‘On or about December 1910’, Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘human character changed.’1 Those who worked in Australia’s universities were less chronologically precise but sure that at some point in the late 1980s they underwent a fundamental transformation. Previous chapters have considered how the Unified National System consolidated higher education, reconstituted the funding system and the relationship with government, altered the ways in which universities conducted their affairs and reworked teaching and research. This chapter is concerned with the cumulative effect of these new arrangements until 1996, when a new Coalition government modified the settings. Further changes would follow, but none were of the magnitude of those introduced at the end of the 1980s. They had a lasting effect.
The most evident consequence of the Unified National System was a growth in the size and scale of the university. In 1988 there had been forty-eight colleges teaching 162 000 EFTSU, an average of 3400 per institution. The 157 000 EFTSU of the nineteen pre-1987 universities meant their average enrolment was 8250. Including the Australian Catholic University, there were thirty-six publicly funded universities in 1996 with an enrolment of 491 000 EFTSU—an increase of 49 per cent—and the average institutional size had grown to 13 600 EFTSU. Higher education had also expanded to accommodate two private universities on opposite coasts, Bond on the Gold Coast and Notre Dame in Fremantle. Sydney was the largest university with 16 442 EFTSU in 1988, when only seven had more than 10 000. Monash swelled to 30 669 EFTSU in 1996, with six other universities in excess of 20 000 enrolments, sixteen between 10 000 and 20 000 and eleven more between 5000 and 10 000. Only the University of Ballarat and Northern Territory University were below 5000 EFTSU.2
Meanwhile the higher education workforce rose from 66 000 to 83 000—an increase of 26 per cent. The larger established universities had been major employers for some time, and they continued to add to their payrolls: Sydney went from 4197 full-time equivalent staff in 1988 to 5468 in 1996, Melbourne from 3606 to 5264, and a similar growth occurred at the University of Queensland, which did not join in the merger mania but still grew from 3638 to 5136. By 1996 only seven members of the Unified National System had fewer than a thousand full-time equivalent staff (see table 3). Higher education was labour-intensive with salaries absorbing two-thirds of operating expenses.3 Universities did not match the revenues of the country’s major companies: that of the University of Sydney reached $598 million in 1996, when it ranked number 264 on the list of Australia’s top 1000 businesses (BHP had a net revenue of more than $22 billion). Even so, they had an appreciable economic effect on their neighbourhoods. In regional centres they were vital.4
Table 3: Members of the Unified National System, 1996
New South Wales |
EFTSU |
Staff FTE |
University of Sydney |
26395 |
5468 |
University of New South Wales |
22505 |
4725 |
University of Western Sydney |
19827 |
2657 |
University of Technology, Sydney |
16050 |
2164 |
University of Newcastle |
13792 |
2269 |
Macquarie University |
13000 |
1867 |
Charles Sturt University |
12264 |
1613 |
University of Wollongong |
9496 |
1564 |
University of New England |
8335 |
1343 |
Southern Cross University |
5832 |
684 |
Total |
147496 |
24354 |
Victoria |
EFTSU |
Staff FTE |
Monash University |
30699 |
5194 |
University of Melbourne |
26080 |
5274 |
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology |
20552 |
2864 |
Deakin University |
19327 |
2308 |
La Trobe University |
16984 |
2421 |
11643 |
1320 |
|
Swinburne University of Technology |
7794 |
995 |
University of Ballarat |
3598 |
520 |
Total |
136677 |
20896 |
Queensland |
EFTSU |
Staff FTE |
University of Queensland |
22436 |
5136 |
Queensland University of Technology |
22041 |
3164 |
Griffith University |
15948 |
2523 |
University of Southern Queensland |
9453 |
1169 |
James Cook University of North Queensland |
6786 |
1374 |
Central Queensland University |
6633 |
918 |
Total |
83297 |
14284 |
Western Australia |
EFTSU |
Staff FTE |
Curtin University of Technology |
16478 |
2491 |
Edith Cowan University |
12867 |
1850 |
University of Western Australia |
11730 |
2702 |
Murdoch University |
6666 |
1239 |
Total |
47741 |
8282 |
South Australia |
EFTSU |
Staff FTE |
University of South Australia |
17248 |
2468 |
University of Adelaide |
12088 |
2524 |
Flinders University of South Australia |
8830 |
1557 |
Total |
38166 |
6549 |
Tasmania |
EFTSU |
Staff FTE |
University of Tasmania |
10168 |
1718 |
Australian Maritime College |
597 |
172 |
Total |
10765 |
1890 |
Australian Capital Territory |
EFTSU |
Staff FTE |
Australian National University |
8390 |
3727 |
University of Canberra |
6535 |
969 |
Australian Defence Force Academy |
1300 |
474 |
Total |
16225 |
5170 |
Northern Territory |
EFTSU |
Staff FTE |
Northern Territory University |
2894 |
509 |
Batchelor College |
574 |
124 |
Total |
3468 |
633 |
Multistate |
EFTSU |
Staff FTE |
Australian Catholic University |
6582 |
907 |
In 1996, as in 1988, 45 per cent of all members of the higher education workforce had academic duties. A little under half of them were classified as ‘teaching and research’ staff in 1988, with most who worked in the colleges designated as ‘teaching only’. That job description disappeared as the colleges were taken or turned themselves into universities, so by 1996 there were barely a thousand academics holding ‘teaching only’ appointments. However, both the pre- and post-1987 universities employed an increasing number of casual teachers whose contracts made no provision for research. Some were postgraduates studying for a higher degree; others, who had completed their academic apprenticeship, were hanging on in the hope that an opening would appear.5 The exact number of these supernumeraries is not known, but in 1996 they made up more than a sixth of the full-time equivalent teaching workforce.6
There was a growth of part-time and casual employment in all developed economies during the 1980s and 1990s as businesses restructured their operations, a phenomenon known as casualisation. The adoption of the practice by higher education, both here and overseas, was indicative of a more entrepreneurial orientation.7 Sometimes the impulse was to strengthen the vocational component, so that practitioners were employed in professional courses as sessional lecturers to teach, assess and even design their own subjects. More commonly, the purpose was to reduce costs and increase flexibility. Casuals could be employed as need arose, were paid by the hour with minimal on-costs and remained at the margins of the profession. The great majority worked as sessional tutors under the direction of the lecturer in charge of the subject, and management of this auxiliary workforce became part of a tenured academic’s workload. In reducing the number of entry-level appointments leading to an academic career, casual employment created a dual labour market. It was most marked in the new universities. Casuals comprised 27 per cent of full-time equivalent staff at Southern Cross in 1996, 29 per cent at Edith Cowan and 32 per cent at the University of Technology, Sydney.8
Casualisation was also apparent in other parts of the university, along with outsourcing of services such as cleaning, security, and maintenance of buildings and grounds. The growth of non-academic staff was concentrated in central administration, academic departments and student services. Servicing students was a burgeoning area, and not just because so there were so many more of them; the recruitment and retention of international and domestic fee-paying students, as well as the needs of a more diverse student body, required additional support programs. Central administration expanded as universities embarked on strategic planning, program oversight and performance management. The increase of administrative staff in academic departments, on the other hand, was less obvious to older academics who now had to handle their own correspondence, book their own teaching spaces, take their own telephone messages and make their own travel arrangements. Local administrators were kept busy meeting the central administration’s requirements.9
A powerful cadre at the upper level of the central administration, with specialist skills often drawn from outside the university, was responsible for arrangements that bore directly on the core activities of teaching and research. Surveys attested to the hostility they aroused and their reciprocal resentment of the disdain in which they were held. ‘There is a deep antipathy to viewing universities as large businesses which need to serve their clients’, one senior administrator complained. It became common to blame the ills of the university on ‘the administration’, a blanket term that failed to recognise that the chief administrators were former academics. The term was used, nevertheless, in a major international study conducted in the early 1990s. Australian academics stood out for their high level of agreement with the proposition that ‘the administration is often autocratic’ (63 per cent, compared with 37 per cent in the Netherlands) and low estimation of the quality of ‘top-level administrators’ (only 29 per cent thought they were providing competent leadership compared with 39 per cent in the United States).10
More often, it was the less senior administrators who bore the brunt of academics’ hostility. ‘There’s a combination of dismissiveness and dislike’, said one; they ‘view us with contempt’, another added. Their official designation as ‘non-academic’ staff was just as demeaning.11 This antipathy was overlaid by a persistent gender inequality. In 1988 women made up 29 per cent of the academic workforce, 36 per cent in 1996. They remained clustered at the lower levels, holding just 14 per cent of professorial and associate-professorial appointments, 41 per cent of the lectureships and 51 per cent of more junior positions. They were more likely to have fixed-term or casual contracts. Women constituted 55 per cent of the administrative workforce in 1988, 60 per cent in 1996. Here again they were over-represented in the lower classifications, although a third of those working at the highest classification and a quarter of senior managers on contracts were women. And by this time a sixth of the vice-chancellors were women.12
The new model of university management imported techniques of control and accountability that were at odds with traditional academic values. These were generic methods brought to bear on the university with little consideration of its nature and purpose. An astute English commentator pointed out in 1993 that universities were being managed as businesses not because they were businesses but because they now worked on a corporate scale.13 An older conception understood the post of vice-chancellor as a custodian or steward whose role was to act on behalf of the institution, safeguard its fortunes and hand it on in good condition. The new conception was of the vice-chancellor as a change agent, shaking up outmoded practices and setting new directions. A newcomer was likely to overhaul existing structures, often bringing in management consultants to do so—this was the case at the University of Sydney, where a team from the Boston Consulting Group was known colloquially as the ‘Boston Stranglers’. One consultant who worked in higher education warned against the imposition of a market model in which the student was the customer, the university the service provider—and the same could be said of the reconfiguration that turned administrative divisions into business centres that charged faculties as clients for their services.14
There is a danger of exaggerating the division between academics and administrators. The roles were blurring, so that both were involved in curriculum design and the application of new technologies to teaching, and an increasing number of administrators had advanced academic qualifications. A survey of senior administrators in 1996 revealed that most felt pride in their institution and allegiance to the academic mission. Their concern was to bring order and efficiency to the operation of increasingly large and complex organisations. Tellingly, these respondents, who arrived on campus early and left late, believed that the academics, whose work spilled beyond office hours, needed to be more accountable for their attendance. Half the senior administrators agreed and only a quarter disagreed with the proposition that ‘academic attitudes are a hindrance to more efficient management styles’. As the cautionary consultant pointed out, ‘One effect of scarcity and change is to lay bare the exigencies of organisational life’.15
An underlying objective of the changes set in train at the end of the 1980s was to employ competition to improve efficiency, responsiveness and innovation. More competition was expected to bring greater choice and diversity. Critics, as noted in chapter 5, predicted that the unification of universities and colleges would have the opposite effect, so that a Unified National System would become a uniform national system, and by 1996 there were clear signs of system uniformity. The new universities all broadened their academic profile by adding new courses similar to those of the pre-1987 ones. They abandoned sub-degree programs, shifted load from undergraduate to postgraduate studies and diverted resources from teaching to research. International studies suggested that Australian higher education exhibited less diversity than all but a handful of countries.16
Despite John Dawkins’ claim that the Unified National System would enhance diversity, his critics contended that its closely regulated form of competition was responsible for a stifling convergence. Hence Peter Karmel, who had come to despair of government as the sole provider of higher education, called in 1998 for the introduction of a voucher system as a way of enabling universities to escape from the ‘strait-jacket of uniformity’.17 The government restricted membership of the Unified National System to just thirty-six universities, which alone were eligible for public funding. Apart from international students and a restricted range of domestic postgraduates, the government also controlled their enrolments. The same relative funding model applied to all of them, the same HECS charges, the same measures and rewards for research activity. The Quality Assurance scheme promulgated a common approach; the Hoare committee insisted on a common form of government and administration. It was little surprise that they all assumed the form of comprehensive research universities with similar organisational structures, offering standard courses and awards with remarkably little variation or experimentation.
Within this uniform framework, competition inhibited diversity. Since all universities were bound by the same rules of resource allocation and each sought to maximise its share of resources, they had little incentive to experiment. Imitation rather than originality was the quickest path to legitimacy and much less risky than blazing a new trail. Hence the new universities duplicated courses offered by established institutions, such as law, regardless of whether there was any need for more lawyers. But in competing on these terms, the new players were at a significant disadvantage. Whatever the quality of any new law school, it lacked the accumulated social capital of the established ones, their long association with the profession, links to leading law firms and the prestige conferred by eminent former students.18
It was for this reason that Simon Marginson argued that, at least at the upper end, higher education was a positional good. He took this term from the British economist Fred Hirsch, who argued in his book on The Social Limits to Growth (1976) that social scarcities impose limits to the rewards of economic growth. Unlike most goods, which can be produced in larger quantities and made more widely available, positional goods derive their value from scarcity. The scarcity of some positional goods is physical—there are only so many Sydney mansions commanding a harbour-side view. The restricted number of positional goods in education is determined by the social advantage they confer and the doors they open; when an exclusive education becomes more widely available, it ceases to be exclusive. The high-status value of such goods is based on reputation, which is built up over time and difficult to contest. An increased supply of law schools will not threaten the prestige of the leading ones; on the contrary, more competitors only make the high-value ones more attractive.19
The effect of the increased competition that accompanied the advent of the Unified National System, Marginson argued, was therefore to reinforce the standing of leading universities as providers of positional goods. The lesser universities competed vigorously to attract students and build research capacity, the stronger ones were turning away applicants and secure in their research mission. When he began writing in 1997 about the patterns that had emerged, Marginson discerned a hierarchy in which the country’s universities were arranged—and defined themselves—within distinct segments.20
The upper segment consisted of the oldest and strongest: Adelaide, ANU, Melbourne, Monash, New South Wales, Queensland, Sydney and Western Australia—the University of Tasmania was old but not strong. He called them the ‘Sandstones’, an allusion to their original buildings modelled on the cloistered courts of ancient seats of learning, although he later distinguished between the five foundational universities and three post-war creations: ANU, Monash and the University of New South Wales, which he called the ‘Redbricks’. That term did not catch on, although he was right to emphasise that Monash and New South Wales were more openly corporate and entrepreneurial, less dependent on tradition. The Sandstones were comprehensive in their coverage and attracted the best-qualified students. They were strong in academic disciplines as well as professional courses; seven benefited from the prestige of medical schools (ANU gained one in 2003). They also enjoyed substantial private income from endowments, donations and bequests, and regularly won the largest share of research funds. All but Sydney streamlined their operations, taking advantage of new opportunities while affirming their academic values, competing with each other but secure in their exclusive status.
Life was harder for the other eleven pre-1987 universities. Marginson originally called them the ‘Wannabee Sandstones’, making the same claim to social prestige but with less plausibility and conviction. That had not been the aim of the ones that set out to be different in the 1960s and 1970s, but their alternative approach did not survive the exigencies of enlarged competition. Heavily reliant on public funding, they struggled to build fee income. Location on the outskirts of cities and in regional centres did not help either, for in attracting part-time postgraduate coursework and international students the city centre was the place to be. Flinders, La Trobe and Murdoch were at a greater disadvantage than Griffith and Macquarie, which were in corridors of population growth. Some Wannabees continued to perform well in research but with a shrinking base. They entered the Unified National System determined to maintain the distinction between pre- and post-1987 universities, but their divergent fortunes made emulation of the Sandstones an unrealistic goal. In 1999 Marginson renamed them the ‘Gumtrees’, the bush design of their spacious campuses setting them apart from the older universities.
The third segment consisted of the five large metropolitan institutes of technology. Marginson named them the ‘Utecs’, later the ‘Unitechs’, and suggested they had created a viable alternative model to that of the Sandstones. With strong links to industry, they were quick to move into new markets. Large and centrally located (with the exception of Curtin), they were strong in vocational and continuing education, and attractive to international students. The Unitechs emphasised the employability of their graduates; one used the slogan ‘A University for the Real World’.21
Finally, the fourteen ‘New Universities’ formed from CAEs searched to define their missions with varying degrees of success. They had to build their research from scratch and struggled to do so. In teaching they mostly relied on regional catchments, with some heavily invested in distance education and others developing niche areas. Lacking claims to academic strength or employability, they played up accessibility and friendliness.
Marginson cited a number of indicators as evidence of these segments: institutional size, ranking by the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, research income, the number of fee-paying students and proportion of entrants in the top quintile of school-leavers; in later versions he added student–staff ratios, research students and institutional assets. In this and other examinations of the top segment some distinguishing characteristics were clearly apparent. The eight ‘Sandstones’ were older (the youngest of them began in the early 1960s), large and most fully developed, with a much greater proportion of full-time students admitted with stronger Year 12 results, and they sustained basic disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. They had many more higher degree students and captured a disproportionate share of research income.22
The last of these characteristics was magnified by the first of them, size. One commentator noted that in 1997 the Sandstones outperformed the Gumtrees in their share of the Research Quantum by a factor of 4, the Unitechs by 5 and the New Universities by 22. But when allowance was made for the size of the institutions, the differences shrank to 2.5, 5 and 3.7. Max Brennan, chair of the ARC, thought a better indicator was Research Quantum as a proportion of a university’s operating grant. According to the Brennan index, the University of Western Australia did best, followed by Adelaide, Melbourne, New South Wales, Queensland and Sydney. But Flinders came next, ahead of Monash, with eight more Gumtrees ahead of the top-ranked Unitech.23
Marginson’s taxonomy identified four kinds of institution according to their origins and history, which after 1988 formed segments in a more extended positional hierarchy. Their distinctive paths towards university status had lasting consequences for their fortunes, although once they were brought into competition with each other it was possible to move up and down the ladder of esteem. Through determined effort some New Universities surpassed some Gumtrees. Sydney, the country’s oldest and long the most successful university, resisted the organisational changes that enabled the University of Queensland to do so well and slipped from its premier position. But it was never in danger of losing its place among the group of leading universities, nor was any non-Sandstone able to break into this category. The top group of a positional hierarchy, its status built up over a very long period and reinforced by deep reserves of social capital, is extraordinarily resistant to interlopers.
Secure they might have been, but the Sandstones were the principal critics of the Unified National System and the limits it imposed on their obtaining a greater premium for their primacy. In particular, they wanted to consolidate their standing as research universities with arrangements that would support them in this role. Unsurprisingly, this ambition found little favour from the majority of vice-chancellors, and as early as 1992 David Penington was talking of the need for a separate association to represent their interests. Since ANU was separately funded for research, it was the others who took the lead. They became known as the ‘big seven’ or ‘super seven’, and even the ‘secret seven’ after reports were leaked of a meeting in 1993 to advance their cause. By then ANU wanted to be involved so they became the ‘great eight’. A formal association, the Group of Eight, was established in 1996 and incorporated in 1999. The Unitechs responded by reviving the earlier association of the Directors of Central Institutes of Technology (DOCIT), now the Australian Technology Network, and two more associations followed later, the Innovative Research Universities and then the Regional Universities Network.24
Neither the Group of Eight nor the other networks withdrew from the peak body, the Australian Vice Chancellors’ Committee (AVCC), which remained indispensible for a range of services. As Marginson’s analysis suggests, the new organisations were products of the competitive segmentation of higher education, not its fragmentation. They articulated the characteristics that distinguished these universities from others, facilitated the pursuit of common interests through exchange of information, conducted vigorous public relations, made submissions to public inquiries and lobbied government for policies that favoured their interests. A further function was to promote international linkages as the globalisation of higher education intensified. That in turn would bring global rankings through which Australian universities were measured according to various indices and placed in an enlarged league table. World rankings were also artefacts of a positional market that increasingly defined the economic market for students and research support. But the first of these international league tables, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranking, did not begin until 2003.
Queensland University of Technology proclaimed itself ‘A University for the Real World’ as part of an exercise to define its identity and place in higher education. It could not compete with the academic prestige of the University of Queensland and so positioned itself as more practical, emphasising the employability of its graduates. When the Institute of Technology was raised to university status, it adopted a logo of electrons spinning around an atomic nucleus, but this found little favour with staff and students from the Brisbane College of Advanced Education with which it amalgamated, so consultants were employed to devise a more suitable device. They came up with the letters QUT emblazoned on a blue square, devoid of any ornamentation.25 The use of initials was a popular style among the Unitechs, adopted by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the University of Technology, Sydney—the bare UTS also dispensed with the comma in its full title that a literate state minister of education had insisted on including.
Symbolism preoccupied universities in the 1990s. The new ones invented bold logos, the old ones commissioned marketing consultants and commercial designers to overhaul their customary insignia. Of the Sandstones, Monash went furthest. Guided by its influential marketing manager, it dispensed with the original shield and motto (Ancora imparo, ‘I am still learning’) in favour of a stylised chevron and Southern Cross, and adopted the slogan ‘Australia’s International University’—reinforced subsequently by dropping the suffix ‘au’ from its email address. A discreet turquoise hue gave way to a stronger blue. Older Sandstones were more cautious. They had obtained their coat of arms from the College of Heralds in England and engraved them on their earliest buildings. But while suitably impressive on the testamur presented to graduates, and often adapted on university stationery, these escutcheons were too intricate and fussy for promotional purposes. The University of Melbourne embarked on a project in 1991 to create ‘a stronger, more professional image’. The wings of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, were extended outside the shield, the scroll bearing the motto enlarged and moved so that it overlaid the shield in defiance of heraldic practice.26
Monash was the only Sandstone to abandon its shield, for a coat of arms provided a valuable signal of inherited prestige and was usually placed within a brightly coloured square or rectangular box with the name of the institution written large. The University of New South Wales, which initiated its image project in 1993, followed the common practice of initialism and also placed the letters UNSW atop the library tower in letters 3.4 metres high, visible from adjacent suburbs. ANU briefly dropped its Latin motto ‘Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum’ in favour of an English translation ‘First to Know the Nature of Things’, a vulgarity that enraged traditionalists all the more for the failure to use a comma after the first word.27
Some of the other pre-1987 universities continued to use their coat of arms, and others made a more liberal adaptation. La Trobe would eventually adopt the eagle that formed the crest of its original arms; Griffith took the open book from its shield and James Cook University the sea waves and rising sun. The new ones went furthest with eye-catching abstract designs. Regardless of motif, the iconography had to be suitable for use in newspaper advertisements, on billboards, at recruitment fairs, on business cards and for a growing range of merchandise. With the new liveries came a corporate communications strategy to ensure consistency in disseminating and reinforcing the preferred institutional image. Slogans had particular resonance. Sydney styled itself ‘Australia’s First University’ and Tasmania invoked ‘Traditions of Excellence’. Regional universities played to their strengths: James Cook was ‘The University of Life’, the University of New England offered ‘Learning in a Landscape’.28
The brand was projected inwards to staff, outwards to prospective students. Universities had long used staff newsletters as a means of internal communication. ‘Down the years’, as the wry historian of the University of New South Wales put it, ‘the photographed visages of the beaming staff of this project or that smiled out together with vice-chancellorial benedictions so standard as to be virtually interchangeable’, although these newsletters also allowed discussion of matters of moment. By the 1990s such publications were more glossy and professional, devoid of self-reflection. All the news was good. So too the annual report, hitherto a document of sober prose and statistics, was turned over to boosterism and the research report to triumphant accounts of projects thought likely to attract media interest. The university calendar or handbook, once used to list courses and subjects, gave way to the student prospectus with arresting typography and graphics, some using the second person in preference to the third and all featuring smiling young people from diverse cultural backgrounds. ‘Get It Together’ was the name of Griffith’s.29
The refashioning of the university extended to its buildings and campus. The first Australian universities had used sandstone to create quadrangles, courts and grand ceremonial halls, in a Gothic style at Melbourne and Sydney and a lighter form at Queensland and the University of Western Australia. Around these heritage buildings more practical redbrick structures were added, and after World War II there was a turn to modernism. New construction methods, especially non-load bearing walls, allowed open-plan layouts and many more storeys, usually arranged in a plainer rectangular style. Disdain for ornamentation culminated in the brutalist excesses of exposed concrete. The thirty-two-storey tower constructed for the New South Wales Institute of Technology in the 1980s was the most brutal, an uncompromising ‘vertical university’ with strip windows set high on every level in the belief that engineers would want to mount their equipment on the walls—one member of the Arts Faculty brought in an IKEA kit to construct a platform for his desk so that he could see outside. Described as ‘the finest example of Stalinist architecture in the Southern Hemisphere’, the Tower was also voted Sydney’s ugliest building, but it caught the ethos of the institution. The same could be said of the more restrained modernist functionalism of the new universities built during the 1960s and 1970s.30
Until the 1980s the capital grants of the Australian Universities Commission came with guidelines on standards, dimensions and facilities. This produced a rather drab utilitarianism, so one sign of the new order was the carpeting of floors previously covered in vinyl and landscaping of grounds to improve amenity. During the same decade architectural fashion turned back from the starkness of brutalism to the idiom known as postmodernism, which drew eclectically from earlier styles with greater reference to context. The major expansion of capital grants in 1988, after a decade of severe constriction, and then the rolling of capital works into the operating grant in 1994 (along with provision for universities to borrow and build new facilities) allowed universities to commission such designs.
By then universities were using buildings as part of their marketing strategies. Improved student facilities, hubs and learning resource centres helped to attract international students, and also encouraged the shift in teaching from formal instruction in lecture theatres to collaborative learning spaces. Libraries once filled with row after row of bookshelves had first to accommodate computer laboratories and later were cleared through recourse to repositories and digital access to make room for chat centres. No major research centre was complete without its purpose-built facility. Australian universities, still struggling to accommodate the rapid growth of student numbers in the early 1990s, trailed behind American ones in this turn to prestigious signature buildings. The use of ‘starchitecture’ was still getting under way in 1996, the high-tech materials and vivid colours, curves, blobs and bulges, the conspicuous display of public space with a coffee lounge in every atrium, only beginning to appear.31
Universities had always been a mixture of old and new; with the increasing tempo of the buildings race they were in danger of becoming a commercial theme park. As with other forms of branding, each chose the image that served its preferred identity. The promotional material of Edith Cowan University, which abandoned the handsome original teachers college at Claremont in 1990, would feature the futuristic spiny edifice that opened into its new Joondalup campus, whereas Sandstones played heavily on their familiar landmarks: the Great Court at Sydney, the clock tower of the Old Arts Building at Melbourne. Deakin made much of the waterfront campus developed in 1997 from heritage-listed woolstores in the port of Geelong, and conversion of old buildings was a prominent feature of university development. In the 1970s cramped inner-city universities had devoured their residential neighbourhoods. From the 1990s they repurposed the industrial and commercial landmarks of the past, while regional and outer-suburban universities opened for business in office towers of the central business district.
The changes made to university management were described in chapter 6: a strengthening of executive control, streamlined decision-making and a clearer form of line management. The most obvious change, and the one that aroused greatest academic ire, was the elevation of the vice-chancellor to a standing similar to the chief executive officer of a large business enterprise. Students were inclined to direct their anger at the emoluments of the office. In 1991 there were angry demonstrations at the University of Technology, Sydney against the proposal to buy a $2 million house for the vice-chancellor, and in 1992 protesters occupied the office of Macquarie’s vice-chancellor, Di Yerbury, after she was said to have received a salary increase of 75 per cent—the University insisted it was just 56 per cent.32 At that time vice-chancellors were reported to be on salary packages of up to $180 000 per annum, although the new one appointed by the University of New South Wales was said to have begun with $250 000. Earnings escalated and were augmented with performance bonuses, although it is difficult to quantify the rate of inflation since contracts remained confidential.33
The proliferation of senior executives brought similar criticism. In the discussion that followed a public lecture by Peter Karmel on the flaws of the Unified National System, Glenn Withers concentrated his criticism on centralised university management. He especially castigated ‘the Vice squads’ with their salary loadings, business class travel, reserved parking places and university-provided cars, their retinue of executive assistants and most of all their ‘Ruritanian titles’. Withers was at that time a senior public servant with the Commonwealth’s Economic Planning Advisory Commission—on leave from his chair of economics at ANU and later head of Universities Australia, the successor to the AVCC—so he was well placed to pick up how universities were adopting business practices. In their function the deputy and pro vice-chancellors were not unlike the Senior Executive Service of the Australian public service, a cadre John Dawkins had established. In their entitlements and the preoccupation with fine gradations of status—the size and furnishing of the office, the type of car, the class of air travel and accommodation—they were more like the private sector.34
The growth of the central executive was a consequence of the increased tasks of university management. The small, elite university was secure in its mission and able to conduct its affairs with a high degree of consensus. A large university in a mass system of higher education had to serve multiple missions and to determine priorities on which agreement was difficult to obtain. It had to act more quickly in response to changing demands, whereas collegial decision-making was cumbrous and disposed to defend the status quo. Financial management was no longer a matter of authorising expenditure but involved finding new sources of income, which in turn imposed new costs. The need for accountability required greater oversight of the units to which operational responsibilities were delegated.35
Management systems varied. Older, more traditional universities tended to use their faculties as business units, typically allocating income to them as earned after top-slicing for central expenses. This encouraged enterprise but deprived the central executive of financial levers or even powers of coordination. In teaching, the algorithm for distributing funds favoured quantity at the expense of quality. Lacking control over resources, the deputy vice-chancellor had to act as a broker if the university wanted to make a major research bid. The newer universities were more inclined to a more centralised system of management; but while this gave the executive more control over resources, it weakened incentives. It also increased the distance between decision-making and those who did the teaching and conducted the research.36
‘Strong managerial modes of operation’ were a principal aim of the Green and White Papers, widely criticised at the time and deeply resented by academics caught up in the Unified National System. The cult of management was not new, nor was it restricted to this country’s universities, but it took hold here with a tenacious grip. In 1996, when Simon Marginson considered its effects, he noted: ‘To be a successful Australian university in this period, you need to be reformed and seen to be reformed.’ He was highly critical of the reliance on models imported from business and the public sector, especially for the way they eroded academic values, but he did not think the answer lay in returning to ‘earlier systems of collegial governance, at least in their traditional forms’.
They were [he wrote] elitist, hierarchical, unaccountable outside the college, exclusive of junior assistants and of general staff; and exclusive of women. They were also inefficient: slow to respond, and unable to initiate new things. People rarely took responsibility for the good of the institution, or each other, preferring to focus on themselves and their departments to the exclusion of all else.
Here Marginson conceded the need for accountability, responsiveness, inclusiveness and coordination, as did other astute observers of the new ways of organising universities. The task they saw was to reconcile the new management values with traditional academic ones.37
Others doubted such reconciliation was possible. Bob Bessant, a La Trobe educationist and a partner of Marginson in an ARC-funded study of university management and organisation, saw the changes as destructive of everything the university stood for, collegialism as its vital force and principal defence. In Bessant’s account, top-down, centralised management rode roughshod over collegial self-management, imposing compliance at the expense of academic freedom. He was not alone in warning of the threat to academic freedom as universities adopted a business model of operation in which the sources of income determined what was taught and researched, but he went further with a claim that management used its control of finance capriciously and punitively to create a climate of fear.38
When the AVCC opposed Dawkins’ proposal to codify academic freedom as a threat to institutional autonomy, the academic unions argued that a charter was needed to protect academics from institutional coercion. Their concern was magnified by the appraisal, redundancy and dismissal provisions contained in the 1988 industrial award and by the codes of conduct that universities introduced afterwards. The procedures set out in the award afforded a measure of protection against victimisation, but that safeguard was weakened following the turn in 1996 from a comprehensive national award to individually negotiated enterprise agreements. A series of incidents in the following years revealed a growing propensity for university management to take disciplinary action against academics thought to damage the institutional reputation.39
One such case occurred in 1999, when a professor of Victoria University of Technology, who was also a staff representative on the University Council, circulated an email to colleagues to criticise the university leasing a corporate box at a Melbourne football stadium. The Vice-Chancellor cancelled his email access for several weeks until, following protest, it was restored. Another Vice-Chancellor, at Monash, took similarly unilateral action against a distinguished emeritus professor who spoke in protest against staff cuts and was ordered to quit his room at the university. Corporate boxes figured in a subsequent incident when the same Vice-Chancellor was found to have committed plagiarism and departed. The Chancellor, who had tried to ride out the storm, was not pleased by the insistence of the Dean of Law that plagiarism on this scale could not be tolerated. The Dean was no longer welcome in Monash’s corporate box at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.40
The University of Melbourne, under new management, proved equally maladroit. In 1998 the commissioning editor of its university press gave provisional acceptance of a book proposal from the head of the philosophy department for an edited collection about the pressures the Unified National System had placed on universities, more particularly on ‘the university’s understanding of itself’. The publications committee of the press’s board, which included two deputy vice-chancellors, expressed reservations about the proposal, both on commercial grounds and ‘because it might not be well balanced in the range of opinions’, and soon the initial minutes of the publications committee were amended to record simply that the book was not commercially viable. After the story leaked, public outcry attracted a trade publisher to produce the book.41
In contrast to celebrated cases of victimisation dating back to the nineteenth century, these attacks on academic freedom came not from outside the university but inside. They did not arise from speaking out on matters of public controversy but from criticism of the university itself. At Victoria University and Monash, the vice-chancellor took unilateral action to punish dissent with no regard for due process; the events at the University of Melbourne involved deputy vice-chancellors in an ill-judged rejection of what its Chancellor called ‘a lament for the “good old days”’.42 Even so, these three episodes that occurred in Melbourne at the turn of the century—and there were similar ones in other cities—were atypical. In each case the dissidents occupied senior posts and stood their ground with little damage to their careers. An action taken to protect the reputation of the university led each time to an outcry that augmented the damage. These were causes célèbres that tapped the public unease about the directions universities were taking.
The more common but less publicised abuses of academic freedom involved interference with less secure academics in the performance of their normal duties. It might be a direction to teach outside their area of expertise or redirect research in order to align the Department or faculty’s activity to the institutional reward system. Along with sanctions arising from performance appraisal, such cases brought conditions of employment into conflict with a particular kind of academic freedom, the freedom to teach and conduct research. Institutional autonomy, as commonly understood, enshrined the right of the university to select staff and students, determine the curriculum content and course standards, and allocate funds as it saw fit—free of external interference.43 But what if a university used its prerogatives to respond to external signals? What if it shifted resources, reassigned staff or changed course standards at the expense of its academic mission?
The competitive pressures of the Unified National System increased the tension between institutional management and academic self-management. A survey of the effect of increased commercialisation conducted in 2000 found that 30 per cent of respondents felt there had been a major deterioration and 45 per cent a minor deterioration of academic freedom over the past four years. The response to the survey was low, and the respondents were probably influenced by the formulation of the questions, for the study was initiated by the Australia Institute as part of its campaign against university commercialisation. A larger and more robust survey in 1997 found that 72 per cent of academics believed academic freedom had been eroded, but did not ascertain the grounds for that belief. It is perhaps best understood as a feeling that professional autonomy was shrinking as management control increased.44
Of particular sensitivity were claims of improper interference with academics in the acceptance and retention of fee-paying students. Two respondents to the Australia Institute’s survey said they had been required to admit such students to their subjects in spite of concerns about suitability and four to ensure that they passed. Others claimed that no action was taken when they detected plagiarism in work submitted for assessment. Few such allegations were proven, but reports of soft marking and bending of rules attracted close media attention by the late 1990s. A critic of the reportage has claimed it betrayed a prejudicial disparagement of international students. Beyond that, it surely suggested the danger that arose when these students were regarded as a vital source of revenue.45
The new methods of university management increased the authority of managers and made them more accountable for performance. The change was most apparent at the faculty level. The dean of a university faculty was traditionally elected from within for a short term of office; the head of school in colleges was a post filled by appointment. By 1996 a new form of leadership had emerged, that of the executive dean, who was typically appointed after external advertisement on a five-year contract with specified responsibilities, directing rather than participating in academic life. Some universities went further, amalgamating faculties or grouping them into colleges or divisions, and the heads of these larger organisational units were usually part of the central executive.
A 1997 survey of deans found that three-quarters were externally appointed. Most were in their fifties, and 15 per cent were women. Although the majority saw the post as a career move, and one in three hoped to move higher, there was clear evidence of stress as they wrestled with budget cuts, finding new sources of income, restructuring operations and sustaining staff morale. ‘The volume of paper is just incredible’, one said. The chief complaints were too many meetings that took up too much time and inability to stay abreast of their field—for although many of them had no academic duties, their job and their credibility depended on an ability to make informed academic judgements. The more successful saw their role as ‘change agents’ assisting the faculty to meet the challenges, but in the absence of a good working relationship with the senior executive, a dean’s life was unenviable. A particularly unhappy incumbent said that ‘legitimate philosophical differences from the views of the VC/DVC are treated as intransigence, defiance, disloyalty’.46
The role of head of department also became more demanding, and here again there was an increased tendency to fill it by appointment rather than election. Sandstones usually restricted the office to professors or senior professors, but that was not the case in other ones; more than half of department heads in the new universities were senior lecturers or lecturers. The job usually carried a salary loading, but it was not one for the faint-hearted. A head was required to follow the university’s policies, implement its strategies and meet its performance expectations, while colleagues expected the head to protect their interests and uphold the discipline.
This role ambiguity was accentuated by a greater distance from institutional decision-making. A professor of geology at James Cook University recalled that he was appointed to his chair in 1981 by a selection committee chaired by the Vice-Chancellor to whom he reported as head of department. During the 1990s he became head of a school of earth sciences, reporting to an executive dean who in turn communicated with the Vice-Chancellor through deputy vice-chancellors responsible for teaching and research. This aggrieved professor resigned in 1988, exhausted, he said, by dealing with three levels of executive officers, all with ‘their own turf and interests to protect’. Professorial heads were more likely to have a good working relationship with the dean and to find the office less stressful than more junior or female ones. But an anxiety about the time spent on administration at the expense of research was common to all.47
Further light is thrown onto this aspect by comparing a study of heads and deans in 1977 with one in 1997. The first found they had five times the number of publications of other academics; by 1997 their output was just twice as large, and the difference in the post-1987 universities was even smaller. Moreover, heads and deans fell further behind the research productivity of professors who avoided such duties. These office-holders were clearly making a sacrifice but, as their duties increased, they were less happy with them. In 1997 half reported that they found administration ‘very boring or dull’.48
Those at the top of this management hierarchy felt greater confidence in its efficacy than those at the bottom. A 1995 survey found that 79 per cent of the senior executive officers agreed with the proposition that the vice-chancellor and deputies were providing effective leadership, as did 69 per cent of deans and 50 per cent of departmental heads. Asked whether academic staff ‘have adequate opportunity to participate in development of the mission and strategic plan’, agreement ranged from 71 per cent of senior executives to 43 per cent of the heads. An overwhelming 71 per cent of heads and 53 per cent of deans thought the management style was ‘top down’, and 33 per cent of the senior executives agreed—although there was no indication whether this minority was critical of top-down management or simply regarded it as a necessary condition of institutional life.49
The management changes were meant to establish greater control over the operation of the university. Centralisation of decision-making was accompanied by closer direction of academic activity and increased accountability for performance, using rewards and sanctions to tie the work of units and individuals to the institution’s objectives. Yet academic work was highly resistant to such external direction. The workforce consisted of strongly self-motivated practitioners of disciplines, each with its firmly embedded norms and values; both teaching and research relied on their knowledge and judgement. The principal source of job satisfaction was the intrinsic interest of the work, the opportunity it afforded individuals to pursue their intellectual interests and the discretion it allowed in directing their time and effort. An academic career was both a job and a vocation for which they were prepared to make many sacrifices. Managerial procedures that demeaned this commitment, such as the need to obtain permission for the most mundane activity, caused inordinate resentment. Changes that confined work choices and restricted engagement in the very activities from which academics derived their greatest satisfaction aroused particular hostility.
A large number of studies of academic life attest to this discontent. Academic research on academics might seem an extreme case of navel-gazing, but knowledge of the composition, performance and attitudes of the higher education workforce was an important form of information for those managing change. Typically, these studies were based on surveys of a representative sample of academics prepared to fill out extensive questionnaires—and the response rate was high. The questions covered their age, gender, discipline, qualifications, family background and country of origin, level of appointment, experience, and time spent in various activities, along with preferences, perceptions and expectations. Some of the quantitative information, for example the hours worked and the number of publications, relied on accurate self-reporting, but each study permitted multivariate analysis of aspects not captured in the official statistics. Several of them were repeated at intervals, making it possible to measure trends.
One survey comparing four universities and four colleges was conducted three times, in 1979, 1984 and 1990, the last allowing consideration of the first effects of the Unified National System. It found that the age and length of service of academics had increased over the decade as recruitment slowed; the proportion of women had risen, but they were still clustered at lower levels. Even after the end of the binary system, pronounced differences remained between established and new universities. Those teaching in pre-1987 universities reported an average of between 8 and 9 teaching contact hours per week in 1989, those in former colleges between 12 and 14. As a result of the lack of college support for research, there was a gross disparity in publication records. A ‘uniformly negative view’ of the ‘administrative hierarchy’ was common to all institutions, while cynicism towards the mergers was strong in the colleges. Above all, there was a significant increase in dissatisfaction across the three surveys, providing a useful reminder that unhappiness did not begin with the Green and White Papers.50
Nor was it restricted to this country. An international survey conducted in 1990–91 confirmed that Australian academics shared many discontents. Hostility to administration was par for the course, with Germans adamant their managers were the most autocratic. Australians felt a stronger attachment to their discipline than others with the exception of the United States; they were moderately satisfied with the opportunities to pursue their own interests and relations with colleagues, less troubled by salaries and working conditions. They stood out for their criticism of government interference in academic policy and the way the institution was managed. Only half expressed satisfaction with their jobs.51
In 1993 the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne conducted a national survey that again replicated questions used in an earlier, 1978 one. This time, however, it sought views on the changes introduced since 1988. The results were startling. Just 9 per cent agreed and 63 per cent disagreed with the proposition that ‘university education is more effective and efficient’ following the ‘1988 reforms to higher education’. Moreover, only 19 per cent thought the new quality assurance mechanism would bring genuine improvement to the system. Negative views were more pronounced among older and more senior academics, while the younger, untenured ones took a more neutral view of the changes—perhaps because they lacked sufficient experience of arrangements before 1988 as a point of comparison. The survey also measured academic satisfaction. Eighty per cent stated that they were motivated primarily by the intrinsic interest of their work and 74 per cent thought it was valued by their department, but just 49 per cent believed it was valued by the university.52
The lead investigator, Craig McInnis, conducted a follow-up survey in 1999. He found a similar level of job satisfaction to that reported in the 1990–91 international survey, 51 per cent, but a significant drop from the 67 per cent who expressed overall satisfaction in 1993. There was little difference between men and women, or universities, but once again the early-career respondents were less troubled and mid-career ones most stressed. Dissatisfaction with salaries, hours of work and increased demands had grown.53 In this and other writing on academic morale, McInnis laid stress on the intrinsic rewards of academic employment and the trade-off between institutional expectations and the opportunity to pursue intellectual interests. Disaffection towards performance management was expressed by a stronger attachment to the discipline and the Department, these providing an alternative source of validation.54
The changing work patterns made that trade-off less attractive. A series of surveys revealed a consistent pattern of longer work hours and increased involvement in non-academic duties. A study conducted in 1977 provided a baseline of 44.3 hours per week in universities and 44 in colleges; by 1997 that had risen to 49.8 hours in the pre-1987 universities and 48.6 in the new ones. The composition of activities changed. In 1977 university academics spent 20.7 hours in teaching and related activities (preparation, marking and student appointments) and college staff 29.1 hours. This disparity narrowed to 22.5 hours per week in the pre-1987 universities and 26.5 hours in the post-1987 ones by 1997. Back in 1977, 10.2 hours per week were spent on research in universities and 3.8 hours in colleges; twenty years later it was 12.4 and 7.8 hours, indicative of the greater research intensity of the older universities. There was a marked increase in time spent on administration and in committees, from 7.2 hours per week across both sectors in 1977 to 10.7 hours in 1999.55
All surveys reported a clear preference for teaching and research over administration, as well as growing frustration with the impediments to satisfaction in preferred activities. With a marked deterioration of the staff–student ratio that reached 18.7 by the end of the century, it was understandable that more complained of having to deal with too many students. The difficulty of teaching classes with too great a range of abilities was another vexation. The funding system induced the development of new subjects to attract additional enrolments and new courses aimed at fee-paying students; institutional policies required greater attention to outcomes and student satisfaction; more time was spent in the development of multimedia materials and computer-assisted learning. In research there was the pressure to seek external funding so that time had to be put aside for the development of ARC applications that had a low chance of success. Universities had become ‘extremely busy places’, McInnis wrote in 1995, characterised by ‘an almost frenetic activity’.56
Less often noticed and more difficult to measure is the effect of such busyness on the university as a workplace. The advent of email provided a powerful tool for internal communication, making it possible to transact business quickly and efficiently. It allowed wide dissemination, with no limit on the volume of information or requests for information, and it also proved a highly unsuitable medium for settling disagreements. Email dissolved the limits of the working day, so that academics could answer questions at any time of the day or night, from office or home. Time was when they had worked with their office doors open to all-comers, the corridor busy with the traffic of staff and students. Coming together for morning and afternoon tea was an important ritual in this collegiality. Now, with so much to do, they crouched alone over their networked computers. The door was shut, and it was by no means certain whether anyone was behind it. Face-to-face meetings required prior arrangement. Together with the changed conditions of employment and the increased use of casuals, these work patterns fragmented the profession.
Staff surveys found differences between faculties. Scientists, social scientists and practitioners of the humanities were most strongly motivated by intrinsic interest; those in the core sciences were most critical of the changes. Engineers and teachers in business studies, on the other hand, displayed a more instrumental attitude to their careers and were less aggrieved. They also tended to be better paid. Before 1988 there was a uniform salary scale, with the exception of members of medical faculties who received a clinical loading. Thereafter universities had flexibility in employment contracts. Academic salaries had slipped during the 1980s and only partly recovered in the 1990s. In 1988 a lecturer earned 1.16 times average weekly earnings, 1.25 times by 1996, but the professor’s standard salary fell from 2.59 to 2.37 times average weekly earnings. The demand for academic employment far outstripped supply, except in professional fields where university rates lagged outside earnings. It was in these fields, moreover, that fee-paying students clustered and their teachers were paid accordingly.57
It was common to see the increasingly complex demands made on the time and energy of academics as putting the university under stress—a Senate inquiry recounted the tribulations of tighter funding, increased competition and commercialisation, corporate management and staffing practices in a report published in 2001 with the title Universities in Crisis. Grant Harman, who conducted some of the most important surveys during the 1990s, came to feel that these claims were exaggerated. He used two further surveys in 2000 and 2002 to argue that ‘many academics have made surprisingly impressive adjustments to the new order’. His sample was restricted to those working in science and technology in five Group of Eight universities and a more representative selection of social scientists. Harman found a strong preference for teaching and research over administration, and for basic over applied research. These academics maintained ‘fairly traditional values’ and were highly critical of university management along with its changes that had made their workplaces less supportive. At the same time 40 per cent of the scientists attracted industry funding, and 60 per cent of the social scientists worked with government agencies or contributed policy advice.58
Harman’s conclusion was that ‘while adjustment to the new commercial and managerial environment has been painful, not all aspects of the transition have been negative’. By the end of the century academics were better qualified, worked harder and more productively in research, and were more involved in entrepreneurial activity ‘without jeopardising their academic integrity’. He postulated that this was a generational change. Previous surveys had indicated that younger academics were less despondent about the changed circumstances, and by the new century the ‘pre-Dawkins academics’ who were so hostile to the new order were passing into retirement. That hypothesis, however, was based on his hope that the government would now relax its stringency and university management soften the invigilation. The high outputs and maintenance of teaching and research quality, Harman contended, depended on the willingness of academics to work longer and harder, and their goodwill and professional commitment could not be sustained indefinitely.59 But if the new order was so successful, why call a halt?