The University and its metamorphoses.

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

Consider the metamorphoses that one man may go through in one day as he moves from one mode of sociality to another--family man, speck of crowd dust, functionary in the organization, friend. These are not simply different roles: each is a whole past and present and future, offering differing options and constraints, different degrees of change or inertia ... I know of no theory of the individual that fully recognizes this.

R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, 1967.

A Scene from the Present Debate

In Hannie Rayson's award-winning play, Life After George, we see George--the left-wing, Oxford-educated professor of history--arguing with Lindsay, his former student, now ex-wife. (1) As dean of a faculty in a fictitious university not unlike the University of Melbourne, Lindsay faces a looming budget deficit. She is moving to close the French department, and replace existing courses with vocational, income-generating courses. She says students want jobs when they graduate, and that as clients they should get what they want. She argues for links with the corporate sector to supplement the faculty's budget. George is outraged. 'Students aren't customers,' he says. 'We can't just give them what they want. They don't know what they want until after they've heard what we have to tell them. We should be producing educated citizens; not corporate fodder! And I won't work for those corporate bastards! All they care about is business!' (2)

Lindsay emerges as the most compromised figure in the play. But her dilemma is real enough. She is not the author of the funding problem, just the person whose job it is to deal with it. She says, 'OK George. We have a two-million-dollar deficit: what's your strategy?' He replies, 'Wrong question, professor. You're still just being a manager, implementing the corporate agenda. The real question is: How do we fight it?'

In a few deft, resonant scenes, the play sets out key elements of the fiscal crisis in higher education, as well as its crisis of identity and purpose. In Melbourne, the play's opening season coincided with the publication of Tony Coady's collection, Why Universities Matter. (3) As Robert Manne has observed, both works reflect a 'common understanding' of what universities should be about, and a common view of their latter-day corruption by the forces of corporatism, economic rationalism and managerialism. (4)

As a newcomer to the debate, I want to tackle, from a policy-managerial perspective, some of the 'Georgian' assumptions that inform this common understanding. This is not because I subscribe to Lindsay's view. Rather, it is because George's view fails to offer a workable solution to Lindsay's dilemma. George embodies both the ideal of the collegial academic ethos, with its sense of tradition, vocation and commitment, and also its policy conservatism, fiscal complacency and context indifference. While perfectly capable of rethinking the world as we know it, George is utterly incapable of rethinking his own world, as he knows it. By tackling him as a representative archetype, I want to challenge the background assumptions of his real-world counterparts and render more visible the policy context in which contemporary 'university management' operates.

Universities and the Marketplace

George is right to insist that the business of education is education, not business. Traditionally, Australian universities have not seen education as a product or service to be sold to students, nor students themselves as products for the labour market. The language of the marketplace does not translate well to the work of universities. For the traditional Left in particular, it adds the insult of market ideology to the injury of inadequate public funding. But, while the values and concerns of the traditional Left are as salient as ever, history has not been kind to their traditional policy prescriptions. It is a while since I have heard left-wing academics confidently quoting Marx's prediction of a 'communist society of the future, where unlimited resources will serve an unlimitedly developing man'. (5)

Can we cherish the baby of social egalitarianism without swallowing the bath-water of anti-market economic policy? I think so. It would be nice to hear a solution or two that did not rely on a magic pudding of public largesse. But as Giddens observes, the traditional Left is reluctant to acknowledge any positive role for its old adversaries: markets, corporations and capitalists. (6) On the other hand, it is clear that market economies, while better at sustaining national prosperity than rival systems, do not produce the basic elements of a civil society. As Stretton and Orchard have argued, they presuppose them. (7) Neo-liberal assumptions about human nature (a mono-motivational homo economicus at the heart of social relations) break down quickly under scrutiny, and fail to acknowledge the contributions of non-market institutions to successful mixed economies. Mintzberg too has argued that the failure of communist regimes in Eastern Europe does not mean simply that capitalism has triumphed, or that the private sector works while the public sector does not. (8) What has been working for Western nations is the balance they have struck between a dynamic private sector and a robust public sector. This has been put at risk by the orthodoxy that a commercial, customer-oriented approach can be applied to any social purpose. For Mintzberg, the role of customer is just one of 'four hats' we all wear: as customers, clients, citizens and subjects.

In the present context, I want to extend Mintzberg's 'four hats' to encompass Laing' s 'metamorphoses'. A university student might go through several minor metamorphoses as she spends her day on campus. With each fresh encounter she becomes:

* a customer wanting routine information (from a department or faculty office);

* a client in need of expert guidance (choosing a course, reviewing an assignment);

* a citizen with certain rights (borrowing a book, appealing against an act of discrimination);

* a subject with certain obligations (being fined for an overdue book, having to rework an assignment to meet academic standards).

The list could grow to express other relations of membership and interchange. She might also be a novice, acquiring the habits and values of a vocation; or an investor (of time, effort, fees), acquiring the knowledge and credentials to pursue a professional career; or an intellectual tourist, with no clear destination. She cannot be reduced to a single subjectivity, instrumental or not. Insisting on a simple definition, market-oriented or not, does nothing to enhance her education.

Why Students are not just Consumers

As George says, students cannot just be given what they want. They do not consume their education; they co-produce it. Staff do not just feed them information; they challenge their thinking, engage them with ideas, assess their understanding, and ultimately decide whether to pass or fail them. Whether students pay fees or not, calling them customers obscures the fact that 'going to university' isn't the same as going to McDonald's. Universities are service providers, but they are also regulators and standard-setters. They incur risks when they underplay any of these roles. If you call students customers, charge them full fees, then fail them, they'll probably complain, appeal, or sue you. This has clear implications for how universities market their courses, for how clearly the social contract is represented by those who teach them, and for how transparently mutual expectations and obligations are managed along the way.

In business, it is now routine to place Customers at the heart of Quality, and Quality at the heart of Best Practice. This makes good sense when we construct the customer as a simple consumer. But good practice is always contextual. In the public sector, prescribing Quality as a doctrine often merely adds to one's list of headaches. The will-to-measure reflects its statistical origins; the will-to-standardize its manufacturing origins; and the will-to-idolize-consumers, its marketplace origins. For all its benefits elsewhere, the idea of 'customer service' fails as a generic solution when it comes to generating public goods, balancing competing interests, or regulating social contracts. In the public sector, much of the work entails more than satisfying the consumer preferences of homo economicus. Often it seeks to shape the behaviour of a less than perfect homo civilis. While ethically bound to act in the best interests of the individual student, educators also apply principles of merit and equity to students collectively, with regard to the interests of third parties (employers, colleagues, clients), post-course and off-campus.

All this has implications for the way business-derived practices work (or don't) in universities. But the present debate is hampered by different conceptions of the term 'customer'. Advocates of 'better customer service' don't necessarily see education as a commodity, or students as simple consumers. Often, the 'customer' description is deployed only as an analogy, in an attempt to identify the needs of students more clearly and find ways to meet them more consistently. These are valid purposes. But advocates tend to draw on an alien literature, largely derived from the (US) business sector. In that literature the term 'customer' often refers to a simple consumer; but it can also refer to clients seeking professional help, often within relationships of extended co-operation.

When scholars reject out of hand the idea of the student as customer, I wonder just how familiar they are with business environments, or with the customer service literature. Much of the latter is about overcoming the Procrustean tendency of large organizations (corporate, bureaucratic or professional) to adopt routines that reflect the preferred habits of insiders, no matter how insensitive...