The Matters of Concern Collective (MoCC) is a group of academics and PhD students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds who have come together in response to existing conditions in universities in Australia. MoCC operate in a horizontal structure, and work collectively on issues pertaining to the state, purpose, direction and possibilities of higher education in this country. We have invited a series of speakers with a diverse range of disciplinary and professional expertise to share their perspectives in public talks and seminars on how and why privatization of the University and its manifest conditions have developed over time and what we can do to rectify it.
We consider higher education to be an area that cannot be the sole domain of specialists and scholars within the field. We believe higher education is ‘of the commons’; an area belonging to and inalienable from the public domain and which reflects and affects conditions in wider society. As such, through a variety of initiatives we are building an interdisciplinary ‘learning community’ together with a number of similar groups of academics and students that are mushrooming around the country. We are pooling our collective experience in tertiary curriculum design, pedagogy, knowledge translation and research to higher education as a commons, as our contribution to a healthier society.
While the theoretical debate continues over the role of the State and the redundancy or recoverability of a welfare state model, it is evident that the public University is being incrementally corporatised. As noted by several scholars in this field, the steady integration of the managerial model into universities in Australia and abroad is part of a global phenomenon that has seen the agency academics once had over direction and priorities stripped away and replaced with the control of professional managers (many from the private sector). Those who experience the most immediate and negative impacts from this re-structuring are students and junior academic staff, which hardly bodes well for the emerging generation.
Among the many significant implications of this transition from public to private ownership of the commons, some of the most glaring can be seen in institutional and political responses to anthropogenic climate change. It is undeniable that planetary climate disruption from global heating is largely due to carbon emissions from our fossil-fuel dependent economies. There is a demonstrable need for a whole-of-society response to meet the challenges presented by this disruption, the scale of which demand both rapid incorporation of existing knowledge into curricula and policy and the development of entirely new ways of learning, being and organising across sectors of our societies. Yet our higher education institutions, as potentially key drivers of such deep and far-reaching changes, are obstructed by the same managerial structure and ethos which foster inertia in the public and political will to mobilise for large-scale, far-reaching inter-sectoral change. It is our contention that the privatization of the public University should be understood as an intrinsic part of the ongoing commodification of the commons, and in the context of climate disruption, that this process is inimical to the kind of change we need to make. Compared to a realistic and viable response to global conditions, the ongoing privatization of knowledge institutions is counter-productive and unsupportable if the accelerating erosion of a flourishing web of life is anything to go by.
How did we get here?
Over the last forty years and particularly since the Washington Consensus was declared in 1992, the neoliberal economic model of putative ‘open markets’, ‘free trade’ and ‘minimal state intervention’ has been projected as fostering robust individualism and autonomy through entrepreneurial competition and innovation. This ideology claimed that private management or ownership of essential services would allow for greater efficiency while promising lower taxes.
Rather than producing a ‘smaller’ state, however, it is well-established that governments under pressure from powerful transnational interests have actively sought to create ‘competitive’ conditions for foreign direct investment. This has included leasing or selling off state assets and facilitating ‘attractive’ deregulated markets with low or negative taxation for multinational corporations and with little or no public consultation. Given that some of these corporations now represent more concentrated wealth than the annual GDP of most nations, this has certainly ensured the ‘creation’ and greater concentration of wealth in far fewer hands. Contrary to disingenuous claims of greater prosperity overall, the negative impacts are significant and numerous. They include the deeper stratification of access to essential services, in which quality comes at a premium and increased inefficiency at the ‘cheaper’ end, wage stagnation for regular workers, reduced managerial transparency and accountability, diminished state sovereignty and regulatory control and a decline in living standards. Ironically, in many cases states must ‘buy back’ these services to retain a semblance of functionality. The higher education sector is certainly not immune to this phenomenon. In this context it is crucial that we find ways to renew the fundamental purpose of these institutions which have been shaped by public labour, knowledge and resources for hundreds of years to deliver knowledge that is essential to a sustainable society.
Impacts from eroding the public university
Since the privatization of the public University, as launched by the Dawkins report in the late 1980s under the Hawke-Keating Labor government, a gulf between a subclass of academics, or academic ‘precariat’, and a combination of senior ‘professoriat’ and Executive management (and private corporations) has become more entrenched. In a basic bargain, a class of casualised academics are expected to cover for the shortfall in available academic skills and time to maintain the everyday functioning and demands of the University at standards required to ensure or increase its rankings/brand. In a form of endless internship, the expectation, both official and informal, is that casualised academics, irrespective of award level or track-record, perform set tasks at a high standard on sub-par, flat rates and fixed totals regardless of the labour necessary for adequate execution. Since simply ‘stopping work’ when the allotted hours are expended is not possible as it will result in discontinuation of employment, expectations are unrealistic, incommensurate with standards and practices in other sectors and unsustainable as they do not support basic needs (i.e. sick leave, holiday pay, employment security, etc.). In short, skilled academic labour is captured for a fraction of the actual cost while undercutting salaries and standards in general.
This is just one example of many from a hybridized public-private managerial model in public Universities within deregulated higher education. Justified in various strains of ‘economic realism’, the overall conditions for meaningful research and teaching which is based on the stability of secure employment has been eviscerated. Although professional staff and academics in the public University typically have received salaries which are lower relative to equivalent positions in the private sector, they have been prepared to forgo those perks in the spirit of supporting a public University which can include all students irrespective of financial background. The culture of a public University is reflected in its cooperative model – libraries, facilities, food halls, shops, common spaces, parking and transport run at subsidized rates – as well as teachers and students giving their time and effort to participate in collaborative modes of learning as based on inquiry, openness, critical thinking, original research and collegiality. This is anathema to knowledge acquisition based on the profit principle.
The Abbott government sought to introduce student fee deregulation in 2014, seeking to complete the steps put in place by the Howard government and reversing a long-held standard in Australia. This push was shelved by the Turnbull government but continues to pose significant danger to the higher education system. The ‘assets’ of the public university have been steadily leased or sold-off to private contractors. The positions and salaries of high-level managers and support staff and selected academics have increased in proportion to a decrease in continuing positions for lower level academics. A select professoriat have been ‘rewarded’ for their active or tacit support for this transfer. With the reduced consideration and consultation on major decisions concerning the orientation of the University that is standard practice in the ‘Executive’ mode, there is a deeper betrayal of the legacy of knowledge and university structures intended as a public asset.
The model is fairly clear: full fee-paying students, casual teaching-only ‘instructors’, professional staff and a small group of permanent academics on privately-run campuses charged public rates which are overseen by a top-heavy Executive team on commercial-scale salaries. Under this regime, the basic purpose of higher education is to increase the ‘student-customer’s’ job-competitiveness through a a University-brand degree in a deregulated market. The acquisition of a set of specific skills as valued within a narrow set of indicators designed by corporate managers fails students, teachers and researchers. While academics are curtailed in space, time and freedom to engage in meaningful teaching, research and engagement in the University community, students are ill-prepared for the uncertainties they will face in uncertain and rapidly changing conditions. Rather than cultivating critical thinking and cooperative skills, for example, which are essential for building sustainable communities with the capacity to transform and regenerate society for future generations, this approach reinforces the ‘survival modalities’ of competition, insecurity, fragmentation, isolation, polarization, information-control among the many ills of social organisation based on neoliberal principles. As deeper cuts in the social fabric ensure that more individuals, families and communities are abandoned to the predations of big capital, this is hardly the way to prepare for the impacts of accelerated global warming – a so-called ‘mass extinction event’.
Higher education reform
For too long academics and students have accepted that a return to a public University model is unrealistic and have either tolerated or openly advocated the culture that a private model of higher education entails. Not only self-serving and acquiescent, this position is ahistorical and a form of false consciousness. There are clear ethical, social, political, economic and historical reasons for correcting this drift. Maintaining a free and open higher education system that is not solely driven by profit sustains an informed society as a foundational tenet of functional democratic systems. We already know from the case of secondary and tertiary education in Finland that the replacement of Key Performance Indicators and standardized testing with individually-tailored education with an emphasis on critical thinking and individual and group-led student research across all disciplines is a key ingredient for significant academic results. When all costs and benefits are included, a similar shift of focus in the comparable education model in Australia, would suggest a way to reverse this illiberal trend. We may even have the foresight to support the design of a new model of education to serve a more representative and decolonised population and to adequately prepare and respond to complex and unprecedented challenges in changing global and planetary conditions.
Public or perish
As the corporate University model tunnels tertiary education toward the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, students, academics and staff can do well to re-learn the value and practices of solidarity. If we have learned anything from the industrial revolution, it is that the permanent acceleration of productivity and waste of modernity is socially and ecologically unsustainable. We also know from the impacts of global warming and large-scale climate disruptions which are exponentially magnifying now (not in 50 or 100 years), that a significant change in our education system is imperative to reflect core values and meet the needs in our society as a whole and not those of a small section of it.
It is no coincidence that for-profit managerial practices and structures now entrenched in the neoliberal state of Australia have targeted the public university at a moment in which both major political parties have been unable to implement an overall plan of action to reduce carbon emissions and prepare for extreme weather conditions and their myriad implications.
The stakes are high. As entrenched for-profit managerial practices and structures in the neoliberal state of Australia have targeted the public University at a moment in which both major political parties are unable to formulate and implement an overall plan of action to reduce carbon emissions and prepare for extreme weather conditions and their myriad implications, the re-evaluation and re-positioning of higher education priorities, principles and structures is increasingly important. Without reproducing a narrow set of policy criteria and for-profit values which disproportionately privilege the few, a University for the commons will:
• help to re-distribute access and opportunities and will strengthen understanding of the need for standards of fair work in all sectors of our society.
• contribute to public awareness and demand public money for Universities and other public institutions to support the adequate delivery of essential services. These funds can be ‘re-purposed’ from greater regulation of private sector influence in politics, rolling back subsidies to and increased taxation of multinational corporations.
• re-establish the centrality of public University for the public good as a cornerstone of a thriving society, a site of possibility and inalienable from the commons.
As higher education is inextricable from the wider economic, social, political and environmental problems we face, we consider the tools of human knowledge as one of the most productive means by which to generate viable alternatives toward a better future for all. We believe that a regenerated public University model will help to protect and enrich the commons from the depredations of large-scale concentrated and privatized power around the world, and for longer-term flourishing in the web of life.
[1] Some other groups include the Ngara Institute and the Public University Forum (PUF).
[2] Margaret Thornton (Ed.) Through a Glass Darkly: The Social Sciences look at the Neoliberal University, Canberra: ANU Press, 2014; Raewyn Connell, The Good University: What Universities actually do and why it’s time for a radical change, Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2019; Blackmore, J. Brennan, M. and Zipin, L. (eds), Repositioning the university: governance and changing academic work, Rotterdam: Sense Publishing, 2010; Halfmann W. and Radder R., ‘The Academic Manifesto: From an Occupied to a Public University,’ Minerva, 2015, 53(2): 165-187; Richard Denniss, ‘Dead Right: How neoliberalism ate itself and what comes next,’ Quarterly Essay, 2018: June.
