No golden age.(Letter to the editor)

SIR: Malcolm Saunders' article on the current state of Australian universities (March 2006) will no doubt strike a chord with many academics. However, your non-academic readers may be left with the impression that, prior to John Dawkins' largely ill-considered reforms of 1988, Australian universities enjoyed a golden age of intellectual freedom where academics were left to get on with their primary duties, largely free of managerial interference.

Few if any Australian universities attained the pre-Dawkins ideal implied in the article, and in some respects they were worse places to work in than they are today. The major culprit was an excessive collegiality, whose erosion Malcolm Saunders deplores.

Collegiality was a free venue for the core of windbags that are found in any university. They would normally have the chance to voice their over-long and often ill-informed opinions in at least three venues--department, faculty, and academic board--since any proposal, academic or otherwise, would normally need to pass through each of these stages of the collegial process. Sometimes they could double or treble their opportunities for pointless oratory if a proposal was referred back by the academic board.

These meetings were frequent, long and normally tedious. They were also often pointless. I well remember my university's budget, in all its detail, being presented annually to the academic board "for information and comment". The many pages of dense financial information were solemnly pored over by conscientious academics who would find difficulty in understanding their own bank statements. The only comments made from the floor on such occasions came from those who noticed that their own departments had suffered a fall in funding, or whose arithmetic was good enough to show that their departments had not received as big an increase in funding as some others; and all the time, most of the important decisions had already been taken by the senior administrative cabal. In short and with few exceptions--one was the time a ...