the country a centre of learning and leadership. It could be Dr John Hood's ultimate legacy.