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What ails Australia's universities?

By Marko Beljac - posted Wednesday, 12 August 2009


The University of Melbourne, like most other universities, has been hit hard by the global financial crisis. The university has lost a fair amount of money on its investment portfolio. This has led management to announce the further culling of 220 jobs among both the professional and academic workforce. The move has sparked uproar and numerous press reports lamenting the near terminal state of Australia's universities, especially the arts and humanities component thereof.

The Vice Chancellor, Glyn Davis, has stated "I'm sure I wasn't the only member of my senior executive team awake at 3am last night, staring into the dark wondering how the world ended up like this".

The most thoughtful analysis has come from the philosopher Peter Singer. He points out that previous cuts have hit the arts and humanities particularly hard. The additional cuts threaten the very future of a liberal education. However, Singer misses the big picture as do most of the press reports. Most of the reports have singled out the "Melbourne Model" reforms that have become largely associated with Glyn Davis.

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To be sure Singer himself does not do this. In his important analytic piece in The Age Singer makes the point that he largely supports the Melbourne Model reforms for they provide a broad education that expands the horizons of students not just personally but also intellectually and civically. Singer argues that for the model to work it must be adequately funded which, he further maintains, currently it is not.

Others argue that the move away from academic specialisation, especially in relatively non utilitarian subjects such as the arts and humanities, has in fact driven the job cuts. The university, for its part, considers that the financial crisis gives it no other choice.

The argument due to the Melbourne Model rests on the supposition that a restructured university curricula naturally leads to the desire to develop a restructured academic workforce more in tune with interdisciplinarity. Without redundancies, sackings and coerced "voluntary" retirements this could not be possible, hence the drama at the University of Melbourne.

I am not in a position to judge whether the employment restructuring at the University of Melbourne, which predates the latest job cuts, is Melbourne Model driven. There at least is a viable hypothesis here worthy of further inquiry.

However, one thing is clear.

The University of Melbourne is not the only university that has gone through these processes. Such events have occurred, and are occurring, across the university sector in Australia. For instance under the reign of David Robinson at Monash University, Melbourne's leading university, similar upheaval was unleashed by a managerial strategy largely designed to turn the university into a corporation. The restructure also hit the Faculty of Arts very hard.

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If I might recall events proved to be quite dramatic. The bust of the almighty General Sir John Monash was made to go AWOL and matters became so charged that perhaps even the maoist-turned-neocon, Albert Langer, was dreaming of recreating the Monash Soviet. Similar upheavals are occurring elsewhere judging by reports in the Higher Education section of The Australian.

This means that whatever is occurring at the University of Melbourne, although doubtless having its campus specific aspects, is part of a much larger systemic process. It is not Melbourne specific. It is this systemic process that Singer neglects to dwell upon, as do critics of the Melbourne Model.

To remedy the tragedy that has befallen the university in Australia would require coming to grips with this systemic aspect to the crisis.

There are two key components underlying the crisis.

One revolves around the role of the university in an increasingly market driven society. The other, related to the first, is centred upon the role of democracy in the age of neoliberalism. Let us first focus on the former.

The university is an institution, as with the church, that predates the market. Like the church it also largely sits ill at ease within a market driven society. Basic knowledge and understanding, which any self respecting university seeks to uncover, reach and impart, is by and large not a profit driven exercise. This is because for the most part knowledge is a public good that requires public subsidy. Absent such public subsidy and there is not much room for a true knowledge seeking institution such as the university. Even in the US the university system is subsidised by the state via the agency of the Pentagon.

The astute reader would note that this all strikes against the rationalist sentiments of the enlightenment and classical liberalism and demonstrates, as do other matters, how neoliberalism and classical liberalism go together like chalk and cheese.

The greater the level of sovereignty that society gives to the market the greater the salience that is thereby placed upon the accumulation of profits within society.

Because the university, especially such aspects as the fundamental sciences and humanities, are not naturally profit driven the increasing reach given to the market in a neoliberal society tends to put the institution into an existential crisis. This crisis has also been manufactured by government defunding of the university. The purpose here is to compel the university to embrace the market and to socialise profit seeking through selection effects. The Melbourne Model should be viewed within this context.

The crisis bedevilling the university system is a small part of a much broader neoliberal assault on society. Greater attention to the bottom line as an end in itself has seen the type of restructuring in our universities that many of Australia's workers are already familiar with such as downsizing, multitasking, casualisation and so on.

These processes have been features of the university based labour market long before the process took root amongst the academic staff. For the universities' cleaners, caterers, security guards, grounds keepers and so on these processes have been all too familiar. A typical university cleaner has more and more work to do and less and less time in which to do it and all on more and more flimsy contracts.

What has been a crisis for the poor for decades now has become a crisis for the privileged. Academics have been privileged members of society. They have had well paying and highly secure jobs. Their employment had been largely free of the type of control and domination typical of the broader working class.

Neoliberalism has now become a crisis for some of societies most privileged.

That's why Glyn Davis stares into the abyss at 3am.

The second point on the university and democracy is especially relevant for the arts and humanities. The university had tended to be a doctrinally compliant institution, furnishing the dominant ideas of the dominant classes and thereby favourably shaping popular attitudes and opinions towards the overall system of power. Education basically functioned as a system of imposed ignorance.

This, however, began to change in the 1960s. The popular social movements that sprang up since then largely began on the university campus and retain a strong presence there.

The arts and humanities have since challenged and questioned many aspects of the dominant narratives that were previously constructed in Australia. The critical intelligentsia was one the most important counter currents that existed during the Howard era. As such the university has tended to veer outside of the control of the moneyed elites. Since the 1960s there has been an "excess of democracy" at Australia's universities.

Neoliberal reforms and democracy do not go hand in hand. No major neoliberal reform in Australia has been supported by the public; tax reform was routinely rejected, labour market deregulation has been rejected, privatisation does not command public support and so on. That there has been an "excess of democracy" since the 1960s makes matters worse.

Free market discipline is a convenient way of bringing the university under control. A core feature of the market, as the philosopher Adam Swift has pointed out, is the satisfaction of the preferences of others. In a class based society that means the preferences of the rich who overwhelmingly have the greater means to satisfy preferences.

The rich and powerful, naturally, are not interested in the production of graduates that would not help them get richer. That's why the Commerce building at the University of Melbourne is an ornate structure. Even worse, the rich are not interested in an institution producing graduates that might seek to take their privileges away from them. That's why the John Medley building is a shithouse.

The development of the profit motive within the university system not only sees the university shift towards becoming a corporation but, more to the point, it becomes more beholden to a corporate dominated society.

The other method of control, which Singer alludes to in his article, is the development of fashionable nonsense in the arts and humanities. Here I speak of such assorted junk as "poststructuralism" and "critical theory".

The purpose of all this is to distract. If the arts and humanities move out of control then tolerating mindless garbage at least serves the purpose of distracting people from undue concentration on the core of the system of power. That one can then point out what passes for scholarship, as Brendan Nelson did, to the punters paying for it all is an added bonus.

The arts and humanities must weed out this nonsense if they wish to remain viable in this country. This will be difficult because the current dominant tendencies control the appointment of academic staff.

Ultimately we should seek to create autonomous universities free of control from outside institutions and largely run by and for its stakeholders which would include the broader community. A viable autonomous university, however, is only truly possible within an autonomous society.

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About the Author

Mark Beljac teaches at Swinburne University of Technology, is a board member of the New International Bookshop, and is involved with the Industrial Workers of the World, National Tertiary Education Union, National Union of Workers (community) and Friends of the Earth.

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