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December 21, 2004
Rafe Champion over at Catallaxy has a post on the effects of a neo-liberal mode of governance on the liberal university.
His post is a response to an article by Barry Hindess at ANU who argued in the Education Supplement of The Australian (not online) that the rise of neo-liberalism had caused the decline of the traditional model of the universities as centres of broad learning and scholarship.
I'm not sure that this is a plausible intepretation of the Hindess article, since the decline thesis is a conservative discourse not a poststructuralist one. A Focuauldian governmentality account, for instance would talk in terms of a mode of governance as a way to analyse the links between the university, economy and state.
Rafe says he shares Hindess' concern with the "sickness" of the universities.But he argues that the latter's "diagnosis" is radically wrong and is seriously misleading as a basis for policy action. Rafe then takes the heroic stance. The decline of the university, he says, has nothing to do with neo-liberalism. The comments of the post confirm this reading.
Rafe then offers an alternative narrative. He says:
"To condense a long story, the decline [of the universities] came from a combination of too rapid growth and politicisation of the humanities in the course of the Vietnam debate.
My take on economic rationalism in economic policy is entirely compatible with the traditional model of the university, at least in its essential elements. Economic rationalism, for me, has nothing to do with putting extra regulations and constraints into a system that was not (administratively) broken in the first place. The system did not need top down bureaucratic regulation, it needed the bottom up regulation of genuine scholarship and civilised exchange of critical discourse in search for the truth."
My comment is that, during the shift to a mass, social democratic university away from the elite liberal one, the universities were increasingly centralised by the liberal state. The humanities were politicized from the 1970s. Both transformed the liberal university into something other. It became a site of conflict about Australian modernity.
I would suggest that Rafe's diagnosis misses the effects of neo-liberalism on the conventions, traditions and operations of the liberal university. There are a diversity of narratives here. We should not forget the utilitarians nor the workings of nihilism.
A neo-liberal mode of governance used market instruments to turn the liberal university into a commercial enterprise to increase the wealth of the nation through applied research. The instrumentalizing effect of that mode of governance on the administration of the university was to make these institutions operate in terms of business logic in a educational marketplace.This liberal state strategy under the ALP government of Hawke and Keating was designed to prevent Australia from becoming a banana republic.
It was this use of market instruments then undermined the genuine scholarship in the run down departments of humanities and social sciences. These were cut down to make way for the more commercially-orientated courses that would keep the universities cash registers ringing. Standards were dropped to ensure that the cash registers from international students kept ringing.
And the civilised exchange of critical discourse in search for the truth? That was never really there judging from my experience in philosophy departments. It was more about gatekeeping to protect Anglo-American philosophy from its competitors. It was more abouthe operations of power than the search for truth through a critical exchange of ideas.
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Governments did (and do) want universities to be more 'engaged' with business, but the instruments were largely bureaucratic rather than 'market' . Nor have the humanities and social sciences suffered from the market - indeed, markets in fee-paying students, largely from other faculties, have kept those faculties afloat. The humanities and social sciences are in a very sorry state, but the primary causes are intellectual suicide and poor goverment funding and regulatory policies. Meeting government quotas is the main reason there are too many weak students, at least at the traditionally better universities (the others work with an ideology of 'access'), and because the government gives too little cash to finance these students more fee-paying students, of highly varying quality, need to be taken to fund them.