I picked up a banner for the first time and joined the fight against fee deregulation as a second-year student in 2014. The experience of being part of a vibrant and winning campaign is crucial for any activist – personally, I came to realise we have the power and responsibility to identify problems within the current system, develop alternate visions and fight for them. Education activism at Australian universities during recent years has been focused on resisting the Government’s various manifestations of fee deregulation. In the midst of calling for the affordability and accessibility of higher education, we have made the assumption that debts and barriers to enrolment are the main problems facing universities today. An important message, albeit one which overlooks the pervasive structural problems characterising modern universities. Over the last few decades universities have come to be organised and managed in a new way. These changes have often corresponded with a degradation of education and research, and changes to the traditional goals and purpose of the university institution. While students are aware of deregulation and federal budget cuts, we rarely discuss what is happening on our own campuses. The example I want to focus on is the ANU’s redevelopment of Union Court. This is a project which has already had negative impacts on student and staff and will radically change the future of education at the ANU. It encapsulates the damaging tendencies which characterise modern universities – tendencies which we rarely examine, let alone fight. Education activism will not achieve a better future until we begin to unravel the problems facing modern universities, envision alternatives, and take courage from our past campaigning experience to fight for a future we believe in.
The Union Court redevelopment is a project which can be best understood in the context of the increasing corporatisation of universities, particularly through the concept of the ‘managerial’ university. Universities are one of the many public institutions which have been subject to the ascendancy of ‘managerial ism’ in recent decades. Managerialism broadly refers to the application of particular management practices to production, for the purposes of increasing efficiency, productivity, and profitability. In the context of higher education, the re-organisation of management has resulted in the collapse of the ‘traditional’ university and the rise of the ‘modern’ university – associated with the pursuit of profit, aggressive performance management, and the prioritisation of measurable efficiency outcomes and research output over quality of education – the standards of which consequently decline. The practical results of managerial reforms in universities have been aptly described by former ANU Associate Professor David West, in his Demos article ‘The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment?’. The logic of the managerial university in effect undermines the social role of the university as a place of teaching, learning and intellectual freedom. West identifies that the pressure put on academics to produce quantifiable results and a high research output leads to a neglect of teaching and research quality. The need to raise revenue through increased enrolments means educational standards are watered down. Managers themselves are assessed based on performance – the more reforms and restructures they introduce, the better their CV looks. As standards of education drop, management become motivated to use expensive marketing materials to attract fee-paying international students into expensive degrees, even though in many cases, the declining quality of education does not match the standard advertised. These conditions run deep, and they are directing the future of our universities today.
Running the university in an increasingly corporation-like way and operating under the same demands faced by private businesses in a market produces market pressures – to compete, to treat students as customers, to increase productivity, and to force down wages and conditions. These imperatives are pursued at the expense of staff, students, and the purpose of the institution. A puzzling example of this logic playing out to the detriment of the university itself was the restructuring of the School of Culture, History and Language (CHL) at the ANU in 2016. A loss in profits justified the gutting of a school regarded by Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt as ANU’s “jewel in the crown” – job losses, casualisation and the cutting of Asian language courses were met with disbelief. Despite the outrage, cuts to departments and courses in the humanities are becoming increasingly common as budget-balancing measures. Management reassures us the coinciding push to online learning and reduced contact hours is not a profit-making venture. Rather, these changes are supposedly pursued in the interests of student and academic ‘flexibility’.
The restructuring of CHL belies a motivation to protect the business interests of the university at the expense of the integrity of the institution as a place of learning. The actions of management in the Union Court redevelopment project suggests a continuation along this trajectory. The demolition of the Manning Clarke Centre, a 30-year old lecture venue with a capacity of over 1000, has been accompanied by the same vague phrases about ‘flexibility’ and ‘innovative teaching and learning styles’ in consultations. The concerns of students and staff about the destruction of our dedicated lecture theatres has been met with the offer of a flat-floor, reconfigurable room designed to be a “multi-purpose, multimodal, flexible learning space” to “facilitate new modes of teaching delivery” – a clear move away from lectures and tutorials, and towards large seminars and online courses. Underneath the rhetoric of innovative and improved learning styles is a desire to save resources on teaching staff by cutting down contact hours and increasing the student-to-teacher ratio, despite concerns about the impact of these changes on educational outcomes. The somewhat unintuitive rationale of a university protecting their financial interests by disinvesting in education – cutting courses, firing respected academics, shortening semesters, casualising and underpaying teaching staff, and replacing contact hours with online modules – predictably results in falling rankings and reputation. The chain reaction established by this institutional logic then impels the university to spend millions on marketing to recuperate funds from full fee-paying international students. The redevelopment project encapsulates this desperate attempt to market a university on image, rather than quality of education.
Buildings like the Manning Clarke Centre and the ANU Union, described as decrepit by management, will be replaced with modern spaces built with cheap and poor-quality material designed to house privately-owned businesses, accommodation, and student services. Our spaces in this university have been taken from us to build more profitable and marketable ones. The ANU bar, housed in the ANU Union building, was the symbol of our university – always full, welcoming, and unassuming – a space which felt like it existed just for us. Its demolition was justified by the unsightly exterior and a lack of diversity in food options. Our student spaces were replaced with expensive bars and food trucks in the “Pop-Up Village” which was explicitly being promoted as Canberra’s ‘newest dining destination’, with price-points catering not only to students, but public servants as well. This new “precinct” does not in any way feel like a space for students and staff, and that is because it is not. The trendy and elite new campus is designed for the market – to compete with other elite international universities in order to award as many expensive degrees as possible.
Crucially, as described in West’s article, these decisions have not been made on the merit of the redevelopment itself – they have been made because ANU management are performance measured themselves on the ‘restructures’ they initiate during their time at a university. The imperatives of managerialism lie beneath developments which will have a serious and detrimental effect on the quality of education, research and teaching at the ANU. Perhaps most emblematic of the sheer disregard for education during this project is that these millions were spent at the exact same time when ANU management attempted to reduce the penalty rates of library and IT staff during enterprise bargaining in 2016. Students and staff have struggled with continuous construction work drowning out classrooms and offices, students have been forced off campus for exams and lectures, and the construction has been gradually encroaching on the small amount of space we have left. Despite these affronts on our ability to teach, work, and learn, we have seen no concerted push-back against any part of ANU management’s agenda.
While the practical effects of the managerial university are alarming, in everyday life these kinds of projects pass by unquestioned as part of the inevitable march of progress – part of a rationalised, neoliberal logic in which restructures like these are necessary for financial sustainability. This perhaps explains some of the apparent indifference at the ANU. However, as activists, we also know that every moment we let this logic go by unopposed is a moment in which it becomes further entrenched. We know universities are changing and if we want them to change for the better we need to intervene in this procession and demand alternatives. Attacks on students and staff from university management are not new – the nature of a capitalist economy forces downward pressure on wages and conditions everywhere – but the lack of resistance is a concerning trend. Nonetheless, there have been some recent examples of education activism which upholds a legacy of holding management to account. At the ANU in 2013, students had an anti-management campaign in protest of the cancellation of tutorials. Their refusal to give up and the ongoing escalation of the campaign resulted in a mammoth win for students. This is just part of a long history of inspiring education activism at the ANU and universities internationally. We know we have the ability, power, and experience to take on difficult campaigns – we’ve been doing it for decades. Now, with so much at stake, we cannot afford to be complacent. We cannot continue to provide consultations with management through our student unions which only serve as a tick of approval to bulldoze our campus. We need to be prepared to campaign against management – because their interests stand in stark opposition to ours. Their decisions, motivated by powerful social trends, are slowly destroying our university. And of course, we need to continue to fight for free education, but it will be futile if we don’t also fight to protect the quality and value of our education itself. At the very heart of activism should be a preparedness to thoroughly examine power structures, identify whose interests are being served within them, and to challenge them when they generate injustice. We have a responsibility to take the university into our own hands and make it a place which prioritises education, to no end other than the value of education itself.
