Ch 3 Conclusions: universities in a free(ish) market (1990)

The changes of the 1980s meant the 1990s started as a strange new world in which universities and university education were now unquestionably a market system, competing for both domestic and international students. The drive to expand higher education’s export potential saw January 1990 starting with a bizarre proposal for a World University, to be housed in an equally bizarre futuristic city called MFP (Multi-function Polis), to be built near a real (though never firmly selected) city, intended largely to house overseas visitors and multi-national companies.[1] Bond university immediately put its hand up to run the World University, unsurprisingly.[2]

Universities were changing managerial practices and seeking efficiencies wherever possible:

Universities  are now being expected to take a more business-like approach to their operations.[3]

Penington perhaps hadn’t noticed this, for he described government incentive funding for management reviews as “thirty pieces of silver” that universities would never touch, claiming universities’ collegial approach was better. Penington failed to mention he had already conducted Melbourne’s management review in 1988[4] and that he planned a staff performance and development scheme himself within the next month.[5] Interference in the character of research by the Australian Research Council was still an issue. In an attempt to overcome the academic freedom objection to Government control of knowledge, the Commonwealth followed Bond University’s anti-tenure lead and tried to design an academic freedom charter, which would apply to all public universities. Many in the sector felt the charter veiled government interference –  “slavery in disguise” – though some tentatively supported it.[6] The committee commissioned to develop it recommended abandoning the charter, as it could end up limiting academic freedoms already taken for granted, rather than protecting them.[7] By the end of May 1990, the idea was discarded.[8]

Within universities, an arts versus science squabble had broken out – an ideological debate about whether the majority of research funding should be directed towards science.[9] The Higher Education Supplement ran comment pieces on the value of the humanities as the antagonism swelled as Aitkin’s Australian Research Council continued to direct increased proportions of funding to science and technology.[10] The student “market” responded with increased demand for undergraduate Arts candidature, seen as a backlash against the “yuppie” aspirations of 1980s students.[11] Aitkin himself kept upsetting Vice-Chancellors with rude comments about poor quality research,[12] and Don Nicol, Sydney’s new Vice Chancellor, called Aitkin a “wowser” for treating research like a “guilty pleasure.[13]

The drive to enhance non-Commonwealth funding through industry-sponsored research and commercialisation was becoming well established, though aspects of its administration and strategic functions were starting to be questioned. The first issue was the role of liaison offices – technology transfer units within universities, established to assist with connecting academic and commercial worlds. Concerns that these offices might in fact create a barrier between researchers and industry were exacerbated by the potential for those units to be seen as profit-making centres in themselves. Liaison officers operating out of self-interest, universities were warned, might hinder the development of partnerships that could be beneficial to the furthering of knowledge and to (joint) profitability.[14] Some feared that the plan to “sell publicly-funded research” was a “plot” to prevent the release of knowledge that threaten profits and sell “the rest back to us at market rates”.[15]

A second issue was the ownership of knowledge internal to universities – who should own the knowledge produced and how much of it should they have?[16] Universities were all scrambling to develop policies on intellectual property, consultancy income and commercialisation that would clarify – and in many cases ensure institutional advantage over – the ownership of knowledge. Every aspect of higher education now functioned as a marketplace. Universities openly competed for students and employed increasingly sophisticated marketing strategies to attract them. Students, after the 1970s struggle for participation as members of a community of scholars, now had even more immediate importance as consumers – though they did not appear to yet identify themselves in this way. This is probably because fees were implemented as a means-tested tax, so that they seemed more like a contribution to the system rather than a moment of exchange. Academic labour, through research contracts and consultancies, was also commodifiable and universities sought to enhance the income opportunities from this apparently plentiful university resource. Getting more “scholar for the dollar”, rather than just a reflection of increased labour efficiency, starts to signify the commodified scholar – the possibility of a “plug-and-play” scholar just in time for the emergence of eLearning.

The new-fashioned academic was becoming increasingly common and universities drew on their values to attract growing amounts of external, private funding for the production of knowledge and the commercialisation of its products. Government policies had pushed this evolving, dialectical change further quite quickly, so that university administration was rapidly shifting to increasingly managerial, rather than collegiate, models and the sector started to compete aggressively in the scramble for a share in government funding. All were commodified. The commodification of one thing led to the commodification of all like things, for once one individual starts to fence off property for themselves, it forces everyone else to, or to risk being left with nothing. Knowledge was now a tradable substance within and beyond each institution. Ownership is a precondition to trade – for the exchange must have parties to conduct it – and so for universities, it was ownership that now needed to be settled.[17]