What ails Australia's universities?

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.