By Graeme Turner

There can’t have been many worse times for taking on the task of defending the public value of universities. The steady drip of bad news stories has been endless. Just over this last month or so we have been told that universities are continuing to engage in wage theft on an industrial scale, that domestic student enrolments are in steady decline, that drop-out rates are on the increase, that vice-chancellors’ remuneration is excessive, that universities are hotbeds of anti-semitism, and that potentially violent protest encampments have taken over our campuses. To top it all off, while international students, who make up less than 4% of renters nationally, have been fingered as the primary cause of the national housing crisis, some have warned that the proposed capping of their numbers is likely to cost the sector ‘billions’.

Simply ‘academic’

And then there are the standard culture wars attacks on what the universities actually do — on the focus and content of their teaching and their research. The targets vary according to the political climate of the times, but the rationale remains the same. Unless there is a clear and immediate vocational or commercial payoff for the knowledge acquired, it is dismissed as useless. The accusation that some knowledge is just simply ‘academic’ has always been perjoratively anti-intellectual, but now it is actually driving higher education policy and commentary.

There is plenty of criticism within the sector itself, of course. But it has quite different concerns. Mostly, the criticism is aimed at the consequences of decades of funding cuts and the rise of the corporate university. The gap between university academic staff and university management has widened as their ideas about the fundamental purpose of a university drift further apart. As management strategies align more closely with government objectives in shaping the contemporary university in Australia, the disaffection of academic staff has grown and deepened. Government, for its part, however, is not at all interested in what these staff think and the Accord Review of the system also paid little attention to their concerns.

Universities, politics and the media

Given how university affairs are reported in the media, and how dismissively successive governments have treated the sector, one wonders just what the public might make of the current situation –or, indeed, if they care? While politicians have always argued there are no votes in universities — hence their disregard — it would be worrying if the rest of the population actually shared their degree of disinterest.  That prospect seems to be with us now, with so few outside the sector moved to speak in the university’s defense.

At the same time, curiously enough, opinion polls tell us that the general public still has an exceptionally high degree of trust in the universities and their expertise. Conversely, those the public trusts least — politicians and the media –are precisely the ones who are most actively driving the bandwagon in any campaign challenging the legitimacy of the university as an institution, the expertise of those it employs, and the authority of the knowledges it creates.

Why is this so? For the politicians, of course, the universities are an easy target for a populist shot at ‘the elites’ as they justify existing policy settings. Sadly, too, we know that the contemporary politician dislikes being challenged by different, and especially critical, ideas. Criticism based on legitimate expertise discomforts them. With the media, it is more puzzling. You would think journalists would be on the side of knowledge rather than power, and, these days, many are themselves university graduates. However, a notable feature of the development of Australia’s journalism degree programs has been their ambivalence about their location within the university. That ambivalence has generated long-running debates about the comparative importance of academic knowledges and practical experience for their profession.

In the end, though, for our politicians and for those in the media, it comes down to a contest over power and authority. The disciplined production of knowledge is a threat to the prevailing norms in the conduct of contemporary politics as well as to the purveying of disinformation that has so comprehensively polluted the production of news and information.

The ‘broken’ sector

Unfortunately, well-informed and independent criticism of the sector has never been more warranted and necessary. Notwithstanding their standing in the international rankings and their massive expansion in size, the breadth and depth of the education our universities can now offer has shrunk along with their funding. Collectively, as teaching institutions, they are now less comprehensive, less diverse, and less innovative than they were before the Dawkins reforms. Whole departments and disciplines have disappeared under the pressure of reduced funding, market competition, and corporate rationalization.

More fundamentally, we are witnessing the gradual dismantling of the traditional concept of the university, along with its focus upon the generation of knowledge and the contest of ideas. As that concept loses its purchase, the status of the university within the public mind, let alone within public policy, is diminished.  Academics have long protested at the vocationalisation and marketization of the sector, and the consequences for teaching, research, and the traditional function of the university in maintaining the nation’s knowledge base. These tendencies have also changed what the university means for the rest of the nation.

Killing off the traditional university

The idea that the university should provide an education – rather than just ‘skills’ or training — has become an anachronism. It has been killed off by successive campaigns against the idea that a university education is intrinsically valuable, that each educated citizen is a benefit to the society as a whole, and that the work of the university should be independent of political, commercial, and ideological influence. The aim of those campaigns may have been strategic at the time — to contest the university sector’s claims on government funding, for instance — but the cumulative effect has been to undermine the legitimacy of these institutions altogether.

Shorn of its fundamental public role, the modern university is without a purpose of its own. This leaves it open to deployment in the service of all kinds of other policy agendas. Consequently, the university has been repurposed as an instrument of policy in a number of extrinsic commercial and political contexts: in industry policy, in trade and foreign affairs, and most recently immigration. Everything, that is, but what once might have been its core purpose — the production, preservation, curation, and dissemination of the nation’s knowledge.

Why we should care

Recently the federal government released a discussion paper on the development of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, a body recommended by the Accord to provide national ‘stewardship’ of the tertiary sector. One of the three purposes the discussion paper nominates for this new body is to oversee the development of a tertiary sector that will create a ‘strong civic democracy through institutions that foster robust debate and critical inquiry and contribute to Australia’s cultural and intellectual life’.

This is precisely the kind of broad national purpose with which the traditional university has long been identified.

But it is also the purpose which has most consistently been undermined by successive iterations of higher education policy, which has long been the target of conservative criticism within politic and the media, and which remains now as the last idea standing in the way of the final destruction of the traditional university and its public value.

This opinion piece has been republished with the kind permission of the author from the blog at graemeturner.org.

Contributor: Graeme Turner is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland and the author of The Shrinking Nation (UQP, 2023).

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