Hannahland

Staff-student ratios: whose doubts?

2012-02-15T09:59:00.000-08:00

The headline in this week's Australian Higher Education Supplement reads 'Doubts Raised over staff-student ratios'.

The story refers to the recent release by DEEWR of equity statistics in higher education in 2010. Skipping over the bit where the department was apparently late (is mid-Feb late for 2010 data?), the HES is more than a little vague about the 'doubts' about staff-student ratios.
Firstly, they hint that the data itself is doubtful, by highlighting the Minister's recent castigation of the 'quality and timeliness' of DEEWR data.

Then they quote a couple of professors to cast doubt on staff-student ratios. Richard James from Melbourne, a Professor of Higher Education, apparently told the HES that 'staff-student ratios were notoriously misleading'. Was he talking about this data? The HES says that the reasons for their notoriety (according to the useful Professor James, they say) is that sessional staff are not included in the data. But they are.

Marcia Devlin, chair of higher education research at Deakin (who also keeps a great blog, by the way), the HES claims, suggests that staff-student ratios are not the beat measure of good teaching.

The purpose of all this appears, on the surface, to be a jibe at DEEWR for their data. But it also seems intended to undermine the value of staff-student ratios in the first place.

Staff-student ratios seem to be an old-fashioned measure. The higher education sector seems to generally prefer to use softer methods of evaluating good teaching - and then convert them into numbers - than using hard facts that cost hard money. Nevertheless, every student knows that the more teachers you have, the better your learning experience is likely to be.

But for universities and governments, staff-student ratios highlight the uncomfortable fact that quality and financial input are actually related.

For The Australian, I would suspect that in giving academic staff hard and comparative data to take to their institutions, staff-student ratios seem a bit too Bolshie.

But lets get the facts. The DEEWR data does include casual teaching: so when one university has a ratio of one-to-47.62, there are no sessional teachers hiding to provide additional expertise. What it doesn't easily tell is the proportion of research to teaching - but even if your teachers are doing a lot of research, that may well be a good thing for students.

Students benefit not only from the connection between research and teaching and regular contact with researchers, but also from the reputation of their institution. Being able to say you studied at the place where Professor X discovered (insert famous discovery) enhances the value of your degree. This might seem spurious, but we all know (and Simon Marginson has told us) that the economic value of the degree is not only in what you have learned: it is also a 'positional good', something that symbolises your value relative to others.

In an era where governments and institutions insist that 'quality' and 'excellence' be converted to numbers, staff-student ratios are exactly the numbers that potential students, selecting their preferred institution, should use. The government should too, but they might not like the funding implications. Higher education researchers could usefully analyse the relationship between student performance (not just satisfaction) and staff-student ratios.

So, lets give the data The Australian didn't.

The top ten performers on staff-student ratio in 2010 were:

Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education

Melbourne College of Divinity

Bond University

The University of New South Wales

University of Tasmania

The University of Sydney

The Flinders University of South Australia

Monash University

The Australian National University

The University of Melbourne

The range is wide: 5.62-18.39. The top two are special institutions that perhaps have particular reasons for a lot of staff compared to their students. Bond university has a ratio of one-to 15.8, so the 'real' range for top performers is 15.8-18.39. Good on them. We might note that they include our wealthiest universities.

Lets take a look at the bottom ten. From best to worst:

Deakin University

Victoria University

University of Canberra

University of Ballarat

Southern Cross University

Edith Cowan University

Charles Sturt University

Macquarie University

University of Western Sydney

Central Queensland University

There are some good universities in there. Their staff must be working very hard. CQU is at one-to-47.62, but the rest range between 23.67 and 29.23. Perhaps there was something wrong with the CQU data. Or a lot of people are doing a lot of self-directed learning in central Queensland.

The middle section of the data is more numerous and more clustered than both ends, ranging from one-to-18.5 to one-to-22.68.

If it were up to me, this would be the measure that universities would start with when they advertise, when they showcase their quality and make claims for the resources they offer to potential students. It would also be the one that governments would use to evaluate whether the sector is sufficiently funded. It is not the only one of course: a lot of bad teachers don't trump a smaller number of good ones. But chances of finding a good one might be better when there are more.

It represents a simple, measurable and useful question: are there enough teachers?

Anything new is probably untrue

2012-02-07T14:12:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since I've posted an Ashby quote.

Education has for so long occupied the minds and driven the pens of thinkers that anything new on the matter would probably be untrue.

- Eric Ashby, 1941.

It seems relevant now (though I hope there is something new in my work).

Acknowledgements, the long version

2012-02-06T22:30:00.000-08:00

As I try to finish this thing, I think more and more of the people I should acknowledge. Not wanting to be too self-indulgent, I restricted my official acknowledgements in the thesis to one page, double spaced. Of course there are more. I will still miss people, for various reasons, but here goes for the long version.

Most of all (this is at the end of the official version, here at the start) I am grateful to my partner Thomas and my son Cooper. Their roles were the most difficult and their support the most important. To say that both were wonderful is a serious understatement. They went without the elegances of life while I left us poorer. They provided emotional, financial and domestic support on a too-regular basis. They understood this to be important. Thomas listened patiently to accounts of ideas, archives and conferences. Cooper dealt with countless school holidays, bored while I worked. They are both brilliant and much-loved.

Sincere thanks are owed to my supervisor, Stephen Garton, whose insightful, disciplined and generous guidance kept me from becoming too absorbed in details, distracted by tangents or impatient with tasks. In fact, I do not believe anyone else could have helped me do this particular project: I was fortunate indeed to have his help. More, despite other significant pressures, he was always available to me. I owe him a truly enormous debt.

As associate supervisor, Geoffrey Sherington not only shared his encyclopaedic knowledge of educational history but also kindly gallanted me to conferences and dinners, offering warm, supportive comments at every step. I am so grateful that he made himself so much more available than an associate supervisor normally should be required to do. I could not have done this project without his help.

The Sydney History Department provided a vibrant and nurturing – and yet intellectually exacting – research environment, for which I am grateful. In particular, Julia Horne regularly came to my presentations, discussed my project and offered friendly advice. Richard White did similarly, but also met me for a beer whenever a friendly chat would help me out. Alison Bashford, Penny Russell, Frances Clarke, Andrew Fitzmaurice and plenty of others offered thoughts and advice on papers, conferences, ideas, approaches and strategies. Mike McDonnell helped me in a thousand different ways, but particularly in cheering me on when things were at their worst.

My postgraduate colleagues have been a godsend: Emma Dortins, Sophie Loy-Wilson, Dave Earl, Matt Allen and so many others.

The Sydney Education Faculty has also provided important support, not only in my associate supervisor, but in other colleagues: Craig Campbell, Helen Proctor and my former colleagues at CoCo have helped in many different ways.

At conferences and in coffee shops, scholars from a variety of disciplines gave advice and commented on my ideas. I should thank Blake Stephens, Rohan Cahill, Mary-Helen Ward, Dick Selleck, Kim McShane, Iain Mason, Rebecca Sheehan, Tamson Pietsch, Yoni Ryan, Zora Simic, Phoebe Palmieri, Anna Clark, Kate Bower and so many, many more: their insights at all sorts of stages of my project helped to shape it.

Several people reviewed drafts and gave advice. In particular, thanks are owed to Lewis d’Avigdor, Peter Hobbins and Terry Irving for reviewing sections relevant to their work. David Rolph read drafts of the chapter on intellectual property twice, giving crucial advice to this very grateful non-lawyer. John Hirst and members of the writing group he hosted were very useful: thanks to Judith Bonzol, Greg Murrie, Emma Dortins, Penny Nash and others for their critiques and suggestions.

Mary Jane Mahony deserves particular acknowledgement, for she read and provided detailed comments on the entire second draft. She also acted as proofreader for a chapter, along with Amanda Kaladelfos, Dave Earl, Nicole Davis, Ruth Laxton and Judith Bonzol.

The project would have been impossible for me to complete without the financial support provided by the ARC, the University of Sydney Postgraduate Research Support Scheme, History Department grants-in-aid, ANZHES bursaries, a CSAA bursary and an AHA/CAL bursary. I have been very fortunate in my employers throughout and thank Ann Applebee, Yoni Ryan, Alison Bashford, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Mike McDonnell.

Of the many archivists to whom I am indebted, Julia Mant at the University of Sydney archives has provided the most support. Thanks also to staff at the National Archives of Australia and the Australian National Library. I am grateful to university archivists at the ANU, CSU, RMIT, UNE and UNSW as well as the Universities of Adelaide, Melbourne, Monash, Macquarie and Wollongong. Thanks too, to the NTEU for granting permission to access the FAUSA archives and to Don Aitkin, David Penington and Robert H.T. Smith for interviews.

In addition to my immediate family, thanks also to my extended family, colleagues and friends who were understanding and helped me in so many different ways. I have leaned on them heavily and appreciate their support.

The god-professor lives

2012-02-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

It is a long time since I felt compelled to photograph something on a university campus: probably because I've been spending all my time writing about them and visiting few but my own.

This photo is from inside the building in which I work. In this building it is possible to believe that the university and the work done within it really has not changed in a very long time. And in this image, it seems the god-professor is also firmly intact:

You could order the photographs of the members of staff of this department in all sorts of different ways: a row of three and one of two, for instance. Or you could do this.

Nearly there....

2012-01-29T15:41:00.000-08:00

My silence in recent months is noteworthy. I have been refining, revising, checking and adding facts. Understandably, I have not re-posted every minor re-draft of each chapter. But it has certainly kept me busy, thus the silence.

The good news: nearly there. Some very generous colleagues are proof-reading for me. I intend to submit on 21st February, 2012.

Draft abstract

2012-01-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

This thesis traces transformations in the history of higher education in twentieth century Australia from the perspective of the ownership and regulation of knowledge. Using primarily archival and oral sources from universities and governments, I argue that after the Second World War, the university’s place in society and the economy was radically altered because of challenges to its authority over knowledge.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Australian government increased its interest in research. Among political and tertiary leaders, this led to questions about the role of research and higher education for society, resulting in uncertainties about the ongoing independence – and thus reliability – of university knowledge. A growing reliance on higher education to support government aims linked the growth of universities in Australia to nation-building and the government’s economic strategies. But in the 1960s and 1970s, a small but influential group of university staff and students resisted the connection of higher education in Australia to established goals and values, exposing the university’s vested interests in society and its role in legitimising and perpetuating social and economic injustices. As a result of these questions about its integrity, in the 1980s, the university’s authority waned. This opened the door to increased control by government, who confronted changing economic priorities. Under new pressures, university leaders sought to regain their standing in society by reconfiguring their task in commercial terms. By the 1990s, the question about the role and autonomy of higher education had developed into a significant contest over the ownership and control of knowledge as a form of intellectual property. Unlike the public institutions they had been in the 1940s and 1950s, universities were treated as an industry, competing with others for government support and commercial revenue.

New Year's Eve

2011-12-27T15:26:00.000-08:00

Years ago I wrote a MA thesis on New Year's Eve in Sydney. The thesis ended up as an article in the journal Continuum and another in History Australia. I also did the entry for the Dictionary of Sydney and today, an article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Eminence

2011-12-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

We no longer question the category of eminence, for all our attention is now directed at how best to define it - and who benefits when we do.

Final Draft

2011-12-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

For the past couple of months I have been preparing this final draft of my thesis, which is now being reviewed with a view to planning final revisions.

The ownership of knowledge in Higher Education in Australia, 1939-1996

New introductory paragraphs

2011-11-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

Despite the urgent need for scientific research when the Second World War began, it did not immediately occur to the Australian government to turn to the universities for help. Universities and their scholars occupied a place in the nation’s high culture that seemed to preclude them from the pragmatic problems of wartime science. Professors seemed above such considerations, figures of public importance whose arrival, normally from Great Britain, was announced in the newspapers, as was their attendance at official functions, where their wives’ outfits were documented as items of public interest. Their standing enabled academic staff to promote the university and their disciplines in the public sphere. Within the institution, they protected truth by reading, teaching and by setting examinations that would test and assure the accuracy of their students’ learning. What they did not do, typically, was research.

Even in the 1940s, that was beginning to change as some academics, in the tradition of disinterested scholarship, pursued research with a determined independence from commercial interests. As the decades passed, research became more prominent, so that by the 1990s, it infused university life. Research seemed, by then, to define the very idea of the university, leading to a state where efficiency in the creation of new knowledge that was useful to others (even if only other scholars) was now the key source of academic distinction. Professors were not lauded as they had been, but many still had substantial standing in an industry to which their research contributed. Academics continued to promote their discipline, but their purpose, often, in doing so was to attract new research funding. New income was always needed to enable them (and, most probably, a whole team of collaborators) to keep developing new ideas and discovering new applications. The value of research would now often be described by the amount of funding it brought into the university, changing that institution’s sense of purpose. No longer a monument to the guardianship of truth, higher education was increasingly identified – particularly by government – as an industry, trading in the intellectual property that was the product of their work.

This transformation raises some important questions about the connections between university knowledge and the development of the nation’s identity and economy. The shift towards a substantial national investment in research assists in revealing the changing relationship between the government, public expectations, and Australia’s public universities. But what if academic staff and students did not wish to endorse government goals – what were the implications for academic freedom and institutional autonomy? Perhaps more to the point, as universities continued to change, what if they did seek to conform, assenting to a government imperative that they operate in an increasingly commercial manner? The commercialisation of higher education is a familiar story, but there are aspects that remain elusive. For while the character of the university as an institution and its importance to society and the economy have been frequently articulated, the ways the different parties characterised and sought to control university knowledge through research funding, teaching, examination and a trade in intellectual property is not as readily explained.

It is an important set of relationships, however, for in the twentieth century society grew to rely on university knowledge to a considerable degree. To be deemed the possessor of knowledge granted individuals access to professions and social standing: examining and legitimising knowledge conferred, then, considerable authority to the university over labour supply and social capital. Research fuelled economic growth, which in the second half of the twentieth century was underpinned by technological development, so that the control of research priorities became central to national economic management. Even parliamentary decision making was increasingly legitimised by expert opinion, making academic advice a key tool of modern democracy. Given this importance, was it really plausible in a capitalist democracy like Australia that research, education and the legitimation of expertise be left to the vagaries of an unelected, socially elite group of scholars?

Taking a longer view of widening participation: toward a history of social inclusion in higher education in Sydney, c.1945-1975

2011-10-04T18:22:00.000-07:00

Another new project, coming soon! Funded through the University of Sydney with MUCH gratitude.

Since the 1940s, the Federal government has regularly sought to widen participation in higher education. Each time new people have been brought into the university, so have new kinds of knowledge, re-shaping the university. This historical study will consider the ways that two universities navigated and debated the issues attached to widening participation in two key decades. It will enable us to contextualise and evaluate strategies for widening participation in the last seventy years and consider which approaches have led to a more socially inclusive university and professional environment for disadvantaged sections of the population.

Full project description here

Knowledge, nation and democracy in post-war Australia

2011-09-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

Project summary...new project, coming soon!

Nestled into the heart of the old Federal Parliament House was the parliamentary library, housing the knowledge upon which the nation’s decisions would be based. Indeed, as the monumental symbols of democracy and government have been progressively constructed in Canberra’s parliamentary precinct, knowledge has consistently held a prominent place. Just beyond the treasury, signifying the wealth of the nation, sit two other important symbols of Australia’s wealth. The National Library, embodying the nation’s accumulated knowledge and Questacon, a tribute to discovery and innovation. It is apt that the old parliamentary library now houses the Museum of Australian Democracy, for knowledge was the substance upon which the nation’s wealth was built, the material that informed and legitimised its democratic process.

In the 1940s and 1950s, when nation building was a key priority and democracy seemed a precious and fragile ideal, the Commonwealth government supported several mechanisms that would nurture knowledge. That is what this project is about.

The National Archives of Australia – itself a monument to the significance of knowledge to democracy – holds records of key knowledge institutions. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, the Australian Council for Education Research, the Australian National Research Council, the Australian Pacific Territories Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Atomic Energy Commission are among the archives that will be studied in this project. These organisations combine in the 1940s and 1950s with a new Federal focus on the universities, which the files of the Australian Universities Commission and the 1957 Murray Review will support. The project will seek out the common elements of nation building that cross these disparate activities as well as acknowledging their individual contributions to Australia’s development. In particular, it will look for connections between the economic goals of this corpus of initiatives and Australian hopes for its democracy.

Histories of Education: Ownership and Academic Markets

2011-09-13T23:04:00.000-07:00

The same rise in Higher Education Studies is observable internationally. Though many concerns were shared, most of necessity focused on their own domestic scene, a result of the relationship between higher education policy and trends in the sector on a national scale, though comparative approaches – or ‘international education’ was strengthening.[1] Substantial concern and analysis was, by the late 1980s and into the new millennium, directed towards the changes that are central to this thesis: the reconstruction of higher education as a market.

In the United States, where a significant for-profit sector has emerged, a substantial critical literature on ‘academic capitalism’ has grown.[2] And yet, despite North America’s marked distinctiveness in its for-profit sector in the 2000s, in the mid-1990s a comparative study by Sheila Slaughter and L. Leslie found that, between the United States, Canada and Australia, ‘academic capitalism’ had progressed most quickly in Australia.[3] That claim was based on their observation of the acceleration of the application of markets and market-derived values to university priorities. Universities had become connected to globalisaton, they argued, and the values of the new global economy were being articulated on campuses across the world with Australia operating as an early warning sign to the rest.[4]

Globally, more mobile students were now consumers, according to Slaughter and Leslie, their consumer choice expressed in course selection and a new prominence given to evaluation. In addition, universities in the United States were increasingly compelled, under a growing requirement to commercialise research, to act as businesses.[5] As academics observed the marketisation of their field, the body of scholarship critiquing it grew. In Australia and the United Kingdom, reduced government funding, scholars argued, had led universities to look to other sources of income, pushing institutions into a new global marketplace for higher education. [6] A burgeoning academic consensus, then, claimed that due to government policy, knowledge was commodified.[7]

The result of this, according to North American scholars, is a change in the structre of academic labour. American lierature mourns the loss of power among academic staff as profit elevated management and marketing over ‘mere content’.[8] Lyotard’s predictions of performativity – knowledge measured not by its value, even economically, but rather by its efficiency in producing more knowledge – seems to be borne out in new labour structures in universities across the Western world. In Australia and New Zealand this phenomenon parallels ‘audit culture’, the structuring of academic life according to administrative requirements to report.[9]

In Australia, these arguments have been repeated and recontextualised by Anthony Welch and other scholars, particularly in critiques of the Dawkins reforms and subsequent policies under Prime Minister John Howard. The ‘entrepreneurial university’ has even been analysed by the Federal government: in 2000 the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs under Michael Gallagher reported on “The Emergence of Entrepreneurial Public Universities in Australia”.[10] Best known, however, is The Enterprise University, an empirical study of changes in university governance conducted by Simon Marginson and Mark Considine, published in 2000. Their research found that, since the Dawkins reforms of the late 1980s, the environment in which universities were managed had changed. University leaders now had a range of incentives, which had not previously existed, to look to new markets, to adjust the administration of universities towards techniques more commonly associated with commercial organisations, to seek productivity increases and to centralise decision-making to smaller, more flexible leadership groups.[11] That research was part of a pattern of scholarship by Simon Marginson, who has focused, since the early 1990s, on relationships between education and economics.

In the 1990s, Marginson published four books, all from his PhD thesis: Education and Public Policy in Australia sought to question the dominance of economic reasoning educational policy, particularly the Dawkins reforms; Educating Australia gave a history of economics and education in Australia since 1960; The Free Market was a critique of neo-liberalism and Markets in Education considered the character of markets in education as they were just emerging.[12] Through each of these, Marginson interrogated the economic assumptions used in the formulation of education policy. He began by investigating the economic value of education. The value of higher education for graduates, he demonstrated, was not primarily in the knowledge gained and skills learned. Rather, the degree was a ‘positional good’, giving university graduates social and economic advantages derived from the degree’s credential rather than their substance.[13] Later, Marginson extended this to show that some credentials were worth more than others, depending on the reputation of the institution from which the credential was received – making global university rankings significant signifiers of value.[14]

The economic value of higher education was therefore the degree, not knowledge. For Marginson, this freed kowledge from the market. In Education and Public Policy he articulated a theory that university knowledge was an inherently non-market product. It was non-rival, meaning its purchase did not take it away from its original owner. The construction of markets around knowledge that were based on the possibility of owning knowledge as a private good, Marginson concluded, was therefore not consummate with the nature of the substance.[15]

This led Marginson to construe knowledge as a public good. In repeated economic discussions, this public good – meaning publicly owned commodity – exactly equates with the public good, for Marginson, meaning the public benefits of knowledge. This was to contrast neo-liberal economic interpretations of education as a commodity that had ‘positive externalities’, benefits that resulted from, but were not intrinsic to, the character of knowledge. Marginson instead separated education from knowledge and then recontructed knowledge as a commodity whose non-rival character required it to be publicly owned.[16] But there was a problem with equating public ownership with public benefit, for what if knowledge was not always beneficial? This ‘atomic-bomb’ question had a very odd answer – these were not public goods. They were, he argued, ‘public bads’.[17]

What exactly ‘public bad’ implies for the ownership of knowledge is not at all clear. Nor does the non-market argument hold up. Non-rival commodities – music downloads, for example – are commonly traded as privately owned goods. Who is to say that a public ‘good’ (or bad) could not be privately traded? The problem appears to be Marginson’s angle of analysis. Looking at education from the perspective of its economic good immobilises knowledge. That is, it means education and knowledge that, from other angles, may or may not be treated as commodities, must be. This position seems to result, eventually, in a significant anbivalence for Marginson. Whereas, in his 1990s writing, Marginson’s intention to critique commodified, privately traded knowledge is stated up front, in his post-2000 literature such an intention is no longer clear. In considering education as a global positional good and knowledge as a public commodity, in his recent work it becomes very difficult to tell whether Marginson is critiquing university entry into a global marketplace or providing instruction on how to do so to greater effect.[18]

Marginson’s assumption that knowledge must be a commodity of some sort leads him to attempt to assure, regardless of the marketised systems in place, that university knowledge remains publicly owned. I have instead taken the position that the ways of thinking about and treating knowledge are historically important. That treatment includes the process of commodifying knowledge, but also other treatments and claims. Rather than assigning to knowledge the category of ‘commodity’ before the thesis even begins, it is my intention to explore how, historically, it has been claimed, owned and sometimes commodified – and for what purpose.

[1] The Australian Comparative Education Society, founded in 1973, became the Australian and New Zealand Comparative and International Education Society in 1983. Australian and New Zealand Comparative and International Education Society, "The Australian and New Zealand Comparative and International Education Society Website," Murdoch University, http://www.anzcies.org/about.php. (Retrieved 7 September 2011)

[2] Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace : The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). S Slaughter, and Leslie, L, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997). S Slaughter and G Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2004). Marc Bousquet, "The Informatics of Higher Education," in The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change, ed. Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills (Stanford, CA: Alt X Press, 2003). ———, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008). Daniel S Greenberg, Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon, 2000).

[3] Slaughter, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University. pages

[4] Ibid. pages

[5] Slaughter and Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. pages

[6] Simon Marginson, "The New Higher Education Landscape: Public and Private Goods, in Global/National/Local Settings," in Prospects of Higher Education: Globalisation, Market Competition, Public Goods and the Future of the University, ed. Simon Marginson (Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2007). Michael Peters, Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of Higher Education (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2007). Mark Olssen and Michael A Peters, "Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism," Journal of Education Policy 20, no. 3 (2005).

[7] Leonard J Waks, "In the Shadow of the Ruins: Globalisation and the Rise of Corporate Universities," in Prospects of Higher Education: Globalisation, Market Competition, Public Goods and the Future of the University, ed. Simon Marginson (Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2007).

[8] Eric Gould, The University in a Corporate Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Greenberg, Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards and Delusions of Campus Capitalism. Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. Slaughter and Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy.

[9] Cris Shore and Susan Wright, "Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture Om Higher Education," in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, ed. Marilyn Strathern (FIX REF: ?).

[10]Anthony Welch, Australian Education: Reform or Crisis? (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996). ———, "Introduction. Challenge and Change: The Academic Profession in Uncertain Times," in The Professoriate: Profile of a Profession, ed. Anthony Welch (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).; Kim McShane, "Technologies Transforming Academics: Academic Identity and Online Teaching" (PhD Thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, 2006). Michael Gallagher, "The Emergence of Entrepreneurial Public Universities in Australia. Paper Presented at the Imhe General Conference of the Oecd Paris, September 2000," ed. Training and Youth Affairs Department of Education (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2000).

[11] Simon Marginson and Mark Considine, The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[12] Marginson, Education and Public Policy in Australia. Simon Marginson, Educating Australia: Government, Economy and Citizen since 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ———, The Free Market: A Study of Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan and Their Effects on the Public Good (Sydney: Public Sector Research Centre, 1992). ———, Markets in Education (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997).

[13] Marginson, Education and Public Policy in Australia., 131-134

[14] ———, "The New Higher Education Landscape: Public and Private Goods, in Global/National/Local Settings.", 43-48 Simon Marginson, "Global University Rankings," in Prospects of Higher Education: Globalisation, Market Competition, Public Goods and the Future of the University, ed. Simon Marginson (Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2007).

[15] Marginson, Education and Public Policy in Australia., 174

[16] Ibid., 172-179

[17] ———, "The New Higher Education Landscape: Public and Private Goods, in Global/National/Local Settings.", 37

[18] See Ibid.

Histories of Higher Education: Higher Education Studies

2011-09-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

In 1954, Harry Eddy of the Worker’s Education Association convened a symposium on New South Wales universities. Since that first meeting and from 1958 when the Federation of Australian University Staff Associations established the journal Vestes, Australian tertiary educators have analysed their own field. Many of the discussions they had have been used as primary sources in this thesis, reflecting as they do the key concerns of each period.

Journal articles and symposia contained opinion, analyses and observations of higher education from particular disciplinary perspectives – philosophy, political science, teacher-education, medicine – or detailed new approaches to teaching and administration in the universities. News from new universities and from higher education internationally was supplemented by statistical compilations, an outcome of the emerging discipline of demography.[1] Academics worked quickly. By the time of the publication of Ted Wheelwright’s 1965 collection on higher education in Australia, it was possible to compile a substantial ‘Bibliography for Australian Universities’. This provided an index to all the articles that had been written in various journals on the nature of Australian universities, on inquiries and commissions (mostly responses to the 1957 Murray and 1964 Martin reviews), material by and about the Australian Universities Commmission, articles about each of the universities, about the universities and government and a small cluster of articles about teaching and research.[2] Early scholarly attempts to synthesise this work and to systematically study Australian universities were led by W.F. Connell and other members of the University of Sydney Education Department in the early 1960s.[3]

Teaching came into focus in the 1960s. The Universities Commission had consulted the National Union of Australian University Students during the war and, as a result of ongoing student advice, the quality of teaching was a key concern among members of the Murray Committee, especially Ian Clunies Ross.[4] This led to a recommendation that universities do something to reduce their attrition rates.[5] In response, the University of Melbourne commenced a University teaching project in the early 1960s.[6] It was students, however, who pushed it further. Once student radicalism started to emerge, the National Union of Australian University Students considered it their task to produce educational research that supported student demands for changes to teaching and assessment. From these demands – and indeed, these student-researchers – the genre expanded and professionalised. In addition to the many academic development units hosted by universities, two centres focused specifically on research in Higher Education Studies: one at the University of Melbourne, and another at the University of New England in Armidale.

Collections of analyses of higher education policy continued to multiply from regular symposia. The same names recurred. Harry Eddy, Perce Partridge and Sol Encel regularly gave their considered opinions alongside the university administrators, Peter Karmel, Philip Baxter, Bruce Williams, Rupert Myers and, a special guest in 1969, the University of California’s Clark Kerr.[7] Drawing on the data gathered by the government reviews, experts specific to the field of higher education were just emerging, finding their own voice in the 1980s. Then, at the ‘end of the golden age’, higher education research began in earnest.[8] Some scholarly heroes emerged, including Ingrid Moses, John Biggs, Paul Ramsden, David Boud, Grant Harman, Lynn V. Meek, Richard James and Simon Marginson.

[1] Peter Karmel, "Comment on 'Supply and Demand'," in Higher Education in Australia, ed. E.L. Wheelwright (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1965).

[2] Naomi Caiden, "A Bibliography for Australian Universities," in Higher Education in Australia, ed. E.L. Wheelwright (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1965).

[3] Hugh Philp et al., The University and Its Community (Sydney: Ian Novak, 1964).

[4] Committee on Australian Universities, "Records of the Murray Review Committee Part Xi," in Committee on Australian Universities NAA/CAU (Canberra: National Archives of Australia 1957).

[5] Keith A.H. Murray et al., "Report of the Committee on Australian Universities," (Melbourne: Committee on Australian Universities, Commonwealth Offices, Treasury Place, 1957).

[6] C.E. Moorehouse and B Falk, "The University Teaching Project at the University of Melbourne," The Australian University 1, no. 294-307 (1963).

[7] Robert McCaig, ed. Policy and Planning in Higher Education (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press,1972). G.S. Harman and C Selby Smith, eds., Australian Higher Education: Problems of a Developing System (Sydney: Angus & Robertson,1972).

[8] Edward Gross and John S. Western, The End of a Golden Age: Higher Education in a Steady State (St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1981).

Histories of Higher Education: Institutional Histories

2011-09-13T22:58:00.001-07:00

Despite that overall expression of decline, individual histories of Australian universities tend to be cautiously triumphant. It is primarily through these instituational histories that the chronology of Australian higher education has been expressed, for broad histories have been sparse. Most of those that have been attempted are now hopelessly outdated: J.J. Auchmuty’s article "The Idea of the University in Its Australian Setting" was much-relied upon, but was written in 1953.[1] That date meant it failed to even reach the key turning point for Australian universities, the 1957 Murray review. This, at least was covered in Peter Tannock’s PhD thesis and his subsequent articles, written between 1969 and 1975.[2] While immensely useful despite their age, Tannock’s accounts are not all-inclusive either, focusing on the role of government in education. Stuart Macintyre’s recent book The Poor Relation, gives a more comprehensive overview of higher education, though through the lens of the social sciences, in the period since the Second World War. That study includes details of policy changes that have been only broadly outlined by Simon Marginson’s 1993 book Education and Public Policy in Australia.[3] Nevertheless, the angle of these works require that, to look beyond government policy to the disciplines and decisions of academics and their university leaders, the institutional histories are indispensable.

Histories of the oldest two Australian universities, the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, established in the 1850s, offer the most comprehensive accounts.[4] Institutional histories are also available for the University of Adelaide, inaugurated in 1876, and Tasmania, established in 1890, and the Universities of Queensland and Western Australia that both opened in 1911.[5]

Histories of the technological colleges that, at the time of the Second World War were not yet, but would one day become universities, are often available.[6] Patrick O’Farrell’s history of the first of these institutions to be created, the New South Wales University of Technology, established in 1949, is important, as it Foster and Verghese’s history of the Australian National University, which began in Canberra in 1946.[7]

The newer universities, established in the 1960s and 1970s, or converted from Colleges of Advanced Education in 1988, are rarely represented in this literature, though a new history of Monash by Graeme Davison is anticipated.[8] Narrower studies of institutions (such as residential Colleges of the older universities, the Sydney Association of University Staff and the Sydney History Department) are complemented by studies of disciplines (such as James Franklin’s history of Philosophy in Australia) and events (like Gavan Butler’s, Evans Jones’ and Frank Stilwell’s account of the struggle to establish Political Economy), but all still tend towards the elite institutions.[9] The elite universities also feature in the very small number of histories that focus on accounts of daily life in the universities. Other than Alan Barcan’s book on the Old Left at Sydney University and Alison Mackinnon’s recent history of women in American and Australian universities in the 1950s and early 1960s, studies of student life in twentieth century universities tend to be concentrated on late 1960s and early 1970s student radicalism.[10] Except for the odd study of a field (such as Academic Development), oral histories tend back towards the great men, focusing on Vice-Chancellors, policy-makers and disciplinary leaders.[11]

The key difficulty with our reliance on institutional histories is that it tends to be mainly the older and wealthier universities who are able to commission them. Vice-Chancellors’ autobiographies do nothing to diminish the dominance of elite institutions in the historiography.[12] Nor do broader accounts of Australian intellectuals.[13] Institutional websites all offer some history. The University of Notre Dame in Australia’s, authored by Peter Tannock is more useful than most.[14] Despite their absence in written history, most Australian universities, at least since the 1970s, were not elite. To assure a more comprehensive understanding of the system, it is therefore necessary to look to the discipline of Education itself.

[1] J.J. Auchmuty, "The Idea of the University in Its Australian Setting," The Australian University (1953).

[2] P.D. Tannock, "A Study of the Role of the Government of Australia in Education since Federation 1901-1968" (John Hopkins University, 1969). P.D. Tannock and I.K. Birch, "Constitutional Responsibility for Education in Australia: The Federal Government's Latent Power," Australian Journal of Education 16, no. 2 (1972). ———, "Defining the Limites of Commonwealth Education Power: The Drummond Case, the Federal Governmnent and the Universities," Melbourne Studies in Education (1973). P.D. Tannock, The Government of Education in Australia: The Origins of Federal Policy (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1975).

[3] Macintyre, The Poor Relation: A History of the Social Sciences in Australia. Simon Marginson, Education and Public Policy in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[4] Both universities have long histories written in the 1990s in two volumes. At Melbourne, Richard Selleck’s The Shop covers the period up to the Second World War while John Poynter’s and Carolyn Rasmussen’s 1996 book A Place Apart begins with the war. Sydney’s too is aplit at the Second World War, though the two volumes are more self-consciously paired. R Selleck, The Shop (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2003). John Poynter and Carolyn Rasmussen, A Place Apart: The University of Melbourne: Decades of Challenge (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1996). C Turney, U Bygott, and P Chippendale, Australia's First: A History of the University of Sydney Volume 1 1850-1939, vol. 1 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1991). WF Connell et al., Australia's First: A History of the University of Sydney Volume 2 1940-1990 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1995). Both universities have also more recently prepared shorter histories, see Stuart Macintyre and R.J.W. Selleck, A Short History of the University of Melbourne (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003). Julia Horne and Geoffrey Sherington, Sydney: The Making of a Public University (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2011).

[5] WGK Duncan and Roger Ashley Leonard, The University of Adelaide 1874-1974 (Adelaide: Rigby, 1973). Richard Davis, Open to Talent: The Centenary History of the University of Tasmania (Sandy Bay: University of Tasmania, 1990). Malcolm I Thomis, A Place of Light and Learning (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985). Fred Alexander, Campus at Crawley: A Narrative and Critical Appreciation of the Frist Fifty Years of the University of Western Australia (Melbourne: FW Cheshire, 1963).

[6] Michael White, Wait to Curtin: A History of the Western Australian Institute of Technology (Bentley WA: Paradigm Books Curtin University, 1996). Noeline Kyle, Catherine Manathunga, and Joanne Scott, A Class of Its Own: A History of the Queensland University of Technology (Alexandria NSW: Hale & Iremonger, 1999). Stephen Murray-Smith and Anthony John Dare, The Tech: A Centenary History of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1987).

[7] SG Foster and Margaret M Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996).

[8] An existing history of Monash by Simon Marginson only gives an account of the changes to the university under Mal Logan in the late 1980s. Simon Marginson, Monash: Remaking the University, Allen & Unwin (St Leonards NSW2000).

[9] James Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003). Gavan Butler, Evan Jones, and Frank Stilwell., Political Economy Now! : The Struggle for Alternative Economics at the University of Sydney (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2009). Sybil M Jack, History of the Sydney Association of University Teachers 1943-1993 (Sydney: University of Sydney Printing Service, 1994). Barbara Caine, "The Department in the 1970s," in History at Sydney, 1891- 1991: Centenary Reflections, ed. Barbara Caine, et al. (Sydney: Sydney Studies in History, 1992).

[10] Alan Barcan, Radical Students: The Old Left at Sydney University (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002). Alison Mackinnon, Women, Love and Learning: The Double Bind (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).

[11] For example, Julia Horne, Not an Ivory Tower: The Making of an Australian Vice-Chancellor. Based on Interviews with Michael and Kenny Birt (Sydney: University of New South Wales Archives, 1997). Alison Lee, Catherine Manathunga, and Peter Kandbinder, Making a Place: An Oral History of Academic Development in Australia (Milperra: HERDSA, 2008).

[12] See for example David Penington, Making Waves: Medicine, Public Health, Universities and Beyond (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010). Bruce Williams, Making and Breaking Universities: Memoirs of Academic Life in Australia and Britain 1936-2004 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2005).

[13] Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788 - 1972 (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1973). Terry Irving, "Intellectuals and Class in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s: A Working Paper and Bibliography," in Seminar Papers Nationalism and Class in Australia, ed. University of Queensland Australian Studies Centre (Brisbane: Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland, 1981). White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980. Brian Head and James Walter, eds., Intellectual Movements and Australian Society (Melbourne: Oxford University Press,1988).

[14] Peter Tannock, "History of Notre Dame University Website," http://www.nd.edu.au/university/history.shtml. (Retrieved 24 June 2011)

Histories of Higher Education

2011-09-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

Progress, despite its link to university research and education, is not normally the dominant narrative of twentieth century university history. Considering the growth of higher education in size and importance across the Western world, this might seem surprising. Crises in the universities, however, have been declared with regularity throughout the twentieth century. Contemporary titles internationally demonstrate the loss that scholars of the university express: The Last Professors, The Fall of the Faculty, The University in Ruins.[1] In Australia, titles have included On the Brink, and Why our Universities are Failing.[2] The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee published a booklet about the crisis in the universities in 1952.[3] On the surface, there is no evidence yet that, in the approximately sixty years since, academics have ever collectively declared the crisis over.

At this stage, this will lead into a section on Institutional Histories, Higher Education Studies and Academic Markets (last one needs a new subtitle...any suggestions?)

[1] Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[2] P Coaldrake, and, Steadman, L, On the Brink: Australia's Universities Confronting Their Future (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998). Geoffrey Maslen and Luke Slattery, Why Our Universities Are Failing: Crisis in the Clever Country (Melbourne: Wlkinson Books, 1994).

[3] Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, A Crisis in the Finances and Development of the Australian Universities (Canberra: Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, 1952).

Technology and the University

2011-09-11T04:21:00.000-07:00

[another segment of my draft Intro]

Technological progress, based on scientific discovery, was the marker of modernity as economies and cultures sought mechanisation, automation, speed and constant change. While this occurred in Australia as it did across the Western world, its global emergence is a narrative in which Australia rarely features. As a result, historians have not closely considered the significance of Australian technological development, particularly in its relationship to the universities. North American historiography displays the reverse tendency. The importance of the growth of twentieth century higher education, in a substantial body of North American scholarship, was that it underpinned technological innovation and produced a skilled workforce that assured the United States’ economic dominance. In Australia, Irving & Connell and other historians have pointed to the skilled workforce, led by ‘technocrats’, that transformed Australia’s post-war manufacturing capacities. And yet, despite this evidence that technological development and technological education were central to Australian post-war modernisation, the structures that enabled their skilling have been largely ignored.

An exception to that broad neglect, in Governing Prosperity historian Nicholas Brown documents the post-war rise of the universities among the key social changes of the 1950s in Australia. He positions the technological turn in the universities within the larger, longer debate between liberal and vocational education – a debate that, as Andrew Spaull’s history of education during the war suggests, signalled a decline in university autonomy in relation to government. Brown’s observations of the debate between general and specific tertiary education, however, could just as easily apply to other professions (architecture, medicine) as to the growth of technological disciplines.

There may be a strategic reason for this neglect. Australian scientists regularly invoke a narrative that would be disrupted were they to also make historical connections between technological development and economic growth. In popular press and pleas for sympathetic government policies, Australian scientists often articulate one of two historical arguments: firstly, that Australia has fostered innovation but not development and secondly, that industrial development in Australia occurred despite, not because of, its universities. These are both narratives of achievement in the face of adversity: a scientific redux, perhaps, of the valiant colonial bushman. They point to Australia’s proud record of technological invention. But those technologies – and often their inventors too – almost all move overseas in this narrative, costing Australia by compelling industries to buy back the nation’s own innovations and inviting governments to reverse the policy failure by investing further in science and to implement financial incentives to ‘reverse the brain drain’.

This image of disconnect between Australian innovation and university education and research helped to nourish a particular vision of Australian universities, one that was inserted into popular consciousness by criticisms directed against higher education from the 1930s to the 1980s. Australian universities, the public imagined, more closely resembled late-medieval British colleges than American bastions of innovation. The scholarly community, envisaged as gown-wearing, port-sipping elites, was only slowly supplemented by images of academic scientists developing progressive technologies in clean, modern laboratories. The celebration of institutional technological achievement in Australia was thus largely confined to histories of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR, which became the CSIRO). While the task of that government body was to support industrial development in ways that universities found more problematic, the divisions between the types of institution have been too starkly imagined. That is not to suggest the division was not real. Indeed, for reasons this thesis will explore, in the view of many academics and politicians, for some decades technology did not seem to belong in the universities. It does, however, belong in their history.

The shift towards technological knowledge in the universities was not only contentious because of a division between utilitarian and liberal aims in higher education, though Brown was right to point to this as one of its elements. In the late 1970s, philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard suggested that the transfer of university attention from scientific observation to technological development constituted a shift that challenged the legitimacy of the university’s authority over knowledge. If Lyotard was right, defending the university from a shift towards technology was not just a defence of liberal knowledge over vocational training. It protected a past epistemology that defined the university’s traditional role in society.

According to Lyotard, the modern university (since the German Enlightenment and the French Revolution) were founded on two modes of legitimacy, or authority over knowledge, both based on scientific research norms. One form, derived from German idealism, stated that scientific knowledge legitimised itself – that is, the value of knowledge was knowledge itself (just as Newman argued for ‘knowledge for its own sake’ in The Idea of the University). That suggested that knowledge was elemental – it was life, or spirit. The state had no authority over this knowledge – indeed, only knowledge could “say what the state and what society are”.

The second mode of legitimacy did not sit easily with the first, according to Lyotard, and it eventually overtook it. In this, knowledge was part of a larger narrative of human liberty. Knowledge was legitimised, not by mastery, but by consensus. Knowledge was thus found to be ‘truth’ or ‘untruth’ by the people, in this heroic myth, as a part of their struggle for freedom – a mode of legitimacy that had expression in democracies. National universities, as democracy emerged, were thus established in the name of freedom, argued Lyotard, as the struggle (by researchers) to win control of knowledge was considered a necessary component of the struggle of democratic people to rule themselves. This second mode of legitimacy meant that university knowledge to become about action rather than truth. It was through observable benefits that the value of science would be evaluated and so science became what the people required it to be – technological. Its value was not initself: it realised when it worked. Given that authority was now located in the people, not in mastery, the university was not necessarily more able to offer technological solutions than anyone else. Knowledge was not ‘life’ or ‘spirit’, it was merely another tool to effect progress.

Lyotard’s interpretation of the logic of legitimacy and the changes rendered by technological change seem a long way from the task of nation-building that preoccupied Australian political and civic leaders in the post-war period up until the economic reforms of the 1980s. But concerns in the universities that appear to mirror Lyotard’s analysis did emerge with each change. No voice was sufficiently influential, however, to prevent a shift towards an emphasis on knowledge that would support the progress the nation sought.

Histories of Science

2011-09-11T04:19:00.000-07:00

[From a section of my draft Introduction]

It was scientific knowledge, in particular, that they sought – but this preoccupation was still quite new. In 1952, at the Centenary of the University of Sydney, leading Australian scientist Ian Clunies Ross recalled the words of William Charles Wentworth when the Bill for that university was introduced in parliament. Wentworth had listed the great thinkers he imagined would emerge from Australia’s first university. Not one of them was a scientist. The great change of that first century of scholarship in Australia, argued Clunies Ross, was the ascendancy of science. As the twentieth century progressed, all other disciplines were made subservient to science: the social sciences building themselves into a kind of “poor relation”, as Stuart Macintyre described them.

Science ascended gradually. The slow progression from imperial exploration to national science in the nineteenth and early twentieth century has commonly been seen as evidence of Australia’s growth and maturity – though as both Peter Hobbins and Tamson Pietsch demonstrate, scientific connections with Britain and the Empire were maintained long after scientific ‘independence’ was achieved. The rise of institutions such as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the development of disciplines, academies, societies and universities are depicted – for example in collections such as as those edited by R.W. Home and Roy Macleod – as providing the intellectual infrastructure for the nation.

While scientific knowledge thus shifted from an exploration of Australia to research for Australia, it was nevertheless not ‘owned’ by the nation. Biographies – Ian Clunies Ross among them – and popular histories emphasise the scholarly discoveries and leadership achievements of scientific heroes like Howard Florey and Marcus Oliphant. Attribution of discovery, as historian of science Mario Biagioli, points out, is a marker of the ownership of knowledge. That is because scientific discovery mimics literary authorshop, he suggests. But Biagioli contends that all is not as it seems. By focusing on observations of a world that exists beyond the author, science challenged authorship’s ability to ‘own’ knowledge. Science, he argues, posited ideas and realities that could not be easily owned at all, contesting traditions of authorship and copyright. And yet, in Australia, histories of science, making regular gestures to British imperialism, emphasise the power of science in owning and controlling the world. Histories of science highlight the colonial power asserted by science in Australia and the racial and imperial assumptions informing its applications, particularly population health management. These, historians of science contest, in line with Foucault, can constitute ownership claims by humans over nature, a kind of imperialism of the knower over that which they know.

The history of science repeatedly demonstrates that human power over nature was enabled by science’s claims to methods that objectively described reality. This gave science an authority unavailable to other types of kowledge. The university, in appropriating science as the proper function of the university, also appropriated its authority. Other disciplines and activities – history, economics, sociology, even cooking (‘domestic science’) sought, particularly in the ‘social sciences’, some of the legitimacy scientific knowledge had acquired. Scientific authority certainly augmented the university’s entitlement to the guardianship of knowledge – to possess truth and its purity, or ‘universal’ knowledge, as Foucault described it. As the twentieth century unfolded, however, science became useful, rather than merely true. The methods of research and discovery led not just to new knowledge but also to new technologies, inventions, medical advances and industrial processes. With so many benefiting personally and financially from its technologies, who would own knowledge now?

Contesting knowledge

2011-08-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

What the banks are to money, the universities have become to knowledge. Over around eight centuries, the power of the university has increased so that – perhaps with some parallels to the medieval church – its authority over knowledge is very nearly absolute. The university built an economy based on knowledge: as it was produced, knowledge was reinvested into the community of scholars, prompting further growth, ever-enhancing the university’s growing monopoly over knowledge. As centuries passed, other communities and institutions lost their purchase on knowledge as the university’s control of it grew. The church, the state, trade guilds, patenting offices, commercial laboratories even academies of science all lack the legitimacy possessed by the university. The university decides what knowledge is, and who may have it and benefit from its fruits. Modern nation states have been built on the power university knowledge has provided. Democracy itself depends on flourishing and widespread knowledge. But the university’s supremacy did not go uncontested. In the second half of the twentieth century, knowledge was the object of great bloodless battles as the state, industry and commerce tussled for its control. That contest is the subject of this thesis.

In Australia, the growth of higher education is associated with nation building. Like its economic structures, health systems, schooling and national infrastructure, then, university history is normally viewed through an institutional lens. In the period from the 1940s to the 1990s, the significant transformations are therefore considered to be the growth in student numbers, changes in government policy and the number and form of institutions. What the institutional perspective does not do, however, is consider the changing nature of the substance at stake as the university’s role changed. By approaching the history of universities from the perspective of knowledge, new anxieties become evident. The moral role of knowledge and the struggle to maintain the university’s civilising ideals; the tensions between university autonomy and national strategy; the relative value of collective and individual academic knowledge; and the search to quantify the value of knowledge, to find a money-equivalent – all issues that transformed academic priorities and institutional relationships.

The changes this thesis considers emerge in the Second World War. Universities and their members, during the war, were no less bound to its duties than their fellow citizens. Having learned, since the Great War, that battles might be better won with science, research infrastructure was this time better prepared, resulting in spectacular advances in knowledge. This demonstration of the value of university research and education to the nation was, for the universities, a mixed blessing. The new investment in Australian universities that resulted from their growing usefulness also brought greater scrutiny. Governments increasingly sought to interfere in university business. As the decades passed, university autonomy seemed less and less plausible. And yet, the university’s responsibility for the health, safety, civility and prosperity of the nation continued to grow. In the decades that followed the war, investment kept increasing. The alliance of university knowledge to the state was strengthened.

It was an imperfect, uneasy alliance, however, for academics were not all readily tamed. Further disrupted by student revolutionary movements in the 1960s and 1970s and then by the economic reforms of the 1980s, towards the end of the century the universities’ relationship to government tended to be far less convivial. Scholars struggled to retain their authority over knowledge as society’s stake in it grew. The complex diplomatic, political, economic and cultural transformations of the second half of the twentieth century required significant quantities of research in every field. And yet, despite that increased reliance on universities for the national good, by the 1990s, government looked upon higher education in a different way. Instead of national institutions requiring public investment, university research seemed an industry, competing with others for government support and commercial income.

Science and technology dominated this transformation, but this is not just a history of science. Focusing on knowledge more broadly allows consideration of a wider set of issues. The ways that universities characterised and negotiated their mission were associated with changes in the ways they thought about knowledge. New disciplines and ideas were included – or rejected – on the basis of an authority that the university gave itself. But Australia’s public university tradition implied that government ought to have a say in research decisions and educational priorities. Transactional authority, the claims of the purchaser over the substance they paid for, was the cause of significant tension as the stakes in higher education escalated.

The most observable change in Australian higher education between 1939 and 1996 is its size. Prior to the Second World War, the nation’s six universities were small and elite. By 1996 a truly mass system of tertiary education had emerged, where 36 universities educated 634,094 students, around sixty times the number enrolled when the war began. With every expansion, new types of students were included. Women, excluded at the start, outnumbered men by the end of the century – though still not in senior academic positions. Indigenous students began to participate from the 1960s. In all cases, widening participation not only resulted in new members of society gaining access to university knowledge, it also brought new knowledge to the university. The inclusion of feminist and indigenous knowledges, just two of many, added new fields and challenged old truths.

That led to struggles to transform curricula and battles over assessment, each reflecting a wider epistemological transformation. Observation of truths, protection of culture and mastery of discrete fields gave way to discovery, collaboration, innovation and uncertainty as scholars recognised the contingent and sometimes fleeting nature of fact. As the twentieth century progressed, the university’s guardianship of truth declined in importance. Research, the great strength of the sciences, became the coup of the university, as government, industry and the economy sought the growth that was made possible by new knowledge.

The PhD

2011-08-24T22:58:00.000-07:00

This is the script from a recent presentation I gave at St Paul's College, University of Sydney.

The university attracts tradition. The values of scholarship, even those invented recently, seem eternal and universal. Like religious ritual and trainspotting, university traditions give a sense of order in a fundamentally disordered process: the unknowable journey that is the discovery and production of new knowledge.

Education scholars Angela Brew and Tai Peseta found in their research that academics tend to be irrationally attached to the PhD process as they experienced it, even aspects that were plainly cruel. In her contemporary study of the PhD at this university, Mary Helen Ward has found that this kind of reproduction of educational experiences seems to succeed in enculturating individuals into disciplinary norms but as pedagogy is anarchic: Ward calls it ‘accidental’.

It is this chaotic and yet highly ritualised phenomenon that is our subject today.

In the medieval university, the journey from inception as a scholar to master took around 16 years, the doctorate up to around 20. The doctorate indicated attainment of substantial professional stature in law, medicine or theology.

It was from the German enlightenment that our contemporary PhD emerged, based not on scholarship, which had dominated the humanities tradition, but on a dissertation of original research. Spreading to America in the 19^th century and then to England in the early 20^th, the PhD was the trademark of the wave that made universities rulers of knowledge.

By the mid-twentieth century, national and international wealth sat firmly on the research that universities provided – not normally humanities research, it must be said, but that did not really result in the decline in the Arts that we would expect, despite our frustrations with being what Stuart Macintyre calls the “poor relation”. That, I would argue is because of the reliance of democracy on knowledge to legitimise its decisions. Democratic nations had for some time realised their dependence on universal education and literacy: knowledge that would enable people to rule themselves. But after the second world war, I suspect that a new reliance on knowledge was developing. Experts – ideally, impartial academic expertise – was becoming a new source of legitimacy for parliamentary rule. Somewhat analogous to Plato’s ‘philosopher kings’, Menzies’ 1957 reform of the university system was in part based on the need for universities that would provide the public and the politicians that represented them with expert advice on the very complex diplomatic, political, economic and cultural transformations that the second half of the twentieth century would require.

By 1947, when the PhD was proposed at Sydney University, universities worldwide had taken control of knowledge. As knowledge was produced, it was reinvested into the community of scholars so that over the centuries their authority had become substantial. Other institutions gradually lost their purchase on knowledge: the church, the state, trade guilds, patenting offices, commercial laboratories even academies of science by the mid-20th century all lacked the authority possessed by the university - an authority that was no longer based on its tradition of protecting old knowledge but rather on its ability to produce new research.

To read the rest of this presentation, see The Humanities PhD

Knowledge and technology

2011-08-24T17:33:00.000-07:00

The Second World War called for a level of technological innovation and economic efficiency unknown in prior conflicts. Robert Menzies, Prime Minister throughout many of the changes that followed the war, later reflected:

The Second World War brought about great social changes. In the eye of the future observer, the greatest may well prove to be in the field of higher education.

Universities were indeed required to change substantially. They needed to agree on the proper place of research, innovation and new disciplines; they had to consider the university’s role in education and training for new segments of Australia’s workforce; and they were compelled to negotiate new relationships with government and industry.

To keep reading, see: Chapter One: Knowledge and Technology, 1939-1957

Knowledge and the twentieth century

2011-08-07T21:23:00.000-07:00

The twentieth century, so often seen as a period of decline and loss for the idea of the university, was also a time of triumph. The university’s importance to society in the twentieth century grew with every change. Technological development, growth of the numbers studying at tertiary level, a realisation that knowledge fuelled economies and democracies: since the Second World War, universities became central to the public sphere. Change was often experienced by academics as a kind of bereavement, each challenge a ‘crisis’. Even in very new universities, the idea of ‘the university’ seemed old. It not only drew on centuries of history, it attracted ritual, tradition and myth. The values of the university – even those values that were relatively new – often seemed like they carried long tradition, and that they should be eternal and universal.

Change happened nevertheless. The ‘technological society’ that grew in Australia, as it did internationally, relied on a fundamental shift in the universities. In pre-war Australia, few professions required a degree. Even the most gifted of school students would only look to university if they were especially ‘bookish’. A limited number of their parents perceived the value of what, for many in Australia, seemed an incomprehensible desire for yet more study. After the Second World War, attendance at university grew until, by the 1990s, it was a truly mass system of education, theoretically accessible to any able citizen. This suggested that university knowledge, if it belonged to anyone, belonged to the public.

This certainly appears to be the way government thought about it. The wartime connection between university research and the national good facilitated a formal relationship between universities and the Commonwealth government. Impoverished universities looked eagerly to Federal politicians as Canberra began to invest in research to support the nation. As the decades passed, the investment expanded: new research bred yet more new ideas. Hopes for the nation were carried fervently by senior public servants, scientists, politicians and scholars. Australia would act as an exemplar to the world, they hoped, as knowledge supported its stable democracy, its connections with other nations, the health and lifestyles of its population and the strength of its economy.

Universities noticed that they were losing their grip on the direction of research. The early diversion of university resources to support the emergency of war set a precedent: the government would step in to ask the universities, at times of need, to support the nation that now supported them. Government would also increasingly seek to protect or to limit its investment. From the Murray report onwards, the questions were repeated: what priorities might be set, what savings might be made? Reasonableness was not lost on the universities, despite fears of increasing economic instrumentalism. For seven centuries, as Eric Ashby pointed out, universities “have learnt how to dissuade their patrons - princes, bishops, tycoons, alumni - from meddling in their affairs”. And so they continued to negotiate, cajole, irritate and plead for university autonomy and academic freedom – for only under those conditions, they argued, could the nation be reassured that it ruled itself on the basis of the best possible knowledge, without self-deceit.

The university’s legitimation crisis was embedded within this sacred duty. If political stability was dependent on academics who would “seek the truth and make it known”, what would happen if despite (or, in the Cold War context, perhaps because of) all their independence, they sought the ‘wrong’ truths? The politicisation of knowledge during the Cold War slowly hinted at what student radicals would finally expose: university knowledge was ideologically determined, perpetuating social hierachy and intellectual conformity. Despite fierce battles with professorial masters, the university’s relatively rapid acquiescence to radical student demands perhaps reveals some discomfort with the university’s responsibility for truth and certainty.

Certainly the guardianship of civilisation was a challenging calling in the twentieth century. After the Second World War, in the very moment that protection of civilised ideals seemed most important, it was simultaneously a difficult concept to continue to defend. Progress was, by contrast, more tangible and achievable. In addition, attaching the purpose of the university to technological development and economic growth aligned to government aims – and they did not require the university to sustain an absolute and unmistaken authority over truth. While some claimed that dissenting knowledge would instead provide a better foundation for a robust democracy, to many observers, dissent seemed wasteful and arrogant, diverting public money to self-indulgence.

By the 1980s these sources of uncertainty converged. The university’s guardianship of the purity of knowledge seemed nonsense. The purpose of the separation of government from the production of knowledge was called into question. The tangible value of the public’s investment was difficult to ascertain. At the same time, paradoxically, research and education were more important than ever, forming the foundation of national competitiveness in a global economy.

It was at this point that the universities, in order to shield themselves from government control, chose to enter the market, relying especially on the concept of intellectual property. But the values of the market transformed relationships in and beyond the university. Academic staff, no longer structured to ensure their position as disinterested scholars, were instead interested parties, competing with government, industries and institutions for the ownership of knowledge. The universities continued to trade on the reliability of their knowledge, derived from the tradition of independent scholarship and collegial authority. But now they traded for money. In so doing, they forged an equation between academic and financial worth that undermined the very structures that had made their knowledge uniquely valuable.