In the last two decades at Australian universities, departments have primarily been funded using formulae that are based to a large extent on the number of Australian and foreign students that are enrolled in their majors, or are taught by their service courses. As such, there is a tremendous pressure on administrations and departments to increase enrollments at any cost – for instance by lowering course requirements, or removing requirements involving other departments and replacing them with in-house substitutes. As one consequence on this focus on enrollments, other factors such as research and teaching quality, or the needs of industry or the community, are considered secondary or are neglected altogether. Another effect is that department funding is subject to short-term fluctuations based on changes in student demand. [In contrast, in other countries such as the US, funding is usually not determined by rigid formulae, but instead changes slowly from historical levels in response to a combination of all the factors listed above.]
These factors have played a significant role in the recent USQ crisis, and as indicated in a letter to the most recent issue of the Gazette, have also had a detrimental effect on mathematics at the University of New England. In this post I would like to describe how this structure had largely destroyed mathematics at my old alma mater, Flinders University, in which the number of full time mathematics staff has dwindled from 19 during my time there in 1989-1992 to just three today, although a rebuilding effort is now being planned there, as reported last week in the Australian.
I graduated from Flinders with a B. Sc. Hons in 1992. At the time there were 19 mathematicians and 5 statisticians in the School of Information Science and Technology, which also included computer science. My graduating honours class was small – there were only two other students in it, and it would in fact end up being the last honours class in maths Flinders would have – but the maths program was otherwise very healthy at the time for such a small university, with a constant stream of post-graduate students, and many advanced courses.
In 1992, there was some movement in the Computer Science division to decouple itself from mathematics, in particular reducing the mathematics requirements in that discipline. Because of this, the School was eventually split in 1995 into three separate schools of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science – and the latter school promptly lowered their maths requirements, thus pulling a significant number of enrolments (and therefore income) from the Mathematics department. (Nowadays, the CS major at Flinders has no mathematics or statistics requirements whatsoever; for comparison, the CS major at UCLA requires six quarters of lower-division mathematics and one quarter of statistics.) [Update, 18 June: The B. Sc. (Computer Science) degree has recently been revised to include more maths and stats requirements, see comments below.]
This situation contributed to a significant funding shortfall in mathematics, leading to voluntary redundancy packages being offered to many of the faculty. By 1996 there was just eight mathematicians and one statistician at Flinders. Other departments such as Engineering and Physics also began reducing their maths requirements at about this time, exacerbating the situation. (To give one example, the Bachelor of Engineering (Computer and Electronics) degree offered at Flinders nowadays requires just three maths courses: two semesters of single-variable calculus, and one 3-unit course in probability and signal processing. A comparable degree at UCLA requires seven quarters of mathematics. The degrees at Flinders are currently being reviewed, however.) [Update, 18 June: The Engineering degrees have also been recently revised to incorporate more maths content.]
The shrinking mathematics and statistics departments were eventually recombined in 1999 with the computer scientists and engineers into the School of Informatics and Engineering (but now recently renamed the School of Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics). Nevertheless, the funding structure continued to give each individual department a strong incentive to lower requirements from other departments (with “hard” mathematics courses being particularly vulnerable to being cut), and mathematics and statistics continued to experience dropping enrollments and fiscal deficits. In 2006-2007 several more redundancy packages were offered, leading to the current situation with just three mathematicians and no statisticians as full time academic staff in the School. Coupled with similar losses in other departments, it now seems that many of the degrees offered by Flinders are no longer viable at their desired levels of quality, simply because there is not enough capacity to teach the required courses.
As the above news item indicates (see also this announcement), there now does seem to be some efforts at Flinders to try to repair the situation, for instance by reviewing the degrees offered and the organisation of its departments, but it seems that there are serious structural issues, particularly the budgetary incentives that encourage departments to lower their course requirements at the expense of other departments (and of the quality of the degrees being offered), that need to be addressed.
[Update, 18 June: Some corrections in view of comments.]
[Update, 3 July: Some more information about the review of the maths department can be found here.]