Questions for the eighties

For both sides of parliament the urgency of economic reform subsumed all other questions about higher education. Education policy was thus directed to answering substantial national challenges: what sort of education system would Australia require to assure confident participation in the global marketplace? How could government compel higher education to respond to international market needs? How could it be more efficient, focusing on issues of urgent national significance?

University leaders, too, were confronted with significant questions: how could they restore public faith in higher education? What strategies should they deploy to retain their independence from government? How should they respond to the new era of financial constraint – could they be more efficient, might there be other sources of income? “More scholar for the dollar” was the headline emblazoned in Rupert Murdoch’s new Higher Education Supplement, added weekly to The Australian newspaper since 1980.  As university and political leaders proposed changes, they were reported and debated by university staff and students across the sector - libraries bulge with their reports, reviews, comments and responses as all segments of the tertiary sector grappled with an era of reform. 

Peter Karmel – a grandfather of higher education policy, contributing to every review between Murray’s in 1957 and Bradley’s in 2008, the last submission just months before his death – considered, on reflection, the installation of market forces did not go far enough to justify the loss of institutional autonomy.  Simon Marginson considers the structural transformations that resulted to be an expression of human capital theory leading, he argues with Mark Considine, to universities focused on markets – an approach, Stuart Macintyre suggests, that undermined the collegial structure of the academic community.  All attest to a change in the structure of the university and an adjustment in its relationship to government. Reform, however, was not only structural: it also changed the ways that knowledge was negotiated and legitimised, transforming scholars’ inner lives, the academic community’s research priorities and universities sense of mission.

Not to be trusted

In the mid-1960s, in the aftermath of the Murray and Martin reports, the universities and colleges seemed to embody the best of what a democracy could offer its people. Researchers explored ideas that would benefit Australia’s technological development, underpin its social and economic progress and assure its political stability. With scholarships aplenty, higher education was open to talented students, almost regardless of their social background. Colleges assured a cost-effective way of making education available to as many as possible, with a focus on professional skills that would assure economic prosperity for the nation as well as for graduates. 

Radical students and academics exposed the ideological apparatus that underpinned this utopia, shattering the public’s faith in the inherent goodness of higher education and the absolute reliability of university research. They demonstrated that university knowledge was controlled and deployed for the benefit of an elite. They revealed the structure of the university as assuring the perpetuation of particular types of knowledge, excluding ideas that would lead to social reform. They showed knowledge to be a kind of power and that teaching and examination gave academic staff an authority that could be exploitative. Student revolutionary movements encouraged the public to question and challenge the university’s right to control knowledge.

Those unpersuaded by student radicalism – often people who also broadly derided the youth movement, with its fashion, politics and new ways of speaking – felt that the universities were mistaken to capitulate to student demands. And yet, issue by issue, capitulate they did, often in very public arenas. Professorial authority was diminished, raising questions about the value of the expertise the university itself proclaimed. Vocal and disruptive students, on the other hand, were granted a respect and responsibility that they denied their seniors. What sort of employees would they one day make?

Hopes that the new generation of students and a restructured higher education sector would develop into a source of social reform proved illusive. Ironically, this was because the student estate failed to fulfil the requirements of the established social and economic order that had been the focus of its criticism. Education that made students, through their dissenting views, better citizens did not necessarily secure for them the level of financial success they had been led to expect. The irrelevance student radicals had described was affirmed (in a different arena) by their under-employment. Higher education seemed decreasingly appealing.

Whitlam’s Labor had been highly supportive of tertiary students, not least since – once the age was majority was lowered – the youthful New Left supported him. But by the time of the dismissal, public sentiment was turning. If higher education was not there to support social and economic progress, what was its purpose? All the arguments that had aimed to shift the university to a more democratic, inclusive and less dominating structure were distilled into one catastrophic message: universities and the knowledge they purveyed were not to be trusted.

Argument: chapter structure

1. Technological development, based on university research, helped win a war, transforming the university’s relationship to society. Universities now saw a benefit in supporting research that might be useful for economic and social development and thus sought ways to fund research and utilise universities for the broader public good. Some academics, however, feared that increased government investment would also bring increased government regulation and control, undermining academic freedom and university autonomy.

2. Despite Menzies’ attempts to find ways to assure university autonomy, the obligations of universities to government that Menzies helped structure through the Murray review in 1957, hardened. Further through the 1965 Martin report, there was a much stronger emphasis in federal government funding and policy on economic instrumentalism.

3. Underpinning this economic instrumentalism was a public faith in the capacity of university research to support economic and social progress. It was useful knowledge that had clear public benefits. This faith was shattered by the student protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Staff and student radicals argued that universities were not havens of independent thought and useful knowledge instruments of state repression, social hierarchy and intellectual conformity. They challenged university governance, curricula and assessment and in doing so undermined public faith in the benefits of university and the objectivity of the knowledge universities produced.

4. After the oil crisis and with declining student numbers, it was clear that higher education needed reform. Equally important there were now a influential opinion makers both inside and outside the universities, appalled by the staff and student unrest of the 1960s and 1970s, determined to encourage governments to subject universities to the rigours of the market (both in terms of research funding and student funding). These neo-liberal thinkers claimed that market forces would improve the efficiency and quality of the system. These discourses gradually gained ground. Labor abandoned Whitlam’s free education policies and, in the Dawkins reforms, used government funding power to convert universities into public utilities controlled by the state.

5. Universities sought to use the new research and education markets as a way to regain their autonomy. Between a new competitive research funding environment and growing market-based values, politicians, reformers and university administrators increasingly considered the value of research in financial terms. All universities invested in frameworks and policies that reconfigured knowledge as intellectual property. Trading knowledge, they believed, would provide substantial income. Financial independence, they hoped, would loosen the government’s grip. Governments hoped that research commercialisation would provide additional funding for universities. University policies increasingly shifted from overseeing patent protection to claiming broader intellectual property rights over the work of academics and research students. Inevitably research and intellectual property became an area of contest between governments, universities and individual academics where complex questions about institutional autonomy, academic freedom, public benefit and social utility were all in play.

Argument

Towards the end of the twentieth century, Australian universities felt that they had to choose between government control and market forces. They chose the market. When they did, university knowledge was reconfigured as property. Its possession became a contest about ownership. University and academics became interested parties rather than disinterested scholars.

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.