Veggie Burgers Revisited

The enduring relevance of Donald Rumsfeld to regulating and financing institutional responses to student need, and Minister Claire's cat

Some 20 years ago I had a presentation accepted at the First Year in Higher Education Conference… since rebadged as STARS (Students Transitions Achievement Retention & Success). As conference presentations go it’s done better than many, picking up 3 citations, but it never really set the world on fire. Rightly so as it falls some way short of a proper paper. With the release of a consultation paper on needs based funding, I am thinking that maybe its time has come, as the underlying conceptual framework remains useful in making sense of the current reality.

The FYHE ‘nuts and bolt’ session was titled “Are a few veggie burgers enough?”.
Read on if intrigued by what this has to do with Donald Rumsfeld and needs based funding, and please share if you want to make the veggie burger go viral.

Donald Rumsfeld - Known Knowns

I have always been a fan of the Johari Window as a tool for understanding how people interact. The window is comprised of four categories across two dimensions:

• Our conscious self - and extent to which we share or hide elements of this to others

• What is known about ourselves - and extent to which this is perceived by others or unknown to all.

This establishes the four quadrants of the Johari Window:

The Arena/Open area: Information known to self and known to others
The Facade: Information known to self, but hidden from others
The Blindspot: Information known by others, but not known to self
The Unknown: Information neither known to oneself or others

This Johari Window is thought to be the conceptual underpinnings of Donald Rumsfeld’s quotable quote on unknown unknowns that he synonymous with - and which formed the title of his autobiography.

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

The Johari Window and Disability

In Are a Few Veggie Burgers Enough? the Johari Window is used (at least in the slide deck and not the linked paper) as a way of understanding disability.

Some students identify as having disability and communicate this to their university - this is the Arena/Open quadrant and what we had referred to those as up-front disclosers.

Some students identify with having disability but choose not to disclose this to their university for various reasons, including fear of stigma, or just wanting a fresh start. These students fall into the facade quadrant.

Some students do not identify with disability - but disability might be observed or imputed though their interactions with their university. Institutional support processes sometimes require that they ‘register’ with disability services for support, making them new to disability, potentially requiring that they confront their own assumptions and blindspots about what they understand disability to mean.

Some students do not identify with disability, and any underlying participation restriction they confront, may be unknown to themselves and the broader university. Their support needs might be considered invisible, to themselves and others. Some in this group will muddle through, some might get a late diagnosis and switch to another quadrant, some might not make it through and withdrawn from their studies.

Veggie burgers in this context were a crap metaphor for understanding how differing student cohorts might express their expectations, and how universities might try (and fail) in creating inclusive environments.

Minister Claire’s Cat: Extending the Johari Window to Regulation and Financing of Student Needs

The known and unknown elements of the Johari Window can be rejigged in all sorts of ways. I’ve just shown how it can be used to understand the experiences of students with disability. As the needs based funding consultation paper has come out, my mind has conjured veggie burgers from the dark recesses of my mind.

Riffing on Donald, Johari, and veggie burger matrices, we might substitute the conscious self - for the manifestation of student need in Commonwealth higher education policies - and substitute visibility of student need in tagged funding.

The relationship between equity, and regulation, and financing is something I have spent some time thinking about. I did a fellowship with the ACSES formerly know as NCSEHE examining Equity Performance and Accountability. Some of the thinking in the table below emerges from analysis of equity related references in university strategic plans and annual reports. Bottom line, there is more going on in universities than just the equity groups prioritised by the government of the day.

If one extends one’s field of view slightly, there is a very long list of circumstances and attributes that are not referenced in Commonwealth higher education policy. For the purposes of this piece Commonwealth higher education equity policy is what I determine it to be - Commonwealth equity reporting (equity groups), the Support for Students Policy guidelines, and ESOS/National Code). The Commonwealth takes a narrow view - with embedded logic that their catch-some-but-not-all categories are likely to intersect with other groupings. Refugee background more likely to overlap with low socioeconomic status than being a billionaire, for example.

The long list of circumstances and attributes can be found in university polices (e.g. RMIT’s Special Consideration policy as a quasi-random choice) and criteria used in selection via the Victorian Tertiary Admission Centre’s (VTAC) Special Entry and Access Scheme.

All this is in service of a key point about needs based funding. Universities will always do much more in terms of supporting and responding to student needs than which the Commonwealth will compel, or fund directly. Funding to support invisible need - the quadrant neither referenced in Commonwealth policy, nor funded by it - can only come from an institutions consolidated revenue. Invisible need will continue to be serviced, whether the Commonwealth calls it out or not. It is what we do.

It’s also increasingly what we have to do given we are in the realm of universal participation. We must accommodate the rich diversity in our communities, even if this diversity does not align neatly with Commonwealth priorities and tagged funding eligibility criteria.

We could do more if regulation and financing policy better recognised the complexity of circumstances and attributes that Australian universities are working with - but for now we have a consultation paper on needs based funding.

The paper is reasonably light on detail, so we are still in the dark about how much need might be funded, what proportion of Commonwealth outlays will be earmarked for student needs, and how stringent funding rules and reporting requirements might be.

Andrew Norton has critiqued needs based funding (and pretty much every element of policy on the table), in this case on the ethics of funding student X but not student Y on the basis of marginal differences in socioeconomic status. This critique holds if University Q is restricted on spending needs based funding resources on student Y who might be in the 26th percentile of socioeconomic status and technically middle class, but perhaps not demonstrably different from a class colleague in the 25th percentile. The critique is perhaps more pointed, if universities have to wind back on services and supports for ‘invisible student’ need to satisfy funding and reporting obligations.

My sense is the Commonwealth would take a dim view of funding supports that were disproportionately targeting ‘invisible students’ outside of the scope of Commonwealth policy priorities and tagged funding priorities - even if they establish loose conditions of funding. My personal view is the financing and regulation needs a balanced hybrid approach. Demonstrating some contribution to the public good and aligned with Commonwealth priorities, whilst simultaneously allowing universities to choose their own adventure and select equity priorities that make sense for their operating context.

In the interim…. good luck to those engaging in the intricacies of the policy process, and I trust that the concept of the Minister’s Cat - neither dead nor alive - brings a smile to your face whilst you gobble down one veggie burger after another.