"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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deregulating higher education
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June 14, 2007
Greg Craven assess the embrace of deregulation of higher education proposed the Group of Eight universities in an op-ed in The Australian. He says about this kind of academic capitalism:
Forget diversity, forget equity, forget policy. Whatever benefits Australia's oldest and richest universities is, by definition, the right thing to do. Naturally, Davis and his colleagues have had the good taste to dress it up a bit. The centrepiece of their proposal is the idea that university education would be funded through commonwealth-provided entitlements for which students would compete. Students could then take their entitlement to the university of their choice. n previous incarnations, this type of idea was referred to as vouchers, which carried about the right connotation of tacky, mercantile opportunism. Now the Go8 has rebranded them national scholarships, which sounds altogether more reassuring.
So what is wrong with competition and giving students what they think they want? Craven says that the market is rigged by status and power.
He rightly highlights the consequences:
The Go8 universities are sandstone colonials (or their equally wealthy but more recent brethren), with the accumulated benefits of decades of public funding. They were permitted to build up their market positions as state monopolies and near monopolies for many years and continue to exist - economically and reputationally - on their accumulated monopoly rents. Newer, innovative universities have no hope of competing on equal terms with these cheerful Telstras of Australian higher education. The fate of such also-ran universities is clear. A significant proportion of higher-scoring students presumably would follow the Nike brand of the Go8, undermining Australia's strong middle band of higher education. These universities in turn would raid the student base of more vulnerable institutions, which would go into free fall.
So we have first-class international research universities (G of 8) and pedestrian second-class teaching institutions whose academics' most recent research is minimal. So the key difference is between rich, real, research universities and the desperately disadvantaged universities, which service teachers, nurses, health professionals, and cannot afford to do basic research.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:04 AM | Permalink |
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