workforce
campusreview.com.au
Managerialism
RULES
The traditional collegial structure
of Australian universities has gone,
and academics have become
disempowered and isolated.
By Peter Curson
W
hat on earth has happened to our universities?
While higher education has become a growth
industry attracting huge numbers of foreign students,
Australian universities have sacrificed their traditional collegial
structure for something more business-like and for a hierarchical
system dominated by a wide array of senior managers who
oversee and control all aspects of university life.
Many universities have now come to resemble top business
corporations with their layers of highly paid executives presiding
over vast empires that encompass not only medical, business and
engineering schools and expensive research programs, but also
centres for marketing and communications, learning and teaching,
corporative engagement and people management.
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Somewhere near the bottom lurk traditional academic
departments charged with offering tuition to undergraduate students.
But unlike the business world where people largely agree or are
aware of their overall purpose, universities have difficulty in defining
what they are all about.
There is little doubt that a number of questions demand answers.
Why are there so many non-academic staff? Why are they paid so
much? Why is so much undergraduate teaching farmed out to poorly
paid casual staff?
Why is so much emphasis placed on obtaining a large research
grant and very little, if any, emphasis on teaching an undergraduate
course? Why can large grant-successful senior academic staff be
allowed to vacate teaching and move to research-only appointments?
What are students expected to learn during their undergraduate years?
Why should students enrol in a particular undergraduate unit,
attracted not only by the nature of the course but also the reputation
of the teacher, only to find the course is taught by a casual lecturer?
What should the university mission be about?
These are all questions critical to understanding what has happened
to our universities.
Few businesses would have difficulty in explaining what they are
all about, why their products are expensive and offered in a particular