policy & reform
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with neoliberal agendas and controlled by
market-orientated managers. How did we
get here?
RC: Similar things have happened to
NGOs, cooperatives, and a lot of public
sector agencies, so there’s obviously
something wider going on. Basically,
in the last generation, the rich have
got richer, the public sector has been
squeezed, corporations have become
more powerful, and governments have
had their heads soaked in neoliberal,
market-first ideas.
In that environment, universities have
been redefined as money-making firms,
not as a public service. They have been
forced to compete with each other rather
than cooperate. Fees have been brought
back and ratcheted up. More and more
university councils have been controlled
by businessmen and corporate thinking.
All this has given power to corporate‑style
managers to change the character
of universities.
How has this corporate style of
management impacted the university
labour force in terms of makeup and
individuals’ day-to-day lives?
I think there have been two really big
changes. One is worse conditions of
employment. There’s been a steep rise
in the number of university teachers and
researchers who are in insecure jobs –
more than in the economy generally.
Universities don’t advertise this, but
two-thirds of undergraduate teaching in
Australia is now done by casualised labour.
The non-academic staff have been
more affected by outsourcing. In this
scheme, people working for the university
(whether as cleaners or computer
specialists) are not actually employed
by the university. They are employed by
another company that holds a university
contract. They vanish from the statistics,
they lack rights and recognition on
campus, and they come and go.
The other big change is how work is
controlled on campus. The highly skilled
workforce in universities aren’t trusted
to know their own jobs and get on with
them. There’s been a major growth of
hierarchy, surveillance, control through
intrusive online systems, arbitrary
restructures, and just plain bullying.
The workers have to be measured,
‘incentivised’ and made fearful, to keep
them in line with the corporate plan.
University management now promotes
a corporate culture glorifying ‘leaders’,
and the top leaders now pay themselves
on the corporate model – a million dollars
a year.
Why is the collective important, not
only within a university, but between
institutions globally?
Universities are our society’s main sites
for making knowledge. When you look at
research as a form of work (the topic of
chapter one of The Good University), it’s
clear that reliable knowledge depends on
shared information and methods. It needs
a workforce – now a global workforce –
cooperating, talking together, publishing,
pooling ideas and data.
There’s a name for this: research builds
a ‘knowledge commons’, a kind of public
park to which everyone has access. That’s
the basis of university curricula, so it is also
at the heart of university teaching.
The fine details of everyday work show
the role of cooperation. Consider a single
lecture: it’s given by the professor, right?
Actually, that lecture also involves
work by cleaners, to prepare the room;
technicians, to install the video machine;
IT staff, to record the lecture; clerical
workers, to get course information to
the students; other academics, to bring
the students up to the necessary level;
building maintenance staff … and so on.
The whole process is a collective one.
There’s a chapter in your book called
‘Privilege Machines’. How do universities
participate in creating inequalities?
It’s not a comfortable thought,
but universities have always been
We should tell university
managers to sell the Mercedes,
zero out the advertising budget,
and forget the glitzy prestige
buildings.
associated with privilege. They produce
an elite workforce for governments,
corporations and professions. The ways
they select students give preference
to the skills, know-how and language
found in professional and upper-class
families and schools. Universities do
have some scholarships for clever
students in poverty. But the evidence
for large social biases in selection is
overwhelming – and international.
Also, in the neoliberal era, universities
model inequality themselves. This is
dramatised in the so-called ‘league
tables’. Harvard constantly comes in as
number one. That’s not so strange when
you discover that this one middle-sized
institution has a capital endowment of
$42 billion dollars. It has received huge
subsidies from the corporate rich in the
richest country in the world.
As the system becomes more
commercialised and fees are pushed
upwards, access to well-funded
universities is heavily dependent on the
students’ (or their families’) capacity to
pay. That’s now a global story. Families
with assets try to position their children for
privilege in a global corporate economy.
English is the dominant language in
the corporate world. Why do we think
so many families from east and south
Asia pay through the nose to send their
children to Australian universities? It’s not
because Australia is the humming centre
of global culture.
Given the obsession around rankings, do
you think it’s ever going to be possible for
universities to become less competitive?
Yes. It’s entirely possible. There are
universities in Europe that have recognised
how destructive this obsession is. They
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