The process of making knowledge ownable in the 1980s started out as a simple problem of academics’ bad reputation. Many felt that public sentiment had turned against higher education all together, and it was a crisis not limited to Australia. Peter Karmel, then head of the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission (which provided advice to government on spending and policies in higher education)[1], was chairing the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conference on higher education in Paris in 1981, when he said:

At the beginning of the 1980s the overriding concern…seems to be how to sustain public confidence in and support for a system which, in most countries, is no longer growing … In many countries there appears to be a crisis of confidence which is approaching alarming dimensions.[2]

Some attributed this loss of standing to an abuse of trust, a loss of the tacit contract between universities and society (or “the establishment” as they would have called it in the 1970s) as a result of the period of student (and staff) unrest.[3] Lyotard’s work would suggest that academic authority was undermined by the period of protest, since some protests – such as the Philosophy strike – highlighted the falsely elevated legitimisation granted to certain types of knowledge by bodies such as the Sydney University Professorial Board.[4] Academic authority, based on what was increasingly understood to be an unnecessarily elitist system, could no longer be trusted. The 1983 OECD report hypothesised that this belief might, ironically, be that held by university graduates – who now made up a relatively large proportion of the public, especially the vocal public – who perceived their own experiences as irrelevant:

It may be that with so may admitted into the temple, the mystery is gone the secrets are out and former respect and awe have given way to a more cynical view of the virtues and vices of the priesthood.[5]

Public sentiment had a direct impact on funding, especially when funding was derived from tax. Dr Harman of the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education in 1980 said:

It is clear that all education, and higher education in particular, is suffering something of an eclipse in terms of public popularity. In the community there are strong voices claiming that too much money has been spent on education and that it is desirable to cut back expenditure.[6]

Some of these “strong voices” were certain to be heard in the new Higher Education pages of The Australian newspaper.

The Australian Higher Education Supplement, based on the existing London-based, also Murdoch-owned, Times Higher Education Supplement, was launched in February 1980, with university and college staff as both its readership and its subject. The inaugural editor of the Supplement, John Bremer[7], said in his first editorial in February 1980:

The debate about higher education must be unfettered. The outcome cannot be foreseen – for thought is free – but the supplement can provide the medium in which debate can be publicly conducted.[8]

How “free” thought was to be by the end of the 1980s – widely acknowledged to be the decade of knowledge commodification, implying that thought, if it had any value, had a monetary price[9] – Bremer could hardly have foreseen. But the Supplement’s commitment to reform was consistent and ensured that it did not shrink from criticisms of its readership. These tended to focus on university inefficiencies, and collegial practices that went soft on reputedly lazy academic staff – for example:

Universities had insufficient power to deal with lazy or recalcitrant staff.[10]

The idea that academics had little incentive to “perform effectively” was described by Peter Karmel in his oral history interview at the National Library as a part of a shift on the part of government and policy-makers from a model of inputs (education measured by the funds put into it) to a model of outputs (what education produces – graduates, employees and so on).[11] The notion that academic work was a performance that could be done efficiently contrasts with Ashby’s view (for example) that outstanding academic discoveries “were often the product of leisure”.[12] Leisured inquiry, by the early 1980s, was one of the old-fashioned aspects of academic labour that many felt needed updating. Reference to academic leisure would only further demean the standing of academics, since it now connoted a grotesque image - “layabout dons”.[13]