Is QUT a real university?

In 1989, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) was created with the hope of creating a local competitor to the University of Queensland. The resources given to it by the community have been immense, with real estate and subsidies worth many billions. With its prime location in the very middle of the city, next to the parliament, it has the basic resources to be the best university in Queensland. Let us have a look whether it has become a serious university by seeing if it is a place that is serious about whom it calls a professor.

One of the hallmarks of a real university is that you don’t get called a professor for being a high level administrator: you have to have been a serious scholar with some degree of national and international recognition before you get the highest academic title a university has to offer. Whilst it is thus quite normal in many universities that high-level administrators are not academics because the job requires different skills, serious universities will only hand out academic titles based on academic merit, not administrative merit. After all, professors are supposed to embody and profess the quality of the academics in their university! So the reputation and quality of these publicly funded universities stands or falls with how easy or difficult it is to get an academic title. I will let you judge the case of QUT.

Let us start at the top of the university, made up of the Vice Chancellor and 6 Deputy Vice Chancellors. All 7 of them are professors. The 2 people just below the VC on the QUT management website, the ‘Senior’ Deputy Vice Chancellors are Professor Carol Dickenson and Professor Peter Little. Let us look at their achievements and those of the others using two standards every other academic has been judged by in recent years in Australia: whether they have published in good journals and conferences, and whether their peers have cited their work. For publications we can turn to the rankings used by the journal lists of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise, wherein publication outlets have been ranked from high (A* and A) to low (B and C). For citations, there are various possible sources, but let us take the very generous and easily accessible Google Scholars information, a resource frequently used and recommend in Australian grant applications.

A complication is that one cannot find the CV of any of these DVCs online, which is unusual because normally academics are not afraid to let you know their achievements. Yet, QUT helpfully has a reprint facility and Google Scholar finds almost every paper from the last 50 years. Also, the QUT website does tell you whether they have a PhD and where it is from, so there is enough information to trace people’s academic careers from these sources. To be sure the results are not biased, the DVCs were individually approached to see if publications and citations were overlooked in this search (none responded with information on additional papers or citations).

Professor Peter Little has a PhD (from Bond university). He has one publication in 2001 registered at QUT (co-authored with two others) in a journal that is not on the ERA 2010 journal list. He has another paper from 1998, also in an un-ranked journal, with a total of 31 Google Scholar Search cites (including self-cites) up to 31.

Professor Carol Dickenson has 17 cites generated by two papers, one of which is a report from a ministry and the other in a B-journal on the ERA journals lists.

What about the next four DVCs in line then: Professors Scott Sheppard, Suzi Vaughan, Arun Sharma, and Tom Cochrane?

Professor Scott Sheppard doesn’t have a PhD, has no publications to be found anywhere and has been a diplomat most of his life.

Professor Suzi Vaughan comes from an art background. In terms of publications,  she has two book chapters,  an un-ranked journal paper, two conferences (see here), and 14 citations on Google Scholar. On top of this is a 2003 ‘art work’.

Professor Arun Sharma  is still producing as an academic, with an A*, 6 A’s and 2 B’s to his name in the 00’s alone, as well as some serious conferences. He has 40 citations from his QUT-registered publications.

Finally, Professor Tom Cochrane. He does not have a PhD. He has one B and one C publication on the QUT repository . His main publication is called ‘making a difference: implementing the eprints mandate at QUT’ and has been cited 21 times, bringing his estimated total number of Google Scholar cites to 44.

Let us for comparison look at the publications and citations of senior professor-administrators in other regional universities in Queensland: the University of the Sunshine Coast and the Southern Cross University.

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Sunshine Coast has hundreds of citations and dozens of articles, praised on his own promotional website.  The Deputy Vice-Chancellor, the Pro Vice-Chancellor International, and the Pro Vice-Chancellor Research, all seem to be solid academics with hundreds of publications combined. Indeed, they are still publishing and are encouraging some of the lower managers, who primarily have worked in government, to write papers too. The one person on the management team who is clearly not an academic is also not called a professor.

At the Southern Cross University, meanwhile, the VC, the Deputy VC, and the Pro-VC look very solid academics too. Together they have about 500 publications (papers, book chapters, etc.) and thousands of Google cites.

Let us now take a different comparison and look at what is normal within QUT, the school of management in the faculty of Business. Let’s look at the lecturers first for they are at the bottom of the academic hierarchy. One of the lecturers there had 5 publications, including an A on the ERA 2010 list. And at the senior lecturer level, the standards are higher: this senior lecturer for instance has an A and an A* and a whole list of further publications. Another senior lecturer has several C’s, B’s and an A* too, on top of 165 Google citations, which is more cites than all 6 DVCs combined.

What is normal at GO8 universities? Well, senior professors at GO8s typically have thousands of citations and dozens, if not hundreds, of articles that are in the ERA rankings. In economics at GO8 universities, it would be hard to even get tenure as a lecturer without at least a couple of A/A* publications. Professors with less than 500 Google citations are rare. I don’t know any professor at a Go8 without a PhD.

What are the criteria at QUT for being a professor? Well, the official QUT criteria for professors is that they demonstrate “leadership and authority in research and scholarship”. Judging by some of the DVCs this apparently does not include the need for either a PhD, journal publications, or citations. Who judges, you might ask? In the end, at QUT it is all up to the Vice Chancellor whose word on this is final according to its criteria.

Do these DVC professors then accept a lower wage as compensation for getting an academic title with their levels of academic output? Not quite: they get huge salaries of around 500,000 dollars each (see pages 44 and 45 for their salaries) and average ‘bonuses’ of 271,000 in 2011!.

I have not looked at all the Deans and other ‘lesser managers’ at QUT, but from a quick glance at ‘Creative Industries’, the situation seems the same as higher up. You might want to browse their list of emeritus professors who are supposed to be top scientists.

I think it is up to the reader to judge whether QUT takes academic titles seriously or not. Personally, I am amazed at the ease with which administrators there get professor titles. I want to see QUT adopt far higher standards and find myself wondering, whenever I meet a QUT professor, whether they are a real one or not.

 

Disclaimer: the views expressed above are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer (UQ). Previous writings on related topics are here, here, here, here, and here.

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conrad
conrad
10 years ago

I think you can probably find such cases at all universities in Australia, and the best you can therefore hope for is that you don’t have too many of these people (and QUT seems really bad).

At least at the lower levels, part of this is in fact somewhat legitimate. The reason is because in many departments, it’s actually very hard to find people who want to be HOD or take other seriously boring roles (e.g., deputy Dean of Teaching, Research, Student Affairs…). Let’s face it, if you have real research interests, why on Earth would you want to sit in crappy meetings all day about money, photocopier accounts, students numbers, satisfying government accreditation requirements etc. with a bunch of hopeless bureaucrats that couldn’t make it in private industry (and evidentally have H values less than many of us had as post-docs, so they wouldn’t make it in science either).

This means that unless you are lucky and get someone good that really wants to do it, you either have to force someone (who will probably just move if you annoy them enough and they are really that good), give them something in return (e.g., a promotion), or get some cretin who just wants to get up the management chain because they are not good at anything. If you have good management, you also wouldn’t want to get someone really good to do these crappy jobs because you would basically be taking someone away from doing something good. This means the best you can really get unless you are lucky is people who are okay (so people can at least have some respect for them) and that are not at level E. You then promote them to that level, so you get people at this level that are okay but not ace. So you can get professors that are not super, and for legitimate reasons (say, versus your examples, which don’t even come close to the okay level).

launcespeed
launcespeed
10 years ago

I’m gobsmacked by the salaries + bonuses.

Three-quarters of a million? Each? Not shared? In the neighborhood of ten times the 2011 median full time wage? Really?

That’s just… It’s… I mean is that really the most effective use of the money? What’s the ROI on a VC/DVC?

wilful
wilful
10 years ago
Reply to  Paul Frijters

Yes that was what stood out for me too. Three quarters of a million bucks and you’re not even head of the organisation. Departmental heads of bureaucracies have far harder and more significant jobs, with bigger budgets and total staff levels, yet get paid far less.

What’s the salary estimate of the VC?

Paul frijters
Paul frijters
10 years ago
Reply to  wilful

I would be surprised if his total package, including perks, is below 2 million.

desipis
10 years ago

That’s the best bit of UQ vs QUT trolling I’ve seen in ages.

hc
hc
10 years ago

One person at a university I know really well was appointed full professor on the basis of a single multi-authored paper in a fairly weak journal. The professional business schools are often (not always) the worst parts of the university.

Of course many administrators have very limited academic credentials and yet they often ineptly drive academic reforms.

The salaries these clots get for poor management of primarily publicly-funded institutions are a scandal.

Martin
Martin
10 years ago

If we’re talking all disciplines rather than just economics, I’m pretty sure Hugh White, professor of strategic studies at ANU and all-round ABC talking head doesn’t have a PhD.

Banananon
Banananon
10 years ago

QUT is built on reclaimed mud in more ways than one – everyone knows that.

After all they had to absorb the old BCAE campuses of MT Gravatt and Kelvin Grove ( famous for dance and theatre , don’t you know) and Kedron which were teachers colleges staffed by people mostly with diplomas. The Staff were told to hurry up and get a DEGREE ; no, on second thoughts admin said – they should just jump straight to a masters. Move on or out- many did move, one had a heart attack,not me- I was just a bemused bystander. .

At least, with the QIT campus they got the down to eath computer nerds and the more job ready ( none of that theory rubbish) law students. They pushed THAT for all it was worth.

Many credentials crept but you can’t make a silk etc. The spirit of enquiry and learning for itself was not at QUT , at least QUT up to 2000.

Australia will have to divorce the marriages eventually. Dawkins’ idea that we should only have one kind of tertiary institution was as stupid as Gillard’s thinking that 40% of the population should/would/could go to university.

It could be a question of age, after all QUT is young, or it could be base prejudice, as I went to UQ.

Duke of Brisbane
10 years ago
Reply to  Banananon

Friend, I believe that QUT is actually the oldest tertiary institution in Queensland, since y’all find the age of an institution important and such. The Brisbane School of Arts and Brisbane Tech College which became the QIT and then the QUT dates back to the 1870s, as I understand it, and was developed to train people in various arts such as engineering, and others. In them traditions you could say the UT is much like RPI, or MIT, or early colleges that trained doctors or lawyers long before universities did. Theory is taught there – I know because I am getting a degree myself and have asked them all – but it aint the kind of theory y’all might like because it involves the kind y’all need if y’all are working in a job.

Billy J. Jack
The Duke of Brisbane Town

Huh!
Huh!
10 years ago

The fact that QUT bestows honorary Professorship to its administrative heads without much publication credentials does not make it an inferior or un-‘real’ university. Many universities, including Harvard and MIT give honorary PhD degrees to famous people worldwide. Curtin university’s bestowal of honorary Doctorate degree to Malaysian shopping queen Datin Rosmah, Chapman University’s honorary double doctorate degree to Arnold Schwarzenegger do not make them any inferior university. These honorary degrees are given for strategic reasons, and I am sure QUT has its own. The credibility of a real university is not measured by whether ‘professorship’ is given to administrative heads, but rather on the amount of daily sweats, dedications, brilliance and performance of academic staff on a day to day basis.

Paul Frijters
Paul Frijters
10 years ago
Reply to  Huh!

:-) you had me going for a sec there. Very good. I think the Malaysian shopping queen should feel badly done by that all she gets is a doctorate!

Duke of Brisbane
10 years ago

Friends, I am getting on but I believe that them fine folks up there in the Gardens don’t care much. Now when I was a young man many decades ago, I worked at what is now a large WS BB and what was then a broker partnership with no degree at all. Why? Because they trained me on the job. Practice triumphs theory every time friends, and universities are now pandering to anyone with a pulse who can sign a loan application and get the basic grades to get in. So UQ is letting people study there too, but for what friends, what? Because employers who make the things and provide the services don’t care none about them fancy degrees – they want well rounded folks who are competent at being able to apply knowledge, not just demonstrate the knowledge. I am getting myself one of them degrees and I would like to know which of the Brisbane universities is better. I like the fact that QUT are in the city near all the big firms here (I live in the CBD) and don’t offer no professional victim degrees and have courses that seem ok by me. Do they really care whether they are UT or IT? Heck, the best universities in the world are IT – like MIT and CalTech. Take care friends.

Billy J. Jack
The Duke of Brisbane Town