Hannie Rayson’s play Life After George, published in 2000, was written in the aftermath of great change to higher education in Australia. With an acute eye, Rayson captures tension on campus as an activist government demands economic relevance from universities. The ageing academic George is not convinced by the new agenda. For him the despised reforms are driven by management clones and business paradigms. The university has lost sight of its mission—to produce ‘educated citizens. Not just compliant employees’.
Others see the world differently. The irascible George declares:
Your customer-oriented marketing posture means that the least intellectually challenging course is privileged every time. It doesn’t make sense to ask a first-year if we should be teaching postcolonial history because she doesn’t know what it is yet. She’s not yet in possession of the knowledge to make that decision. But you’re obsessed with pandering to her demands.
His second wife (and fellow academic) responds calmly:
Her demands are fairly straightforward, George. She wants a job at the end of it.1
In one intense period of disruption, beginning in 1987, such arguments seethed at universities across Australia. At the time, it seemed the end of everything familiar. Only with the benefit of distance does it become clear that bold change in fact reinforced an existing model of the university, and spread it still further across the nation.
To continue, path dependency requires strong reinforcement: benefits from travelling down a single line, constraints to discourage deviation. Expectations matter—these are nourished by the model that Australians carry in their minds—but so too does public policy, as it sets up rules and incentives to shape institutional behaviour.
Australian universities were established and funded by colonial and then state governments. The Commonwealth began paying close attention to the sector during postwar reconstruction, and established its own national university in 1946. Three years later, Canberra agreed to introduce Commonwealth scholarships, seeking more graduates in the national interest.2 Within a generation, Canberra was entirely responsible for funding the sector. With a sole funder, a single set of rules pushed institutions towards conformity. The template legislated by John Dawkins remains the purest expression of the Australian tertiary tradition—conservative in design, radical in imposing a standard template across the continent. The Dawkins unified national system is no historical curio but a key force still in the shaping of Australian tertiary institutions and how they are understood.
To set the scene for national policy change, the story must begin outside the university sector. For while diversity did not take among universities, it could be found in many other post-school education institutions. From the nineteenth century, Australia supported an array of technical and further education colleges, institutes, colleges of divinity, art schools and conservatoria in fields such as nursing, teaching, agriculture and the arts. This lively sector ranged from small colleges with just a few hundred students to large institutes of technology in capital cities. Ownership and governance were equally diverse, running the gamut from autonomous institutions to units within state education departments. Here was the variety of missions and forms not found among universities.
This plurality reflected different histories and purposes. In the university sector, governmental and community expectations weighed heavily on a small number of institutions, each obliged to be all things to all people in their state. In contrast, the non-university higher education sector could occupy many niches. Without research as a primary requirement, the post-school sector employed a diverse array of teachers, including many who combined professional practice with instruction. Artists and writers taught students such as painter Margaret Preston and the novelist Joan Lindsay, both of whom attended the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. Margaret Olley spent time at Brisbane Central Technical College before transferring to East Sydney Technical College, where fellow painter Charles Blackman also took classes.
Alongside these institutions, many with a history reaching back to the nineteenth century, were colleges of advanced education. Faced with the problem of funding sufficient new university places, the Menzies Government invented this additional category of institution; some were newly created, others based on existing teacher colleges. This catered to changes in the training of professions such as teaching and nursing, and called into being tertiary institutions that looked like universities but cost a good deal less because they did not support research.
The creation of colleges of advanced education reflected concern about expanding the university sector. As Prime Minister Menzies told federal parliament:
unless there is early and substantial modification of the university pattern, away from the traditional nineteenth-century model on which it is now based, it may not—and I say it with reluctance— be practicable for Australian governments to meet all the needs for university education in Australia and at the same time to achieve the best use of resources in the national interest.3
In his influential 1964 report, Sir Leslie Martin, first chairman of the Australian Universities Commission, endorsed non-university institutions as a timely form of specialisation. For Canberra, the distinction between expensive university education and more economical technical training offered a compelling financial rationale. Hence, the Commonwealth embraced a ‘binary divide’— research-focused universities on one side of the ledger, and a growing non-university sector on the other. Funds from Canberra would be directed to the college sector. In 1968, university students outnumbered college of advanced education students two to one. A decade later, enrolments were almost equal.
Overall, the system provided students with three post-school education options. They could access technical and further education (TAFE) colleges, funded by the states, with a traditional focus on employment skills and apprenticeship training. Alternatively, an aspiring student could look to colleges of advanced education, many with specialist courses in education and health. Finally, a student could seek professional training in an existing university. In 1972, Peter Karmel, then heading the Australian Universities Commission, optimistically described this higher education landscape as a ‘continuum of educational opportunities’. Others used the language of complementary systems.
However, this spectrum of choice proved unstable and short-lived. Institutes and colleges chafed at the status difference implied by a binary divide. They too aspired to offer higher degrees and undertake research. Continuing differences in prestige rankled. Research remained the domain of universities, and this became a point of contention for institute and college of advanced education staff. The dominant model of the university, combining research and teaching, was more attractive than the possibility of creating distinctly different institutions around teaching.
Barely ten years into the formal binary system, mergers began among small institutions in the interests of economy. In 1975, the Victorian Government agreed to combine the Gordon Institute of Technology and the Geelong Teachers’ College as Deakin University. This was followed by mergers between universities and colleges in Townsville during 1981 and Wollongong in 1982. In 1986, the Western Australian Institute of Technology further challenged the binary system, negotiating with the state government to become Curtin University.
When John Dawkins, Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and Training from 1987 to 1991, came to review higher education policy, the binary divide was already under sustained challenge. At first, the new minister seemed cautious about abandoning the dual-track system. His original 1987 Green Paper suggested the binary divide ‘not be set aside lightly’, but acknowledged that differences between institutions had ‘blurred’. The minister understood the two-sector model had created stratification and jealousy.
Minister Dawkins wanted to expand student access to the system, and sympathised with institute and college claims for university status. His challenge lay in working out how to pay for system expansion. The minister’s answer would end institutional diversity and take the process of standardisation to its logical conclusion, imposing a single institutional form on all Australian universities.
Minister Dawkins understood the power of policy to remake a system. The ministerial title he adopted— placing ‘education’ after ‘employment’—underlined that university reform would focus on human capital, with explicit economic objectives. Higher education, he argued, must be ‘more responsive to the needs of industry, more flexible, more consistent with “national interests and objectives”’.4 By the time Dawkins left the portfolio in December 1991 to become treasurer, it was a much altered higher education landscape.5
Simon Marginson, Professor of International Higher Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, offered a bracing assessment of ministerial craft:
What Dawkins did was strengthen the normalisation process by systematising the norm of the Australian idea, using the powerful device of competitive emulation to entrench it, while at the same time stepping away from, and/or actively preventing, all forms of state sanctioned diversity of mission and approach, whether binary sector, disciplinary specialist institution, or sanctioned experimentalism.6
The new minister listened carefully to concerns from institutes and colleges about their status. Such arguments could be yoked to the minister’s aspiration to expand enrolments. By abolishing the binary divide, and extending university status to a wider array of institutions, the minister would double university places. National protocols would define a university and regulate its operations, creating what the minister called a ‘unified national system’ of higher education.
The Dawkins reforms adopted the familiar template of an Australian metropolitan university and compelled all institutions to conform. The loss of small specialist colleges accentuated similarities. Henceforth, Australian higher education would operate with a single set of funding rates and a preference for three-year undergraduate degrees, using the programs, titles, nomenclature and operating procedures of the nation’s founding institutions.
The unified national system accepted only one idea of a university and made it the national standard. The raft of new universities that emerged from the Dawkins reforms were designed in this single image, each a public self-governing institution established through legislation, strongly tipped towards educating the professions, meritocratic, non-residential and comprehensive, with a mission that required teaching and research. They joined existing players already shaped by the Australian tradition.
To fund these changes, the minister ended a fifteen-year experiment with free tertiary education. Undergraduates would now pay fees once earning a salary through a Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). The minister had already allowed universities to charge up-front fees to international students. In time, this would create a huge export industry for Australia, and allow government to reduce financial support for universities.
Minister Dawkins stressed efficiency, and imposed a new minimum size requirement. The Commonwealth would support only research institutions with at least 8,000 full-time students. This meant an end to the independent art schools and music conservatoria, along with the rural and fashion colleges surviving on the periphery of tertiary education. Their demise ended the distinctive educational experience possible only in a small and specialised institution.7 Some became part of the TAFE sector, but those aspiring to university status faced a difficult decision. Twenty-one institutions failed to meet the size threshold. Their arguments for continued independence were rejected, and so small specialised teaching colleges were absorbed into larger institutions. In the process, Australia lost a diverse set of institutions, even as it gained new universities.8
The Dawkins policy prompted a fourth, and largest ever, wave of university foundations. Former teachers’ colleges, institutes and colleges of advanced education banded together as new universities in Ballarat, Bathurst, Coffs Harbour and Toowoomba. Some agonised over possibilities before settling into their ultimate shape. The South Australian Institute of Technology and the South Australian College of Advanced Education explored mergers with both Adelaide and Flinders before banding together as the new University of South Australia.9
Each amalgamation required a state or territory government to pass enabling legislation, following extensive negotiations among players joining together as a new university. In 1988, just as the Dawkins changes began, the University of Technology, Sydney was established.10 It was followed the next year by Charles Sturt University, the Northern Territory University, Queensland University of Technology and Western Sydney University. In 1991, Edith Cowan University and the University of South Australia began, while 1992 saw formal commencement of Central Queensland University, RMIT University and Swinburne University. Two years later, the sector welcomed the University of Ballarat (now Federation). Southern Cross University also joined in 1994 after a difficult divorce from the University of New England.
New universities based on former institutes of technology began with strong cultures and seasoned leadership keen to seize new opportunities. Universities emerging from complex amalgamations across colleges were not always so fortunate. Some faced years of internal power struggle in the search for coherence. Deals done in haste were repented at leisure; several universities would spend decades seeking to offload unviable campuses acquired in the heat of change, navigating difficult terrain between communities determined to keep their local university and governing boards concerned about financial viability.
Once Minister Dawkins made mergers necessary for smaller institutions, vice-chancellors scrambled to acquire real estate. One astonished registrar described the operating principles at work as ‘greed, and the existence, even in the groves of academe, of corporate raiders’.11 Some state governments imposed geographically coherent solutions on amalgamations while others deferred to local deals. Thus, while the Queensland Government consolidated former colleges into corridor institutions serving the north, west and south of Brisbane, the Victorian Government signalled preferences but did not enforce outcomes. Instead, ‘powerful vice-chancellors’ conferred with ‘the heads of colleges they coveted’, and the deals began.12 As a result, the University of Melbourne sits only a few hundred metres from a campus of Monash, while the outer Melbourne suburb of Bundoora is home to two university campuses with similar facilities. A university based in Geelong has its largest campus in eastern Melbourne.
Amalgamations also imposed change on existing players. The University of Sydney ‘incorporated six institutions as its contribution to the creation of the new unified system, increasing its student load by almost a third, although its academic staff increased by only around 20 per cent’.13 In the judgement of analysts Julia Horne and Stephen Garton, post-amalgamation Sydney was ‘very different’ from its earlier self, weaker than more nimble competitors.14
By the time the Dawkins wave of mergers concluded, seventy-three higher education providers had become thirty-eight universities. Only three small institutions survived into the following decade: the Australian Maritime College, the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) and the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education. Eventually, the Maritime College would become an institute within the University of Tasmania; the VCA would become a faculty of the University of Melbourne. Only Batchelor endured as a dual-sector tertiary provider outside the university-dominated system, the sole survivor of a more variegated tertiary world before Minister Dawkins.
The Dawkins moment offers a vivid display of path dependency at work. It took an existing model of a university, already credible with students and academics, and mandated it as the national norm. The minister then imposed additional rules around funding, accreditation and operations. He even required a standard semester timetable across the sector. Here, in Page’s formulation, path dependency arose from financial rewards for staying with the familiar model, self-reinforcement through academic norms, positive feedback from government for working within the uniform national system, and lock-in through regulation.15
For Minister Dawkins, an expanded and more rigorously uniform system addressed a political challenge facing the Hawke Government: how to provide more university places as higher education became central to family aspirations. By reducing difference between institutions, Dawkins rapidly expanded enrolments, providing a rebadged university campus and new tertiary places in many communities. He met his economic objective of expanding the national skills base. The Dawkins moment was the point when Australian higher education tipped from elite to mass—when university attendance became the plausible expectation of millions of school students.
To achieve his goal, Dawkins played on academic status. Prestige resided in institutions with a strong research profile. To garner support, the minister leaned on the normative power of the ideal university type by offering the label—and access to competitive research grants—to new players.
This proved a clever way to divide the tertiary sector. The Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee warned about ‘creating universities out of thin air’.16 Academics at the ANU offered ‘strident’ opposition to extending the university name and professorial nomenclature.17 Yet those in institutes and colleges could celebrate their new titles and access to research-funding schemes. In turn, new universities insisted staff undertake doctoral study, thus encouraging a more uniform set of academic qualifications and research experience across the sector.
It still required external command to complete the imposition of a single model. John Dawkins understood the power of public policy to enforce a single model. In 1987, Canberra provided 83 per cent of university revenue and it used this financial leverage to force sweeping restructures across the entire publicly funded sector. Since states and territories had surrendered the field to the Commonwealth, there was nowhere for universities to seek alternative support. This allowed Canberra to impose consistent national standards. A single Australian Qualifications Framework would fix the length, credit points and standing of certificates and degrees. To ensure parity of esteem, Minister Dawkins insisted on equality of treatment across institutions, despite their uneven starting points. The old and venerable would be subject to the same rules as the newly minted. All would undertake research.
This program would be eroded if a clear hierarchy of institutions emerged. Hence, Canberra insisted on setting the price for study. The middle class would not be permitted, as they could with private schools, to invest greater sums in their children’s higher education. To this day, ministerial control of fees remains in force, with degree costs consistent across institutions and the nation.
Evaluated against the objective of improving access to higher education, the reforms of 1987–91 constituted a significant and sustained success. Minister Dawkins delivered the nation’s most rapid expansion of tertiary education, using a fourth wave of foundations to double university enrolments. In the decades since, hundreds of thousands of Australians have accessed courses once available only to a small cohort. University campuses have become a familiar sight in most Australian towns and cities, and overall participation in higher learning has risen sharply. International students are now found in communities across Australia, and are the nation’s largest source of skilled migrants. Access initiatives have lifted the number of Indigenous Australians going to university, while women and people of non-English speaking backgrounds continue to achieve rates of participation at or better than parity.
Minister Dawkins was not focused on facilitating diversity within the higher education system. He achieved his primary objective of rapid system expansion at the expense of difference, driving specialist programs into larger institutions. Subjects too expensive to run vanished, along with the workforce of dedicated staff nurtured by colleges to pursue excellence in teaching.
Critics counted the cost. As a 1995 report prepared for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) argued:
the most astounding result of these changes in Australia has been the degree of uniformity of mission which has developed. No sooner had the new universities gained their new titles than they began to copy their older university counterparts. All wanted to enter the research arena; all wanted to enrol doctoral students irrespective of their infrastructure … all wanted to introduce Law faculties and most did. The fears of commentators who predicted that instead of creating a unified national system we were about to create a uniform national system (or uniform national mediocrity) were realised. The arguments which the college sector had mounted to demonstrate that while it might be different from universities it was certainly superior to them, and all the avowed emphasis on teaching and diversity disappeared.18
Alongside the loss of identity among smaller institutions, the Dawkins reforms intensified concerns about a managerial logic. Discussion of the economy of public universities evokes a rich literature, often offering a narrative of decline in traditional university values.19 How could academic decisions yield to new management imperatives? Donald Horne recalls a letter of abuse following an acrimonious dispute within the Faculty of Arts at UNSW. ‘Your conduct sits better with the professional ethics of a bazaar rug-merchant than those of the chair of an academic faculty,’ proclaimed an aggrieved academic.20 Others wondered aloud whether, in the words of nineteenth-century cultural critic Matthew Arnold, the university could continue to offer the ‘best which has been thought and said’.21
More often, the analysis focused on the consequences of deterioration in public funding, as tuition costs were pushed onto university students.22 When education was free and universities reliant on public funding, they were public institutions in every sense. Now Australia’s public universities had to raise the majority of their income from students, competitive research grants, philanthropy and commercial activity. Though still public in spirit, and expected to be accountable as public agencies, universities would rely more heavily on private income.23
Today, these costs are felt most acutely by those who study and work on campus. If classes are more crowded for students, employment is less certain for staff. Around 120,000 people work in Australian universities, typically at good wages by international comparison, but guaranteed employment disappears as tutorial sizes increase. Staff-to-student ratios have declined across the nation.24 To contain costs and deal with budget fluctuations, universities deploy a large casual workforce—a shrinking ‘tenured core’ of older scholars supervising a large periphery of younger academics. One study suggests a majority of Australian academics now work on contingent rather than continuing appointments.25
The stringency of tight budgets and larger student loads has encouraged commercial approaches within institutions. This poses a risk, in the words of Stefan Collini, that higher education reform will ‘turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies’.26
Murdoch Professor of Politics and International Studies, Kanishka Jayasuriya, suggests the state has imprinted on universities its own economic transformation.27 Institutions face competitive pressures and growing levels of debt and risk. Platonic ideals of the university give way to discussions about competition, capital and skills. Once scholars but now managers, university leaders find themselves in meetings to choose enterprise information systems, set risk ratings and make commercial decisions alongside academic judgements. Older collegial modes of governance jostle with a more corporate approach to management. The university of popular imagination, a space of witty word-play at academic board meetings and languorous afternoon seminars, is lost from view.
The brief but intensive Dawkins moment gave Australia a much larger higher education system, but one less varied, less resourced for each student, more heavily subject to national rules and regulation. Thus, by ministerial fiat, all Australian universities became essentially— and more than ever—the same.
Minister John Dawkins did not invent the Australian idea of a university—that journey began more than a century earlier—but his new rules and funding arrangements reinforced the single Australian path.
In The Enterprise University, Simon Marginson and Mark Considine, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Melbourne, map similarities and differences within a common Australian model. They maintain that universities are shaped by the state, which imposes conformity, but strive still for individuality.28 History, curriculum, resources, structures and mission vary, but the study suggests universities can be grouped through association, from the original sandstones to the ‘gumtree’ universities of the 1960s and 1970s, the former institutes of technology, and the new array of city and regional institutions created in the Dawkins moment.29
Marginson and Considine observe that each university has ‘its own history and geographic location, its social clusters and particular personalities’.30 They are keen to acknowledge subtle differences, even as they point to powerful pressures for institutional convergence. Regulation imposes a common template and universities, they suggest, are also prone to copying each other. Since innovation on campus cannot be copyrighted, a new subject area or a clever marketing device will be quickly plagiarised. An idea such as work-integrated learning, encouraging students to spend time in industry while studying, may start in just one institution but spread rapidly. If successful, it may become a standard feature of all Australian universities.
This logic suggests a paradoxical conclusion—that competition can lead to conformity rather than real difference. Dutch social scientist Frans van Vught describes this as a ‘reputational race’ that drives universities towards the same goals.31 The phenomenon is known as ‘isomorphism’, a term appropriated from mathematics. It draws on the Greek isos, meaning equal, and morphe, to shape, and points to the process by which organisations become more alike over time.
As universities are subject to the same policy environment, employ from the same pool of staff, and compete for the same students by providing much the same set of offerings, they learn from each other. New institutions copy the already successful, and so reinforce a standard model. Academics reinforce hierarchies of status, journals and curricula. Over time, the sector converges around very similar profiles and ways of behaving; ‘rational actors make their organisations increasingly similar as they try to change them’.32 In America, this is sometimes described as ‘Harvard Envy’.33
Isomorphism is a frame to explain why universities adopt similar structures and missions. Mimicry encourages the foundation of yet more law schools and MBA programs in already crowded markets. It sees innovation ripple across the sector, from the names of schools and faculties to industrial agreements governing employment, until any distinct profile is blurred. Even as they wrap themselves in a rhetoric of difference, tertiary institutions are ‘courageous imitations’.34
Though a path dependency argument begins from a different point, it supports the same conclusion: amid a wide world of possible institutional design, Australian tertiary education has landed in a narrow confine. There are differences, captured in labels and sector groupings, with some institutions stressing graduate education, others their close links to industry or community. There is stratification by prestige, historic resources and ability to attract research income. These are important differences, but overall the Australian idea of a university is marked less by diversity than by similarity, with few outliers amid many expressions of a shared tradition.
The model expressed in the unified national system continues to exercise a powerful effect on the Australian imagination, shaping the thinking of both sides of politics about higher education. Faced with an ambitious agenda from Minister Dawkins, the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee first cautioned against an expanded university sector, then eventually embraced the minister’s definition and made it the criterion for entry to the AVCC.35 The Dawkins model was further entrenched in the year 2000, when state and federal ministers agreed on a protocol for accrediting universities. This required research in at least three broad fields of study, and so made research a legislated requirement of any Australian university.36
For a generation, the standard model of an Australian public university has been fixed in regulation. Institutions vary in size but not in purpose or ambition. Locked into a common funding system and Commonwealth regulatory framework, shaped by isomorphism, Australian universities converge.
Though government has changed hands many times in the years since the incumbency of Minister Dawkins, tertiary education policy remains surprisingly static. There have been reviews and failed legislative attempts at system change, but ministerial successors have retained the logic and regulatory mechanisms they inherited. This so surprised the architect of the system that in September 2016 John Dawkins returned to political debate. He criticised the failure of policy makers to embrace more flexibility and competition between universities. It was time, suggested the former minister, for ‘fresh thinking’ because his 1987 reforms were now ‘completely out of date’.37
The former politician offered a stark warning for his successors: ‘everyone is sitting on their hands while the world has changed around them’. John Dawkins could see the looming challenge from online providers and alternative approaches to tertiary education. He argued that a model developed in an earlier era, to solve a particular problem around student access, had outlived its usefulness. The regulatory framework Dawkins established now stifled the creativity required to meet the challenge from Silicon Valley.
John Dawkins demonstrated that education policy can shape university practice. He defined the Australian university and hastened it down an existing path. His reforms called forth a system of broad similarity and his legacy persists: Australian universities offer, as their defining rationale, a similar range of undergraduate programs, postgraduate education, and research. There are no specialist institutions, no engineering schools without an arts program, no public institution of scale with a discipline-specific mission. Path dependency and the pressures for convergence have all but eradicated the points of differentiation between Australian universities. In an age of regulated assimilation to a standard model, Australian universities have become more alike over time. In a world of global opportunity and flexibility, this makes them vulnerable.