Australian universities are in crisis. Under pressure to corporatise, they have become over-dependent on income from overseas students. The pandemic has exposed the fatal flaws in this model, sparking fresh debate. The outcome is critical to the culture of society as a whole.
The university as an institution basic to civil society has two purposes: original research, and the training of young minds; and the two must go hand in hand. Teaching methods are supposed to be based on the Socratic techniques of challenging assumptions and asking questions, with lectures by leading researchers, and tutorials enabling students to engage directly with highly qualified mentors.
A healthy campus has a lively cultural life – a dramatic society that attracts mathematicians as well as literature students, a debating club open to students from all disciplines. It’s an education that produces the kind of well-rounded minds that have served Australia so well in the past.
The experience of most students today is far removed from that ideal. Young friends tell me of tutorial groups larger in number than the average primary class; of lecture halls filled with overseas students struggling to follow by running translation programs on their laptops; of campuses where most of their peers call in only for a lecture, then have to rush off to casual jobs in order to earn a crust. And that’s largely the middle-class students. For working-class kids, faced with the prospect of massive HECS debts, it’s a lot harder to get in than it was almost 50 years ago, when the Whitlam government opened up free university education.
After decades of neoliberalism, universities are being turned into businesses. Vice-Chancellors operate as CEOs on vastly inflated salaries, with University of Sydney VC Michael Spence on upwards of $1.5 million. (An honourable exception is ANU VC, Nobel Prize-winning Professor Brian Schmidt, who requested a 25% pay cut when he signed up in 2016; he’s a man with a vision for education that’s all too rare these days.)
Meanwhile teaching staff are casualised and either given crushing workloads or left without enough hours to make a living. Wollongong University staff have just been forced into accepting a pay cut of 5-10% as an alternative to further job losses.
Experts have long been warning about the consequences of under-funding, especially since the Turnbull government cut funds by $2.2 billion in 2017. Apparently we can afford $50 billion for obsolete submarines, but only $17 billion for the entire university sector.
The immediate crisis requires an emergency bailout of $4.5 billion that would be a relatively small item in the overall federal budget. But the Government says no. In February PM Scott Morrison’s excuse for an education minister, Dan Tehan, warned VCs that instead they should “wring every last dollar” out of existing funding. In May the government explicitly refused universities the JobKeeper allowance, even though they face the loss of 30,000 jobs.
In NSW the lean and hungry Treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, is offering universities not a bailout but a $750 million loan guarantee, with the proviso that he expects them to make their operations more “sustainable” – neolib-speak for commercial.
Under this pressure the Group of Eight major universities, led by their well-paid Vice-Chancellors, are looking at a “Research Roadmap to Recovery”. Sydney’s Michael Spence said that without the return of overseas student in previous numbers it’s “all over red rover and it gets really ugly” for research budgets. The alternatives the Group is examining include mergers and that has set alarm bells ringing for Universities Australia and the Regional Universities Network, which fear losing research facilities at smaller institutions.
Australia is already well down the road of corporatising universities on the American model. The century-long undermining of liberal education there was documented by Frank Donoghue in his 2008 book The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. Of business interests he wrote: “Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual inquiry for its own sake led them to insist that if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts.”
It’s no accident that in Australia the humanities are under the gravest threat. Wollongong is considering abolishing its Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts altogether. The University of Sydney is planning to cut eight per cent of courses in the arts and social sciences faculty, which it projects will lose almost a quarter of its students.
Students and staff have published an open letter to VC Michael Spence warning: “The sudden and dramatic drop in the university’s course offerings, coupled with the devastating loss of talented and committed staff members, will lead to a long-term decline in the quality of education offered by the university.”
More than 2,400 years ago Socrates said: “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.” His dialectical method for training minds was anathema to the conservative authorities of Athens. They executed him for “corrupting young minds”. Whose side would Morrison, Tehan and Perrottet be on?
In his 2010 book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literary and the Triumph of Spectacle, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Presbyterian minister Chris Hedges wrote:
“For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge. To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological, and humanist ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilisation is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”
Judith White, a former executive director of the Art Gallery Society of NSW, holds two degrees from Oxford University, is author of the book Culture Heist: Art versus Money and blogs on the site www.cultureheist.com.au
Judith White BA (Hons), BPhil (Oxon) is a former arts editor of The Sun-Herald and a former executive director of the Art Gallery Society of NSW
Comments
12 responses to “Universities as businesses: a cultural disaster”
A challenging piece to read. Thank you.
In 1980 the upgraded Ballarat School of Mines was taking Bachelor of Engineering students with rank order of 50 out of 100. As an engineer first trained at RMIT and then University of Melbourne I was shocked. The engineering students at RMIT then mainly came from the Technical schools in Victoria. They would graduate with a Diploma. I worked alongside many Dipomates in my career. A high proportion of these made competent technicians, not engineers. But a competent engineer could gainfully employ several competent technicians.
Now we have rebadged all the Technical Colleges, and privatised the TAFES, and we produced too many substandard engineers and hardly enough competent technicians and tradies. Not the formula for productivity or creativity.
I feel we have too many univeristies, producing too many substandard graduates, and all trying to do “world beating” research. Market segmentation please. Or a thought on silk purses, or normal distribution curves.
And with the half-baked or ideological uncapping of university of places, VCs have a field day, ably organised by their omnipresent faculty business managers. A growing bottomline leads to a growing “compensation” package. One VC , hands on her swaying hips, championed her fellow VCs not to be coy about claiming their loot.
It’s time to heavy-dose this corporatisation epidemic.
My happiest memories are being at University from 1976 to 1982. I enjoyed the challenges and the chance to extend my knowledge of the world around me. Today Universities spend more time chasing students from around the world then they spend in teaching and research. The problem lies squarely in the Federal Government’s court. For Australia to grow and prosper and deal with issues such as Climate Change, with its implications for an already fragile environment or pandemics, such as we are experiencing, we need R&D and top level well trained scientists and other experts . The Government needs to realize that Universities need proper assured funding to do their job. We risk becoming the poor man of Asia.
Unfortunately, things are not that rosy at the ANU, despite the VC’s vision for a smaller university: https://medium.com/@actcasualsnetwork/open-letter-act-casuals-network-respond-to-anu-vcs-email-of-09-june-2020-d3c7d724e159. Universities across the country have been relying on casualised workers to allow top-heavy executive managers to pursue non-core business to expand bottom lines as encouraged by reduced Government funding for decades now. The end result of this market fundamentalist vision is a decline in University learning, teaching and a significant shift away from the humanities and social sciences to engineering, business and natural sciences.
Over the last twenty years in Australia the idea of the university has been corrupted by the adoption of the idea of the university as corporation, and the other side of the coin, the withdrawal of a growing proportion of government funding and more devastatingly the withdrawal of the concept of government responsibility for universities. Already in at least some universities here the idea of the lecturer as an expert in his or her subject who engages as an essential part of their job in cutting edge thought and research has been watered down. Some lecturers are allowed neither paid time nor acknowledgement of research. They are paid purely for teaching and tutoring, and a particularly heavy lecture load often beyond their area of expertise, while there is a special “class” of lecturer, usually with an already-established reputation as a researcher, who are employed primarily as researchers with minimal or no teaching. The whole concept is corrupted and major reform is needed; if not universities will just become corporate support mechanisms.
I wonder if anywhere in the SWOT analysis accompanying the business plans that must have been developed for those massive changes to University operations one can find the critical section dealing with the utter stupidity of basing a critical income stream on educating students from the contender for the role of global super-power, against our major security provider and ally. A contender well known for having a command and control system of government, well capable of turning off the supply of students at will.
Surely a business plan developed by the organisations tasked with educating our best and brightest students would not ignore such an obvious conflicted interest issue so critical to the stability and success of the enterprise transformation being considered?
Trade qualified people like myself are shaking their heads in disbelief at the stupidity so clearly on display, and wondering whether the degrees on offer from administrations capable of this sort of mistake are either fit for purpose or worth the cost.
Quite some time ago, education in general was considered (by some, anyway) to be essential for a functioning democracy, rather than judged as a cost, as it has been for quite a while.
It’s always bewildered me why the language of business and the market has become the lingua franca of society in general, let alone in universities, from both an intellectual and practical point of view. I studied and taught a little in this area (as a casual) in the past, and also consulted, and it was hard to find much rigour in what was being claimed. Ideas from the humanities were much more robust.
There’s really no difference between a particular old-style management, where every penny was counted regardless of what needed to be done, and what goes on from those with the purse-strings these days. Neither involved any real thought.
“Experts have long been warning about the consequences of under-funding, especially since the Turnbull government cut funds by $2.2 billion in 2017. Apparently we can afford $50 billion for obsolete submarines, but only $17 billion for the entire university sector.”
A sad truth is reviewed here for our political leaders to do something. Thank you Judith.
I really hope PM Morrison is hearing the cry for help. Wise investment in our tertiary education never goes wrong. It is where our leaders are produced including the current crop. What is more important spending $50 Billions and much more on our defence budget for some imaginary future threats illustrated by many writers on P&I , than educating our next generation of well rounded leadership for our country??
There is too much to deal wit in this article because so many issues are addressed>
There is no doubt that the corporatization of unverisities has resulted in a loss of collegiality in dumbing down of educational standards and in loss of the researcher from the teaching front. Some universities download Google images into lecture notes.
A recent graduate told me that there was no problem with the forthcoming exam- as it was online and you can Google the answers- true ou have to done a minimum of work to dissect out the right ‘fact’ but you don’t need to learn and apply them. Most tragic of all is the loss of basic knowledge from curricula- knowledge that underpins thinking and the failure of students to attend lectures and learn from individuals rather than from You Tube
Commendable commentary but remember, corporatisation was not rammed down the gullet of an unwilling academia, it was dangled in front of them and, like greedy nestlings demanding to be fed, they jumped for it. Now our universities are stuffed full of people who think higher education is not so much a public service for youth and country, but an industry they can mine and manipulate to their private advantage. If Covid-19 forces a vast clean-out, it will be to our advantage.
When you say “academia”, the actual teaching and research academic staff did not “jump for it”. Years later, Barry Jones said he was amazed, imagining the V-Cs who are only administrators would defend academic principles, instead were ‘pusillanimous’ about corporatisation. The current V-C at my university then, straight away put up a “CEO” sign over his dedicated car park. Administrations also straight away built vast financial divisions. It’s like the old joke of British Airways running a financial outfit with BA planes as a secondary only potential activity. It’s worth reading R. Dennis, Sat Paper this week, for the figures of university Administration’s investments.
Universities are ripe for reform. Selling tickets to a life of superior remuneration is a survival strategy straight out of the Middle Ages when the Church sold tickets to heaven.
There is a lot of ground covered in this piece.
Socratic dialogue is a mode of instruction, not enquiry.
The well rounded minds produced by uni’s in the past are currently in parliament defunding the uni’s.
The simple solution is to reduce the workload on students. You don’t hear this in the proposals for reform.
Reforming uni’s based on how people learn is entirely do-able. It isn’t by going back to students taking notes (in the ear, out the hand, bypassing the brain).