Abstract
Government rhetoric and policies exhort Australian universities to be ‘productive’ and to build a ‘clever country’. Academic award restructuring is an important element in this re-shaping of Australian higher education, although the increasingly fashionable term ‘intellectual property’ enters higher education discourse and re-defines academic labour and the ways in which academics perceive themselves and their roles. It is argued that the term intellectual property carries within it a range of meanings extending beyond the legal world of patent and copyright and that this privatising and capitalising discourse has the capacity to transform universities. The individualising and formalising of academic labour goes against the tradition of university collegiality and, crucially, contradicts the processes by which ideas and skills are constituted within a university. Inappropriate intellectual property discourse has the potential to devalue university work by positing a model drawn from the world of the managerialists within the bureaucracy and private sector.