NTNU (og det akademiske Norge) om 10 år
hvis Dag Flaa m/ meningsfeller. får viljen sin?
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Fra "University Inc"
By PETER ELLINGSEN
Tuesday 14 December 1999
(dette er del 2, fortsettelse fra del 1, se intro forrige melding)
.........
La Trobe, like many of Australia's 36 universities, is trapped between tradition and
turning education into a paying business.
In an era when government funds just half the $8.5 billion cost of tertiary
education, vice-chancellors have become obsessed with efficiency. La Trobe is
considering slashing humanities studies by dumping subjects with fewer than 20
students - but it's not dropping standards, its vice-chancellor, Professor Michael
Osborne, insists.
Osborne, a softly spoken former classicist, claims 20 per cent of his funding has
disappeared since the Federal Government got tough on universities in 1996. That
is about $60 million of La Trobe's annual $300 million budget. The reduction,
mirrored on other campuses around the country, has forced him into deep cuts
and a need to seduce the private sector. And because no-one pays the piper
without calling the tune, La Trobe's governing council, like others around
Australia, is now full of suits, and they are focused on immediate results, not on
ideas.
"Business doesn't want the humanities, even though they say they do," Osborne
says when we meet in his outer Melbourne office. "What they want is things like
teamwork. I say to them, 'That's interesting, because universities promote
individual thinking.' We've had some nasty run-ins [with those] who want to flood
us with business information courses." Osborne has tried to hold the line, but with
the Government's market-driven policy linking money to student numbers, and
students convinced the path to a job is paved with practical skills, the university is
in danger of drowning under marketing, tourism and management courses.
This was the inevitable outcome once Australia's handful of universities became,
with the addition of technical colleges, a higher education industry. But while
economies of scale and market mechanisms may be appropriate to car production,
are they right for a process that seeks to instil creativity as well as can-do skills?
Forget the elite notion that universities should be about knowledge for knowledge's
sake. Even on a cost-benefit analysis, the corporate campus can be less than
impressive.
According to research by Simon Marginson of Monash's education department,
students are not getting a better deal now than they were before, and may well be
getting something worse. Marginson found that market reform does not seem to
bring greater creativity or diversity, nor does competition result in greater
responsiveness to students, or quality, as opposed to quantity, of research. His
well-regarded investigation found that university marketing departments were
making claims of uniqueness and competitiveness with nothing to back them up.
It was, in other words, smoke and mirrors, a sell job premised on an economic
rationalist credo that all systems must be made to converge with the business
model. Behind the shiny images was a campus where class sizes were exploding,
the quality of postgraduate supervision was collapsing, and standards were
slipping. Jenkin and his head of department, Robert Young, say they worry that
the frenzy to turn universities into cost-efficient conveyor belts has undercut the
quality of teaching and research.
The cost for students is, according to Jenkin, lower standards. "I don't think
there's any doubt that standards have dropped," he says. "Despite all the bullshit to
the contrary, because we get paid for the number of students we have, the money
you get depends on the number of students. There is pressure to push them over
the line [pass them]." The student-teacher ratio has gone berserk. According to
Young, philosophy still has the equivalent of about 300 full-time students a year,
but only a dozen teachers, about 60 per cent of the level of five years ago. The
teacher-student ratio has gone from 1:15 (La Trobe's overall figure) to 1:24. It
could be a primary school.
Young, 55, who gave up the possibility of a lucrative career in economics for
philosophy and now finds there is no time for research, admits there has been
"pressure" to boost marks in fourth year so that students get postgraduate
scholarships. "To make the whole of the discipline orientated to the market is to
ignore questions philosophers have been asking for a thousand years," he says.
Young grew up in Sydney and was the first person in his family to go to
university. In the '80s, before restructuring, he wrote a book on personal
autonomy. Now, following a review that urged a culling of older staff, he is
struggling to retain his motivation. "But I'm not intimidated," he says. "I regard as
laughable the idea that I'd go away because someone disagrees with me. If
academics are going to be cowed, then they are not worthy of the profession."
Australia's biggest university, Monash, runs on a climate of fear, according to Dale
Halstead, who heads the university's National Tertiary Education Union branch.
"People are really scared," she says. Her assessment follows a decision last month
by the dean of science, Professor Ron Davies, to leave after a "heated and
emotional" row with the vice-chancellor, David Robinson. The blow-up was over
further cuts to funding for science, which has already lost $3.6 million and 73
staff. Davies, who refused to sack more staff, argued that further cuts would
mean science would no longer be "viable".
Davies said Robinson "went ballistic", making it clear he could no longer work
with him. Robinson would not comment on the exchange. The vice-chancellor
has, however, hired a spin doctor, Anne Stanford, who now works from his
office. Stanford told Good Weekend that her job included helping Robinson "get
into the media a bit more". Stanford worked previously with the former Victorian
Liberal attorney-general, Jan Wade. Wade's husband, Peter, was until recently
Monash's general manager.
What particularly annoys academics is that, while funds for science and the arts -
which took a 20 per cent cut last year - decline, money is found for other things.
According to Paul James, a Monash senior lecturer and spokesman for the
Association for the Public University, a group formed to defend academic
freedom, some $5.5 million is spent on international marketing. "We're being
divided and ruled by a new style of corporate management," he says.
One of those hardest hit by the new culture is Professor Clive Probyn, head of
Monash's school of literary, visual and cultural studies. Like La Trobe's philosophy
department, his school has lost a significant proportion of its staff without losing
any of its students. This is not unusual in Australian higher education, where
student numbers have ballooned by nearly 50 per cent in the past decade while
full-time academic staff numbers have increased by only 27 per cent.
Wedged behind a desk in the featureless, flaking Menzies, or "Ming", building,
Probyn, 54, makes John Jenkin sound like an optimist. "What's the difference
between the outside world and the university?" he asks forlornly. "In the outside
world, it is dog eat dog. In the university, it's the other way around." It is no joke.
Two years ago a Monash senior administrator, Lionel Parrott, in an address to the
Australian Institute of Tertiary Education Administrators, advised that the new
corporate environment has shifted from "dog eat dog" to "rat eat rat". Parrott
suggested that the "emphasis within our society on standing up for your rights"
could be misinterpreted. "Most people do not want to work in an environment
made stressful by unreasonable colleagues..." he said. Other examples he gave
included active union involvement, being the conscience of an organisation, or
expecting everything in an organisation to be fair.
This was the word from corporate HQ, otherwise known as HR or Human
Resources. But there was nothing human in the way Clive Probyn perceived his
"scandalous" lack of resources. While La Trobe philosophers organised the
painting of their rooms, Probyn's corner of the ivory tower found themselves
cleaning toilet doors and paying for nameplates on their offices. "We're desperately
short of money," he explained. "It's becoming so stressful that colleagues are
having trouble going on. I've heard the term 'dumbing down' being used. You can
feel it beginning to blow. It's a spiritual and cultural crisis. The question is: do we
want a higher education system in Australia?"
For Probyn and many other academics, a university's quality and uniqueness is
linked to the freedom it affords its academics. It is a freedom that was tested at
Monash when Professor John Legge, an academic of the old school who, along
with writing books on Indonesia, is able to reel off slabs of Paradise Lost, spoke,
in a moderate way, about the future of the arts faculty. As a former dean, it did
not seem too risky a move.
Next day, he found himself reading a curt, three-paragraph note from
vice-chancellor David Robinson. "I would be grateful if you would vacate the
office you are using within the next two weeks," it said.
"No university space will be available for you after that date." Legge, a respected
emeritus professor who, despite "retiring" in 1986, remained active on campus,
was taken aback, as were his colleagues.
"John, I'm working from home today and have just heard you have lost your
room," Helga Kuhse, one the country's leading bioethicists, wrote. "I'm appalled by
that decision. It shatters my belief in everything that I always thought our
university stood for."
The following day, Robinson gave his reasons for the eviction in a note to union
representative Dale Halstead. Legge, he implied, had overstepped the mark by not
confining himself to academic work and by abusing the "hospitality of [his] host".
Halstead wrote back, saying she was "dismayed" and could only conclude Legge
was "being punished for speaking [out]".
Legge subsequently got another room when history professor Bill Kent wangled
him a space. Robinson, who insists academic freedom is "alive and well" at
Monash, said he did not believe "in emeritus professors debating issues at
lunchtime meetings about enterprise bargaining. With 20-20 hindsight, there are
always occasions where you think: 'Shit, do I really need that?'"
It is tempting to blame vice-chancellors for the heavy-handed tactics, but it is not
necessarily their fault. Ever since then Labor education minister John Dawkins
forced them onto a commercial footing a decade ago, they have had to become
entrepreneurs. The result was that the traditional university began to die. When
this was first highlighted by Canberra writer and Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans in
1987, people demurred. But not any more.
Michael Osborne admits that "the traditional university had no hope after the
Dawkins review".
And David Robinson, while arguing that traditional university experiences, such as
close contact with staff, may provide a marketing edge in a deregulated future,
acknowledges the emergence of a "new teaching". This is one in which students
can seem to spend more time with computers, and staff appear too busy to find
time for a random corridor chat.
Which was the point made by Ryckmans when he argued that a university need
not necessarily perform any sort of function or role, or achieve any
socio-economic relevance. Like Jung's response when he was asked what
direction a young man should take in life, it was a plea for the detour. Such
meandering may sound trivial but it has led to some of our biggest breakthroughs,
like Fleming's discovery of penicillin. Now, of course, research and teaching are
geared to the needs of industry, and universities such as Deakin, in Victoria, offer
supermarket-management courses where student clients can learn shelf-stacking.
That eagerness to attract external funding from government or industry by taking
on corporate values puts intellectual freedom at further risk.
Gideon Polya, associate professor of biochemistry at La Trobe University, claims
his research, on natural resistance to pests and fungi, was potentially
compromised when his own department agreed to a deal with a private company.
The agreement contained a "no competition" clause banning competing research
from being carried out by the university's academics.
The company, a joint venture between local agricultural firm Pivot and a
University of Melbourne subsidiary, Hexima, was looking at research in an area
close to that being undertaken by Polya. (Melbourne University academics are
subject to a similar agreement.) There was nothing untoward about the deal - "no
competition" clauses are not unusual in industry - but it illustrates the growing
commercial pressures on scholarship. Polya, worried it could restrict his work,
says, "The bottom line is that I've been subject to some sort of constraint on
scholarly inquiry by an agreement to which I'm neither privy, nor a signatory."
So far there have been no problems, apart from a university administrator asking
him to "please explain" why he spoke to the media, but Polya remains uneasy.
"Muzzling of academics needs to be reversed," he says. "It violates the basic
scholarly ethos."
It is late and Michael Osborne, an Englishman who was at Oxford in its liberal
heyday 30 years ago, is looking tired. There is a sublime Greek sculpture of a
woman's head on his desk. But he barely glances at it. Instead, his gaze is fixed on
his pen top as he muses that the university of the '60s was a place for an
"education". Now it is a conduit to a job. Not far away, John Jenkin is staring into
his computer. He was here in the '60s when La Trobe was new and inspiring
students such as ACTU chief Bill Kelty and Westpac boss David Morgan. Now,
according to Jenkin, it is drifting towards teaching students rather than enabling
them to learn.
"Sometimes," he says, "I think that's what our political masters want. Quiet, pliable
academics who spend all day in a classroom and have no time to research or
comment critically."
[SLUTT]
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