#Occupy the university

This clearly has an affect on the humanities and arts, indeed the very idea of a liberal education, for of what use is philosophy to BHP Billiton? Of what use is literature to the National Australia Bank? Of what use is sociology to Qantas?

None. Of what use is a liberal education to a privatised public sphere? None.

This also can apply, although not to the same degree, to the basic sciences, as industry is more interested in graduates that are less interested in pursuing basic research regarding the fundamental properties of quantity and reality. The positive externality effects of markets encourages the privatised university to produce a less than socially optimal amount of theoretical science.

So students do not enrol in many a course in sufficient quantities to maintain profitability. So departments and courses shut up shop. Not because the subject matter is not as intellectually appealing, if not more so, than, say, financial mathematics, but because the corporate sector has no use for such graduates.

In neoliberal society only that which commands the assent of the market, which means corporations and the rich who have the capacity to provide ready demand, are permitted to exist. Cultural studies graduates are not demanded by the rich so literary and cultural studies courses are closed.

This might enrich universities and businesses but it impoverishes all of us.

Markets, contrary to the ideology purveyed by servants of the well heeled, radically limit choices. A young inquiring mind does not have a substantively free choice to study either the violin or human resources management.

Public funding provides an important role in securing the relatively autonomous status of the university. This ensures that the university is not subject to the demand to make profits and so frees the institution from pressure to conform to the concerns of the corporate sector exclusively.

It must be stressed that public funding is not a sufficient condition for this.

The autonomous university must also be self managed within by students and faculty that are not tied through networks of affinity to an elite without.

As the university becomes corporatised, in response to market driven dynamics, so its increasingly proletarianised workforce comes under the sway of a managerial class for whom control, not just profit making, constitutes a key objective.

There are a number of ways that this managerial class cements power, one not readily recognised hitherto is the use of pedagogical theory. At the university professors and lecturers are now told that they make, indeed always made, for shoddy teachers and need to acquaint themselves with the latest buzz phrases of tertiary level pedagogical theory to demonstrate otherwise, what is sometimes called "professional development."