Steven Schwartz (vice-chancellor)
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Steven Schwartz (born 1946) became the Vice Chancellor of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia on February 1 2006. He was previously Vice Chancellor of Brunel University in the UK.
Schwartz is a trained psychologist and a university corporate manager by experience. He attempts to cultivate universities to be more market-oriented, research-focused, accountable, transparent and held to higher standards, in the hope of improving the institutions' profiles and attracting more students, funding and researchers. This include building new facilities and developing new schools in the universities he has managed such as Brunel University and Murdoch University. His style of management is not without controversy.
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[edit] Education and early years
Steven Schwartz was born in New York in 1946. He worked for the National Institute of Health before completing a postgraduate degree at Syracuse University. He also worked as a journalist, authoring many articles for research journals, magazines and newspapers
[edit] Academic career
He began his academic career teaching at the University of Illinois. This lead him to University of Texas and then in 1978 moved to Australia working in a number of roles at the University of Queensland. He then moved to Perth to be the Executive Dean in the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Australia. In 1996, Murdoch University appointed Steven Schwartz has its Vice Chancellor. During his tenure at Murdoch University he realised the government had cut back funding. He introduced a number of Feeder Colleges, restructured the University to become more research-focused and developed new courses to attract additional students. By 2001, however, Murdoch staff had issued a vote of no confidence in him. As of the end of 2002, Steven Scharwtz was appointed the Vice Chancellor of Brunel University in the United Kingdom. Unusually for the state-run university sector in the UK, he hired new talent and retrenched sixty staff (1 in 8 of the full time staff) on the basis of poor research output. He hoped to re-mould Brunel University into a [[business] focussing on a more restricted set of niche areas where it had a competitive advantage and could hire talented staff. The proof of these changes was expected to be seen in increased research output and RAE ratings, bolstering the economic viability of the university in what is a competitive market of other universities faced with the challenge of reduced government funding per student. Similarly to his experience at Murdoch, this lead to staff action, including pickets in 2005. Shortly thereafter, Schwartz left Brunel, returning to Australia to take up the position of Vice Chancellor at Macquarie University.
Steven Schwartz has a reputation as an efficient and effective manager, leader and communicator, and in his current post as VC at Macquarie University he has begun to make similar changes to those in place at Brunel: refocussing the university around peaks of research excellence.
Professor Schwartz remains a strong advocate of the role of the University in promoting freedom of thought, and to improve our future choices. He also promotes increased choice in schooling as a powerful leveling device in society: effectively giving all parents the freedoms currently reserved for those who can pay for (private) choice.
[edit] Controversies
Some in academic circles say Schwartz's promotion of a market-orientated focus is inappropriate for a university. For example, at Brunel University when sixty staff members were let go, some by negotiations, and one forced redundancy, the Association of University Teachers put full-paged ads in the Times Higher Education Supplement to ask the public to boycott the university and show their emotional wrath. Hundreds of letters were received protesting redundancies and Departmental closures. Prof Schwartz responded back with ads to counter the claims, but left the University before the issue was settled. This controversy continues... with Google recently pulling advertising critical of Schwartz. Others of course agree with Professor Schwartz's view that the university is a business and must measure performance, profitability, transparency, accountability and quality. This includes aligning university resources to building better facilities and services, developing new courses, new revenue streams and promoting research that will deliver economic benefits to the academic community. Over time, he argues, universities can develop into niche and specialised areas that can help them become competitive. The biggest trade off are cutting courses in some unpopular courses, downsizing academic and general staff and reduced job security. Whether the cuts he introduced were the right ones, however, is open to question, as are his methods.
