Universities are durable institutions. The first ones began in Europe more than eight hundred years ago, and there are now well over ten thousand worldwide. They have survived by adaptation, grown by taking on new purposes. Universities are better at adding activities than shedding old ones, for the institutional dynamic is to grasp opportunities rather than consider how an additional commitment might impinge on existing ones or recognise the implications of such accretion for the way they conduct their affairs. So Australian universities eagerly embraced their augmented educational role following World War II, as they did the Commonwealth funding that flowed after the Murray report, the Martin committee’s recognition of their research role and the Whitlam government’s assumption of full financial responsibility for higher education. It was only later, after Malcolm Fraser squeezed their resources and John Dawkins imposed his directives on them, that the consequences of hypertrophy became apparent.
When lean seasons succeed bounteous ones, universities struggle to adjust. In 1967 an impetuous Commonwealth minister, John Gorton, decided to bear down on profligacy and brought the hapless University of Melbourne to its knees.1 The withdrawal of government confidence and support after 1975 caused an initial disbelief throughout the sector, which gave way to anger, confusion and a protracted despondency that inhibited decisive action. But gloom usually lifts quickly once fortunes improve and growth resumes. With the return of academic business as usual, there is a rapid forgetting of the difficulties and little inclination to think about their lessons. Hence the sociologist Neil Smelser chose The Dynamics of the Contemporary University: Growth, Accretion and Conflict as the title of the lectures he delivered at the University of California in 2012. These lectures on the role of higher education in society commemorate Clark Kerr, the president of that university who in 1960 created the state’s master plan, which charted its course as the most ambitious, innovative and widely emulated model of higher education.2
Apart from the pressures created by growth, and the accretion of so many interests within the university pressing their conflicting priorities, Smelser argued that it was at a disadvantage by the end of the twentieth century in obtaining external support. Health, welfare and schools made increasing demands on government revenue; the consequences of cutting back on higher education were not immediately apparent, and it was one of the few areas that could recoup cuts by generating fee income. Universities struggled to mobilise other constituencies, each of which had its own expectations, and some sources of income that Smelser identified—alumni, industry, foundations and philanthropy—made less of a contribution in Australia. Beyond these relationships, the university found difficulty in explaining itself to the public.
Don Watson, historian, former speechwriter and commentator at large on foolishness, has attested to the ferment of ideas to which he was exposed as an undergraduate at La Trobe during its pioneering days. In a recent lament for that time of innocence, he asked: ‘What is a university without ideals?’ and answered: ‘Too easy: one with a mission statement’.3 But those ideals were seldom articulated in terms that acknowledged what the university had become in a mass system of higher education. If its custodians were called upon to justify the commitment to a broad and liberal education, there was a fair chance the vice-chancellor would fall back on the lectures John Henry Newman delivered as rector of a new, exotic and unpopular university college in mid-nineteenth-century Dublin. If it were necessary to explain why teaching should be guided by research, the even older arguments of Wilhelm von Humboldt would likely be repeated.
The most compelling explanation of the modern university came from Clark Kerr in lectures published in 1963 as The Uses of the University. He extolled it as a ‘city of the intellect’, open to all and a vital force for economic and social progress. He also described it as ‘a city of infinite variety’, pulled in too many directions so that organisationally it had become a vast ‘mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money’. Kerr recognised the strains of the ‘multiversity’, especially the danger that its production of knowledge came at the expense of undergraduate tuition, and that the humanities so fundamental to a liberal education would be displaced by science, but he remained adamant that all participants must possess the utmost freedom to pursue their lines of activity. All shared a common interest in the reputation of the university and therefore a desire to sustain it in competition with others, to attract the best students, conduct the best research and win more resources. ‘The process cannot be stopped. The results cannot be foreseen. It remains to adapt.’4
Kerr’s explanation of the irresistible forces working on research universities was addressed to those who directed them. A quarter-century later a professor working at the University of Chicago wrote a much longer book, a vehement if sometimes arcane account of new currents of thought in the humanities and how their teachers were ‘impoverishing the souls of today’s students’. Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind took off and sold half a million copies, remaining in the bestseller list for four months in 1987. The book helped turn discussion of the university from an intramural activity into a subject of public controversy. Its success attracted other American academics to try their hand in tracts with even more alarmist titles: a philosopher proclaimed The Moral Collapse of the University, and a historian denounced higher education for Killing the Spirit.5
As American universities were caught up in the country’s culture wars, political activists took up the assault with books such as Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, Lynne Cheney’s Tyrannical Machines and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education.6 Since capitulation of administrators to the illegitimate demands of student radicals figured largely in Bloom’s account of his earlier experience at Cornell University, it was hardly surprising that neoconservatives should castigate the country’s educators for betraying the nation’s youth. American discussion of higher education displays a gravity seldom seen in Australia, the university being regarded in the United States as a touchstone of the country’s highest ideals and failure to safeguard them treated as desecration. A charged, apocalyptic tenor extended across the political spectrum, finding expression in Bill Readings’ 1997 response to the neoconservatives, The University in Ruins, and Ellen Schrecker’s more recent lament for The Lost Soul of American Higher Education.7
Since the end of the 1980s there has been a continuous flow of writing about the American university, covering standards, access, affordability, the consequences of commercialism and corporatism, and many other aspects. ‘Jeremiads seem to pop off the press every week’, the distinguished historian Anthony Grafton remarked in a recent review of eight such publications in the New York Review of Books. Although such works are commonly written by academics, the subject is too dear to them to allow for scholarly detachment. ‘They pile up stories clipped from the popular media and web pages; describe individual experiences, often egregious ones, as if they marked a general rule.’ Such philippics are also marked by a tone of perpetual alarm and imminent catastrophe. They typically open by depicting a crisis of epic proportions. There is ample evidence of its consequences, little explanation of the causes other than the university falling away from how things used to be in some former golden age.8
Australia has its own literature of loss and betrayal, although it is less voluminous and lacks the same conviction of manifest destiny. There are also echoes of the culture wars, but without the intensity of the hostilities conducted in the United States. The editor of Quadrant took it as symptomatic of the debilitated state of higher education at the end of the 1980s that a ‘serious discussion’ of the nature of the university, as suggested by Bloom, seemed ‘inconceivable’ at any Australian university.9 Insofar as such discussion took place, it was in response to the changes initiated by John Dawkins. Before his intervention there was criticism of the shortcomings of Australian universities. Afterwards, they were remembered for their prelapsarian virtues.
‘If one only read the press, or listened to Minister Dawkins, one might well believe that Australian universities are pretty terrible places, full of lazy staff, riddled with administrative inefficiency …’ David Caro retired as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne at the end of 1987, and this statement, made during the debate on the Unified National System in the following year, could be read as a defence of his stewardship. Now free of office, he had no inhibition in condemning the turning of universities into instruments of the national interest and the government’s flagrant disregard for the very ‘idea of a university’.10 Caro was speaking at a self-styled conversazione or salon conducted by Claudio Veliz, a professor of sociology at La Trobe University. Veliz, originally from Chile and with links to American universities, shared Allan Bloom’s conviction that relativism, nihilism and a ‘puerile egalitarianism’ were corrupting the university; indeed, he warned members of the Institute of Public Affairs that a ‘Closing of the Australian Mind’ could be written, suitably modified for local conditions, about the malaise affecting academic life. He regarded Dawkins’ proposals with horror for turning places of learning into ‘instruments of policy’.11
‘A university is a place where scholars seek truth, pursue and transmit knowledge for knowledge’s sake—irrespective of the consequences, implications and utility of the endeavour.’ Pierre Ryckmans, an eminent Sinologist at the University of Sydney, looked with disdain on the deformation of the university into a bazaar that turned scholars into ‘peddlers, touts and pimps’. A year after taking early retirement in 1993, he condemned the Uniform National System for abolishing the vital distinction between a liberal education and training. He thought the illness was terminal but proposed a desperate remedy: universities should award no more degrees to make it clear that a degree ‘leads nowhere’. The great majority seeking a professional qualification would go elsewhere, leaving the university to be true to itself.12
Criticisms of higher education made during the 1980s by cultural conservatives and neoliberal economists were described in chapter 3. Their demands for sweeping change were replaced at the end of the decade by a call to defend universities from an unprecedented assault. In a feature article in The Australian in 1989, Tony Abbott gathered testimony from prominent former critics to warn that ‘the university as a collection of scholars of the highest quality absorbed in a disinterested search for truth is under threat as never before’. The threat came from Dawkins and his Unified National System, abetted by compliant vice-chancellors and overweening administrators who had betrayed the academic mission. Such characterisation was not restricted to the Right. The environmental scientist Ian Lowe, prominent in the Federation of Australian University Staff Associations, wrote of a ‘new Dark Age’ in which vice-chancellors were ‘falling over each other to collaborate with the Goths at the Gate’.13
Here already past criticisms of the university were being set aside in order to establish the gravity of the injuries that Dawkins inflicted on it. Those affronted by the imposition of corporate management, formula funding, research directed to national priorities and teaching to professional preparation harked back to a golden age of collegial decision-making when teachers and students had been free to pursue the life of the mind for its own sake. Their recall of this lost Arcadia was highly selective. The philosopher Max Charlesworth remembered his time during the 1940s as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne with gratitude, but pointed out that even then most students were enrolled in professional courses, that there was very little provision for research and that the university was socially exclusive, academically paternalist, intellectually uncritical and largely removed from the outside world. He thought many of the criticisms of Dawkins were animated by an ahistorical ‘essentialism’ that failed to understand that universities took many forms and suggested the most recent changes were largely a local expression of those occurring in all advanced industrial countries over the past two decades. From this point of view, ‘Mr Dawkins was simply the spirit of the Zeitgeist’ and ‘if he hadn’t existed it would probably have been necessary to have invented him’.14
Dawkins remained a lightning rod for much subsequent complaint, but with his departure and no abatement of the strains on higher education under the Coalition government that took office in 1996 came acknowledgement that a more fundamental change had occurred. Universities lost their way before Dawkins, the philosopher Rai Gaita argued, and that was why they did not resist his incursion. Gaita’s friend Robert Manne thought they were incapable of resistance because of a ‘conceptual collapse’: at some point before the Unified National System the question of what a university was and what it stood for had ‘more or less ceased to be of interest’. Both Gaita and Manne drew heavily on their experience as students at Melbourne in the 1960s, recalling the aura of teachers in the Arts Faculty who encouraged undergraduates to reflect on the purpose of intellectual inquiry in conversations that extended from the classroom to the cafeteria and nearby pubs. This had been a time of passionate argument governed by an ideal of truthfulness rather than utility, made possible because the university was so unworldly.15
In these and a number of other publications at the turn of the century evoking what the university used to be, it was common to reject charges of nostalgia, but there was an increasing conviction that this earlier form of academic practice was irretrievably lost. Gaita offered his appraisal at a conference called to consider the question ‘The university: Is it finished?’, and came to the conclusion that, at least for time being, it was. Manne wrote in a collection entitled Burning Down the House: The Bonfire of the Universities that the university as he had known it was dead. Later lamentations talked of ‘standing in the ruins of liberal education’ and seeing the ‘lights of civilization blink out’.16
More recently, there are books such as Richard Hil’s Whackademia and Donald Meyers’ Australian Universities: Portrait of a Decline: first-person accounts of managerial madness and the debasement of standards.17 Alarming and overwrought in their litany of abuses, such testimonies exemplify the characteristics that Anthony Grafton identified in their American equivalents. The incidents are seldom documented or contextualised. They exemplify forces that possess neither history nor contingency, only baleful effects. Hil had previously written satirical sketches of the follies afflicting higher education, rather like those of Laurie Thomas in the Times Higher Education Supplement, and his book carried overtones of the fiction that made sport of the new absurdities of academic life. In contrast to England, where Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge established the campus novel as a popular genre, there were few exponents here. Hannie Rayson’s play Life After George (2002) was probably the most noteworthy creative work, but it dramatised the personal tribulations of a progressive professor of history under siege from the administration. Ross Fitzgerald’s scurrilous Grafton Everest had five outings, the first in a fictional university that looked very like Griffith University, Fitzgerald’s employer at the time. Sydney’s notoriously factionalised English Department inspired two satirical novels, Howard Jacobson’s Redback (1986) and Michael Wilding’s Academia Nuts (2003). The essays of Stephen Knight, a former member of the same department, collectively entitled The Selling of the Australian Mind (1990) are just as mordant. All three of these authors was recruited from England—as Hil was to James Cook University. It seemed the subject was too grim for jest by locals.
By 1996 the Liberal and National Parties had drawn back from their earlier call for a higher education market. The policy released before they won the federal election in March of that year undertook to maintain the universities’ operating grant and continue the HECS arrangements for deferred payment of student charges. Some within the Coalition yearned for a bolder approach. A quixotic national review commissioned in 1997 canvassed fees and vouchers, but the government ruled out that impolitic suggestion. The Minister for Higher Education prepared a similar submission to Cabinet in 1999 that proposed abolition of controls over student places and deregulation of fees. All ‘accredited providers’ (public and private) would be free to determine their charges; the government would support all qualified students with a ‘universal tuition subsidy’ and offer loans (with real interest rates) to bridge the gap. The Prime Minister killed off this proposal as soon as it was leaked. The underlying principle of the Unified National System, public provision of higher education on a uniform basis, was so strongly embedded as to rule out any breach of this kind. The Howard government accordingly fell back on altering the settings.18
A first step was to dismantle the National Board of Employment, Education and Training (NBEET) as a source of independent advice. This had been foreshadowed in the Coalition’s election policy as it had always regarded the Board’s incorporation of trade unions and compliant business representatives with disfavour. For that matter, the AVCC thought the Board structure too large and diverse, and would have preferred greater autonomy for the Higher Education Council (HEC) and Australian Research Council (ARC). That was the thrust of the new government’s Employment, Education and Training Bill of June 1996. Even though the Senate blocked the legislation, the Board and its other two councils became inactive until their final abolition in 1999, when the HEC was also scrapped. That left the ARC, which operated under ministerial control until placed on a statutory footing in 2001.
Few lamented the passing of a cumbrous advisory machinery whose functions were the product of a compromise between John Dawkins and his critics. A review of the Board in 1993 had remarked that separation of policy advice and resource allocation was ‘a difficult concept to grasp and operationalise’. Peter Karmel’s submission to the review was more blunt: ‘the divorce of policy device from program administration is a recipe for the increasing irrelevance of the advice’.19 NBEET and its councils were not a necessary component of the Unified National System, but they had allowed for mediation between the Department and the universities, and were able to consult and comment with greater freedom than departmental officers. After 1996 that sounding board was no longer available.
The new government’s changes to funding arrangements began in the same year with a cut to operating grants of 5 per cent over the following triennium and an increase of HECS charges. Indexation had taken HECS to $2478 for each year of full-time study in 1996. From 1997 this increased to $3330 for courses in humanities, social sciences and education, $4700 for science, engineering, architecture and business studies, and $5500 for medicine, dentistry, veterinary science and law, while repayment thresholds were lowered and rates of repayment increased.20 The cut was justified by the need for budget repair (the Howard government began the masquerade whereby a new administration discovers a ‘black hole’ in forward estimates), the increase in HECS by the income advantage of degree-holders, and the creation of three bands of HECS by the cost of teaching the courses. But the new charges were not determined solely by cost since law, which was cheap to teach, became expensive to study. By using HECS settings to influence student demand alongside a different formula for allocating funds to universities through the relative funding model, the government created two contradictory price signals, one to the provider and another to the customer. The disparities would persist and widen, so that by 2016 an undergraduate studying law or business paid 84 per cent of the funding for those fields against 33 per cent in science and engineering and 32 per cent in medicine.21
The new government also halted the increase in funded student places. Anticipating further growth, universities over-enrolled in 1996 and again in 1997; from 1998 the Commonwealth offered them the equivalent of the lowest HECS payment for these additional students, a small fraction of the cost of tuition. Domestic enrolments had reached 581 000 in 1996 and grew to just 614 000 by 2001. Furthermore, since the government maintained its predecessor’s decision to abolish indexation of operational grants for salary increases, the nominal cut of 5 per cent amounted in real terms to between 12 and 15 per cent. Between 1996 and 2001 Commonwealth funding fell from $5108 million to $4586 million in constant prices, and funding for each HECS-paying student from $12 104 to $9892, a decline of 18 per cent over five years.22
The government expected universities to make up the shortfall from increased student payments. HECS contributions rose over the same period to $1748 million by 2001 (17.4 per cent of university revenue), international student fees to $1148 million (11.4 per cent) and domestic fees to $264 million (2.6 per cent). The increase in HECS rates had a significant deterrent effect, with one study estimating it reduced school-leaver demand by 9000 places a year and mature-age demand by 17 000 places; students from low-income families gravitated to the less expensive courses. The charges continued to increase, making Australia’s tuition fees more expensive than many other countries. HECS and its 2005 successor, the Higher Education Loan Program, has heaped up a mountain of debt—more than $40 billion by 2015—that hangs over graduates with implications for their capacity to break into the housing market and start a family. Yet the deferred, income-contingent repayment system has proved remarkably resilient. It remains a mainspring of the Unified National System.23
The Howard government encouraged universities to increase earnings by allowing them to enrol full-fee students in undergraduate courses (up to a limit of 25 per cent of enrolments in any course after the HECS places were filled). Not all universities took this opportunity and demand was limited (just 3044 enrolments by 2000), so postgraduate courses remained the principal source of domestic fee income. Then, as now, the international student market provided the lifeline as universities responded to cuts in public funding. But much of this new private income was absorbed in the cost of generating it through the recruitment and servicing of international students as well as support of offshore operations, marketing and promotions and outlays on new buildings and facilities. The consequence was a further deterioration in the student–staff ratio, from 15.6 in 1996 to 20.4 by 2002.24
The reduction in the government’s contribution was dramatic, from 58 per cent of universities’ revenue in 1996 to 46 per cent by 2001. Commonwealth expenditure on higher education (for teaching, research and the cost of HECS loans) had grown in the early 1990s to 1.06 per cent of GDP by 1994, only to fall to a low point of 0.78 per cent by 2004—a long way short of the OECD average.25 In his 1999 Cabinet submission David Kemp acknowledged that universities were in ‘a difficult financial situation’ with rising costs but no capacity to increase returns from their Commonwealth-supported students. He said eight universities appeared to be operating at a deficit and some regional campuses were at risk. Three years later, when his successor Brendan Nelson initiated a new review of higher education, he accepted that underfunding and over-enrolment was affecting quality. Nelson’s solution was to extend student loans to domestic fee-paying students, allow universities to increase their HECS charges and provide a modest increase in the Commonwealth contribution contingent on ‘workplace reform’. The new settings provided only temporary relief. Universities were increasingly reliant on non-government funding, above all the volatile and uncertain international market, to maintain their core activities.26
The research policies pursued after 1996 were more expansive. Here the Commonwealth remained the chief source of funding and the Howard government injected additional support to advance its objectives, using the same levers of competition and contestability to promote concentration and selectivity. In 1999 it overhauled the ARC’s grants and rolled the Research Quantum and university-based Small Grants into an Institutional Grants Scheme. This and the other two performance-based funds, the Research Infrastructure Block Grant and a revised Research Training Scheme, used different combinations of research income, research student enrolments and completions, and publications to allocate funds to universities. As before, the Sandstones captured some two-thirds of the money.
A flurry of reports into Australia’s poor innovation performance brought further initiatives during the early years of the new century. There was increased support for the ARC to fund more grants and fellowships, additional centres and improved infrastructure support. Four ill-conceived priorities were promulgated for science and technology, to which the humanities and social sciences were appended as an afterthought, with predictable results—all manner of research projects were reclassified to conform to the priorities, so that the ARC was able to claim that 70 per cent of its grants served them.27
The effect of expanding support for research while reducing it for teaching was to increase the separation of the two activities. There were many inquiries into higher education between 1996 and 2007, their inflated titles indicative of the attenuated analysis: Learning for Life, Higher Education at the Crossroads, Setting Firm Foundations, Backing Australia’s Ability. By far the most substantial was entitled simply a Review of Australian Higher Education. Commissioned by the Labor government that came to office in 2007 and conducted by a panel led by Denise Bradley, it presented a comprehensive examination of a higher education system that was falling behind other countries in participation and quality, overly reliant on international fee income and in urgent need of additional investment.28
Among the recommendations were an uncapping of student places and a 10 per cent increase in Commonwealth funding. The first of these recommendations was adopted, allowing universities to enrol as many qualified students as they chose to accept, but the second was not. Despite a further review that affirmed the need to rationalise course charges and recommended a government contribution of 60 per cent for all courses, in 2013 the government announced a 3.5 per cent cut to funding under the guise of an ‘efficiency dividend’. The Coalition has since sought to inflict further cuts and remove the ceiling on HECS charges, measures blocked in the Senate. Deregulation of funded places was undoubtedly a significant modification of the Unified National System; deregulation of fees charged for these places would amount to its abolition. Among the advocates of this step is John Dawkins. In 2016 he declared that the system he introduced was ‘completely out of date’. Ever the iconoclast, he also expressed surprise that it had lasted for thirty years and added: ‘That is actually a bad thing’.29
This book has examined only the first decade of the Unified National System. It began with an account of the forces working on higher education, and described how a forceful new minister seized the opportunity to break with the past. The first half considered the design and implementation of the new arrangements; the second paid particular attention to the ways in which universities responded down to 1996, and how staff and students experienced the changes. It remains to evaluate how far the government succeeded in its objectives.
Writing a week after the Labor government lost office in 1996, Simon Marginson offered a succinct summary of the extent to which it had changed higher education:
Labor changed the way we practise research as well as the way we define and value it. It changed the place of teaching, the pattern of rewards and incentives, and the main lines of accountability. It opened higher education to the external world in quite a new way. It helped to make us global, and opened us to East and Southeast Asia, more quickly and completely than we would have done ourselves.30
Elsewhere he enlarged on these changes by drawing up a balance sheet of aims and outcomes. It provides a useful checklist that is employed here with some qualification of his assessment.31
The government wanted growth and achieved it, with the goal of 125 000 graduates annually reached seven years in advance. It set out to improve the access of under-represented social groups, and had some success in lifting the participation of Indigenous Australians but not that of poorer and regional students. It aimed to replace financial reliance on government with a mix of public and private funding, and did so. HECS proved an extremely effective instrument, and the distortions created by increasing and manipulating the charges came later. The government initiated an export market in higher education that has continued to grow, less predictable in its returns and reducing universities’ control of their discipline mix—such are the consequences of demand-based higher education.
The government set out to make the system more responsive to its economic objectives, especially a revival of manufacturing with a more skilled workforce and more advanced technology. It achieved a shift of enrolments to business studies, computing and electrical engineering, although not to another priority area, Asian studies. And while this aim was largely met, the government’s industry plans failed to halt the decline of manufacturing. An urgent need to reduce dependence on commodity exports was the starting point for the government measures; it lost office just as a commodity export boom was about to transform the country’s fortunes. It put greater emphasis on employment outcomes (graduate employment became a primary indicator of university performance) and on retraining (especially in postgraduate coursework), but the intended articulation with vocational education and training was not achieved and the failure to integrate TAFE with the Unified National System has still not been remedied. Stronger research links with industry were promoted vigorously, with insufficient attention paid to national circumstances and only modest results achieved.
The government abolished the binary divide between colleges and universities in the expectation that the Unified National System would maintain a diversity of institutional missions. Its amalgamation process, especially the linking of institutional size to course offerings and research opportunities, resulted in a marked uniformity. All universities became comprehensive research universities, that term signifying that they provided a wide range of degrees along with research and research training. Some did a lot more research than others. Some turned away students while others scrambled for them. That all were funded on the same basis was a constant cause of vexation. The inability of providers to adjust the product and the HECS charge in a competitive market made all universities unhappy, each unhappy in its own way.
The government promoted competition between universities. They did compete for fee-paying students, industry support and research funds, although the advantages of the Sandstones made this an uneven competition. The intention was to replace activity-based with performance-based funding, and that change was made with research, but applying it to teaching proved too difficult. It used a variety of devices to serve its goal of improving the quality of teaching: systematic evaluation by students, awards to recognise outstanding teachers, grants for projects to enhance course delivery and a dedicated fund supporting technological innovation through computer-based instruction. These were far outweighed by the support for research, which increased its primacy in the academic reward system.
The government wanted to strengthen institutional decision-making by reducing the size of governing bodies, enhancing executive authority and introducing a corporate style of professional management. Governing bodies did shrink, although they remained larger and more representative than company boards, and academic boards continued to function as collegial forums in older universities. But the senior executive wielded greater power, especially through its control of revenue and expenditure, and line management was extended down to divisions, faculties and departments. Martin Trow observed in 1994 that the ‘ism’ in managerialism, a term embraced by the Green and White Papers, pointed ‘to an ideology, to a fashion or belief in the truth of a set of ideas which are independent of specific institutions’.32 It pointed to a withdrawal of trust by government in the academic community and recourse to generic instruments designed to hold its members to account. The academic unions resisted the changes to employment practices, including performance appraisal, so there was slow progress until a change of government tilted industrial relations in favour of management. The increased resort to casual employment was not an aim of government, more a response by universities to their budgetary exigencies.
Australia was not alone in pursuing such policies. The growth of universities, their increased importance in serving national objectives and the fiscal strain on governments in a more difficult economic environment brought many reconstructions of national systems of higher education during the 1980s and 1990s. The path of change proceeded from prior institutional arrangements, but all countries—including those in Europe that abandoned communism at the end of the decade—used a common body of principles and techniques for the design of public policy in a market economy. They expected their universities to draw on private as well as public funding, to be more accountable, more competitive and entrepreneurial. The university, as a leading European historian put it, was ‘cast adrift’ into a ‘state of autonomy’.33
Governments stepped back from direct control and transferred responsibility for growth, efficiency, responsiveness and innovation to institutions. In doing so, they retained a substantial measure of control. The Australian Government required universities to assemble a vast body of information (more than it could digest) for the educational profiles, and imposed all manner of requirements. It determined the policies around which the universities formulated their strategic plans, allocated the public funds and controlled the fees and charges. Critics of the new arrangements suggested that the autonomy granted universities amounted to a freedom to conform to the government’s objectives, resulting in a symbiosis whereby they interpreted its wishes and acted accordingly. Since the one blamed the other for unpopular decisions, it became difficult to determine whether the change was imposed by Canberra or initiated in the chancellery.34
This hints at an important distinction between what the Unified National System imposed on universities and what it enabled them to do. When the Green Paper appeared, vice-chancellors denounced the threat to institutional autonomy but embraced the opportunities it presented. Those in a position to do so embarked eagerly on mergers and acquisitions, and were soon unlocking the value of their new assets. Initially concerned by the abolition of a buffer body, the AVCC decided very quickly that it was better off without CTEC determining what they could and could not do. Dealing directly with the Department was often frustrating. It was less knowledgeable, more cumbrous, steering from a distance with a constant flow of policy documents and directives, forever recalibrating the national formulae, but it had neither the capacity nor the inclination to prevent a university from charting its own course.35
The arrangements introduced in Australia bore the hallmark of the Minister who devised them. Some admired his courage, others attributed the upheaval to his caprice; in either case his name was commonly fixed to the reconstruction undertaken here. To speak of the ‘Dawkins reforms’ or ‘Dawkins revolution’ carries a misleading implication that he was responsible for the idiosyncratic design of the Unified National System when in fact many of its features were apparent in other countries. British universities, for example, moved to a corporate management model following a 1985 report on efficiency improvement; research assessment was introduced in 1986; the University Grants Committee was replaced in 1988 by a new funding body that made universities accountable for performance, and its binary divide was abolished in 1992. With the exception of research assessment, all these changes were made together in Australia in a brief passage of concentrated reconstruction.
How was this transformation effected? It arose out of a more comprehensive recasting of national policy in response to serious economic difficulties. The Fraser government was unable to repair the country’s fortunes because it could not establish a consensus on the need for change; indeed, the Coalition ministry was beset by internal division over the appropriate policy response. It took a Labor government to secure consent from the labour movement for wage restraint, to embark on financial deregulation and to reverse the Party’s ingrained adversarial relationship with business. Fraser and the Coalition had a similarly fraught relationship with the universities and colleges, and its efforts to change them were unproductive. Once Labor decided to do so, they had nowhere else to turn.
Speaking at a conference on Australia’s reconstruction of higher education in 1989, a senior OECD administrator observed that initiatives in public policy were ‘exceedingly blunt instruments for change, even when their targets are public institutions’. Strong loyalty to tradition, resistance to outside forces and even ‘dumb inertia’ were powerful determinants of institutional behaviour. He added that there were ‘propitious times for intervention’, occasions when institutions were ‘knocked off balance by external events overtaking them’, which made it possible for an intervention to deflect the institutional momentum, ‘rearranging the structure of incentives and directives, and the landscape of interests’.36 Such an occasion arose at the end of the 1980s as the strains on the existing system created instability, but it took an unusually effective minister to take advantage of it.
No other minister has had the same sustained interest in universities, the same certainty of purpose and determination to achieve his goals, the same mercurial approach. Although higher education came well down the concerns of the Prime Minister and Treasurer, their backing enabled him to prevail over other departments sceptical of his approach, as well as opposition within the Caucus and the party. As we saw, he conducted his program in a calculated sequence of steps, alternatively confrontational and conciliatory, using austerity as well as expenditure to bend institutions to his purpose. While prepared to give ground on aspects that were not essential, he retained the initiative. He set the terms of debate, which was conducted as an argument of how best the university should make itself useful as an instrument of national objectives.
We still live with the consequences of what he created, with the structural constraints, the financial pressures, the over-dependence on government, brash commercialism and micromanagement. Yet for all their worldliness, universities remain places that support research and scholarship, places of intellectual awakening where students can still become committed to a life of the mind. Public institutions can be deflected from their purpose. They can be made to serve many purposes, but the pursuit of knowledge remains their core business. If only that most precious of all activities were better served, the grandiosity of our universities could be excused.