Universities have lost their way, but cost-cutting and consultants are not the answer

Last week in Sydney, we saw a melodrama acted out that could stand in for the state of Australian universities more generally. Inside Sydney’s swish Fullerton Hotel, a glittering cast of vice-chancellors, politicians, public servants, journalists, and consultants deliberated at a higher education summit, sponsored by the Australian Financial Review and consultancy Nous Group.

Teaching-only casual staff, who do the bulk of teaching in many universities, were not represented in the official line up of speakers. Instead, academics and students remained outside, protesting in the rain against staff cuts and governance issues facing the sector.

It started with the public good

This is not where the modern Australian university began. The expansion of the system in the decades after the second world war was animated by a profound sense of the university’s mission of pursuing the public good. New universities were established to advance nation-building but also to strengthen civil society and a common culture.

Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who played a crucial role in this expansion, expressed this vision eloquently in 1942. He saw universities not as “mere technical schools” but devoted to

the preservation of pure learning, bringing in its train not merely riches for the imagination but a comparative sense for the mind, and leading to what we need so badly — the recognition of values which are other than pecuniary.

We seem to have arrived at the antipodes of that vision.

There is a steady stream of stories about exorbitant executive salaries, and universities across the country are currently cutting courses, jobs and research, mostly on the grounds these endeavours are not financially “responsible”.

Three ways out of the crisis

If there is any way out of the present crisis, it it unlikely to come from current university leaders, who have shown little capacity to manage complex change.

Many vice-chancellors are on million dollar-plus packages and have the job of advancing the corporate interests of their own institution in competition with others.

Scholars and researchers apply a different lens. They tend to identify three ways of thinking about the current problems of the sector, and the way out of them.

• The first we call a “policy” approach. Proponents of this idea agree that universities could do better, even much better, and the problems of the sector are amenable to good policy. Contributions of this kind have come from former Melbourne University vice-chancellor Glyn Davis and foreign policy academic Michael Wesley. They agree universities could do better and the key is to get the policy settings right. The problems of the sector are amenable to better policy, they argue, clarifying their purpose and enabling greater diversity within the sector.

• The second response is the “public good” approach. Cultural studies academic Graeme Turner’s recent book Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good is an example. As the book’s title indicates, Turner sees the system as broken, rather than merely flawed. Universities serve the public good and need to be publicly funded on that basis.

• A third approach is “radical-democratic”. Advocates of this approach, such as sociologist Raewyn Connell and historian Hannah Forsyth, argue universities need to be reorganised as democratic institutions. This should encompass everyone in the university community and its whole workforce, not just the academics. They need to provide spaces and opportunities for dissenting forms of knowledge and action, seeking to transform society to make it more educated, equal and just. The erosion of democratic university governance, they argue, has led to widespread exploitation and diminished quality of education.

We argue we need elements of all of these approaches. But current university leaders rarely manage to get beyond the first – the policy approach – and even then their cupboard looks pretty bare.

Losing the ‘social licence’

There is a growing anxiety about Australian universities’ loss of “social licence” – or the idea that a community trusts and supports an organisation to operate.

There is a view universities have become businesses devoted to the budget bottom line rather than places of learning and research devoted to the public good.

This is a problem of governance as much as of finance. University councils are dominated by business people, not academics.

University executives routinely delegate decision-making to consultants. Decisions are frequently hidden from public scrutiny, let alone input.

The trouble is thinking about universities through the lens of the balance sheet has left those in charge unable to advocate for the institutions they oversee, the staff who work there, and the students they educate in terms of their contribution to society in all of its aspects. This includes the social, cultural and civic.

Once you have surrendered that territory, the loss of social licence quickly follows.

Who are the experts?

Professors are no longer seen as experts, but merely as “expensive” and targets for redundancy. Tutorials – the place where much university learning occurs – are cut or reduced because they’re costly to run.

Courses critical to maintaining our national capabilities – like languages and public health – are cut on the grounds they are “unviable”. Prestigious, long-running national projects, such as the Australian National Dictionary and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, both at the Australian National University, are dismissed as financially “unsustainable”.

What are universities really for?

Universities educate students, but they are also incubators of new knowledge and discovery. They have obligations to preserve knowledge for the nation. For example, by supporting areas of research that might not be economically “efficient” but which will be required for our future.

So, yes, we need better policy that shifts the incentives for universities so they build critical national capabilities like linguistic and cross-cultural knowledge and skills, rather than cutting them. And we need to recognise that universities, in this way and many others, serve the public good.

Even that, however, is not enough. Planning must look beyond just financial sustainability to consider sustainability and value in a broader sense. We live in a world of rapid technological, geostrategic and political transformation. Our universities, as they are now run, are not fit for purpose in this environment.

We might be historians, but the point of all this isn’t a history lesson. We’re not advocating a return to a mythical golden age. Education is fundamentally about the future and our aspirations for it.

A good start would be a serious debate about what sort of expertise, capabilities and qualities we need to be a successful nation in this world where no one owes us a living, the democratic system of government we cherish is being abandoned by our major ally, and our social cohesion is in seeming decline.

Universities cannot solve these problems alone, but they are undoubtedly part of the solution. They need to be at the table when the nation’s problems and future are being discussed.