Introduction.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Cooper, Simon
• Date: 22 March 2002

After the events of 11 September the American Council of Trustees and Alumni--a US-based conservative think-tank--commissioned a report into the influence of American academics on the cultural life of the nation. Entitled 'Defending Civilization: Why Our Universities are Failing America', the report tabled various critical assessments of US policy made by academics in lectures, student newspapers and the like. While this kind of political surveillance is pernicious in its own right, from another perspective the report seems anachronistic in its willingness to believe that universities have been able to maintain a role in the cultural interpretation of their societies. While such interpretation no doubt continues, the capacity of universities to undertake this traditional role has been greatly reduced in recent decades.

The university remains influential but today exercises its influence in very new ways. Ideas have fused with market values, helping to reconstitute rather than interpret society, while the techno-sciences and vocational disciplines have flourished at the expense of the sciences and humanities. In short, the university as a place for the discussion of ideas, and transmission of tradition; a cultural institution which can sustain the cultural framework for social interpretation, is less under threat by intervention from the conservative Right than it is undermined by an embracing structural change: the fusion of intellectual practices and market forces.

While the nature and ultimate significance of this change remains a subject of debate, as the varied contributions to this volume reveal, such questions have largely been ignored in the public arena. Typically, the university has been understood merely in terms of the more general celebration of the coming 'knowledge society'. In Australia the enthusiasm for a new hybrid of the university and the market began almost two decades ago with the 'Dawkins reforms'--a local variant of a transformation occurring across the Western world. These reforms saw no contradiction, and indeed opportunity, in the new fusion between the academy and the market. The chapters in Part I of this collection are responses to the Dawkins reforms, written at the time the reforms first swept through Australian universities. They reveal the comprehensive nature of the forces which have led to the present crisis of the universities.

At first it seems ironic that the further we progress towards a 'knowledge society' the harder it is for universities to sustain themselves. Almost universally, universities have been subject to cuts in government funding which, together with the massification of the tertiary education system, has overstretched their diminishing resources. Applied and vocational disciplines are flourishing at the expense of traditional knowledge. The semiautonomous status of the university is collapsing as the institution increasingly merges or competes with private capital for education and research funding. Culturally, it has become very difficult to defend the traditional university. Calls for the university to return to its traditions, to turn away from the market--whether it be the student market or the research market--fall on deaf ears or mesh with an anti-intellectualism which brands any such suggestion of a return 'elitist'.

It is no coincidence, however, that the crisis facing universities corresponds with the expansion and increasing importance to governments and economies of 'knowledge'. Contrary to claims which suggest that the...