This is an edited version of an address to an NTEU election forum in April 2019, when the author was Greens candidate for the seat of Canberra.
Universities are a critical site not just of learning, but also of social change, of progress, of democracy. Universities are where the ideas for social and democratic change tend to be born and incubated, because they are where analysis of social, economic, and environmental outcomes is undertaken, and where solutions to the problems identified are developed. They are where people and ideas come together, formally and informally, to challenge each other to rethink, cross-fertilise, establish new connections, learn from and inform one another, create new paths and re-establish old ones. They are where we train the next generation of teachers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, economists, to be not just technically better, but also more thoughtful, and where we reimagine those fields for the changing world. They’re where we develop vaccines, think through more effective forms of democratic decision-making, learn from and come to terms with our history, and come to understand ourselves better, physically, psychologically, sociologically, ecologically.
Universities aren’t just a place where people get qualifications. They are a public space; they’re public institutions, for the public good.
Over the last thirty years, however, a progression of neoliberal reforms, starting with the Dawkins reforms under Hawke and Keating, have undermined the ability of universities to play their vital social and democratic role. These institutions for the public good are being turned towards private profit. Instead of sites of learning and wisdom, the corporate, managerialist, instrumentalist approach has sought to turn them into factories, with academics and professional staff the replaceable and interchangeable cogs in a machine churning out students as widgets; good little workers, ready to play their role in the market.
The Greens have long advocated against this, and this election we presented the most comprehensive and exciting platform in this space for a generation – a platform that would go a considerable way to reversing the damage, with an explicit agenda of decorporatising higher education and supporting students and staff to do what you’re supposed to do.
The Dawkins reforms were by no means all bad. They opened up access, and introduced a level of accountability that is, to some extent and in some form, necessary. But they began the process of turning public good institutions into part of the all-encompassing marketplace. A process which began in part as an attempt to enhance the social mobility that higher education provides, has ended up doing the opposite.
The key aspects of the neoliberalisation were: the reintroduction of education by fee for service; increasing the competitive processes for grants; and replacing collegiate decision-making with corporate, managerialist, KPI-based decision-making. All three of these have increased out of sight in the intervening 30 years, under Liberal and Labor governments, abetted by senior management, and exacerbated by funding cuts, most recently through the freeze in Commonwealth Supported Places and in research block grants, as well as cost of living going through the roof while student support falls through the floor.
The impact on students has been immense.
Fees are now amongst the highest in the OECD, and the threshold for paying back the debt is now well below median income. At the same time, while accommodation on and off campus is increasingly expensive, Youth Allowance, Austudy and Abstudy have stagnated, meaning a great majority of students have to work, sometimes multiple jobs, to put themselves through uni. This both limits access to tertiary education to those who can afford it, and drastically limits the extracurricular student life which is a vital part of learning. Hanging out on campus and discussing the ideas you’ve been studying with other students is how deep learning happens and is now largely a thing of the past. Add to this the destruction of student life and support on campus through Voluntary Student Unionism, another classic neoliberal intervention, and the student experience is increasingly anaemic.
Concurrently, there’s been a dramatic reduction in options for student learning, through the narrowing of curricula and the focus on job-ready training… for jobs which probably won’t exist in the same form in the coming years. If we know anything at all about the future of work – and there’s a lot more we don’t know than we do – it’s that the vital skills of the future, the ones that computers can’t replace, will be analytical, critical thinking, care and creativity, and an understanding of human nature and ethics. Those aren’t taught and learned through job-ready programs and narrow curricula, but through broad, challenging, interconnected programs.
Ironically, the narrow focus on training for the existing market is preparing students astonishingly poorly for the real world. A return to public good education would do a far better job. But it would also produce a generation better prepared to challenge entrenched power. And that’s just what those in power are seeking to avoid.
The impact on teachers, researchers and professional staff has been, if anything, greater.
One of the basic tenets of the university as a public institution is the principle of academic freedom, and this principle has been whittled away – and in some cases hacked at. The hacking has been done by Coalition governments, through political interventions such as the national interest test for ARC grants, and, in the Howard years, the instructions handed down to deprioritise research regarding climate change, for example. The deep-seated anti-intellectualism of the Liberal and National parties, egged on by the commentariat, is horribly destructive and short-sighted. But the whittling away has been done by governments of both stripes, furthered by senior management, through KPIs, underfunding, corporate partnerships, and the destruction of job security.
Insecurity of work in our universities is at crisis point. And it’s particularly offensive when set in the context of bloated salaries for senior management. According to the Australia Institute, over 25% of university jobs are now casual, and standard employment has dropped below 50%. The majority of classes are taught by casuals, and some 80% of researchers are now on contract. Where things are bad for academic staff, they are often even worse for professional staff, expected to do more with less, and with even less negotiating power. 25% of all university employees get no sick leave, parental leave or days off.
This drives many out of fields they are passionate about and incredibly good at and into jobs outside unis because they are desperate for stability. Without passing judgement on the staff, it is also problematic for students, being taught by people with the sword of Damocles hanging over their head, and with little to no institutional support. And it is hugely destructive of academic freedom and public interest research. In the academic precariat, with short term contracts based on securing grant funding, rolling post-docs, casual teaching positions semester by semester, it’s almost impossible to build long-term public interest research, and it’s all too easy to suppress dissent and control the research agenda. It has, of course, a disproportionately negative impact on women, and on people from non-traditional backgrounds, further eroding the diversity of attitude and approach which is so vital to public good research and teaching.
Underfunding drives research away from public interest and towards private profit, both incidentally and by direction. If governments won’t fund your work, and there’s little philanthropic funding available, you have no choice but to seek corporate funding. That has led to a less independent and increasingly instrumentalist research agenda, as well as the normalisation of the deeply problematic idea that research should be tied to corporate interests. More broadly, it feeds into a tendency to prioritise STEM over HASS, as more easily commercialisable, undermining the vital public good work of learning to understand ourselves better.
The increasing difficulty in securing funding also drives a shift from cooperation to competition, and corporate funding introduces commercial-in-confidence clauses, further reducing the capacity to share ideas and cross-fertilise. The old idea of the academy as a commons, where knowledge is shared to the benefit of all, is replaced by private ownership of knowledge for commercial purposes.
Competition is also driven by the obsession with KPIs. While accountability is important, the increasing imposition of student teaching assessments, requirements to publish a certain number of papers in a certain suite of journals, often disconnected from a real understanding of the discipline, and obsessing over ERA rankings, is very damaging to collegiality. The silliness of it all was brought home to me recently when my partner was seeking to submit a paper co-written with two colleagues at two other universities and they could not find a suitable journal that all three institutions deemed worthy. That’s not accountability – it’s pointlessness. What’s more, there’s evidence that women and people of diverse backgrounds tend to receive lower scores on student assessments, due to deep cultural issues, making it that much harder to build a career.
Overarching all of this is the question of funding.
It is a shocking indictment that Australia now ranks 30th out of the 34 OECD countries in terms of public expenditure on education. But it’s also ridiculously easy to fix, with the political will to tax those who can afford it so as to support the public good. The Greens are proposing to not just unfreeze block grants and CSPs, but to increase per student funding by 10%, totalling $16 billion over the next decade, to give students, academics, researchers, professional staff, the resources you need. We can make that commitment because we are the only party that unashamedly believes in taxing the wealthy, taxing corporations, closing loopholes, removing perverse subsidies. If we taxed those who can afford it, we could fund our unis properly and so much more.
Simply providing more funds would take some of the pressure off, and create more academic freedom, enabling some corporate partnerships to be shelved, supporting the revaluing of humanities, and opening space for public good. But there’s more to our policy. We would tie the increased per student funding to requiring administrations to reduce the casualisation of the workforce. In order to qualify for certain funds, universities would have to demonstrate progress towards proper employment practices. That would do even more to reverse the neoliberalisation.
But at the heart of the corporatisation of universities is student fees. The reintroduction of fees, more than anything else, turned unis into profit-focussed bodies. By ensuring that corporations pay their fair share of tax, the Greens would abolish tuition fees for all undergraduate degrees and TAFE courses, and will increase Youth Allowance, Austudy and Abstudy by $75/week.
It won’t do everything, because the corporate, managerialist approach has become culturally ingrained at universities. But the way you start change is by making strategic interventions that both undercut the existing systems and begin building the new. By abolishing student fees and lifting student support, increasing public funding of teaching and research, and requiring decent employment practices, that’s what the Greens seek to do.
This won’t happen overnight. But it can happen. The Greens have a long history of putting ideas on the agenda that are first ignored, then laughed at, then attacked, and finally adopted. We will negotiate important steps in the right direction, and we’ll keep the pressure up for more. Margaret Thatcher was wrong – there IS an alternative. The era of the neoliberal university is coming to a close.
