Towards a politics of the Enterprise University.

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

1. Starting Points

   The Enterprise University is the archetypal university of the time. This article analyses the Enterprise University as a political formation. In doing so, it draws its methods from political economy and social theory. The paper treats material production, government policy, university governance and political culture in the Enterprise University as together forming a system of action, which is the site in which university enterprise is practised. I define this system, examine some of its joins and junctions, and consider its externalities: the social meanings and effects constituted by the Enterprise University.

   This article is not confined to the subject matter covered in The Enterprise University. (1) That book was based on a three-year research project and located in the small branch of social science called 'higher education studies'. The Enterprise University viewed the university through a lens focused on governance, leadership, management and institutional strategy, and it stands or falls on its explanations in those areas. It helped to define the institutional dynamics of the Enterprise University, but left much of the politics unexplored. This article more directly considers the politics of the Enterprise University and the question of political responses to it.

   The Gramscian project

   One explanation of the Enterprise University is that it is neither a natural nor inevitable outcome of global capitalism or cultural life. Rather, it is grounded in the specific history of the university as an institution. It is a neo-liberal political response to the 'red bases' strategies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which the New Left student movement sought to reorder the university on the basis of participatory democracy and turn it into a factory of social intervention and political revolution? Without taking the historical debate further, this article is partly shaped by a modest local experience of the 'red bases' strategies at their tail-end in 1970-4. At that time, many of us imagined a university in which science, social criticism and classical culture would be wrested from the military and commerce, and turned to mass empowerment, self-determination and social transformation. It was a Gramscian conception of education, though less well-read than the Gramscian curriculum. (The actual identification of Gramsci with these ideas about education came later, in the second half of the 1970s, when The Prison Notebooks were circulating. (3)) In the 'red bases' period, the need to expand and democratize access to higher education, and to eliminate fees and other private costs, were taken for granted. Positional status meant nothing to us. There was an impatience with sandstone stuffiness. Educationally and politically, the newer universities were more interesting than the universities of Melbourne and Sydney. (4) The New Left also strongly believed that university education should be made more relevant. Here 'relevance' referred not to the provision of job-related skills to individual students, but to courses and research that were related to social and ecological needs. It referred to public rather than private goods.

   For a time it seemed that a Gramscian university was possible, and its features in embryo were present, but the Enterprise University took a very different direction. At best, in defending the university as an institution, within a de-stabilizing setting, we are defending the possibility of the Gramscian project rather than its salient features. We defend the university as an institution despite the Enterprise University, rather than because of it.

   While the Enterprise University and the Gramscian project share a common modernism, the dynamics are different. Though both projects endorse university expansion and mass access, in the case of the Enterprise University the democratizing potential of access and participation has been fragmented by the market, interuniversity competition and resource scarcity. This reasserts the old prestige hierarchy in which only the sandstone universities represent 'true quality'. While both projects draw on critical intellectualism--the trained capacity in scepticism and imaginative reconstruction in diverse disciplinary forms--they place different limits on criticism. In the Gramscian university, those limits were determined by political identity and utility, with its burden of endless engagement. Continuous politicization was scarcely compatible with sustained creativity, except in the case of politically favoured knowledges. In the Enterprise University, the capacity for reinvention is channelled and limited by the selling and part-commodification of teaching and research, the scarcity of time and the atomization of projects, the legal alienation of intellectual property, and the displacement of knowledge-forming agendas by institution-building agendas. Both projects deconstruct the authority of academic disciplines. In one case the higher authority is social justice and political democracy. In the other it is money, status and market.

   In the Enterprise University, the capacity for reinvention is channelled and limited. But it is never altogether controlled. Criticism and reconstruction are part of the mainstream discourses of research, science, culture and, more problematically, 'innovation'. It might seem counter-intuitive to some, but today Australian universities are often intellectually bolder than they were in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though politically, and perhaps aesthetically, they are more timid. Even in the Enterprise era, the university provides the potential for reconstructing knowledges and social practices. This remains a good reason for doing certain university courses--and for not doing others!--for working in universities, and for enlarging their conditions of existence.

2. From Nation-Building to Corporate Hubris

   The archetypal university of the 1960-80 period in Australia was the public-collegial university. Conceived of as a central element in governmental strategies of nation-building, it was an amalgam of the sandstone universities founded in the colonial period--elite enclaves moulded in the nineteenth century, English, redbrick tradition--and the modern mass institutions created after World War II. All institutions, old and new, were energized by national investment, public science and the rapid growth of middle-class professionalism and intellectual labour. (5) There was a great expansion in educational demand and supply. Most of the energy was settler-state energy, directed at building institutions on the frontier. The curriculum, and the academics, derived largely from Britain. Nevertheless, native plantings dominated the grounds of the post-war foundations, a first sign of national identity. Several of the newer universities, including Griffith, Murdoch and La Trobe, began to experiment in local disciplinary structures and modes of university government. Later, these experiments faltered as the policy consensus underpinning the financing of the public-collegial university fell away, resources became scarcer, competitive pressures increased, innovation seemed risky and markets could not be ignored. Eventually, modernizing managements shepherded the radical newcomer universities back to the fold.

   The sudden adoption of neo-liberal norms in national economic management in 1975-1976 forced the halt and then reversal of the annual increases in the public financing of higher education that had characterized the previous fifteen years. (6) A similar policy change took place in most other OECD countries. In Australia the growth of university enrolments almost stopped but by the mid-1980s school retention rates were rising, student demand for higher education was again increasing, and in government circles there was renewed support for expansion. Similar policies appeared around the world: higher education was explicitly linked to national economic competitiveness; governments were no longer willing to fund the full costs of growth; student charges were increased; there was greater use of competitive markets in resource allocation; and management was professionalized. The neo-liberal reconstruction of higher education was pursued with a special vigour by Australian Labor Party minister John Dawkins. (7) He turned the colleges of advanced education into universities, centralized research funding, and created a national market of competing institutions in place of the pro rata distribution of public funds, and uniform standards. He kick-started direct fee-charging for selected students and in place of free undergraduate education introduced the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS), at an average twenty per cent of course costs.

   The changes set in train by the Dawkins reforms were profound, reshaping the political economy of the universities, university-government relations, internal governance and political culture, and academic work. Taken together, these changes created a new institution. Similar changes occurred in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe and a range of other countries. In some, such as Chile and Hungary, there were more extreme market reforms and funding cuts than in Australia, but in few other university systems was the cultural transformation so complete. In defining the post-1980s institution, the term 'Enterprise University' is more accurate than 'entrepreneurial university' or 'academic capitalism'. (8) It is true that many leader-managers imagine the university as a corporation, and have adopted some features of the corporate world. Nevertheless, universities are more heterogeneous than are private firms. Although they contain some units whose dominant motive is profit--for example, international education in Australia-they continue to be publicly funded. In the United States, often seen as the paradigmatic market system, the level of...