The PhD

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

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

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. 

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.