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October 04, 2007
Many have argued that the traditional idea of the university is in jeopardy, due to the contemporary political moves to transform the Australian university by subjecting it to the values of the market Freedom to teach, the unity of teaching and research, and academic self-governance--the key values associated with the traditional idea-- are under threat and have little currency in a neo-liberal mode of governance.
The last decade has witnessed sharp divides being drawn in a battle over values --the culture wars---that many have argued has distracted our political attention and energies from questions of economics and equity. This struggle between progressive and conservative values in Australia has became the political battlefield since 1996, as the conservatives created a picture of a divided, angry, unhappy society so as to deploy the language of denial, division and abuse.
A key target of this conservative rhetoric is education, especially the universities as it was that progressive values centrally placed and defended. The sustained assault on the high education institutions have undermined public confidence in them and created a certain kind of defensiveness about academia and the role of universities in a market economy.
Margaret Thornton in her 'The Idea of the University and the Contemporary Legal Academy' in the Sydney Law Review reworks the traditional defensiveness of the liberal university.
She says that within a contemporary neo-liberal setting, knowledge is the revolutionary trading commodity and that the university is not only a primary site of the production of new knowledge, but also of new knowledge workers.... Accordingly, it is expected to play a key role in the process of transforming society and ensuring acceptance of the discourse of the market, which has been described as the ‘metanarrative of our time’....Comporting with the neo-liberal imperative to privatise public goods and promote competition, a university degree itself has become a commodity like any other to be sold within the contemporary marketised environment.
She adds that, generally speaking, universities are responding to the new knowledge challenge with alacrity.
They are compromising, if not overtly forsaking, the traditional values associated with collegiality, public good and the disinterested pursuit of learning in favour of a constellation of values associated with entrepreneurialism and the market. The eagerness of universities to become market players is largely attributable to the funding crisis besetting Australian higher education. The paradox is that at the very moment the state placed pressure on universities to increase their student intake, the per capita funding of higher education places was curtailed. Universities responded by taking in more students— and an endless spiral was set in motion.
In the new world of student customers competition and education industry reflection and critique are inevitably sacrificed in the minimalist approach to credentialism.
Thornton's response to this state of affairs is to defend the liberal law school and a liberal legal education by which she means the interrogation of the knowledge purveyed, which necessarily involves far more than a set of technocratic rules:
Those wishing to educate enlightened lawyers for the future have insisted that students continue to ask the imponderable questions as to the how, the why and the ought of law. However, the market embrace is causing Australian law schools to discourage such questioning.
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In my extremely limited experience the neo-liberals have not won yet. They've done some severe damage, but they haven't won. You can't take on some of the smartest people in the universe and expect to get your own way.