Academic Darwinism: the (logical) end of the Dawkins era.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Cooper, Simon
• Date: 22 March 2007

In July The Australian reported that the salaries of vice-chancellors were edging closer to those of the corporate world, with some packages topping a million dollars a year. (1) Academics might ruefully recall when vice-chancellors were considered part of academic staff, whereas today it seems that to compare the remuneration of VCs with CEOs in the 'private sector' is largely unproblematic. In the Australian article, if any distinction was to be made between universities and private corporations, it was made ever so modestly, with one senior academic referring to the university as part of the 'non-profit sector'. That such comparisons can be made is indicative of the degree to which the idea of the university has been supplanted by business norms, and how 'knowledge' has increasingly become another commodity.

Mark Olssen and Michael Peters write that 'after the culture wars of the 1990s will be the education wars, a struggle ... over the meaning and value of knowledge'. (2) Yet there seems little evidence so far that such a war will be fought with the vigour and tenacity of the culture wars. This is not to say that academics have been entirely passive over the corporatization of the university. There have been pockets of resistance and isolated critique. So far, however, any kind of systemic resistance to what amounts to a wholesale reconstruction of the university has not occurred. This can be attributed partly to the climate of precariousness in which many academics faced the possibility of redundancy. However, it is the enhanced status of 'knowledge' within the high-tech neo-liberal economy that has undermined the public and critical role of the university. While once the university stood apart from the society it framed and interpreted, it now stands in direct competition with a society made over in its image: a technologically enhanced knowledge-driven form of the social whose commitment to ceaseless innovation and commodity creation leaves the university little ground on which to stand apart, or to defend more traditional values.

The increased 'relevance' and expansion of the university sector has been based on the shift from manual to intellectual forms of labour. Knowledge, increasingly regarded as a set of skills for use in the high-tech society, was, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, welcomed by many as a means of invigorating the university, making it a key player in the new economy. If the university was caught between its traditional role as a public-oriented institution with the means to critically reflect and interpret society and its emerging role as a generator of knowledge for the high-tech economy, this contradiction was managed (or reconciled) by many in the wake of the expansion of institutions, the increased number of students, and the apparent overthrow of the elite nature of university education.

The increasingly reductive catchphrases concerning the importance of knowledge--from the 'knowledge society', to the 'knowledge economy', to the more contemporary 'knowledge capitalism'--reveal that this balancing act was not sustainable. Having embraced the tenets of neo-liberalism (outsourcing, privatization), western governments 'found themselves as the major owners and controllers of the means of knowledge production in the new knowledge economy'. (3) This paradox has slowed the pace of transformation, or at least made it uneven. However, the introduction of student fees and vocational courses, the pressure to commercialize research, and the increasingly baroque systems of accountability for teaching and research have now stretched the model of expanded higher education set up in Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1980s to a point of unsustainability.

In this context the address made to the National Press Club in June by University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis is significant. (4) As a leading member of the 'Group of Eight', a self-styled group of elite universities within the Australian context, Davis' remarks carry significant weight. He began by fully embracing the climate of neo-liberal reform, listing the widespread economic 'benefits' of abandoning 'old patterns of public ownership and regulation'. The reconstitution of public institutions and services within a market paradigm had been successful, causing Davis to ask why similar reform ought not to be applied to the university sector. The pressures of global competition, the need to create skills for the knowledge economy, all pressed a case for the government to deregulate universities. For Davis, this would restore something of the universities' 'autonomy': a freedom obtained through the market, as opposed to a more traditional idea of free inquiry outside of it.

Davis argued that it was widely accepted that the 'Dawkins era was over' and that universities needed to become more specialized and diverse. The current situation had left Australia with '36 universities with largely indistinguishable missions'. The solution to providing skills for the knowledge economy and remaining competitive in the global education marketplace, he said, involves specialization, deregulation and market-based regimes of 'choice' involving fee-paying students and less restriction on enrolments. Essentially, Davis was arguing for a much more unregulated approach to universities, letting the market decide, with governments providing 'block' funding to prop up some essential services...