The madness and malady of managerialism.(Universities)

VERY RECENTLY several admirable and insightful publications have appeared in scholarly and intellectual forums dealing with the follies and evils in Australian universities brought about by their corporatisation over the past fifteen or so years. Corporatisation, as it has been applied to the universities, essentially comprises commercialisation and managerialism. Together they have totally re-oriented our tertiary education institutions. While the one has effectively provided them with a new imperative (income) the other has given them the means of achieving it (obedience). Here it is proposed to summarise three such publications and go on not so much to criticise as to complement them.

The rationale for the present offering is that perhaps a lecturer's grass-roots perspective rather than another overview is needed to illuminate the near-terminal damage that has been done to our universities, particularly by managerialism, since the Dawkins Revolution was launched in 1987-88. Although an academic, I make no apology for making use of the higher education argot of the day; it is a useful way of demonstrating the insanity currently being perpetrated in Australian universities.

Margaret Thornton, Professor in Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University, in a path-breaking paper ("Corrosive Leadership (or Bullying by Another Name): A Corollary of the Corporatised Academy?", Australian Journal of Labour Law, 17, 2, 2004) has argued that corporatisation has produced an increase in bullying of academic staff. To her, the universities' new concern to have academics do more work with less money has created a culture "which would seem to foster bullying practices".

Since universities have now adopted "entrepreneurialism or profit-making, values that have become central to the educational market" in which they operate, they have developed what Thornton calls "the new managerialism". Students have become customers, and academics have become "productive units" (somewhat like machines in factories). The value of both "is assessed primarily in terms of the competitive dollars they generate". Lost in this transformation are collegiality, academic freedom, work satisfaction, and, not least of all--here one can easily read between her lines--the courage that was once considered an essential attribute in a worthy academic.

Jan Currie, Emeritus Professor in Education at Murdoch University, is less concerned with the rise of bullying than with the loss of collegiality as universities "pursue teaching and research for profits", a quest, she argues, which "has begun to threaten the academic quality of Australian tertiary education" ("Organisational Culture of Australian Universities: Community or Corporate?", keynote address, HERDSA conference, University of Sydney, July 2005). Managerialism in Australian universities is something she began studying about ten years ago and she cites studies which reveal "[the] strong change in management styles from the collegial to the managerial style of businesses".

Currie is clearly just as concerned by the personal effects that corporatisation, commercialisation and managerialism have had on academic staff as she is with their impact on the universities themselves. She writes about academics' frustration, high stress levels, low job satisfaction, and disillusionment. A striking feature of the paper is her refusal to predict whether things will improve or only get worse. She begins with the question as to whether "universities in the 21 st century [can] be more like scholarly communities than corporations" and ends by asking whether "it is too much to hope" that the federal government, when dealing with universities, might turn away from commercialisation and "revert to notions of community".

Rodney Nillsen, an Associate Professor in Mathematics at the University of Wollongong, published in this magazine a remarkably succinct summary ("Don't Do What Australia Has Done", Quadrant, November 2004) of the ways in which Australian universities have been compromised by "the Dawkins policy" and subsequent changes to higher education institutions since 1988. Given the necessity to become more financially independent, universities have been forced to enrol more students and especially more full-fee-paying students. In other words, they have had to pursue commercialisation. Higher education, in the form of teaching, has increasingly been seen as a commodity like any other and its integrity compromised by priority being given to what is vocational rather than intellectual, to "dumbing down", and to student evaluation of academic staff. Researchers have been reduced to the status of technicians, required to apply for external funding and to focus on short-term problems, their principal purpose to enhance their university's "research image".