Draft conclusion

The twentieth century history of universities is so often seen as a story of decline and loss. By the 1990s, the university was left in ‘ruins’, according to Bill Readings.  But it was in many ways also a time of triumph for the universities. 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 – seemed like they carried long tradition, and that they should be eternal and universal. Universities and academics regularly felt that their job was to protect those values, particularly as government interests expanded. Ever the optimist, Eric Ashby felt the universities were well equipped:

Alarmists in the British academic world fear government control and cry: 'Hands off the universities!' I do not share this alarm, for universities have always depended upon patrons to finance them, and over a stretch of seven centuries they have learnt how to dissuade their patrons - princes, bishops, tycoons, alumni - from meddling in their affairs.

But while the university’s knowledge became more valuable in the world beyond the cloister, the values of the university itself decreased in worth, declined in prestige and even lost much of its importance to the academic community. An ever-ascending economic legitimacy was the substitute.

The mechanisms that legitimised knowledge from the Second World War until the mid-1990s were challenged and trasformed. The guardianship of the community of expert scholars was supplanted by the dominance of the god-professor. The ‘philosopher-kings’ of a democractic meritocracy shifted to the de-centred logic of democratic dissent. Dismantling a patron-client like relationship with the state, universities became a supplier of goods, accepting money in exchange for knowledge.

Knowledge was not a constant, unchanging substance throughout these transformations. It had been imagined, at the start of the Second World War, as a unified – but growing – body of knowledge. It was external to the knower and could thus be protected by the university and its community of scholars. The unity of knowledge was already crumbling when the student revolution transformed it into an internal, inalienable substance: it was the possession of the knower in the same way as their heart, mind and sense of smell. But the tough economic discourse of the 1980s and 1990s altered the subjectivity of this personal knowledge. Newly commodified, knowledge necessarily was made alienable again. But it was not reunited as a singular, external substance. Now fragmented, each piece of knowledge was ready to be traded. For this reason, by the 1990s, universities’ guardianship role had slipped. No longer protectors of a body of knowledge, universities refigured themselves as owners of private property. 

This thesis does describe a loss, then, but it is not because universities would have been better if they had stayed as they were before the Second World War. All evidence points to enormous benefits for knowledge as a result of looking beyond the university and responding to challenges faced in the community.

That traded knowledge is any less valuable admittedly sounds like nonsense. How could value be lost? Particularly when knowledge is a non-rival substance: transferring it anywhere would not take it away from its original owner. Moreover, it is not immediately obvious that the loss is of any great moment. At first glance it appears to be only the university, not society, that lost its wealth by losing control over knowledge – and that perhaps it deserved to.

It need not, however, have been a tussle at all. For the distinguishing characteristic of university knowledge was that it was public. It was not public property but it was placed in the public domain for scrutiny, examination, use and even transformation. As Mario Biagioli argues, knowledge can be private or public, but truth can only be public. Knowledge could be developed and used to serve interests, but the special reliability, the quality attributed to university knowledge was because it was public. 

Democracy needed knowledge that was useful and trustworthy. The economy needed graduates who could be relied upon. Exchanging the wealth of the university’s knowledge for money undermined the structure that assured its quality. Afterwards, quality knowledge became both hard to identify and difficult to maintain.

At first, this was convenient for government as, now measurable as money, the public value of knowledge could be quantitatively compared to other demands on the treasury. But the system would cannibalise itself. Monetary value might reasonably act as an indicator for quality at first, but before long it must create a crisis of confidence in the quality of university knowledge. The evaluation of university success, now measured in its financial efficiency, would imply that universities would increasingly seek more money in exchange for less knowledge – or, more probably, lower quality knowledge. Remnants of university authority over knowledge might be asserted in constructing arguments for increased class sizes, for example. It was the consequence of an absurdity: if quality university knowledge was indicated by its monetary value, how much funding should have been allocated to produce it? How much money was needed to buy money?

Riches and value

Riches are the attribute of man [sic], value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable.


Marx, Capital Vol 1, p 176












[Seems simple, but sometimes I need some of these little phrases in front of me to help the more confusing stuff make sense.]

They were wrong

The university was everywhere being reconsidered and restructured, its relationships transformed. In this decade, the structure of obligations within the community of scholars would change. The connections between universities and society would also be irrevocably altered. These changes were seen, by reformers, as a good thing. Knowledge, most assumed, would stay the same. It would be of a higher quality, many hoped. Produced more efficiently, the public demanded. But agents of change assumed that knowledge would be fundamentally the same substance it had always been, despite a radical trransformation of the conditions that protected it. They were wrong.

Do university and government strategy need to align?

One of the several thousand books I have been trying to read (all at the same time) lately is a written-for-politicians discussion about the relationship between universities and economic growth. It is based on an assumption that government's financial input for education is about government economic goals and questions whether education is actually able to achieve the things government hopes it will. It sounds fair enough, but I started to wonder.

For every time government does anything with the universities, the same old tussle arises. Government articulates what it needs. It refers to taxpayer dollars and public benefit. Sometimes it is explicit about economic goals.

The universities do similarly, describing fundamental values of the university, hoping that government strategy will align to the goals of protecting and pursuing knowledge.

Both sides seem to be convinced that they will only succeed in fulfilling their task as government or university if the other’s strategy is aligned with theirs. This received wisdom is especially strong where the line is drawn between government goals, public money and university outcome.

But what if this belief in the necessity of strategic alignment is false?

For example, the new Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Bill went through the Senate last week. This has been a source of great anxiety across higher education in Australia.

In particular, the universities were watching closely to see that their self-accrediting rights were protected (they weren’t). But since government accreditation is on the surface a perfectly reasonable mechanism for assuring minimum standards of quality, the strategic interests of universities and government contradicted.

“Self-accreditation is a central characteristic of true universities around the world”, said the Peter Coaldrake’s Universities Australia statement on an earlier draft of the TEQSA legislation.

Why would the government care about that?

Universities Australia said that the independence of universities  “underpin distinctive public benefits for our society”. It was the benefits, not the truthfulness of knowledge that Coaldrake believed would persuade government.

Even though the TEQSA legislation is all about quality, Universities Australia believed it would not convince government so say that university autonomy is a prerequisite to quality. When it was revealed that the London School of Economics took cash in exchange for a doctorate and some pro-Gaddafi propaganda, this undermines the reliability of knowledge emerging from that institution. The university’s autonomy from financial and political (and once upon a time sectarian) influence is what creates quality. But the universities lose sight of this themselves in the effort to align their priorities to the type of public benefit government will understand.

It is not government’s job to prioritise knowledge. What government sees is a partly deregulated and expanding system, which already carries questions in some areas about its quality and integrity. Government is there to ensure the public gets what it pays for. The problem is, government continually asks the universities not only to understand this priority, but to make it their own.

It is not the universities’ job to prioritise government strategy or even public need. Indeed, if they do, it is at the expense of the autonomous conditions they need to actually assure the quality government requires.

Strategic alignment has led to several levels of crazy. Every time government hints at a new strategy, universities scramble to align themselves to it in the hope of a better position in the system. And whenever Canberra hears of troubles in the universities, politicians and public servants try to grapple with the nature of quality knowledge and how to best run institutions that have a very different purpose to theirs.

This situation would surely worsen with a government department with too much responsibility for university quality.

What if the goals of government and the universities don’t need to be aligned? What if government could worry about expenditure, value for money, the knowledge economy and universities could worry about knowledge? They could each concentrate on their own tasks, talking to each other where needed, but basically each doing their own job.

For if universities were in fact to take as their own government’s priorities or if government were to assume the priorities of the university, neither would perform the function they should. So each rightly resists. But when the next issue arises, they perform the same dance, all over again.

Instead, if they were to accept their different roles, Government might not need to spend so much energy watching the universities’ every little move in a misguided attempt to en sure they are fulfilling government strategy.

Universities could avoid having to keep cajoling and convincing government about the public benefit of fundamental attributes of university-ness, like autonomy.

There are some practical problems to be sure. Restructuring the relationship would take work.

Accountability would need to be re-thought. It is no longer plausible for government to simply take university quality on trust, so universities would need to demonstrate as great a commitment to quality as they are asking the government to show to institutional autonomy.

Universities need to account for the government money they spend: they need to spend what they receive prudently, wisely and with a view to producing excellent research and great teaching. They always have, in fact.

Most importantly, government and universities would need a relationship where they can both articulate their priorities on their own terms, but also listen to and fulfill the priorities of the other.

At the moment, while each does each other’s job, neither is doing it very well.

I have lately been puzzling over the various arguments for levels of education (as in % of school leavers), credentialism, economic benefit of education. I'm not an economist obviously, but I've not yet seen an argument that quite adds up (so to speak). Anyway, I stumbled across this one, which articulates some of the arguments that float around.

"But my God, go to most places and try and get someone turfed out merely because he's too stupid to pass his exams - it'd be easier to sack a prof. That's the trouble with having so many people here on Education Authority grants, you see."

"How do you mean? The students have got to get their money from somewhere."

"Well, you know, Jim. You can see the Authorities' point in a way. 'We pay for John Smith to enter College here and now you tell us, after seven years, that he'll never get a degree. You're wasting our money.' If we institute an entrance exam to keep out the ones who can't read and write, he entry goes down by half, and half of us lose our jobs. And then the other demand: 'We want two hundred teachers this year and we mean to have them.' All right, we'll lower the pass mark to twenty percent and give you the quantity you want, but for God's sake don't start complaining in two years' time that your schools are full of teachers who couldn't pass the General Certificate themselves, let alone teach anyone else to pass it. It's a wonderful position, isn't it?"

Dixon agreed rather than disagreed with Beasley, but he didn't feel interested enough to say so. It was one of those days when he felt quite convinced of his impending expulsion from academic life.

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, Penguin, p. 170

The student estate

It was the age of the student. Even though student radicals were a minority even in the universities, they were loud. The New Left voice could be heard in the rhetoric of Labor politicians in State and Federal parliaments.  Opposition to Vietnam – a signature issue for student protest – was gaining strength throughout Australian society. That students had been right in this instance encouraged a broader invitation to students to take a place in the public sphere.  “The conscience of society” was the soon-to-become cliché.  In Britain, Ashby and Anderson called them the ‘student estate’, articulating for young university scholars a unique structural position in democracy. This role separated students from the institutional protectionism and pragmatic preoccupations of the first and second estates and even from the adult worries of the third. The student estate drew on youthful fervour and flexible, innovative thinking fuelled by rigorous intellectual training. For society, students could display issues of the day in a new light; they could offer different angles of analysis and articulate concerns that went beyond immediate or selfish goals. Students earned a bad name for themselves in the 1960s and 1970s to be sure: but there were also many who welcomed their assertion of this civic role.

How students should be?

University student radicalism is a historical icon of the 1960s and 1970s, but as a revolution its key characteristic often seems to be that it is long over. To many who were there and to those who wished they were, the era defines the way university students in some way ought to be. Youthful intellectuals rebelled against established structures. They challenged conventional thinking, themselves producing new, dissenting and irreverent ideas. Some of these images are truer than the mythic proportions of their telling might imply. Enshrined in memoirs and nostalgic histories that celebrate struggles to overcome various kinds of opposition, the intellectual and social concerns of student rebellion made a lasting imprint on the universities, even if the period failed to permanently shape the (mis)behaviour of students.