education


CAMPUS CRISIS

Don Anderson

Tony Coady (ed)
Why Universities Matter
Allen & Unwin $24.95pb, 254pp
1 86508 038 1

YOU HAVE DOUBTLESS HEARD the old joke about a university being a large number of academics united by a parking crisis quite often enough, but please bear with me. It is not a joke and, for 'academics', substitute 'academics, administrators, & general staff'. At the University of Sydney, where some staff are entitled for a fee to a 'parking' sticker that guarantees entry to the grounds but nothing more, parking meters have been installed, your regular police may invigilate them, and anyone may park as long as they feed the meter. Doubtless some students take advantage of this, as one imagines do people who work in nearby Glebe. Insult has been added to injury in front of the English Department building recently by four spaces being roped off, with no explanation, though the rumour is that they are set aside for a group renting the Union Theatre for rehearsals and paying the University handsomely for the parking on which they insisted. Paranoia runs high. A Staff Association questionnaire asked whether the parking crisis leads to an increase of tension (Answer: 'Yes'). Some point out that funding crises oblige the university to behave thus. Maybe. But it ought to be recognised that what we are witnessing, at the apparently trivial level of parking, is what Kuhn called a paradigm shift. We are witnessing a shift in the university's core values, from educational institution to fiscal manager. The public brouhaha over Melbourne University Press's declining the honour of publishing Tony Coady's collection of conference papers, Why Universities Matter, may testify to this paradigm shift. This, certainly, is the burden of Morag Fraser's Afterword to the collection, as it is of many of the essays included. Consider:
* Education carries 'the great moral duty of assiduously cultivating that learning, wisdom and virtue, not to be inherited as worldly wealth descends...Without [education] worldly riches sit, like undeserved honours, gracelessly and unprofitably on the possessor.' (Redmond Barry, Chancellor, opening the University of Melbourne, 1855)
* Melbourne University Private's 'programs will be designed essentially for an emerging domestic and international market demanding high quality educational [sic] and training to meet the professional up-grading and re-skilling needs of early to mid-career technical, managerial, or executive clients already in employment. Corporate and individual professional clients will measure its success in terms of the real present value it adds to the people it educates and trains.' (Melbourne University Private brochure 1998.)
      If you approve the first of these 'mission statements', then supporters of the second will accuse you of 'elitist nostalgia'; the same nostalgists will regard the latter as 'managerial newspeak'. And we know who is winning. At the University of Sydney, which I am Panglossian enough still to regard as a virtuous institution with its educational heart in the right place, according to Coady, 'the proportion of administrative to academic staff [has] grown from 23.61% in 1980 to 94.5% in 1994.' (Coady doesn't define 'administrative' & 'academic', but I imagine the holder of a Personal Chair who devotes her energies to the role of pro vice-chancellor would be counted on the 'administrative' side -- cf Peter Karmel's documentation that 'teaching-only staff constituted 28% of all higher education staff in 1988; by 1996 this had fallen to 4%'.) Let us not forget that third world, the students, and staff-student ratios. I belong to a Department where, in the last five years, staff numbers have diminished by 16% while student numbers have increased by 25%.
      'Élitism' is a great stick for faux-egalitarians to beat anyone about the head with but, is there necessarily anything wrong with universities being élitist -- on intellectual, educational grounds? Not, that is, on grounds of social class. Peter Karmel again: `The extent of access to higher education is reflected in entry standards. In general, the greater the access, the lower must be minimum entry standards.' Yet, 'there has been a significant long-term decline in the government's commitment to funding higher education in relation to the scale of the Australian economy'. (6% cut 1997 - 2000.) If John Howard were to recognise the merit of Karmel's proposed 'panacea', a comprehensive program of national scholarships, then he might in this respect don the robes of his revered Robert Menzies.
     This book contains very disturbing claims. 'Never before has there been so much talk of "excellence and quality assurance" and never before [has there been] so little concern for either.' (Hazel Rowley) 'In some cases the selection of individuals to be declared redundant seems to have been influenced by who has or has not been critical of those in power.' (Bruce Langtry) Research today 'is a means rather than an end. The "higher" end is not truth-telling for its own sake, or for what it might teach us. Nor is it the closer engagement of truth-telling with the world. It is the glory of the university, and the augmentation of its balance sheet.' (Simon Marginson) This is Canberra-driven, of course, a Ph.D candidate being worth, in funding terms, several junior-level undergraduates.
      Anyone who bothers to read Peter Craven or attends to Morag Fraser's afterword to this volume will be aware that Melbourne University Press gave some very odd reasons indeed for declining to publish it. The proposed book 'promoted a "traditional" (and important and laudable) view of universities, without clear or sufficient representations from the proponents of countervailing views'. 'The collection of papers did not attempt to present a balance of current ideas in higher education management.' (Italics added.) Had these 'managers' never heard of critique? Does Lyotard, did Nietzsche, offer a 'balanced' view? Did Plato? Actually, Plato/Socrates pretended to, and his 'dialogues', his straw men, show, at the foundation of Western philosophy, the questionable nature of 'balance of current ideas', as Karl Popper bore witness.

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Don Anderson is a member of the English Department at the University of Sydney.

Return to May 2000 /Letter to the Editor / Australian Book Review