Morag Fraser

cultural studies

THE DEBATE WE HAD TO HAVE

Morag Fraser

Simon Marginson and Mark Considine
The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia
CUP, $34.95Pb, 272pp, 0 521 79448 X

Try counting the number of front pages devoted to higher education -- even to technology -- in any of Australia's major metropolitan dailies over a given month. You won't need two hands. Even this January's election-year tertiary education boosting -- Kim Beazley putting universities online and John Howard countering with 'innovation' -- didn't displace Pat Rafter's day sweats or Mark Waugh's travails from page one. After a very few day's dissection, education policy slid up the back again into the lettuce fold of niche 'sections'. The sexual scandals of a single Sydney private school got more coverage.
All of which makes The Enterprise University, with its fine-grained and empirical approach to the state of Australian universities, an even more welcome contribution to the education policy debate we have to have.
This is not a book about a golden academic and collegial past. Nor is it a to-the-barricades clamour for reform of a demoralised and corporatised university present. Rather, it is a dense (a bit of a thicket in places) description of the way Australian universities are, and a thorough, authoritative analysis of the university governance structures that have emerged post the so-called Dawkins' revolution of the late 1980s. (If there is a villain in the piece it's not the sometimes hapless Liberal education chief David Kemp, but Labor's John Dawkins, the man of reforming zeal who, as Super Minister of Employment, Education and Training threw all the component parts of Australian higher education into the air and then departed his post before they fell to earth -- changed forever.)

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