Ch 3 Commercial research and the new-fashioned academic (1983-1985)

Jane Ford, one of The Australian’s science and technology journalists during the 1980s, saw industry-funded research as a magic bullet, solving all higher education’s problems at once. Commercialising the outcomes of research or conducting industry-sponsored research, she wrote, could potentially address the combination of a reputation for irrelevance, a declining funding base and accusations of a lack of the “entrepreneurial spirit” that theoretically fosters efficiency, according to her range of articles and editorials between 1983 and 1985. Along with other Higher Education Supplement authors, Ford contributed to the growing pubic discussion around establishing (or “improving”) links with industry – especially research commercialisation – as a priority issue in the middle part of the 1980s.

With the reputation of academics as irrelevant and inefficient, some within higher education sought to establish the image of a new-fashioned academic, which functioned as a contrast to the old. The new-fashioned academic actively sought links to (and funding from) industry, focusing their research to the needs of markets.[1] The new-fashioned academic was more prevalent overseas, especially in the USA, according to reports, where less tenure made academics “more competitive and aggressive”, a change portrayed in the newspaper as a self-evidently positive.[2] The new-fashioned academic, in the pages of the Higher Education Supplement had a heroic status utterly dissimilar to that of the traditional, cloistered academic, which was monastic-style heroism of isolation and discovery.[3] The new academic’s heroism was located in their struggle against the bureaucratic traditionalism of universities and even against the very characteristics that had once given academia its status. Jane Ford wrote of one “rebel professor” who was leaving the university system for a “lucrative” position in pharmaceuticals – though not, apparently, because it paid better:

“The system is dead”, he says, “there is no vision, no management competence, no measure of performance, no original thought and no realisation of the needs of the real world.” The basic problems were a lack of reward for performance, the destructive effect of the tenure system, the lack of interest in technology transfer and an aversion to becoming involved with industry.[4]

While the new-fashioned academic struggled against the apparently lagging university system, other academics were concerned with the enhanced value given to applied over basic research.[5] These academics, along with any who held concerns about the potential reduction or loss of research in the humanities, were construed by some academic leaders as:

Staff not confident of their capacity to compete in such a system.[6]

The implication of this statement was that an objection to a research system focused on a knowledge market was probably evidence in itself of poor performance. Based on a belief that academics would always operate out of self-interest (rather than, say, civic responsibility), this assumption permeated the papers at the 1984 “Withering Heights” conference. Monash’s Centre for Policy Studies under Michael Porter (a prominent pro-privatisation academic of the 1980s) organised the conference that gathered people who held “senior positions in the higher education sector in Australia”.[7] Of the 16 contributors to the consequent publication, six were economists, six senior academics (largely administrators) three policy-makers, and one lawyer. The disciplines represented are telling. The conference aimed to influence policy, so administrators and policy-makers are to be expected and a lawyer was undoubtedly helpful as well. That the remaining participants were all economists was one of many signs of how influential economics was becoming in university policy, pedagogy and epistemology. 1950s politicians had debated whether Philosophy should be compulsory for all undergraduates, as ‘foundational’ – now 1980s academics started to say similar things about economics.[8] Economics was assuming philosophy’s traditional role as the lens through which knowledge was to be understood and valued. This rather epistemological step was crucial in enhancing the tradability of knowledge.

“If universities can claim to produce anything of value for society it is knowledge”,[9] said David Biggins in the magazine Australian Society in 1984. Biggins was also quoted in Blandy and Sloan’s paper at the “Withering Heights” conference (the title of which was intended to designate the growing stagnation of an irrelevant higher education system, which lacked capacity to adapt to changing economic needs), as demonstrating the “turning point” at which Australian universities had arrived. Blandy and Sloane saw this turning point as the need for the reconstruction of the university system to one which was competitive in character. In this, labour and tuition would be deregulated, and knowledge would flow in a market-type environment to support the national economy.[10] Their views were a motif throughout many published papers, and which regularly found its way into the Higher Education Supplement.

Biggins’ paper connected these values to a shift in the perceived character of university-based knowledge and exemplifies the “crisis of confidence” Karmel described regarding the role and value of higher education in the 1980s. In Biggins’ paper, the economic lens is combined with an emerging postmodern one. He correlated the values of liberal education with scientific positivism, problematising his perceived rationale for the existence of universities. Universities’ mission, he suggested, was propagation of the myth of “value-free” knowledge. Now that this had been exposed as flawed, he claimed, the university had no mission. Its values – which he tellingly construed as “slogans” – he said, were nonsense:

They are summed up in slogans like “academic freedom”, “objective scholarship”, and – most bizarre of all – “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”.[11]

Since knowledge was not value-free, it in fact had no value, according to this interpretation, except an economic one. Knowledge applied for the benefit of the economy was the only real value universities could offer. And old-fashioned fears about external influence and academic freedom in a fee-for-service model could surely no longer apply, since there always were external influences on knowledge: one cannot taint tainted goods. Concern for academic freedom was therefore seen to be economically, sociologically and epistemologically naïve. Blandy and Sloan were especially harsh:

The universities are essentially large-scale worker-cooperatives funded by the state: sheltered workshops for intellectuals…Like all such Utopias, the system appeared to work well while resource constraints were so loose as to maintain the illusion of costless allocation choices. With the onset of harder times, the familiar inadequacies of Utopian systems have appeared: there are few incentives to individual scholars or lower-level groups of scholars to do things which would add to the resources of the scholarly community as a whole.[12]

The Higher Education Supplement’s sequences of articles on research commercialisation and entrepreneurial academics, subtly and successively positioned the new-fashioned academic against the old-fashioned one.[13] Government initiatives to encourage university-industry links[14] and university-initiated schemes to support commercialisation[15] were reported alongside accusations of institutional and cultural barriers to commercial development[16] and accusations that government policies do not go far enough in acknowledging the need for advancement of industry-related research for Australia to compete internationally.[17] But articles that gave voice to academics’ concerns over academic freedom or the future of the humanities were difficult to hear through air thick with uncertainty about the existence of any intrinsic value to knowledge and with desperate pleas for funding. For the traditional values were well known, needing no reiteration except that academics’ bad reputation had stained them. Some even felt able to declare that basic research was completely unnecessary.[18] The new-fashioned academic – at least in Murdoch’s publication – had the edge.

Naturally, the argument that research commercialisation would assist in making university-based knowledge more relevant to industry needs was not separated from the discourse suggesting universities should be more financially independent of government and that perhaps university activity should not be entirely the responsibility of the taxpayer. Commercialisation was one of the alternative sources of funding many felt universities should explore. And of course, faced with reductions in public funding, it was quickly an income stream universities started to covet.[19] An additional angle was brought into this discussion about research, which paralleled the argument that free education was benefiting those who could well afford to pay. In research, publicly funded knowledge production was already benefiting private companies. One 1984 headline read:

Companies exploiting universities’ ideas for next to nothing.[20]

But unlike upper-middle-class students, the issue here was not just that companies could afford to pay for knowledge but rather that the knowledge they obtained through university research would be used to make a profit, meaning they should be morally compelled to pay for it.

Here we see the self-fulfilling logic that research commercialisation provides. Once inquiry was no longer free – that is, once it was no longer for its own sake – the ethic of commercialisation made it for profit. Once it was for profit it was obvious that those who profited from it should fund it. And once university business was for-profit knowledge, the university form relinquished some (more) of its authority over knowledge, based as it was on free inquiry.[21] With no special authority over knowledge, then, university knowledge-production crept closer to being positioned as a business like any other, undeserving of any privileges, certainly including public funds – though of course this was not achieved completely. But concern for the status of knowledge in universities and society, construed as the whining of those who couldn’t keep up, seem brushed aside, in the Supplement pages, by louder, more urgent, voices. Universities thus commenced the ceaseless process of navigating the knowledge economy, selling knowledge for profit. It was the institutions where technologies and biotechnologies dominate that started it, but all quickly followed – the Supplement gleefully announced in 1984 (only one year after the first technology transfer offices were established) that “one of the country’s more traditional universities”, (Melbourne) “finally succumbed to pressure for more contact with industry”.[22] Three key forms emerged: the establishment of research/technology parks;[23] the formation of for-profit companies owned or part-owned by the university;[24] and the establishment of units intended to liaise between businesses and (reputedly) less-savvy researchers.[25] By 1985, it was noted that research commercialisation slowed down the spread of knowledge and in some cases kept it secret.[26] But the civic value of an increasingly knowledgeable society was decreasingly obvious as a valid motivation for university research. At the same time, the exchange value of knowledge was increasingly tantalising.

The logic of research commercialisation implies a tacit ethic of public and private knowledge. It is clear – and intuitively just – that knowledge used for profit should be funded by those who profit from it.[27] This implies “private” knowledge, knowledge owned by individuals or groups and applied for profitable purposes. It was this privately owned, for-profit knowledge, according to McSherry, that had been set up as the opposite of the morally superior knowledge attributed to the type of free inquiry carried out by universities.[28] “Disinterested” inquiry was explicitly for public good – for society to generally and progressively know more and better.[29] This “public good” is commonly understood in two ways. One is public “good” as a shared commodity. It is in this sense that Marginson uses it (as do the later advocates of knowledge commons that emerged with the World Wide Web and eLearning, as we will see, possibly in the next chapter). One of the characteristics of public goods, says Marginson, is non-rivalry – that consumption by one person does not subtract it from another. In Marginson’s view, this makes knowledge, intrinsically, a non-market (public good) product.[30] Tempting as this perspective is, commodification does not balk at non-rival goods, as the large and growing industry in music download demonstrates (this issue needs further discussion). The other meaning of public good refers to the public benefit of higher education – what Ian Clunies Ross probably would have called “civilisation”, but what the economists of the 1980s started to call “positive externalities”.[31]

Students in the 1960s and 1970s saw it differently to both of these positions. They had questioned whether knowledge was underpinning “civilisation” or capitalism – whether it served general interests or the interests of “the establishment”. Combining this student-sourced politics with a prevailing uncertainty about the existence of any intrinsic value to knowledge, the idea of public knowledge started to seem nonsense. Indeed “positive externalities” connoted a fortunate by-product of individual consumption rather than a purpose for higher education. Since the idea of society itself and any notion of a public sphere were also notoriously being questioned,[32] the most obvious benefit that knowledge could have to Australian society was to help diminish the nation’s current account deficit.[33] The test of the value of knowledge, in this crisis of confidence and emerging market logic, was willingness to pay: if there was no one willing to pay for it, a piece of knowledge probably had no value.[34] Such reasoning, if it were absolute (and it wasn’t, entirely, though at some points must have seemed close), would be the triumph of knowledge commodification. For in it the only possible valid measure of value is exchange value. Academic authority would have shifted entirely to the authority of the market.

There were plenty who thought that authority over knowledge should shift to the market, or to a combination of market and government (but certainly away from “layabout dons”).[35] This was especially the case regarding funding for research though the Australian Research Grants Scheme (known then across the sector as ARGS). The existing ARGS scheme, it was thought, inflated the (exchange) value of poor research.[36] It must encourage second-rate research, said the new-fashioned academics, because nearly everyone got the funding they applied for. The absence of competition, using economic logic, always results in a poorer product.[37] In early 1983 the grants scheme was criticised:

“When I tell them [US-based academics] we fund 65 per cent of all applications they say we didn’t realise Australian scientists were so good”, Professor Oliver says. “But they have a grin on their faces when they say it, because in America you have to be in the top 25 per cent to get your money.”[38]

The grants scheme was seen to be the type of funding that encouraged the perpetuation of the old-fashioned academic, and it was seen to be typical of the type of “egalitarian” funding government interference tended to:

“ARGS is spreading the available money too far and too thinly…if you give everyone a little bit they can only do a little bit.[39]

Coinciding with growing perceptions that research was more hobby than work, that PhDs were useless and society would be better off with graduates of “practical” doctorates[40], the existing model of research funding and the freedom to conduct whatever research an academic saw fit to explore were lumped with the rest of the reputedly old-fashioned and wasteful aspects of higher education. By the end of 1983, moves were made “to make ARGS more accountable and responsive to national needs”.[41]

A part of the general call for greater relevance of academic knowledge was the increasing expectation of research that meets “national needs”. Added to the perception that relevance was an intrinsic good were moral and political notions of accountability – especially since the idea that public funding should be granted to universities had diminishing levels of support. Where Menzies had purchased a national higher education system generally, the Commonwealth now felt that universities should be compelled to perform in accordance with taxpayers’ much more specific expectations.

Early in 1983, the newly elected Labor Minister for Education and Youth Affairs, Senator Susan Ryan showed from the beginning of the Labor term that university funding was contingent on compliance with the knowledge-aims of government. “Ryan tips modest growth if institutions fit government aims”, read the headline, and the Senator said:

[Universities] can look forward to more growth if they are able to change the way they operate in order to meet the needs of the Government”[42]

Governments around the world, reported the Supplement, were taking a greater role in shaping the direction of university research.[43] The Minister, among many others, was convinced that sufficient funding was already allocated to universities for research, but that it was “not being spread around the right way”.[44] The research grants system was currently allocating a very small proportion of public funds to projects of government priority, with the majority granted to universities “with no strings attached”. The Supplement reported:

Many believe funds are being frittered away on too many projects – some of questionable merit – and the money should be concentrated on projects of real worth.[45]

Ryan called for greater accountability to the funding public for research income in universities.[46] The explicit alignment of government priorities with purposeful funding for knowledge production in specific areas demonstrates an absolute shift away from university-based knowledge as that which underpins progressive civil society. This leaning towards “feuilletonism” (Herman Hesse’s fictional state where government controls knowledge and scholarship is therefore polluted by propaganda[47]) was met with rather less alarm than might have been expected, though some certainly questioned the validity of “national needs” as the key determinant to knowledge production.[48]

By early 1984 a new research council was proposed that would “channel scarce resources into areas of specific need and national priority” – though it would be a few more years until the Australian Research Council was formed.[49] The Commonwealth government started to use the source of its power to assure the cooperation of the sector – in 1984, the Commonwealth unexpectedly withheld funding from hundreds of research projects, signalling a wish to reform the process of funding research to better align to perceived “national needs”.[50]

Determination of the direction of knowledge, a fundamental attribute of academic freedom, was thus sliding towards government and industry in the first half of the 1980s. This reflects a major change in the perceived value of knowledge, a change which rested on a “crisis of confidence” in the efficacy of university-based knowledge as it had been traditionally understood. This, combined with a mistrust of universities’ traditional governance systems, suggested to many that knowledge might be better determined by the market (including, but not limited to, government), in which the value of knowledge would be evident (and determined) by the willingness of the market to pay. The staff unions had a reasonably loud voice in opposition to this shift, but struggled against academics’ reputation for inefficiency and irrelevance. With a declining sense of the value of “public” knowledge and a growing sense that a marketised system would provide better incentives to quality, a belief that knowledge would be better furthered without government funding dominated the Higher Education Supplement pages. Research commercialisation was seen to address funding and relevance with one blow. The problem, for its proponents, was that the existing system did not provide sufficient incentives for academics to seek external funds. In 1984, the Institute for Public Policy with Monash University recommended forcing the issue, with a $250 million cut to university funding.