The fate of public scholarship in the global university: The Australian experience

Abstract

This paper explores the proposition that modern universities have been changed radically by globalization not least of which has been the erosion of ‘public scholarship’. The paper argues that whatever the kind or scale of changes which have occurred in the past few decades, ‘globalization’ does not provide an explanation of what has happened. Rather far-reaching changes have been made driven by human capital theory and the practices of the New Public Management. Have these changes spelled the end of public scholarship? The paper proposes that in Australia at least public scholarship played little if any part in the actual work practices or culture of Australian academics in the recent past. Whatever the apparent value of the idea of the university as ‘critic and conscience and critic of society’, the absence of any sustained intellectual or practical resistance to changes introduced into modern Australian universities (like ‘student-centred learning’) since the 1990s points to a significant and long-term absence of a vibrant culture of public scholarship.

Introduction

There is a widespread view, amounting almost to a cliché both within and outside universities that the ‘massification’ of once elite institutions has produced a profound crisis in the identity of the modern university. Some critics talk about ‘the capitalization of universities and the de facto libertarian model of their development’ (Bauman & Donskis, 2013: 136). Others like Graham (2005: 25) point to a managerialist revolution in which universities are now:

‘… blown hither and thither by modularization, semesterization, academic audit, quality assurance, staff appraisal, resource allocation modeling, on-line management, student evaluation, research assessment and countless other “initiatives” ’.

Others, taking a large view insist universities are simply an integral part of a ‘knowledge economy’, caught up in an inexorable process of ‘globalization’. Mindful of Graham’s (2005: 25) concern that what universities ‘have not done is to deploy their own intellectual resources to take critical stock of these changes’, we address here the encounter between the idea of ‘academic freedom’, a long-cherished aspect of the university’s self-portrait, and the ‘globalizing’ process.

Academics working in Anglo-American universities have often claimed to promote ‘academic freedom’ as part of an idea of ‘the university [as] both critic and conscience of society’. Barnett (1997: 174) epitomizes the conventional representation of this idea when he claims that:

‘By subjecting the curriculum contents of higher education to criticism, we subject much of society’s cognitive structure (and thereby much of modern society itself) to criticism. This … is a condition of the maintenance of an open society in the modern age’.

Certainly as Andrews (2007) suggests, the university’s role as ‘critic and conscience of society’ continues to be linked to a persistent discourse by academics about ‘academic freedom’ and a self-portrait of the academic as someone committed to nurturing critical thought and advancing ‘knowledge’. To simplify matters we will refer to this as an ‘imaginary’ (Castoriadis, 1998) understood as ‘the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life’ (Thompson, 1984: 6). University academics have long constructed an imaginary about the university in terms of ‘public scholarship’. This has been tirelessly adumbrated in the USA from Arendt (1998: 200) to Cohen and Yapa (2005) and Mitchell (2008). As writers like Cohen and Yapa (2005: 1) argue, ‘public scholarship’ involves scholarly and creative work which produces public goods like accessible and valuable research, and transformative teaching that treats the work of teachers and students ‘not as the isolated, self-indulgent actions of a campus segregated from society, but as the contributions of scholar-citizens with membership in a larger community’ (see also Andrews 2007: 1). This has a genealogy going back at least to Kant (1784) who drew on a distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ to defend the normative practice of scholars engaging in untrammelled ‘public scholarship’. Kant saw scholars as people who engaged with the literate world through public use of their ‘own reason’, a position which linked freedom and reason: ‘[the] scholar who speaks through his writings to the public as such, ie., the world – enjoys in this public use of reason an unrestricted freedom to use his own rational capacities and to speak his own mind’ (Kant, 1784: 2).

In our time there are still many prepared to defend this position. Habermas (1991, 1992, 1996) for example, treats universities as a crucial part of the modern ‘public sphere’. Menand (1996: 4) likewise emphasizes the social value of unconstrained discourse:

‘ … academic freedom is not simply a kind of bonus enjoyed by workers within the system, a philosophical luxury universities could function just as effectively, and much more efficiently, without. It is the key legitimating concept of the entire enterprise’.

Recently Docherty (2011: 4) inverted Newman’s famous defence of the university when proposing the ‘university of the idea’:

‘The university is above all governed by action of discovery … such discovery and inventiveness – the adventure that is a university – is shaped by an ongoing openness to possibility. The word that we usually give to such openness to possibility is just freedom … it is through the search for what we call true (in science), for that which we call good (in social sciences) and for that which we call beautiful (in aesthetics, arts and humanities) that we practice this fundamental activity of extending freedom in just democracy’.

Docherty (2011: 1) is not alone when he insists that this idea matters because it is now under assault. Is Docherty right?

This question surely needs to be asked, given abundant evidence of the apparent ‘globalization’ of higher education and of concerns about its effects. Certainly the signs of ‘globalizing’ are everywhere. Sahlin, a Deputy Vice-chancellor at Uppsala University, for example, insists: ‘The university is in the heart of globalization. Universities adapt to globalization, they reinvent themselves and they channel globalization’ (cited in Garman, 2009). Marginson and der Wende (2007) claim modern universities are caught up in a discursive web in which categories like ‘globalization’ and ‘competition’ are deployed relentlessly by intra-state agencies like the OECD, governments and university managers. Australian universities devise verb-less propositions like ‘global footprint’ to define their strategic mission, or talk about ‘being worldly’ or claim to ‘advance knowledge … in a globalizing world’ (Raciti, 2010).

There is certainly evidence of concern about the impact of ‘globalization on universities (Coady, 2000; Anderson et al., 2002; Hil, 2012; Leys, 2011; Mohrman et al., 2008). Mohrman et al. (2008: 21), for example, claim that ‘Academic freedom is a core value essential for the success of the Emerging Global Model and research universities worldwide’ but worry that oversight of the Emerging Global Model of the research university will be complicated by the desire for ‘academic Freedom’. We start from the premise that we ought to be concerned about what happens to the idea and practice of ‘public scholarship’ when policy-makers both inside and outside universities decide that universities are actually part of a ‘globalizing’ project.

Here we address just a few questions. First, what sense firstly is to be made about the modern cliché that universities are now caught up in a ‘global market’ offering ‘global education’, promoting ‘global citizenship’ and ‘global engagement’? Second, is ‘public scholarship’ well understood, widely practised and well protected? (We use the case of Australian universities to address this question). Third, if there is a gap between the espoused theory and the practice of public scholarship, does ‘globalization’ figure in any such explanation? We begin by briefly reviewing the representation of the ‘globalization’ of universities and make a case that while much of the discourse is vacuous, it serves to divert attention away from more serious discursive and practical changes in the ways many universities now function. We then make a case that the idea of the university as ‘critic and conscience of society’ is not everything it has been said to be. In what follows we focus on the Australian experience.

Globalizing universities?

As Bell’s (2003) synoptic–critical review of the ‘globalization’ literature suggests, the general concept of ‘globalization’ has long suffered from both a degree of vacuousness and semantic indeterminacy. This has not deterred the many early-bird academics determined to push the ‘globo’ bandwagon. Waters (2001) insisted, for example, that ‘globalization is the key word by which we understand the transition of human society [sic] into the third millennium’. Robertson (1992: 2) thought ‘globalization’ involved ‘the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole’. Giddens (1991: 64), who would famously and fatuously declare the ‘death of the nation-state’ in the face of ‘globalization’, treated ‘globalization’ as ‘the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’. Discussion of the ‘globalizing university’ has seen more of the same: Evans et al. (2011), for example, treat globalization as a ‘widening, deepening, and speeding up of interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary life, from the cultural, to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual.’ In similar vein Marginson and der Wende (2007: 5) argue that higher education systems, are being transformed by ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of world-wide interconnectedness’.

This last reference to the way ‘globalization’ transforms policies and institutions is a good example of the longstanding tendency on the part of intellectuals to reify by magically representing ‘globalization’ as an external ‘force’ which ‘does’ things to people and institutions. This strong, though far from hegemonic tendency, treats ‘globalization’ both deterministically and as a kind of ‘force’ or external ‘structure’ to which people are compelled to respond. Many social scientists from Emy (1993) and Catley (1996) to Friedman (2012) and Nordberg (2012) have promoted a determinist logic when discussing ‘globalization’ which effectively negates any sense that policy-making or institutional change is a discursive and contingent achievement by people facing constrained choice. Equally some scholars like Albaek et al. (1996) and Weiss (1998) to Ampuja (2012) and Soderberg (2013) have insisted on a less determinist approach which emphasizes the agential capacities of key institutional actors. While occasionally critical of the effects of ‘globalization’ on universities, Marginson and der Wende (2007: 7) seem intent on both having and eating their cake, by allowing that ‘higher education is swept up in global marketization’ entailing that ‘higher education institutions often see themselves as objects of globalization, they are also its agents’. Yet ultimately even Marginson and der Wende (2007: 5) insist on the determining role of ‘globalization’: the ‘growing impact of the global environment is inescapable’, resulting in governments and university leaders, being preoccupied with ‘strategies of cross-border cooperation and competition’.

No-less striking is the way the globalizing of higher education is treated as a positive and beneficial process. DeGioia (2011) is not alone in arguing that, ‘Globalization should be understood as a force through which we can further advance the betterment of humankind.’ Burnett and Huisman (2010), who offer a multiple, case-study research project of different university cultures, institutional strategies, and practices ‘in response to globalization’, do so with a view to ensuring that ’university culture’ becomes more ‘entrepreneurial’ so that ‘responses to globalization are optimized’. Even Marginson and der Wende (2007: 8) who claim they will use the term ‘globalization’ in ways ‘designed to be neutral as far as possible and free of ideological baggage’ (2007: 5), cannot help suggesting that universities who stay aloof from globalization will pay a severe price: ‘Research-intensive universities that downplay global connectivity pay the price in diminished effectiveness [sic]’.

A case has been made (e.g., Watts, 2000) that ‘globalization’ is better approached as a legitimization device that governments, their policy communities, and key institutions have found expedient to use to legitimate their decisions. A discourse which stresses the absence of choice, renders ‘globalization’ a convenient explanation-cum-excuse for policy-makers and managers, enabling them to reassure whoever needs their reassurance, that they either did the ‘right thing’ or else had no other choice. In this respect the globalization discourse is used to mask a large number of political decisions and processes. All policy makers and institutional managers like any other political and social actors make constrained choices: here what Steger (2009) calls the ‘global imaginary’ provides a useful discursive frame which represents the policy and management problems in particular ways which constitute and constrain the range of possible solutions. In common with most policy processes, decisions taken to make ‘global’ connections or to talk up a discourse of ‘globalization’ are taken in practice settings where there are large ‘discursive spaces’ about which choice exists. In short and whatever else might be said about the ‘global university’ idea, there is a case to be made that talking up ‘globalization’ serves to divert attention away from the more salient role played by a complex of ideas epitomized by ‘human capital theory’ and the ‘reform’ process associated with ‘new public management’ which has decisively reshaped the way universities work. Here we briefly review the intellectual and managerial practices which have changed the actual way people work inside universities.

Human capital theory

Today the most commonplace way of talking about the ‘globalizing university’ is to make universities central to the development of a global ‘knowledge economy’. Marginson and der Wende (2007: 15) claim that, for example, ‘The fact that global economic competition is seen as knowledge-driven has magnified national policy interest in the sector’. Here we see how an unexamined premise, namely that we all now live in a ‘knowledge economy’ undergirds the ‘commonsense’ claim that more education confers all sorts of individual and collective economic benefits. As Graham notes, it is never all that clear what people mean when they invoke the idea of the ‘knowledge economy’ except that it gestures at the idea that ‘familiarity with innovative technologies is essential for economic prosperity’ (Graham, 205: 248). Those ‘innovative technologies’ include information technologies in the services sector (e.g., finance, insurance and superannuation) and the bio-medical and pharmaceutical industries: the extent to which these technologies are actually key drivers of modern economies remains an open question. The level of skill needed in most applications of IT, e.g., in education, supermarkets, banking (ATMs), retail and hospitality remains minimal. In spite of all the talk of a ‘knowledge society’ the total value of global IT sales in 2011–2012 was $3.5 trillion as a share of total Global Domestic Product of $69 trillion while global manufacturing was worth $10.5 trillion.

The large point is this: far from being a simply ‘factual’ or ‘natural’ way of framing policy or practice, these ideas all point to a political and discursive process which has seen ‘human capital theory’ displace other ways of thinking about the value of education. In this respect it is useful to recollect the provenance of human capital theory and the way the governments converted human capital theory into a policy truism: our case is Australia’s higher education system after 1987–1988.

Human capital theory has informed the reluctance of western governments to invest in employment stimulus programmes since the 1980s. When the OECD (1988) outlined its ‘active society’ model, a model quickly embraced by many western governments (e.g., EU, Australia and the USA), it sounded the death knell of the post-1945 policy commitment to full-employment policies in many western states. The ‘active society’ model represented the acceptance by policy-makers of the premise promoted by the ‘new’ neo-classical economic paradigm promoted by von Hayek, Freidman and Becker (Clark, 1998), that governments could and should do nothing much to amend the ‘naturally occurring unemployment rate’. Accompanying that interdict, the OECD also proclaimed that long-term unemployment would henceforth be an on-going feature of modern labour markets and that young people would ‘unfortunately’ be among those most affected. Finally the OECD criticized what it called ‘passive’ income support schemes which ‘gave’ the unemployed benefits and ‘received nothing back’. The OECD proposed a new frame: ‘active’ policies as part of an ‘Active Society’. The new policy mantra required unemployed people to seek work or else enrol in some form of officially accredited education or training. ‘Welfare’ recipients would be eligible for continued support only on condition they embarked on training or education to improve their ‘job readiness’ (OECD, 1988: 10).

The ‘active society’ policy was based on the premise that more education was crucial to addressing the socio-economic and demographic ‘challenges’ of an ageing population, increasing numbers of low-skilled adults, and high rates of youth unemployment (Becker, 1964/1993; Council of EU, 2006; Folloni and Vittadini, 2010). Gillies (2011), has demonstrated the extent to which human capital theory (Becker 1964/1993; Mincer, 1958; Schultz, 1960, 1961) informed educational policy from the 1980s in Europe and in most western and many developing societies. That human capital theory has been subjected to damaging empirical and theoretical critique has not yet stopped it in its tracks (Bowles and Gintis, 1975; Gillies, 2011; Klees, 2008; Ozga and Lingard, 2007; Ritkowski, 2005; Unterhalter, 2008). Well after the fact Brown et al. (2011: v) established the inconvenient truth that the ‘opportunity bargain based on better education better jobs and better incomes‘ had collapsed.

In Australia the embrace of human capital theory was swift and produced dramatic consequences for the university sector (Quiggin, 1999). Bacchi’s (2009) policy analytic model suggests the ‘active society’ policy was the result of representing the policy problem (i.e., unemployment) as a consequence of underinvestment in education, a position sanctioned by ‘human capital theory’.

Using Bacchi’s (2009) policy analytic model, we can say that in 1987–1988 John Dawkins as the new Minister for Education, Employment and Training, represented his intentions to revolutionize the structure of Australian higher education as an ‘economic’ solution to an ‘economic’ problem. That problem was constituted by an ‘inefficient, under-performing university system’ which needed to educate more students (Department of Employment and Training (DEET), 1987: 2; see also Gallagher, 2000). The idea that Australian universities were not playing their proper part in strengthening the Australian economy had been ‘discovered’ when Dawkins was Minister for Trade: Australia’s universities were not fulfilling their proper economic role ‘especially as a contributor to international competitiveness’ (Edwards, 2001: 101). Meredith Edwards, a key Ministerial advisor, argues that upon taking on his new role as Minister for Education, Employment and Training in August 1987, Dawkins brought a ‘reforming zeal’ and ‘a commitment to managerial approaches in public administration from his time as Minister for Finance’. Mike Gallagher another of his key advisors agreed with this, insisting that:

‘Dawkins saw higher education as an export commodity, tied to the question of trade. He believed higher education needed to be more robust if it was to stand up to international competition and that it needed to be linked more directly to the needs of industry’. (Edwards, 2001: 102).

That problem intersected with the ‘fact’ that the Australian government apparently lacked the financial resources to fund increased student numbers. On the one hand Dawkins understood the expansion of universities entirely in economic terms:

‘A better educated and more highly skilled population will be able to deal more effectively with change … education facilitates adaptability, making it easier for individuals to learn skills related to their intended profession and improve their ability to learn while pursuing that profession. Adaptation to technological change is also aided by a better skilled and educated workforce’. (DEET, 1988: 9–10).

At the same time Dawkins allowed that expansion of the higher education system would be expensive:

‘The dilemma facing the Government is that, while more and better higher education is needed, the desired rates of growth require a substantial increase in outlays if they were to be funded by the Commonwealth alone. The Government will therefore explore the possibility of broadening the resource base to fund increases in the number of graduates’. (DEET, 1988: 13).

To solve this dilemma Dawkins proposed reducing the total number of tertiary institutions and re-introducing a university student fee system (or what became the Higher Education Contribution scheme) to fund growth. This problem representation relied on a number of assumptions.

The Dawkins higher education reform strategy clearly presumed the value of ‘human capital theory’ (Becker, 1993). Human capital theorists treat people essentially as bearers of capital whose personalities, abilities, knowledge and interests can be improved by education and thereby improve their own economic welfare as well as contribute to general economic growth. Theorists like Becker treat ‘investment in higher education as an investment in human capital development’ (Becker, 1993: ix). Accordingly the role of human capital in economic development, productivity growth, and innovation is deemed to be the justification for government intervention in and regulation of university education. Human capital assumptions are evident, e.g., when Dawkins (DEET, 1988: 8) insisted that:

‘The premium placed by the community on a highly skilled and educated workforce will almost certainly continue to rise, with the result that the individual’s long-term labour market prospects will depend increasingly on the possession of appropriate qualifications’.

Human capital assumptions were equally in evidence when Dawkins emphasized in the Green Paper how ‘as the prime source of higher-level skills for the labour market, the higher education system has a critical role to play in restructuring the Australian economy’ (DEET, 1988: 8). Notwithstanding the many criticisms that had already been made of human capital theory, the ‘common-sense’ status of this assumption played a key role in protecting the Dawkins policy from serious criticism from the moment the policy problem had been ‘discovered’.

The embrace of human capital theory has also legitimated the decisive move to embrace a new way of managing universities referred to as New Public Management.

New Public Management

Marginson and der Wende (2007: 8) claim ‘the responses of systems and institutions to globalization have been conditioned by on-going reforms to national systems, and related reforms in the organisation and management of the institutions themselves, that draw on the techniques of the new public management (NPM)’. This seems an odd way of putting it. It seems rather that the NPM-inspired ‘reforms’ were the drivers of whatever ‘globalization’ was supposed to explain. The key elements of new public management clearly point to some of the ways the university system has been ‘reformed’.

The template used by the advocates for the ‘new public management’ includes redefining national university systems as ‘economic markets’ a redefinition rendered into an imperative as governments began to engineer fake ‘competition’ between institutions by encouraging university mangers to promote competition between academic units inside universities and between universities and in 2012 removing government-imposed quotas for student enrolments. Governments have also found it convenient to increasingly devolve responsibility to universities for raising additional finances by using a mix of budget cuts (e.g., in 2006 and 2013), performance measures and output-based funding. Governments have also encouraged university managers to offer incentives to themselves and to embrace a panoply of managerialist and quasi-corporatist practices like bonus payments to senior managers, contracting-out services, self-service for ‘customers’ (i.e., students), new regimes of surveillance of staff and a range of accountability techniques like quality audits and the use of key performance indicators. Marginson and Considine (2000: 49, 62) argue that in consequence Australian universities ought now to be characterized as ‘enterprise universities’.

Though it is difficult to generalize about all universities one result is that the work culture and practices of many university academic and professional staff have been transformed. This seems to have little to do with any effects arising from the new ‘higher education market’ and more to do with the combination of constrained budgets and the ‘massification of education’ (which together is called ‘doing more with less’) plus the use of on-line technologies, increasingly intense work surveillance, the culture of auditing and the increasing reliance on cheap, unskilled teaching labour (Power, 1997: 98–104).

Whatever the semantics of the change, there can is little doubt that over the last two decades these reforms have been the strongest single driver of change in the way universities have worked in the past century.

Even in 2001 an Australian Senate Inquiry into Higher Education in Australia reported that it was reporting on a university system with a ‘corporate’ rather than a ‘collegial’ focus (Australian Senate, 2001: para 9.33). The Senate committee concluded that this represented a ‘deterioration of the intellectual climate’ and was accompanied by ‘victimization of critics or dissenters and a reduction in academic freedom and transparency’ (Australian Senate, 2001: para 3.223). In one empirical survey Kayrooz et al. (2001: x) suggested that suggestsAustralian academics agreed. Kayrooz et al. reported that ‘almost all of the respondents (92 percent) reported a degree of concern about the general state of academic freedom in their universities, with over one-third (37 percent) reporting major concern’ (Kayrooz et al 2001: 13). The academics they interviewed pointed to the erosion of ‘public scholarship’ as a consequence of things like the ‘pressure to attract research funding from industry and a range of consulting and other services which increasingly channeled research effort into safe, well-defined areas, rather than curiosity-driven ones’. These academics also pointed to what happens when universities begin to behave more as businesses selling ‘services’ to ‘customers’ and are run by ‘executives’ rather than ‘academics’. The academics interviewed by Kayrooz et al. (2001) believed they now confronted a division between ‘management’ on the one hand, and academics or ‘staff’ on the other which ‘has never been more exaggerated’.

A recent 25-country study (Coates et al., 2009), shows that ‘Australian academics expressed considerably lower satisfaction with management issues than all other countries other than the UK’. These authors noted that ‘It is worrying that Australian academics – together with their British colleagues – are the least complimentary when it comes to the leadership and management of their institutions’ (Coates et al., 2009: 21). One possible explanation for this is that the higher education systems in these two countries have been subjected to the most profound government-induced changes anywhere in the developed world (Coates et al., 2009: 310; see also Meek et al., 2009). Most recently Bexley et al. (2011) drawing on a sample of 5,525 responses, concluded that among Australian academics ‘there is a general disquiet with the leadership and management of institutions’ (Bexley et al., 2011: xii). They found that 40.9 per cent of the respondents felt they could not speak out on matters of university policy, cf. with the 33.5 per cent who felt they could (in some institutions negative responses reached into the high 50 percentile range).

It is evidence like this which has generated concern about the erosion of public scholarship and the diminution of academic freedom. In the UK, Docherty (2011: 23) has argued that modern university managers are increasingly treating university academics as ‘human resources’ carrying out functions given to them by governments which obliterate the ‘faculty of thinking’ (see also Davis, 2002; Gaita, 1999, 2002; Nussbaum, 1997).

Given this kind of indicative evidence, we ought not be surprised that so many observers have concluded that the idea of public scholarship and the role of the university as ‘critic and conscience of society’ is either under attack or already defunct. Yet we are not convinced that everything that could be said about this matter has been said. We think that there is value in asking several questions: Is ‘public scholarship’ understood as the active practice of criticism and ethical reflexivity well understood and protected in Australia by formal mechanisms? To what extent has ‘public scholarship’ been practised in our universities, and if there is a gap between the espoused theory and the practice of academic freedom, what best explains the gap? We address these questions below.

Australian exceptionalism and the formal protection of academic freedom

There are many international covenants and declarations that espouse the kind of normative and social value of free and unhindered critical discourse in universities which Docherty says has been eroded. The American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, originally drafted in 1940, has long been a classic statement of academic freedom in the west (AAUP, 2006). Even more important is the UNESCO declaration of Recommendations Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel (1997). That UNESCO declaration (to which Australia is a signatory) specifies (at Clause 27) that academics are:

‘ … entitled to the maintaining of “academic freedom” defined as the right without constriction by prescribed doctrine to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom in carrying out research and in disseminating and publishing the results thereof, and freedom to express freely their opinions’.

More recently the Global Colloquium of University Presidents (2005: 1) has defined academic freedom as ‘the freedom to conduct research, teach, speak, and publish, subject to the norms and standards of scholarly inquiry, without interference or penalty, wherever the search for truth and understanding may lead.’

We are only able to speak with confidence about the Australian case where the UNESCO declaration notwithstanding, there is neither statutory recognition of nor protection of academic freedom.

This is not to deny that the idea of ‘public scholarship’ has been described in a range of formal declarations, including staff and student codes of conduct, enterprise agreements and strategic plans. For example, the Australian National University’s Enterprise Agreement 2005–2008 states in its ‘Objectives’ that:

‘ … [t]he University recognizes that its greatest assets are its staff and students, and that its capacity to support, develop and provide critique of Australian society will be greatest when intellectual freedom is exercised in a manner consistent with a responsible search for knowledge and its dissemination’.

Many universities, like the Southern Cross University have a Code of Conduct which guarantees academic freedom when it says (at 5.2.3.1):

‘ … The University shall: (a) Guarantee academic freedom of both inquiry and expression provided such inquiry and expression does not contravene applicable State or Commonwealth legislation (such as defamation and privacy laws) and provided that if disputes arise, the University’s dispute resolution practices are observed’.

On an optimistic reading, the references to academic freedom in these kinds of documents are enforceable under Australian industrial legislation. However, Jackson (2006: 135) points to a worrying ambiguity about clauses which, for example, limit academic freedom to the relevant academic’s ‘area of expertise’. The absence of formal statutory protection of academic freedom may also explain why Jackson concluded that ‘there is no body of academic freedom case law in Australia’.

That absence in turn may simply be one of a number of factors which when combined explain the fugitive status of public scholarship in Australian universities. Here a certain circularity of argument is on display as academic commentators bemoan the transformation of Australia’s universities from elite to mass institutions entailing the death of ’real universities’.

Commentators like Coady (2000) and Gaita (2002) claim, for example, that Australia’s universities have ceased to be ‘real’ universities because they no longer provide opportunities for study in disciplines like philosophy, theology, various languages, literature, or even disciplines like physics, earth sciences and mathematics, studies that once defined the university. They regard universities which are part of the Australian Technology Network as examples of what has gone wrong. For these commentators this transformation is sufficient explanation for why the traditional character of the university and its commitment to academic freedom has been undone. This results in an explanation couched variously as a narrative of ‘decline’, ‘ruin’ or as the ‘death’ of the university committed to the ‘higher learning’. Leys (1999) gave an unabashedly elitist account of higher learning offered by any ‘real’ university as a prelude to his denunciation of modern universities:

‘The university is elitist by very definition. In his little treatise, On Education, Bertrand Russell observed: ‘University education should be regarded as a privilege for special ability’ … love is not democratic, beauty is not democratic: truth is not democratic; genius is not democratic’.

(For a critique of this see Watts, 2002).

What is never entirely clear from these narratives of ‘death’ or ‘decline’ is precisely how the decline took place. This is where explanations couched in terms of ‘globalization’ prove helpful. Even talking about the role of factors like increased size and complexity, the impact of neo-liberalism or new kinds of management practices, or new funding models, as we have done while undoubtedly pointing to important aspects of what happened may tend to overstate the play of structural determinism, while ignoring the extent to which university teaching staff were ever disposed to be anything but compliant. As one important study of two major scandals which erupted at the beginning of the 21st century at the University of Melbourne suggests, focusing on the role played by the hubris, cupidity and incompetence of managers is all very well and good so long as it does not deflect attention from the way an academic culture that had become both supine and defensive also played its part in what happened. There are several points here which require clarification.

Australian academic culture and the practice of public scholarship

As Andrews (2007) has noted, assuming that the ‘old’ elite university was the ‘real’ thing and the modern ‘enterprise university’ a perversion or abomination, invites us to choose between one of two binaries marked on the one hand by elitism, ‘traditional scholarship’ and social irrelevance, and the other by mass tertiary education, economic instrumentalism and servitude to the market. Defining the options in this restrictive way leads to an extreme narrowing of the conception of the university, the roles that it can and should play, and the public to whom it might properly relate. As Andrews (2007: 61) argues:

‘Those who support the traditional university model construct academic work as an activity that best occurs in “splendid isolation”, removed from any engagement with the public or publics beyond the university wall. In this regard, academic activity is to be conducted outside of the public gaze and at a distance from public affairs. The conversation is private in that it is restricted to the initiated. On this account, freedom is constructed in negative terms i.e., freedom from interference in the form of demands to be useful or an assertion of authority by someone outside the institution. This model provides an intensely privatised kind of scholarship obligated only to preserve a regard for some ‘great tradition’ of intellectual effort’.

The evolution of the ‘enterprise university’ model in Australia points to another kind of ‘privatized’ model of scholarship, one based on the normative assumption central to ‘human capital theory’ (Becker, 1993) that academic activity like teaching and research produces as Andrews (2007: 61) states:

‘ … private goods that benefit individual entities be they a student or a corporation. In other words, the private interests of individual stakeholders are given primacy within this construction. Academic activity is judged on the basis of immediate and tangible goods which are divisible to an individual basis and disbursed accordingly. Within this perspective freedom is constructed in positive terms but is bound by economic considerations. Academics are free to compete, to engage and negotiate with the market and cashed-up stake-holders’.

What has gone missing in constructing this binary is a third option, namely public scholarship. The idea of ‘public scholarship’ points to another option as well as providing a basis for thinking about what has gone wrong.

An idea of public scholarship is precisely what MacIntyre spoke to when he identified the special responsibility universities have when they are working well and to which they are uniquely placed to give effect. MacIntyre (1990: 222) says:

‘When it is demanded of a university community that it justify itself by specifying what its peculiar and essential function is, that function which if it were not to exist, no other institution could discharge, the response of that community ought to be that universities are places where conceptions of, and standards of rational justification are elaborated, put to work in the detailed practices of enquiry, and themselves rationally evaluated, so that only from a university can the wider society learn how to conduct its own debates, theoretical or practical in a rationally defensible way’.

Habermas (1989: 73) likewise spells out the value of public scholarship which he understands as what happens when intellectuals use:

‘ … arguments sharpened by rhetoric, intervene on behalf of rights that have been violated and truths that have been suppressed, reforms that are overdue and progress that has been delayed, [to] … address themselves to a public sphere that is capable of response, alert and informed’.

Bohmann (2005) speaks to the democratic character of this conception of public scholarship:

‘In a democracy all must be able to exercise their reason “without let or hindrance” and not simply appeal as subjects to authorized agents who respond in light of their own criteria and grant entitlements in exchange for cooperation within existing practices. In some cases it is necessary not only to criticize such norms but also to change the practices themselves. (Also see Docherty, 2011)

At stake here are two questions. First, were Australian universities ever host to a vibrant culture of public scholarship? Second, if they are no longer hosting such a culture how has this absence come about? Our sense is that the first question is best answered with a negative, and that that absence suggests that academics are themselves implicated chiefly by way of inaction and inattention in the way whatever changes have taken place in Australia’s universities have taken place. Some evidence points in this direction.

In March 1987 just months before the Dawkins reform process got under way in Australia, the federal Opposition led by Liberal Senator Michael Baume, launched an attack on the Australian Research Grants Scheme administered by the ALP Minister for Science. The Opposition identified some 62 projects which had been funded, most of them in the humanities, and argued they were unjustified and a waste of public funds. The then-Minister for Science and Technology Barry Jones (2006: 367–368) recalls that:

‘ … depressingly no more than five of the shell-shocked academics attempted any kind of defence … the attack was taken up with a vengeance by philistine elements in the mass media, especially talk back radio. I felt isolated and waited for our 21 Vice Chancellors to ride to my rescue en masse, sabers raised. Instead they retreated … They maintained an eerie silence. I tried to work up a collective noun for Vice Chancellors, perhaps “a caution”, “a hesitancy” or although harder to say, “a pusillanimity” ’.

In effect one explanation for what has occurred involves paying attention to the absence of public scholarship as part of the academic habitus in our universities (Bourdieu, 1994, 1996). Drawing on Berlin’s (1959) famous account of two conceptions of liberty, too many academics have failed to move beyond a largely ‘negative’ conception of academic freedom as freedom from government interference to defend a more positive conception of academic freedom as public scholarship. In this respect there is a case to be made that for too long, too few Australian academics have ever cared about the practice of public scholarship to begin with. That case which would involve a major exercise in revising the history of universities cannot be made in what is only a short paper.

In lieu of elaborating that case what can be said is that if we look to a core academic practice like teaching over the last few decades, we see a management-led movement to disavow the value of teaching in favour of what Latas (2009) has called a rhetoric of ‘student centered learning’. This has been allowed to go essentially unchallenged. The absence of reasoned critique or resistance to this change points to a larger failure.

Student centred learning?

One of the distinctive features of the New Public Management university and the culture of auditing it sustains, is the emergence of a management-driven discourse that claims both to value student learning and new kinds of learning which are ‘enquiry-based’ or ‘student-centred’ (e.g., Hutchings, 2006). Enquiry Based Learning (EBL) or student-centred learning is used to describe an approach to teaching and learning based on ‘self-directed enquiry or research by the student’. Frey (2007) is not alone in his utopian imagining of a higher educational future based on a student centred, enquiry-based learning (there is also a lot of talk about ‘life-long learning’). Frey says enquiry-based learning involves abolishing the ‘sage on stage’ model of lecture-based teaching, and introducing a ‘student centred learning’ model where the student is the active producer of knowledge where they fashion their own knowledge by drawing on on-line courseware. The paradigm shift from ‘teaching’ to ‘learning’ is said to involve a shift from inefficient teaching which as Frey (2008) sees it, is ‘time dependent, location dependent and situation dependent’ to efficient learning in which students will increasingly access courseware on-line, learn at their own pace and work with teachers who function more as coaches and mentors.

Enquiry Based Learning is said to provide a strongly student-centred approach to teaching and learning, enhancing students’ learning experience. One department at Sydney University declares typically, for example, that:

‘In enquiry-based learning, students take on more responsibility for identifying precisely what they need to learn and finding resources which will allow them to fill their knowledge gaps. Enquiry-based learning can begin in first year and progressively help students to develop their research skills as self-directed learners. Students learn to identify and find answers to the questions that they need to ask and the resources that they need to draw upon in solving any given complex (often real world business problem) [sic].’ (University of Sydney, 2011)

Given that the older lecture based model of university teaching was not always successful, EBL might seem a benign, even welcome development.

However one major problem is that EBL is not student-centred at all. Apart from the typical retreat into weasel words where managers seemingly have no trouble issuing documents with titles like ‘Excellence in learning about learning in a world class university’, EBL discourse is not really about student-centred learning at all (Watson, 2003, 2005). This is made clear, for example, when it is claimed, in an all too typical statement:

‘The starting point for student-centered teaching must be the achieved learning outcomes – good teaching must be achieving learning outcomes which are valued by students, graduates, industry and employers…’.

The discourse of student-centred learning is negated by so many other aspects of the modern university. These include the requirement built into the ‘quality assurance‘ regime that subject outlines, ‘graduate capabilities statements’, and all sorts of other pedagogical materials be prepared in such a way as to prevent student-centredness from ever being possible. Even more astonishing is the way ‘student-centredness’ apparently aligns quite nicely with the interests of all of ‘the stakeholders’ (including governments, professional bodies and employers) who get to say what the ‘learning objectives’, graduate capabilities and ‘outcomes’ should look like.

Secondly critics like Latas (2009) suggest that at the very moment when universities are claiming to focus on teaching, universities are ‘actually engaging in and accelerating the dynamics through which the art of teaching may be lost’:

‘In all the flurry of setting up awards for teaching, urging the scholarship of teaching, funding its projects, articulating the philosophy of teaching, the excellence of teaching, pinning it down in plans and guidelines, urging curriculum reform and the adoption of new pedagogies, it is the distinctive essence of teaching that may be missed even repudiated, in its sublation in the discourse of learning without teaching’. (Latas, 2009: 86)

Worse there is emerging evidence that the shift to student-centred learning in the modern mass university is either masking or contributing to a catastrophic decline in basic abilities on the part of a majority of students. Given the absence of relevant contemporary data for Australian universities (Coates, 2009), the American experience and the evidence being gathered by US researchers will have to serve as a proxy. Arum and Ropska (2011) provide a nuanced empirical study of the consequences for student learning of decades of cultural and organizational change which US universities have gone through since the 1980s. Based on a study of some 2,322 students and using a battery of internal assessment practices as well as the CLA test instrument to assess generic intellectual skills, Arum and Ropska conclude that too many undergraduate students are ‘academically adrift’ and that a pattern of limited learning is prevalent in contemporary American universities. The evidence suggests that students learn little if anything, remain functionally illiterate, and generally refuse to use their time in universities to read, think or learn how to write. They show too how persistent social, ethnic and economic inequalities are proving resistant to the policy imperative which declares that by expanding access to higher education educational provision and social equality will be enhanced.

Among the many explanatory factors which account for this, Arum and Ropska point to the increased employment of sessional staff, used to mask the flight from teaching by experienced full-time academics who are variously required to or else cheerfully embrace a commitment to research in preference to teaching. Granted the difficulties involved in calculating the shift to sessional staffing in Australia, there is little doubt that this trend is well and truly in place. In the 1990s the proportion of sessional teaching staff doubled from 10 per cent of Full Time Equivalent staff to just over 61 per cent (Bexley et al., 2011: 1). More recently as May (2011) notes, there were 67,000 sessional staff employed in Australian universities comprising 60 per cent of the academic staff in 2009–2010. Without labouring the point, the bulk of these sessional staff lack job security, typically experience what Bexley et al. (2011) call ‘intellectual marginality’, and are even less likely to be professionally trained to teach than the 34,000 full-time academic staff.

There is also emerging evidence that for all of the talk about giving more weight to teaching, that university management aided and abetted by government policy-makers, are dramatically reducing investment in teaching and learning (in April 2013 the Australian government announced plans to slash a further $2.3 billion from its $12.9 billion grant to universities). As Cram (2009) acknowledges, the connection between expenditure on education on the one hand, and the quality of education on the other is not well understood. Cram’s research ‘explores the conjecture that the public policy settings for Australian universities drive the per-student expenditure related to the provision of education to low values’. This conjecture informs Cram’s careful assessment of the empirical data. These data and his analysis suggest that Australian universities are spending over $200,000 to generate one HERDC point (equivalent to one refereed journal article) while they are spending about $20,000 or $7,500 per Equivalent Full-time Student on teaching to achieve one completion. In effect as the American Boyer Commission (1998) found, while:

‘ … tuition income from undergraduates is one of the major sources of university income, helping to support research programs and graduate education … the students paying the tuition get, in all too many cases, less than their money’s worth’. (Boyer Commission, 1998 cited Cram 2009: 91)

If Cram’s work is credible (as we think it is) the relentless push to reallocate income earned form teaching away from teaching to research suggests some of the paradoxes that now define the modern university as a site of teaching and learning.

What is clear is that there has been little if any response to this basic change in the working culture of Australian universities. Part of this ‘null-response’ may well reflect the fact that many academics do not like teaching and would prefer to do research.

Conclusion

This paper has suggested that whatever the nature or scale of the changes which have accompanied the ‘massification’ of the Australian universities, ‘globalization’ does not provide an explanation of what has happened. Rather far reaching changes have been made driven by human capital theory and the practices of the New Public Management. Have these changes spelled the end of public scholarship? Our inclination is to say that this is not one of the important effects of these changes. If anything public scholarship has played little if any part in the actual work practices or culture of Australian academics. Whatever the apparent value of the idea of the university as ‘critic and conscience and critic of society’, and whatever the occasional defence of it on those occasions when universities stage public events like graduation ceremonies, this idea has not informed a vibrant culture of public scholarship as a practice. The absence of any sustained intellectual or practical resistance to the new mantras of ‘student-centred learning’ since the 1990s, points to a long absence of a good idea waiting only to become a practice.