Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Opening plenary - Challenging the neo-liberal danger
Saturday 30th July 2005

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David Taft

Education Officer, Monash University Student's Association

The unseen revolution in higher education

The higher education sector has undergone profound, yet largely unheralded, structural and cultural changes in the past twenty years. The Australian university has been unhitched from its traditional role of nation and culture building. The death of this ideal has occurred at the same time as a steep decline in public funding of universities, and a commensurate dependence on private income, as well as the embedding of universities in a competitive framework. These factors have fundamentally re-aligned the university’s mission.

The core objectives of the modern university are the interlocked pursuits of prestige and profit. This has caused the erosion of the core academic mission of the university, and many have hailed the death of the Enlightenment University – where the quest for knowledge is viewed as a legitimate and worthy end in itself.

The discourse of ‘excellence’ has replaced those of ‘culture’ and ‘knowledge’, and has become the guiding principle of the 21st century University. As Bill Readings points out, excellence is a meaningless term, and ‘The University of Excellence serves nothing other than itself, another corporation in a world of transnationally exchanged capital’. Australian universities have become strange combinations of private and public. They have increasingly corporate governance structures, are increasingly dependent upon private income and increasingly profit-driven. However, they still receive substantial amounts of public funding. They still function within a public regulatory framework. Ostensibly, they still exist as public corporations aiming to, amongst other pursuits, ‘promote critical inquiry within the university and within the general community’. Profit does not feature in the legislative objectives of any Australian university.

The central question confronting the higher education sector in Australia is that of funding. Despite an increasing recognition of the economic fruits that properly funded public universities can bring, public funding in Australia has been progressively dropping since the mid-1990s. Australia is the only country in the OECD where public funding of the higher education sector as a proportion of GDP actually dropped between 1995-2002. Commonwealth funding now accounts for around 40% of university revenue, down from 77% in 1987. Universities have, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, embraced students as their major revenue source, with almost all universities increasing HECS fees by twenty-five percent after the passage of the Crossroads legislation.

Silencing dissent

Coherent opposition to this new form of university has been muted. Staff, in increasingly precipitous and short-term work arrangements, have largely been unable to challenge this new form of university, or have limited their criticism to wages and working conditions. Traditional collegial forms of decision-making, such as academic and faculty boards, have been sidelined. Staff representation on University councils has been reduced, and external – meaning business – representation has increased. Power has been increasingly concentrated in executive-style university management. Many academics remember the case of Alan Patience from Victoria University of Technology, who had his email disconnected after criticising his university’s decision to purchase a corporate box at the footy. Another case demonstrative of the pressures on academics was that of Ian Firns of Newcastle University, who found evidence of plagiarism amongst his students and was asked by his university to remark the assessment in a much more ‘friendly’ way.

The situation for staff is likely to worsen. Reneging on legislation passed in late 2003, Brendan Nelson is now tying increases in funding from the Crossroads legislation to implementation of the government’s industrial relations agenda. This includes mandatory offering of individual non-union agreements, as well as forcing enterprise agreements to be ‘simplified’ – doublespeak for paring back working conditions.

Howard and Nelson’s agenda of silencing opposition is not confined to staff. The most intense criticism of this new university has come from student unions. Whether campaigning against the recurrent spectre of course closures in the humanities, or protesting against increases in HECS and the number of full-fee paying places, students have been the most strident opponents of the corporate university.

This is set to change. Legislation euphemistically titled ‘voluntary student unionism’ is set to pass through Federal Parliament within a month. Fundamentally, this legislation is engineered to silence a group who have been a trenchant critic of this and other conservative governments over a whole range of issues. This has always been the aim of voluntary student unionism, through its various incarnations. A leaked memorandum from the Kennett government was the most revealing indicator of the motivations behind VSU when it stated ‘We do not want compulsory student monies flowing out to anti-Kennett and anti-Coalition campaigns and other fringe activities of the hard student left’. Despite the rhetoric of choice ably parroted by Brendan Nelson, the motivation remains consistent. The current form of legislation is even more odious, as it is destroys essential services on campus as collateral.

VSU devalues and diminishes the university learning experience. The pursuits that have long constituted the holistic university experience - from debating clubs, to student newspapers, to student theatre - will either disappear or become cost prohibitive as a result of VSU. The long cherished notion that the university experience extends beyond the classroom is under threat. This correlates to the growing commodification of university qualifications in the last twenty years, and the proliferation of ultra-utilitarian courses, mostly in business and IT, that teach purely vocational skills rather than any form of analysis and criticism.

The future beckons?

The process of commercialisation seems set to accelerate over at least the next three years. Public universities, already confronting a crisis of identity as public institutions, will become increasingly private in their objectives, processes and governance. A 2005 DEST Issues Paper, Building University Diversity, asserts ‘the boundary between public and private institutions is blurring as financial challenges drive some public universities to behave in a more entrepreneurial way characteristic of the private sector.’ Although we can all be heartened by the closure of Melbourne University Private (MUP), the rationale for the closure was that MUP was no longer needed as the University was now able to enrol large numbers of full-fee students in the public arm of the university.

The trend towards user-pays university places will continue. We are likely to see an explosion in full-fee places, aided by the introduction of FEE-HELP, the loans scheme for full-fee paying places. This trend will extend to the creation of full-fee only courses in public universities. In a discussion paper released two weeks ago by Melbourne University, the possibility of confining places in law and medicine to postgraduate full-fee paying students was raised. Although touted as ‘radical’ by the Australian, this could become common practice in Go8 universities. Legislation capping full-fee paying places at thirty-five percent of course load will almost certainly be removed. This will further expose universities to market forces, and result in greater vertical differentiation between universities. The strong will get stronger, and the weak will get weaker.

Government support for the for-profit university sector – an overlooked pillar of the Howard government’s higher education agenda – will intensify. The Federal Government already provides substantial financial support to private providers, accompanied by minimal accountability requirements. Last year, it announced a multi-million dollar funding injection to assist the private Notre Dame University to start up a medical campus in Sydney, at the same time Sydney University was closing its nursing faculty.

This trend will be accentuated by competition from international full-fee providers, such as Carnegie Mellon University, which is currently seeking to establish operations in South Australia. The South Australian state government has already committed twenty million dollars to assist it. These providers will be bolstered by a loosening of the protocols that govern accreditation of universities.

Reasserting the public university

Solutions only arise when there is sufficient recognition of the problem. As I’ve noted, opposition to the changing nature of our universities has been muted. Beyond groups like the Association for the Public University, there has been little sustained criticism. There have been flare-ups around specific incidents like that of Firns and Patience, but very little in the way of genuine community debate about the broad direction the university system is heading in. Real debate and engagement must form the basis for future action. We simply can’t afford to let the next few years be quiet ones for those who support public universities.

National Union of Students website

National Tertiary Education Union website

Australian Education Union website

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