AUSTRALIA
In an April issue of The Conversation (Australia), the veteran higher education commentator Gavin Moodie casts his critical eye over the higher education policies of both major political parties in Australia.
It’s a forensic, albeit constrained, analysis that draws a number of stark conclusions, namely, that successive governments have repeatedly cut funding to universities, made humanities courses more expensive for students, and privileged more ‘practical’ vocational courses.
Despite some rather modest election campaign promises relating to regional universities, Moodie notes that the prevailing picture as far as Coalition policies are concerned, especially in relation to funding, remains grim. Indeed, their general attitude to the sector has bordered on the hostile, while remaining stoically indifferent to, or wilfully ignorant of, problems that have long dogged the sector.
One of Moodie’s more startling observations is that “during the pandemic the government changed JobKeeper’s rules three times to exclude public universities from support, but left private higher education providers eligible”.
That says a lot about where the government’s priorities lie when it comes to higher education, and the same could be said of funding to technical and further education (TAFE) institutions and independent as opposed to public schools.
Moodie is particularly concerned about how the humanities have been treated under the Coalition’s watch, leading to “…a devaluing of fields which are intrinsically valuable, and are instrumentally valuable in understanding society and culture’s handling of health measures and of developments abroad, whose importance has become more obvious in the last three years”.
The status quo
But what of the Australian Labor Party’s policy song sheet when it comes to universities? It seems that it dodges many of the problems created by its own policies as well as those of the Coalition.
In addition to more university places for under-represented groups, 20,000 extra university places are proposed in key areas of national priority such as clean energy, advanced manufacturing, health and education.
Predictably limited and disappointing as such policies settings are, they reflect two major features that have long characterised higher education policy approaches: first, the ongoing fiscal impoverishment of universities is designed largely to make them more ‘business-like’ and ‘self-sufficient’; and second, the patchwork, piecemeal and fragmented nature of such policy formulations means that inherent problems in the system (course duplication, costly marketing, inflated management salaries and so forth) have yet to be addressed.
There is no overarching national plan that might prevent such problems, or a broad-based educational agenda that addresses today’s complex challenges.
Instead, the dominant policy agenda is aimed at ensuring (with the help of Universities Australia and other entities) that universities are fully allied and responsive to the neoliberal economy.
There is no mention of alternative models of higher education, different ways of thinking about what universities are for, or what universities should and could become in a radically transformed world.
In short, the status quo – corporatisation, marketisation, business models, public management, vocationalism, managerialism – prevails.
Neoliberal functionality has been achieved by:
• Linking university operations to ‘national priorities’;
• Installing management regimes conducive to meeting commercial ends;
• Vocationalising curricula;
• Commercialising research agendas.
Higher education for the public good
Neither major party appears to have the ability to think afresh when it comes to higher education policy. Market-based models in the United States and Britain continue to benchmark policy deliberations.
For an alternative perspective we must turn to the Australian Greens. In essence, their approach reflects policies across a number of countries that regard higher education primarily as a public service in the interests of the nation state – that is to say, society as a whole.
This means redistributing the cost burdens from the ‘consumer’ to the state by abolishing student debts, guaranteeing students a ‘liveable income’ by raising student allowances and restoring government funding to universities.
The Greens manifesto also seeks fundamental changes to top-down management by democratising institutional governance and “giving power back to staff and students on campuses”. A Green Education Infrastructure Fund is proposed to ensure the sustainability of public universities and TAFEs, which is code for ensuring appropriate and operationally viable public funding to institutions.
Although far-reaching, these policy proposals are only part of a broader change agenda required to radically transform universities in order to restore their public status and relevance to current global and national challenges.
A more comprehensive approach – indeed, one of the most potentially important policy interventions in higher education since the Hawke-Keating reforms of the late 1980s – has been proposed by Public Universities Australia (PUA).
PUA is a broad coalition of organisations comprised of the Australian Association of University Professors, Academics for Public Universities, Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations, Casualised, Unemployed and Precarious Uni Workers, National Tertiary Education Union, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Postgraduate Association and the National Union of Students.
The need for radical change
Founded in early 2022, PUA advocates for radical change by both exposing the many shortcomings of Australian universities and articulating specific legislative and policy proposals designed to ensure greater accountability, democratic governance, equity, academic freedom and financial oversight.
In a package of material sent to vice-chancellors, leading politicians, the media and others, the PUA sets out model governance legislation at both state and federal levels.
Upfront, the legislation states that: “The governance of Australian public universities must be collegial, transparent and accountable.” To ensure this, it states, governing bodies must be made up “of a majority of active members of the academic community, as well as individuals (including alumni of the university) who represent the broader communities that universities serve”.
The majority of these bodies, the proposal suggests, should be “elected by and from within the university community (representing academic staff, non-academic staff, students and alumni)”.
As far as the appointment of vice-chancellors and chancellors is concerned, these would be made via a selection of “trusted academics” representative of the “university community”. The transparency of governing bodies is guaranteed through open forums and detailed, publicly available minutes.
“Commercial-in-confidence” provisions and gagging orders, present in current institutional practices, would be rendered largely redundant. As far as decisions affecting faculties, schools and disciplines are concerned, the proposed legislation states that these should involve the whole faculty, with management appointments to be decided by faculty members.
Additionally, the proposal outlines conditions for senior manager salary levels, and calls for more career paths for aspiring academics and “secure, safe, non-exploitative employment, as well as tenured academic employment”, thereby introducing greater pay equity into the system.
On the vexed question of academic workloads, the legislation seeks to ensure that meaningful and accountable time be allocated for explicit research activities and the elimination, as far as possible, of the “metrification of academic workloads” – a long-standing grievance among academics.
Further changes to university governance are applied at the federal level. The new provisions would ensure more secure and accountable institutional funding, including clear and consistent financial reporting standards, presided over by an independent tertiary funding and standards body covering TAFEs, private colleges and public universities.
This body would also monitor “minimum national academic quality and standards for core course content” and an Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority that would oversee financial probity in respect of capital costs and various infrastructure spending.
Additionally, the model provides for various academic disciplines across the sector to be adequately and equitably funded, academic and research positions made secure and fees to be “fully subsidised by the government to ensure higher education is free for all domestic students”.
The tip of the iceberg
This snapshot of the nature and breadth of the required legislative changes indicates the degree to which the governance of universities has drifted away from what were broadly accepted practices associated with the public university.
The fact that university councils are now largely made up of people with unrelated business backgrounds, that university managers and consultants often hail from the same, that the exercise of management is glaringly undemocratic and manifestly inefficient, is indicative of why such legislative changes are so urgently required.
But this is the tip of the iceberg – albeit a necessary corrective to the corporatisation of universities. Complaints about the modern university have a long history. In the academic arena they are now referred to generically as “critical university studies”.
Among other things, these complaints relate to governance regimes and the lasting implications of “public management” and “managerialism” on the sector.
Equally worrying is the way in which the arts, humanities and social sciences have been assailed over recent years. The vocationalisation of these discipline areas, and in many instances, their disappearance, has profound consequences for our society.
The commodification of critical thinking – turning it into something sold to employers, rather than the basis of active citizenship – is one of the most egregious developments of all.
And into the void we have witnessed growing accusations about the bogus influence of “woke culture”, “political correctness” and “cultural Marxism” on university curricula, as well as the reassertion of “Western” values in foundational knowledge.
Given the increasingly autocratic tendencies across the world, and the attacks on the principle of public protest and civil liberties more generally, such developments are of great concern.
Faced with the current malaise in higher education, it is clear that a public conversation on its future direction is long overdue. It’s a conversation made more urgent by the crises we now face – multiple, intersecting, existentially profound crises impacting almost every area of life.
If universities are to have any relevance in terms of addressing such problems, then they need to change – and quickly.
Dr Richard Hil is adjunct professor in the faculty of business, law and arts at Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia.
