A presentation to the Professional Historians Association conference in Melbourne, August 2016, on history as a policy tool

1. FR AN C ESC A BED D IE
P H A N S W & A C T
A D J U N C T A S S O C I AT E P R O F E S S O R , FA C U LT Y
O F E D U C AT I O N , U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A N B E R R A
POLICY HISTORY
LESSONS FROM A PROJECT
ON
THE BINARY SYSTEM OF TERTIARY EDUCATION

2. WHAT I WANT US TO TALK ABOUT
• How to influence the public debate and policy
development:
• Working from the assumption that history can be a useful policy
tool
• Options and obstacles
• Dissemination and impact
• Lessons from a project on tertiary education
• What can we do?

3. HISTORY AND POLICY
• “History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pre-tested
recipes…It can illuminate the consequences of actions in
comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for
itself what situations are in fact comparable.” Henry Kissinger
• “If we know…which elements of policy arrangements have
generated important adaptations for which sets of actors, we
are more likely to be able to identify which kinds of revisions
they would regard as acceptable and which they would view
as problematic.”
Pierson, US political scientist

4. HOW CAN WE INJECT HISTORY
• By teaching the five ‘c’s’:
• a challenge in the face of the push for STEM
• By employing historians within government?
• By engaging historians from outside
government?
• Making more ‘relevant’ history?
• Advocating for history

5. THINKING HISTORICALLY: THE FIVE CS
• Trace change over time
• Interpret the past in context
• Causality: not just facts but
why?
• Contingency: things don’t
happen in a vacuum.
• Complexity: life is messy

6. HISTORICAL ADVISERS
• “I believe that each department should appoint a historical
adviser, not to advise on the historical background to every
problem which a department has to manage – no single
person could have the expertise to do that – but to put the
policy-makers in contact with a source of such expertise.”
Lord Butler of Brockwell, 2013
• Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson in the September 2016
issue of Atlantic Monthly urge the next president to
establish a White House Council of Historical Advisers
• We believe it is time for a new and rigorous “applied history” — an
attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing
precedents and historical analogues.

7. DON’T OVERPROMISE
• Relevance is more than fine. It’s important. But let’s not
inflate expectations.
• And let’s certainly not give up on a pluralistic
commitment to the past, to teach our students and
convey to our readers the importance of alternative
narratives — and how to evaluate them according to
shifting values of the present, new evidence, and the
range of voices we need to hear.
• This pluralistic vision is not necessarily at odds with
relevance. But giving the news cycle outsize weight in
deciding what kind of history matters can lead to less, not
more, remembering.
Jeremy Adelman, Princeton

8. PASTEUR’S QUADRANT

9. DISSEMINATION AND IMPACT
• The History Relevance Campaign was founded by a
group of history professionals who believe that a united
voice in the history field and better communication
among its widespread practitioners would lead to more
influence and funding. They recognize that history
organizations are not as articulate as they could be in
demonstrating their relevance and that increased
evaluation of their impact in their communities could lead
to a better understanding of the value of history in
general.

10. SYNTHESIS
• We need to put easily digestible versions of our research
out in the public, and to peer-review the research behind
them as quickly and efficiently as possible. The goal
should be crucial new syntheses informed by a desire to
act on improving the human condition by imagining
multiple futures arising from a great variety of pasts.
David Armitage and Jo Guldi, The History Manifesto, Cambridge
University Press (available via open access)
http://historymanifesto.cambridge.org/

11. In the May
budget
Education
Minister Pyne
proposed
deregulating
tuition fees and
extending
government
subsidies to
students in
accredited
private
institutions, and
reducing the
government
contribution to
HE by c. 20 per
cent as well as
indexing student
debt payments.
2014
The Bradley
report
recommended a
demand-driven
system, better
articulation
between
vocational (VET)
and higher
education, and a
single tertiary
education
regulator. This
led to uncapping
of government-
subsidised
places
2008
Minister John
Dawkins
introduced the
unified system,
with CAEs
merging into the
university sector
and the
provision of
income-
contingent loans
(originally the
Higher
Education
Contribution
Scheme (HECS)
now HECS-
HELP)
1988
The Whitlam
Government
took funding
responsibility
from the states
for universities
and colleges,
and made higher
education free
for those who
could gain a
place on merit
1974
The Menzies
Government
response to the
Martin
Committee on
the Future of
Tertiary
Education in
Australia
introduced a
binary policy of
universities and
colleges of
advanced
education
(CAEs)
1965
Murray Report
prompted Prime
Minister Menzies
to make the
Federal
Government
integral to
financing higher
education and
research
1957

12. HISTORY AS A POLICY TOOL IN
TERTIARY EDUCATION
• I went back to the 1964 Martin Report on the Future of the
Tertiary Education in Australia whose report saw
government response that introduced the binary policy of
higher education and of Colleges of Advanced Education.
• To look for trends, constants and differences
• To stimulate thinking beyond the current system of higher education
• To encourage consideration of structures and purpose before
funding

13. WHAT CAN HISTORY TELL US?
The issues that confounded the binary policy
were:
• the elusive goal of achieving parity of status for applied
and advanced vocational learning
• the perennial difficulty of building seamless transfer
arrangements from one kind of education to another and
to the labour market
• the pivotal influence of status and funding of research on
institutional behaviour
• the quest for autonomy in a publicly funded and
regulated federal system.

14. DISSEMINATION
• Involvement of stakeholders in the project
• roundtable
• Report, summary and podcast
• Newspaper articles
• Conference presentations
• Discussions on social media (including the Professional
Historians Association of NSW and ACT blog
• Comments on government discussion papers
• Correspondence with ministers
• Submissions to House of Representatives inquiry and
NZ Productivity Commission

15. IMPACT OF THE RESEARCH
• Well received by those end users who were
personally involved
• Because it gave long-term context, revealed wicked
problems, stimulated discussion about the future
• Since publication in 2014, the web statistics are as
follows:
• A differentiated model for tertiary education: past ideas, contemporary
policy and future possibilities
• views on both VOCEDplus and the NCVER portal = 1,862
• downloads from both VOCEDplus and the Portal = 1,056
• What next for tertiary education: some preliminary sketches:
• views on both VOCEDplus and the NCVER portal = 1,570 plus 328 for the
podcast
• downloads from both VOCEDplus and the portal = 782
• Podcast
• 232 downloads

16. SOCIAL MEDIA
• PHA NSW & ACT blog post on the project published on
28 August 2014.
• The post prompted only one comment from those who
viewed it:
• 33 in August, 280 in September, 697 in October, 295 in November
and 57 in December 2014.
• This is the fate of the vast majority of posts on the blog.
• Why are historians whose craft is the written word lurkers rather
than socialisers in the online world?

17. REFLECTIONS ON APPLIED HISTORY
AND THE POLICY PROCESS
• Alert prospective audiences in the policy world to the possibilities
history offers evidence-based decision making.
• Advocate for history
• Through greater efforts to raise awareness of the historical research that is
underway and of the historical method
• Not just a collection of facts or analogies
• By showing the importance of history to policy, identity, community
• Tell the story of the past in ways that are pertinent to current policy
deliberations can demonstrate the power of the discipline
• Clendinnen: ‘you can’t do history on the opinion pages’
• But you can add historical evidence to the debate
• Engage with policy makers, for instance by following the example of
Science meets Parliament
• Launch our own History Relevance campaign!
• Start by engaging with our PHA NSW & ACT blog!

18. REFERENCES
History as a policy tool, a case study
Francesca Beddie www.makeyourpoint.com.au
A differentiated model for tertiary education: past
ideas, contemporary policy and future possibilities
Francesca Beddie www.ncver.edu.au
PHA NSW & ACT blog www.phansw.org.au