It is late. This is a 'stringing quotes together' post in the light of this response to Brendan Nelson's reforms to higher education.

These reforms addressed the deregulation of academic labor so that universities are able to provide every staff member with the right to negotiate their own individual employment contract. (The Howard Government linked $400 million of additional government funding to university governance and workplace relations changes.) Whilst the response by the Vice-Chancellors explicitly rejected this link, they are quite silent on the' disappearing public' in public education, due to the externalities caused by the play of market forces.

First, I'll note this article about the disappearance of public education in US universities. It is the future for Australian universities. Here are some extracts:

"Today, however, colleges and universities are seen principally as providing tickets to financial security and economic status. Few people worry about higher-education institutions leading young people astray."

Yep. It's the case in Australia too apart from the fluff about the academic left politicizing the academy and the postmodernists white anting Australian values.

"Yet the principal responsibility for making colleges and universities less places of public purpose than in the past belongs to the public itself, or the voters and the officials they have elected to national and state offices. At the federal level, the evolution of financial aid as a subsidy to student "consumers" has reinforced the notion that a college education is principally, if not solely, an investment in personal advancement."

Thats the slope we are heading to with the Nelson reforms. Yes sirre. No doubt about it all. Gearing for market position in the prestige stakes, as Paul Watson points out here

Then a warning from those who've travelled further down the slope.

"The slope has proved to be an increasingly slippery one. As more people have viewed colleges and universities as providing principally personal advantages, institutions have been able to charge even higher prices to provide those advantages. The result is that public colleges and universities are less dependent on public appropriation -- to the point where many of the nation's best-known public institutions have become like private ones. And university presidents, recognizing that being successful now and in the future requires them to become skilled managers of billion-dollar enterprises, see little advantage, either personally or institutionally, in pursuing the visibility that comes from leading a university that defines itself in terms of its social and economic contributions to the community, state, or nation."

We can see that future begining to form now. It is characterised by the corporate university, academic mythology, the end of teaching as a vocation, PhD's being shut out of a career in academe and academics advising undergraduates not to undertake graduate studies. And we get used to fluff in the guise of debating public policy. Such fluff implies an acceptance of market reform and it turns a blind eye to the devastation that has been wrought. This article gives a very good background to the disaster inflicted on universities by the liberal state.

And the consequences of the market approach?:

"When the market interests totally dominate colleges and universities, their role as public agencies significantly diminishes -- as does their capacity to provide venues for the testing of new ideas and agendas for public action."

True, so true. The university as a public institutions withers on the vine. Thats our future. What withers when the university becomes a corporation is the public dimension of the university. Now some comment. What is the public purpose of higher education?

One aspect is articulated here here (its blogger. RESPONDING TO THE BUDGET #1 PEDAGOG0RRHOEA May 29 03) by Rob Schaap. He says:

"The purpose of the university is therefore not only to represent the world in its natural timelessness and its remorseless inevitabilities, or even to hone techniques in the manipulation of nature. The university is there to ask whether aspects of our world are in fact natural or timeless, whether our techniques serve desirable ends, and whether the very focus on technique itself constitutes a problem for society and the articulation of its aspirations."

Robe then proceeeds to give a demonstration of what he means by this form of questioning by taking aim at the assumptions of the neo-classical economists:

"So, as we swoon further into the embrace of these 'market forces', let us remember that there is nothing natural and timeless about this 'market' and 'its' forces - that definitions and prescriptions are always in contention, and each timeless truth ever on notice. It has ever been thus. And perhaps ever should be. But to allow the market of today to determine who teaches what to whom is precisely to confer decisive power to the truly unaccountable, to the naturalisers of the contingent, to the circumscribers of thought, to the wielders of interminable patents, to the keepers of secrets, to the monopolistic bulwarks against competition, and to the narrow seekers (to pinch a line from Thoreau) of improved means to unimproved ends. Whither then the right and obligation "to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas and to state controversial or unpopular opinion"?

The Vice-chancellors know this. Ian Chubb from the ANU pens this paragraph in a text about privilege and duty:

"The real issue is the sort of country we want Australia to be and the role and capacity of our universities to help get us there. Whatever we might be encouraged to think sometimes, it is the strength of the community that makes this a place worth living and widely accessible education is the key."

But he along with the others remain silent about the disappearing public in public education. Few defences of public education are ever made. It is becoming something that belonged to the era of the Cold War. Something that we embarrased about, if not ashamed of.

Comments

Posted by: meika | June 3, 2003 9:24 PM