Prologue
1Lacy et al., Australian Universities at a Crossroads: Insights from Their Leaders and Implications for the Future, 2017, p. 52.
2Personal communication from Sharon Bell, 2017.
3Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin, 1996 (f.p. 1852); an introduction to Jill Ker Conway’s influence on Smith College is available through the college’s historical encyclopedia: see Smithipedia, ‘President Jill Ker Conway’, 2017; Wilson, Princeton in the Nation’s Service, 21 October 1896; Kerr, The Uses of the University, 2001.
4Horne, Into the Open: Memoirs 1958–1999, 2000, p. 216.
5Walsh, Lapsing, 1986, p. 251.
6Collins, ‘Political Ideology in Australia: The Distinctiveness of a Benthamite Society’, Daedalus, 1985.
7Collini, What Are Universities for?, 2012, pp. 24–5.
8Leckart, ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’, Wired, 20 March 2012.
1 End of the line?
1In Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, 1998, p. 225.
2Backus, ‘Commentary: Creative Destruction Meets Higher Education’, The Washington Post, 19 May 2013.
3The Economist, ‘Higher Education: Creative Destruction’, 28 June 2014.
4Kao, Innovation Nation, 2007, p. 264.
5Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1975 (f.p. 1942), pp. 82–6.
6Schumpeter, The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, 1991, p. 349; Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 84.
7Woolley, ‘The Coming of the Railway to Oxford’, South Oxford Community Centre, 2016; Woolley, ‘How the Railway Changed Oxford’, Oxfordshire Local History Association Journal, 2013–14, p. 31.
8A quote attributed to Rector of Lincoln College Mark Pattison, in Stoppard, The Invention of Love, 1998, p. 17.
9In Thomas, ‘The Chase’, London Review of Books, 20 October 2016, p. 15.
10This description of Rutgers and the University of Phoenix draws on Davis, ‘The Rising Phoenix of Competition: What Future for Australia’s Public Universities?’, Griffith Review, 2006.
11Rosen, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, 2011, p. 150.
12Trowbridge, ‘University of Phoenix Parent Accepts Federal Amendments for Buyout Approval’, Phoenix Business Journal, 21 December 2016.
13Newman offered an earlier version of this argument, discounting even books when compared with personal conversation: ‘no book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its subject with that rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation’. Newman, Historical Sketches, vol. 3, 1889, pp. 8–9.
14An insight that Stuart Macintyre attributes to historian and Vice-Chancellor Alan Gilbert, himself a pioneer in online learning.
15Leckart, ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’, Wired, 20 March 2012.
16Udacity, ‘About Us’, 2017.
17Based on a visit to Udacity in January 2016.
18In Leckart, ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’.
19Wood, ‘The Future of College?’, The Atlantic, September 2014.
20Ibid.
21The Economist, ‘Established Education Providers v New Contenders: Alternative Providers of Education Must Solve the Problems of Cost and Credentials’, Special report, 12 January 2017.
22For a characteristic example, see Toren, ‘Top 100 Entrepreneurs Who Made Millions without a College Degree’, Business Insider Australia, 20 January 2011.
23Cohan, ‘Why Peter Thiel Is Wrong to Pay Students to Drop Out’, Forbes, 15 June 2011. Cohan’s piece refers to a paper by Lange et al., ‘Human Assets and Entrepreneurial Performance: A Study of Companies Started by Business School Graduates’, Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship, 2012.
24The list is drawn from Dodd, ‘New Study Reveals $40 Billion Is Invested in Education Technology’, Australian Financial Review, 8 May 2017, p. 12.
25The Economist, ‘Higher Education: Creative Destruction’.
26Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 83 note 2; Eldredge and Gould, ‘Punctuated Equilibria: An Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism’, in Schopf (ed.), Models in Paleobiology, 1972.
27Fain, ‘Fine Print and Tough Questions for the Purdue–Kaplan Deal’, Inside Higher Ed, 30 May 2017.
28Rosen, Change.edu, pp. 181–93.
2 The metropolitan university
1This chapter draws on Davis, ‘The Australian Idea of a University’, Meanjin, 2013.
2Thrift, ‘The University of Life’, New Literary History, 2016, p. 402.
3It is a truth universally acknowledged in jeremiads on universities that managers have multiplied on campus while academic recruitment languishes. It is a surprise therefore to note that a systematic American study, with data from 1987 to 2013, finds that the ‘share of college employees who are executives, administrators, or managers has not changed appreciably over time’. See Hinrichs, Trends in Employment at US Colleges and Universities, 1987–2013, 2016.
4Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, ‘Basic Classification Description’, 2017.
5Campion College in Sydney, a private institution, would be classified as a ‘baccalaureate college: arts & science focus’ in the Carnegie schema. The private University of Divinity would likely be called a ‘special focus institution’, though the Carnegie classification has little to say about theological schools. Dual-sector institutions offer both vocational and bachelor qualifications. Category R in the Carnegie classification offers three variants— highest, higher and moderate research activity, with some distinctions between universities with medical and veterinary schools and those without, so Australian universities spread across these sub-categories.
6Matchett, ‘Uni Lobby Laments: We’re Being Punished for Peak Performance’, Campus Morning Mail, 4 May 2017.
7Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories, 1968, in Schwartz, ‘Down the Wrong Path: Path Dependence, Increasing Returns, and Historical Institutionalism’, 2004.
8Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis, 2004.
9David, ‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’, The American Economic Review, 1985. See also Anderson, ‘Why is QWERTY on Our Keyboards?’, BBC Culture, 13 December 2016.
10Liebowitz and Margolis, ‘The Fable of the Keys’, in Spulber (ed.), Famous Fables of Economics, 2002.
11Pierson, ‘The New Politics of the Welfare State’, World Politics, 1996, p. 175.
12Page, ‘Path Dependence’, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2006, p. 87.
13Schwartz, ‘Down the Wrong Path: Path Dependence, Increasing Returns, and Historical Institutionalism’, p. 5.
14Page, ‘Path Dependence’, p. 88.
15Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939, 2013, p. 5.
16Alan Atkinson suggests that the University of Toronto, as with Sydney, was influenced by Anglican thought, with concessions to secularism in the founding constitution a nod to divergent protestant beliefs within a nation assumed fundamentally to be Christian. Atkinson, ‘“Do Unto Others”: Australia and the Anglican Conscience, 1840–56 and Afterwards’, in Macintyre, Layman and Gregory (eds), A Historian for All Seasons: Essays for Geoffrey Bolton, 2017.
17Turney, Bygott and Chippendale, Australia’s First: A History of the University of Sydney, Vol. 1: 1850–1939, 1991, pp. 7–8.
18Longo, ‘History Honours, 1901–2010’, in Prest (ed.), Pasts Present: History at Australia’s Third University, 2014, p. 116.
19McCord and Purdue, British History 1815–1914, 2007, p. 376.
20From the 1963 Robbins Report, in Collini, ‘From Robbins to McKinsey’, London Review of Books, 25 August 2011.
21In Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, Lytton Strachey provides a sympathetic picture of Newman’s failure, blaming not the concept but local clerical politics and ‘the inertia of the Irish authorities’.
22Collini, What Are Universities for?, 2012, p. 195.
23Mill, ‘Inaugural Address to the University of St Andrews’, in Robson (ed.), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XXI—Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, 1867.
24Persse, ‘Wentworth, William Charles (1790–1872)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1967.
25Collini suggests that at least three different kinds of British universities were operating at the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘the Oxbridge model: residential, tutorial, character-forming. There was the Scottish/London model: metropolitan, professorial, meritocratic. And there was the “civic” model (“Redbrick” was a later coinage): local, practical, aspirational’. What Are Universities for?, p. 28.
26Horne and Sherington, ‘“Dominion Legacies”: the Case of Australia’, in Schreuder (ed.), Universities for a New World: Making an International Network in Global Higher Education, 1913–2013, 2013.
27Ibid., p. 285.
28Colony of New South Wales Legislative Council, Votes and Proceedings, Friday 28 June 1850, p. 44.
29Jayasuriya, ‘Transforming the Public University: Market Citizenship and Higher Education Regulatory Projects’, in Thornton (ed.), Through a Glass Darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University, 2014, p. 90.
30In calculating this figure there is a definitional argument about whether the Australian Catholic University counts as a public institution (it certainly relies on public funding and is established by legislation, but takes the form of a company). In 2015, the Department of Education and Training recorded that private universities make up 1.1 per cent of overall teaching load, with TAFE contributing a further 0.19 per cent. If ACU is counted as a private institution also, the private higher education effort rises to 2.8 per cent. In either case, the system remains overwhelmingly public.
31Turney, Bygott and Chippendale, Australia’s First, pp. 40–1.
32University of Sydney Act 1850, United Kingdom.
33Serle, John Monash: A Biography, 1982, p. 479.
34A quote from the Sydney Morning Herald of 5 October 1849, cited in Hirst, Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony, 2008, p. 216.
35Though midwifery is identified in the founding statute as an essential skill for the colony, women were not allowed to sit the matriculation exam until 1871 and not granted admission to the university until 1881.
36Selleck, The Shop: The University of Melbourne, 1850–1939, 2003, p. 47.
37Cable, ‘Woolley, John (1816–1866)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1976.
38Calculating exactly what constitutes a professional program can be challenging, and this figure is an estimate based on close reading of the University of Sydney annual report. On this count, graduate courses account for 69.2 per cent of current enrolments at the University of Sydney. I am grateful for personal communication from Julia Horne in 2017 clarifying the early pattern of enrolments at Sydney.
39Horne and Sherington, ‘Extending the Educational Franchise: The Social Contract of Australia’s Public Universities, 1850–1890’, Paedagogica Historica, 2010, p. 210.
40Ibid., p. 211.
41As Turney, Bygott and Chippendale argue: ‘A university education, or at least a university degree, was the prerogative of those, and only those, who subscribed to the established religion’. Australia’s First, p. 6.
42Persse, ‘Wentworth, William Charles (1790–1872)’. The recommendations of the Royal Commission of 1850 opened the doors of Oxford to non-Anglicans, suggest McCord and Purdue, British History 1815–1914, p. 376.
43Horne, ‘Political Machinations and Sectarian Intrigue in the Making of Sydney University’, Journal of the Australian Catholic Historical Society, 2015, p. 5.
44Atkinson, ‘“Do Unto Others”’, p. 132.
45Ibid., pp. 132–3.
46The visitor was Thomas Donovan in 1915, who would later help establish Newman College at Melbourne. In Selleck, The Shop, p. 574.
47Colony of New South Wales Legislative Council, An Act to Incorporate and Endow the University of Sydney, 1 October 1850; Horne and Sherington, Sydney: The Making of a Public University, 2012, p. 7: ‘The foundation of the University of Sydney as a secular and non-denominational institution was integral to its character as a public institution’.
48Horne and Sherington, ‘Extending the Educational Franchise’.
49Cable, Turney and Bygott, Australia’s First: A Pictorial History of the University of Sydney 1850–1990, 1994, p. 12.
50Selleck, The Shop, p. 132, on the origins of Trinity College, the first at the University of Melbourne.
51Turney, Bygott and Chippendale, Australia’s First, p. 137.
52Linn, The Spirit of Knowledge: A Social History of the University of Adelaide North Terrace Campus, 2011, p. 73.
53There are no definitive national figures available, and residency varies by institution and time, so a precise count is difficult. A large metropolitan institution such as the University of Sydney currently houses 5 per cent of students on campus, and the University of Melbourne hosts 5.7 per cent of students in colleges.
54In a personal communication, in 2017, Simon Marginson observes that the ‘always present’ comprehensive nature of Australian universities ‘coincides with the main line of international development, in the direction of the comprehensive multi-disciplinary multi-purpose university. This has been a significant factor in the high global performance—on a modest public financing base—of Australian universities’.
55Turney, Bygott and Chippendale, Australia’s First, p. 123.
56In ibid., p. 116. Italics in original.
57Newman, The Idea of a University, Preface, p. 3. Reading The Idea is a very big commitment. As Dr Johnson said of Paradise Lost, this is ‘one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is’.
58In Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914, 2004, p. 55.
59Connell et al., Australia’s First: A History of the University of Sydney, Vol. 2: 1940–1990, 1995, quoted by Forsyth, ‘Disinterested Scholars or Interested Parties? The Public’s Investment in Self-interested Universities’, in Thornton (ed.), Through a Glass Darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University, p. 28.
60Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne, 1957, p. 196.
61Alas, needless to say, this excluded all those without access to reasonable secondary education, such as most Indigenous people. See Horne and Sherington, Sydney: The Making of a Public University, pp. 53–7.
62Horne and Sherington, Sydney: The Making of a Public University, and in personal communication, 2017. See also Horne and Sherington, ‘Extending the Educational Franchise’, p. 209, and Horne, Campbell and Sherington, ‘The Idea of the University in the British Colonies’, 2007.
63‘Though the constellation is changed, the disposition is the same.’ Clive James renders the motto as: ‘Sydney University is really Oxford or Cambridge laterally displaced approximately 12,000 miles’. James, Unreliable Memoirs, 1980, p. 125.
64Cable, ‘Woolley, John (1816–1866)’.
65Selleck, The Shop, pp. 14–15.
66Ibid., p. 20.
67Ibid., pp. 52, 55.
68Personal communication, 2017, from university historian Carolyn Rasmussen.
69Horne and Sherington, ‘Extending the Educational Franchise’, pp. 209–210.
70Selleck, The Shop, p. 147; Blainey, A Centenary History of the University of Melbourne, p. 48.
71Selleck, The Shop, p. 111.
72Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, p. 79.
73See Henningham, ‘Weir, Margaret Williams’, Encyclopedia of Women & Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia,2014.
74Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, p. 79.
75Davis, Open to Talent: The Centenary History of the University of Tasmania 1890–1990, 1990, pp. 17–18.
76Thomis, A Place of Light & Learning: The University of Queensland’s First Seventy-five Years, 1985, p. 21.
77Byers and Thackrah, ‘Constructing the Student Experience’, in Gregory with Chetkovich (eds), Seeking Wisdom: A Centenary History of the University of Western Australia, 2013, p. 184.
78Linn, The Spirit of Knowledge, pp. 14–15.
79Turney, Bygott and Chippendale, Australia’s First, p. 134.
80Selleck, The Shop, p. 27.
81Thrift says that ‘universities, like most institutions, have accreted new values (and thrown others aside) as they have acquired new strands of activity’. ‘The University of Life’, p. 400.
82In Collini, What Are Universities for?, p. 21.
3 Attempts to leave the path
1Jordan, A Spirit of True Learning: The Jubilee History of the University of New England, 2004, pp. 15, 78, 98.
2Castle, University of Wollongong: An Illustrated History 1951–1991, 1991, pp. 3, 11.
3University of New South Wales—University Archives, Broken Hill Division of the University of New South Wales, 2014.
4Queensland, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, 3 November 1959, pp. 1088–9.
5Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University, 1946–1996, 1996, pp. 4–5.
6Ibid., pp. 13, 21, 38.
7The Australian National University Act 1946, S6 (a).
8Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University, p. 3.
9Ibid., p. 180.
10Technical Education and New South Wales University of Technology Act 1949, S18.
11O’Farrell, UNSW, a Portrait: The University of New South Wales 1949–1999, 1999, p. 75.
12Report of the Committee on Australian Universities (The Murray Report), 1957, p. 88.
13University of New South Wales, History, 2017.
14Davison and Murphy, University Unlimited: The Monash Story, 2012, p. 5.
15Mr Sutton spoke in a debate on the Monash University Bill, see Victoria, Legislative Assembly, Parliamentary Debates, 1 April 1958, p. 3935.
16Report of the Committee on Australian Universities (The Murray Report), p. 87.
17In Davison and Murphy, University Unlimited, p. 55.
18Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University, p. 201.
19Davison and Murphy, University Unlimited, p. 137.
20Perry, The Rise and Fall of Practically Everybody: An Account of Student Political Activity at Monash University, 1965–1972, 1973, p. 4, in Davison and Murphy, University Unlimited, p. 118.
21James, Unreliable Memoirs, p. 127.
22Personal communication from Howard Whitton in 2017, who attended the 1974 seminar as a ministerial liaison officer for then Education Minister Kim E Beazley. This was not a phenomenon unique to the 1960s. Two decades earlier, reports Donald Horne, ‘I had been moved by McAuley’s prose piece in Hermes about how he went home, but could not talk to his parents, and went away again’, The Education of Young Donald, 1967, p. 238.
23Personal communication from Ian Marshman, 2017.
24Mansfield and Hutchinson, Liberality of Opportunity: A History of Macquarie University 1964–1989, 1992, p. 30.
25In ibid., pp. 31, 51.
26In ibid., p. 55.
27A quote from a letter by Robert Springborg to Vice-Chancellor Di Yerbury in November 1989, in ibid., p. 289.
28I here draw on Davis, ‘Making the World Safe for Diversity: Forty Years of Higher Education’, Australian Book Review, March 2007, which is an expanded version of the inaugural ABR/Flinders University Annual Lecture, delivered in 2006.
29Flinders University, Peter Karmel Memorial Booklet, 2009.
30Hilliard, Flinders University: The First 25 Years, 1966–1991, 1991, p. 29.
31Ibid., pp. 110–11.
32Manne, ‘An Academic’s Dozen’, in La Trobe University (ed.), From the Paddock to the Agora: Fifty Years of La Trobe University, 2017, p. 54.
33Watson, ‘Goodness and Wisdom in Bundoora’, in La Trobe University (ed.), From the Paddock to the Agora, p. 29.
34Miller, ‘Murdoch’s Trajectory: From Periphery to Core; From Core to Periphery?’, in Murdoch University (ed.), Murdoch Voices: The First 40 Years at Murdoch University, 2015.
35Geoffrey Bolton reports that when Murdoch (at this point frail, ill and in his nineties) was asked by the state government about their intention to name a second university in WA after him, Murdoch ‘was moved: what a marvellous tribute, he murmured, yes of course he was agreeable. Then a pause, and a glint of the essential Walter Murdoch: “But it had better be a good one.”’ Bolton, It Had Better Be a Good One: The First Ten Years of Murdoch University, 1985, p. 7.
36Ibid., p. 30.
37Ibid., pp. 53–4.
38Byers and Thackrah, ‘Constructing the Student Experience’, in Gregory with Chetkovich (eds), Seeking Wisdom: A Centenary History of the University of Western Australia, 2013, pp. 161–2.
39University of Western Australia, ‘How Many Students Does It Take to Dig a Hole?’, Stories from the Archives, 2015.
40Bolton, It Had Better Be a Good One, p. 56. See also Wackett, ‘Theme and Variations—Music at Murdoch’, in Murdoch University (ed.), Murdoch Voices, p. 122.
41Macmillan, Australian Universities: A Descriptive Sketch, 1968, p. 85; DEETYA, Selected Higher Education Staff Statistics, 1997, 1997. Of course, there are many myths about who worked at universities. A character in Laurie Clancy’s The Wildlife Reserve reminisces about the 1960s, a time when a job at a university was said to be easy: ‘Anybody could get a job in a university then. We had one chap come out to wash the windows of the Arts building. He stayed on to become the first Professor of Sociology. Many was the story of a young man’s meteoric rise to mediocrity’. 1994, p. 62.
42Quirke, Preparing for the Future: A History of Griffith University 1971–1996, 1996. p. 11.
43Fitzgerald, Pushed From the Wings: An Entertainment, 1986.
4 A unified national system
1Rayson, Life after George, 2000. The description of the play is drawn from the introduction by Peter Craven, and this dialogue from pp. 58–9.
2Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, 2015, pp. 214–15, 459.
3Australia, House of Representatives, Parliamentary Debates, 23 November 1960, p. 3.
4Macintyre, with Croucher, Davis and Marginson, ‘Making the Unified National System’, in Croucher et al. (eds), The Dawkins Revolution: 25 Years On, 2013, p. 21. Stuart quotes Dawkins, The Challenge for Higher Education in Australia, 1987, p. 2.
5The material that follows is informed closely by No End of a Lesson, a study of the Dawkins reforms by Macintyre, Brett and Croucher (2017), and the earlier volume The Dawkins Revolution, edited by Croucher et al. No End of a Lesson is one of the outcomes of an ARC Discovery project on the history of the Unified National System, DP140102874.
6Personal communication from Simon Marginson, 2017.
7Macintyre, ‘Making the Unified National System’, p.17.
8‘The number of institutions providing higher education dropped from 73 in 1987 (not counting TAFEs) with an average size of 5,300 students, to 38 in 1991 with an average of 14,000 students.’ DET, Higher Education in Australia: A Review of Reviews from Dawkins to Today, 2015, p. 12.
9A process described with clarity and humour in Alison Mackinnon’s A New Kid on the Block: The University of South Australia in the Unified National System, 2016.
10The comma after Technology was dropped by UTS in 2015. See Loussikian, ‘UTS Banishes Comma that Made It an “Orphan”’, The Australian, 8 July 2015.
11Vin Massaro was Director of Administration and Registrar at Flinders University. See his address to the AITEA (SA) Branch, ‘Mergers—the Government’s Intentions and Likely Outcomes’, 1989.
12Brett, Croucher and Macintyre, Life after Dawkins: The University of Melbourne in the Unified National System of Higher Education, 2016, pp. 44–5.
13Horne and Garton, Preserving the Past: The University of Sydney and the Unified National System of Higher Education 1987–96, 2017, p. 140.
14Ibid., pp. 140–3. In Liberal Education and Useful Knowledge: A Brief History of the University of Sydney 1850–2000, 2002, p. 43, Williams concurs: ‘It was a “brave” decision and one that created problems that were much greater than those arising from the amalgamations agreed to by the universities of Melbourne, Adelaide, Western Australia, Queensland and New South Wales. As judged by the indicators widely used, the University of Sydney fell in rank’.
15Page, ‘Path Dependence’, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2006, p. 88.
16Massaro, ‘Mergers—the Government’s Intentions and Likely Outcomes’.
17Foster and Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University, 1946–1996, 1996, p. 342.
18Massaro, Developing Diversity, 1995, pp. 5–6.
19For example Meyers, Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline, 2012.
20Horne, Into the Open: Memoirs 1958–1999, 2000, p. 226.
21In Epstein, ‘Lower Education: Sex Toys and Academic Freedom at Northwestern’, Weekly Standard, 21 March 2011.
22Universities Australia, Higher Education and Research Facts and Figures: November 2015, 2015.
23A case argued eloquently by Ben Etherington in ‘This Little University Went to Market’, Sydney Review of Books, 21 June 2016.
24‘ABC Fact Check calculated there were 13 students for every teacher in 1990. The number rose to 19 in 2000 and 24 in 2012.’ ABC Fact Check, ‘National Tertiary Education Union Correct on University Class Sizes’, ABC News, 30 August 2013.
25Specifically, this was 56 per cent, according to Andrews et al., Contingent Academic Employment in Australian Universities, 2016, p. 1.
26Collini, ‘Sold Out’, London Review of Books, 5 December 2013.
27Jayasuriya, ‘Transforming the Public University: Market Citizenship and Higher Education Regulatory Projects’, in Thornton (ed.), Through a Glass Darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University, 2014, p. 99.
28Marginson and Considine, The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia, 2000, p. 175.
29Ibid., pp. 188–90.
30Ibid., p. 185. In a personal communication in 2017, Sharon Bell notes that institutional differences can be deeply local, citing a study of the Physics Department at UNSW. This suggested that the lived experience of women in Physics in one place was different from that of their male counterparts, and from women elsewhere in the same institution.
31van Vught, ‘Mission Diversity and Reputation in Higher Education’, Higher Education Policy, 2008.
32DiMaggio and Powell, ‘The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields’, American Sociological Review, 1983, p. 147.
33Rosen, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, 2011, p. xvii.
34Marginson and Considine, The Enterprise University, p. 184.
35A process described in Massaro, ‘New Quality Assurance Frameworks for Higher Education: Quality Assurance in Transnational Education’, 1999, pp. 6–7.
36Norton and Cakitaki, Mapping Australian Higher Education 2016, 2016, p. 15.
37In Dodd, ‘John Dawkins Throws Down the Challenge to Labor on University reform’, Australian Financial Review, 26 September 2016.
5 What next?
1Coates et al., Profiling Diversity of Australian Universities, June 2013.
2In ‘Political Ideology in Australia: The Distinctiveness of a Benthamite Society’, Daedalus, 1985, Hugh Collins calls this a ‘Benthamite’ view of the world. Following the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, Collins argues, Australian political settlements tend to be utilitarian because concerned to maximise outcomes for most citizens, legalist because purpose and organisational form are defined by legislation rather than trusted to custom, and positivist because Australia’s public institutions express a practical ambition, focused on outcomes rather than speculation about principle.
3Noonan, ‘Australian HE Reforms Need Further Vetting’, Times Higher Education, 22 June 2017; Noonan, ‘The Current and Future Landscape for Tertiary Education Funding’, The Mandarin, 26 July 2017.
4Emison, Degrees for a New Generation, 2013.
5Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1938 (f.p. 1926), p. 240.
6van Vught, ‘Mission Diversity and Reputation in Higher Education’, Higher Education Policy, 2008, p. 151, abstract.
7In Pelikan, The Idea of the University—A Re-examination, 1992, p. 13.
8To date, relatively few Australian students study for degrees offshore, though study abroad for a semester or a year is popular. A 2017 report noted that in 2014 ‘11,447 Australian students enrolled in tertiary courses in other countries’. While significant and growing, at this stage the number of Australians choosing universities outside the nation is about 0.01 per cent of the local education load. DET, International Mobility of Australian University Students, January 2017.
9DET, ‘Chinese Universities Establishing Programs and Campuses in Foreign Countries’, undated.
10Wildavsky, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World, 2010.
11Howarth, ‘The Business of Higher Education’, Australia Unlimited, 13 August 2015; Norton, Sonnemann and McGannon, The Online Evolution: When Technology Meets Tradition in Higher Education, 2013, pp. 7, 9 and 16.
12Norton and Cakitaki, Mapping Australian Higher Education 2016, 2016, p. 10. Forty-three of the 170 are universities.
13Marginson, ‘The Impossibility of Capitalist Markets in Higher Education’, Journal of Education Policy, 2013, p. 353, abstract.
14In Macintyre, Brett and Croucher, No End of a Lesson: Australia’s Unified National System of Higher Education, 2017, p. 154.
15Marginson, ‘Dynamics of National and Global Competition in Higher Education’, Higher Education, 2006.
16Universities Australia, Offshore Programs of Australian Universities, April 2014.
17O’Keefe, ‘UNSW Singapore Campus Doomed to Fail’, The Australian, 27 June 2007.
18Marginson, The Dream Is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education, 2016, p. 78.
19Lacy et al., Australian Universities at a Crossroads: Insights from Their Leaders and Implications for the Future, 2017, p. 47.
20Trow, ‘Elite and Mass Higher Education: American Models and European Realities’, in Swedish National Board of Universities and Colleges (ed.), Research into Higher Education: Processes and Structures. Information on Higher Education in Sweden, 1979. See also van Vught, ‘Mission Diversity and Reputation in Higher Education’, p. 21.
21Noonan, ‘The Current and Future Landscape for Tertiary Education Funding’.
22Lacy et al., Australian Universities at a Crossroads, p. 49.
23Wolf, ‘Degrees of Failure: Why It’s Time to Reconsider How We Run Our Universities’, Prospect, 14 July 2017.
24This account is drawn from my experience as an international member of the UGC 2008–2011.
25Coaldrake and Stedman, Raising the Stakes: Gambling with the Future of Universities, 2016, p. 273.
26Anderson, ‘The “Idea of a University” Today’, History and Policy, 1 March 2010.
27DEETYA, Learning for Life: Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy: Final Report, 1998, p. 88.
28Bebbington, ‘Is the Traditional Research University Doomed to Extinction in a Digital Age?’, Times Higher Education, 20 April 2017.
29Garner, The Student Chronicles, 2006, p. 152.
30Massaro, ‘Diversity Must Be Rewarded’, The Australian, 16 July 2003.