Investing in learning hubs ‘could fix language crisis’

Australia could fund universities to avert the looming “extinction” of domestic expertise on Indonesia for a fraction of the cost of most foreign relations programmes, a forum has heard.

University of Sydney Asian studies professor Michele Ford said less than A$10 million (£5.2 million) a year would be enough to sustain a “hubs and spokes” mechanism for teaching the language.

Under the model, one university in each state would employ a cadre of academics with expertise across Indonesian language, economics, politics and society. Students at spoke institutions could attend the hub universities’ lectures remotely before gathering in classes arranged by local tutors to ensure a group learning experience.

Ford said plunging student demand had turned Indonesian into a “loss-making game”. The “very few” universities still teaching the subject had either come under “a lot of pressure” to do so, or were surviving on the commitment of academics who learnt the language “in the 70s”.

“Unless a university is wealthy, and increasingly universities are not, that is not sustainable,” Ford told the Asia Capability Forum at Sydney. “We need…government intervention and we need it to be smart. Having a hub in each state would be fundamentally transformative. This is not much money for the government, and the payoff would be incredible.”

In June, a report from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education warned that the teaching of Indonesian would be “functionally extinct” by 2031 without intervention. The report said barely 500 domestic university students were studying the language of Australia’s near neighbour, which has the world’s fourth largest population.

“It is often said that there is no country more important to Australia than Indonesia,” the report observed. “If…so, there is no country more important for Australia to understand than Indonesia.”

The committee’s chair, Victorian MP Tim Watts, said Queensland was on track to have just one student taking Indonesian in next year’s final school exams. Watts said there was a growing assumption that Australia’s Indonesian diaspora would make up for the loss of domestic expertise, but this was unlikely because language skills in migrant communities tended to dissipate over a generation or two in Australia’s “open” multicultural society.

“Unless we act now”, Australia will have nobody with deep Asia expertise in two decades’ time, Watts said. “It’s a complex system problem,” he told the Sydney forum. “It requires investing in teacher capability and…curriculum; requires investing in partnerships between higher education and secondary education. There are no quick fixes here.”

Watts’ report recommended several interventions from the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (Atec), including the establishment of a network of “Asian language hubs” to guarantee national teaching of “priority” languages and provide “cross-institutional access”.

Atec CEO David Turvey said the government had not yet formally responded to the report. “I can’t pre-empt…the government’s response but I like the hubs idea,” Turvey told the forum.

“We’re…going to be talking to unis next year about how they might think about collaborating and where that might include joining up for delivery in courses where they are struggling for demand.”

Turvey said Atec planned to undertake some analysis this year on ways that universities could band together without breaching competition law.

He also flagged a possible reorganisation of the A$44 million Outreach Program, which is allocated to universities based on their shares of students from under-represented groups. “Next year [we will be] looking at whether…there’s other ways to target that kind of effort,” he told the forum.

Indonesian ambassador Siswo Pramono said that as “rich” people, Australians had “all the facility” to learn the language of their northern neighbour. “If you reach out to Indonesia, which is the largest economy in South-east Asia, then you get the benefit,” he told the forum.

Pramono said he was mystified that despite being Australia’s most popular overseas tourist destination, Indonesia attracted relatively few Australian students. “Tourists have interest, but the young people…do not have that interest. It’s something that we need to resolve.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com