The University and after?

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Sharp, Geoff
• Date: 22 March 2002

One of the most interesting aspects of the reception of Higher Education: a Policy Discussion Paper circulated during December 1987 by the Hon. J. S. Dawkins, Minister for Employment, Education and Training, was the absence of any immediate and vehement critical response.* (1) This is not to suggest that there was no response at all. The Minister's departmental staff was sufficiently media-wise to ensure that there was, arranging a launch at the Hilton Hotel rather than leaving it to interested parties to drop around to the Government Printer's Office, as once was normal practice.

If convivial accord among the representatives of peak organizations encouraged public comment, little followed which was of any substance. This 'dumbing down' has been in the making for many years, both in the circles of university administration and among the elected representatives of staff. Overall these groups have expressed compliance, merging at times into active support, of the Dawkins direction, with just occasional qualifications expressing the special interests and anxieties of the commentators.

Since the Green Paper had been foreshadowed by other government initiatives, both university administrators and staff representatives had already taken up their positions on a range of related issues. Nevertheless the Green Paper does serve as a reference point. In it the Government sums up policy proposals which point in unmistakeable terms to the further decline of the modern university and the rise of the higher education system.

In the flow of comment so far, there has been a surprising absence of any sustained defence of the tradition of the modern university. This absence has been so marked that people without close connections to academic life could well think there is no significant issue here for discussion. However, rather than silence indicating some failure to recognize that important issues are at stake, could this be the kind of pause which follows recognition that the moment of truth has come: no stereotyped or conventional rendering of the modern university tradition can serve as a basis for defending whatever remains valid within it. (2)

Professor Don Aitkin, one-time Chairman of the Australian Research Grants Committee, avoided mute compliance. That was the response from members of the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission. Aitkin is now reputedly one of an inner circle of ministerial advisers, an arrangement which allows the Minister to draw on expert briefing from academic insiders while at the same time retaining freedom of action. Aitkin was especially well placed to note the concern the new policies were producing. His succinct critique of the 'sacred cows' and assumptions of the modern university tradition was both printed and then broadcast Australia-wide, as if to ensure that the silence of choice was deepened by the silence ridicule can impose.

Few of those who might wish to defend something of the modern university would wish to support the full range of its ideals, or identify themselves with the way in which it related to only a narrow social base. Yet much of the difficulty in speaking lies in the fact that these class-based expressions of privilege were integral with a particular historical form of the larger function of cultural interpretation to which the university contributed. Most people in the universities and in the higher education system generally, and almost certainly most people in society at large as well, would wish to see some form of independent cultural interpretation and critique maintained. The difficulty is how this claim should be stated in the present. For particular historical reasons, the modern university tradition still lurks in the background, inhibiting comment with contemporary relevance. Its particular synthesis of the claim to privilege and the role of cultural interpretation restricts the chance for fresh understanding to break free and outline the part it can play in the new conditions.

In a quite general sense then, the unavailability of a critical response which could stand outside the Green Paper's assumptions and break through the restraints these impose on the issues for discussion, runs in tandem with the more articulate general compliance exhibited by the peak people. In its own way each reaction expresses the deep-seated transformation in the relation of the university, and in fact of intellectual life in general, to society at large.

As it affects universities, this transformation has had the peculiar character of not really declaring itself. It works its way within the framework of the name and tradition of the modern university, but towards increasingly divergent ends. Throughout the years following the Second World War the signs were there: at its conclusion, the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme was set up to be followed in the 1960s and after by major milestones in the Murray, Martin and Williams reports. (3) In none of these cases were the prominent professorial figures involved drawn from the humanities. As scientists and economists they took the standpoint of the service of the 'higher education system': they supported the expansion of professional employment and the role which this in turn might play in the development of the nation. To list these preoccupations is certainly not to suggest that they were not relevant matters for consideration, but it is to point up the basic orientation involved. This found its most developed 'theoretical' justification in Leslie Martin's stress on the role of the university in the formation of 'human capital'. Yet the end of the modern university as a cultural institution was never declared. The result was that while the university's role in maintaining the higher educational privileges of a narrow segment of the population was whittled away to some degree, the nature of its cultural and interpretive role tended not to come up for more than passing consideration.

Part of the reason for this was that the theoretical concepts for understanding the cultural and interpretive role of the intellectual groupings were lacking. In any case the fact remained that this autonomy of the university, the way in which it did not simply guarantee social privilege in the direct sense, but was also a condition for a more diffuse interpretive and critical role, was never directly examined. On the Left it is still common to encounter the myopia which reduces this critical role to

elaborating the interest of a particular class. Of course the university did that, but in order to do so it could scarcely avoid doing something more as well; so that the university established itself as a peculiarly ambiguous element within the 'superstructure': a class-bound institution which continually overstepped the limits of a simply defined class role.

When one looks back it is obvious that the history of the postwar years was marked by very major contestations The staff members of the universities actively defended the autonomy of their own institutions (for instance, the case of S. S. Orr and the University of Tasmania) or, taking as given some public acknowledgment of the right to autonomy, they played a prominent part in the cultural and political events of the period. This, however, is to speak of a special class of events, those which raise issues of justice and freedom beyond narrowly defined or sectional interests (for instance the referendum on the dissolution of the Communist Party and the struggle against the war in Vietnam). No doubt such encounters contributed to the way in which, until well into the 1970s, the core ideal of university autonomy remained strong. Yet at the same time other processes were at work. Figures of the upper echelon of academic life were writing 'higher educational' policies for the government without recognition that these might be discontinuous with the tradition of the modern university. In another setting the level of job-related organization among staff members was also developing.

These were the years of affluence. The pressures or encouragements of tied governmental grants to universities were complementing the regulatory pressure of staff organization; the higher education system was expanding within the walls of the university, yet under the given conditions this did not break up the sense of a continuing tradition. Staff members accepted the salaries and the relatively open chances of promotion which an expanding higher education system could provide. Yet, perhaps unreflectively, they continued to lay claim to the traditional status privileges which association with the tradition of the modern university fostered. Without widespread recognition of this process, staff members were beginning to take on a new identity as they began to merge with the intellectually trained stratum, which was itself expanding rapidly within the larger body of society. Gradually the fusion developed, between people living off their professional formation in the general run of workplaces and those still advancing increasingly hollow claims to be living for their vocations in the tradition of the modern university.

It has been left to Minister Dawkins to publicly render unmistakeable the process which has been at work for forty years: the rise of the higher education system within the husk of the modern university. Yet even now there is no final separation. The process is slow simply because it goes to the roots of the organization of social life. If similar...