campusreview. com. au
POLICY & REFORM
Fight to define higher education
University staff are coming together to contradict vice-chancellors on deregulation and push to make institutions what they should be.
By Julie-Ann Robson
The Abbott Government’ s ideological push to deregulate universities, together with the spectacle of the Go8 vice-chancellors clambering after mammon, striding the corridors of power all the while claiming to be the voice of the university sector, has been like a blowtorch to tinder for university staff across Australia.
In less than a week, academic, professional and technical staff across the country have come out in force to sign up to a Charter for Australia’ s Public Universities issued by the National Alliance for Public Universities( NAPU).
This marks a split between VCs and staff, and shows that staff will no longer stand passively to the side but will fight for what they think universities should be.
For years, university staff have been forced to run, like so many souls in the vestibule of Dante’ s hell, behind the ever-changing banners government and university management put before them.
They’ ve weathered the rapidly changing demands of an increasingly harsh policy environment. They’ ve suffered restructure after restructure and redundancy round after redundancy round. They’ ve endured the decline of the institution of learning, and the rise of university brand.
University managements’ fear of‘ brand damage’ is symbolic of the calculated and unabashed marketisation of both the institutions and their students( now clients and / or customers).
What I think has resonated with university staff about the NAPU Charter, and is the reason it has taken hold so quickly, is that – like the death of Gough Whitlam – it has reminded staff of the idea of the university as an institution, and what that institution should be, not what it has become.
The first of the charter’ s eight principle states that universities provide both public and private benefits. It reads:“ To fulfil these, they must function independently of market forces and political interference”.
This principle runs counter to the education minister, Christopher Pyne’ s, argument that a tertiary education is for the individual’ s benefit alone. Such a claim not only demeans the nature of a university education, but is not even remotely true. As the Sydney Morning Herald recently reported, OECD figures on the public benefit of university education for Australia have demonstrated that“ the Australian public, not individuals, profits most from higher education but students shoulder most of the cost”.
By rejecting market forces and political interference, the charter also rejects two major obstacles to staff teaching, researching and expanding the public good.
As a colleague of mine said recently, academic staff don’ t charge in six-minute blocks if a newspaper, or a colleague, or a member of the public calls on their time to ask how to research family history, whether the Ebola epidemic will continue to escalate and at what rate, or how, music affects mental health.
Whilst management and politicians measure outputs, staff take the call or answer the email: they contribute to the public good, and are betrayed when their vice-chancellors say in a public forum that free education is a no-brainer, and see that vice-chancellor, the next day, courting the apparent Minister for Deregulation.
The tagline for the University of Sydney’ s MBA program reads“ Me, First.”
I’ ve not quite worked out the linguistic or marketing benefit of the comma and full stop, although I’ m sure they were significant to the focus groups upon whom the tagline was presumably tested. What I do know is that it shows why the NAPU has come into being: an overwhelming determination, on the part of staff at universities across Australia, to reclaim their institutions as places where learning, teaching and research are practised for public good. ■
Julie-Ann Robson is a casual academic at the University of Western Sydney and an administrator at the University of Sydney. She is a co-founder of the National Alliance for Public Universities.
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