Parker’s response is the consumate technocratic response that fails to critique the discourses and their underlying epistemes that have framed the “idea of a university” since Dawkins began the process of technocratisation and the so-called professionalistion of particular areas of work (eg, nursing, teaching, journalism, PR). He thinks only within the framework of the dominant discourses.
There is no critique of the student-based model that essentially reduces education (or non-education and mis-education in Dewey’s terms) to an instrumentalist, uncritical product bought in a market according to lifestyle interests.
No wonder our universities continue to be stripped of money and social status (in the sense of serving a worthwhile social purpose) when our VCs can’t mount a case for universities to be any more than training factories with no social role to speculate, to record, to interpret, to analyse, to theorise, to innovate, or to challenge.

Bernard McKenna UQ
(these are personal comments and may not reflect the views of my university)

Is it the ‘centuries old’ model that is worn out – that of the Athenian academica, or the Renaiissance university, or the great 19th century re-inventions, or the glass and concrete institutions for the technologically optimistic 1960s? No, what is at stake here is clearly not the future of education but the business model used to re-launch it as a mass education project in the 1990s. Universities would be free to compete for students in a ‘market’, V-Cs would be reconfigured as CEOs, academics would be relegated to employee delivering to goals set by management, quality would be ensured centrally by government – all of which would lead to efficient universities thriving and those that didn;t would go to the wall.

The introduction of quasi-markets – because everybody knows this is not a real market and students are only by a huge distortion of reality ‘customers’ – involved massive amount of bureaucratic coercion. Teaching and learning, research outputs, and huge outpouring of assessment and measurement all with major implications not just for academic workloads which were swamped by these demands. As everybody also knows these quality assessments measurements did not measure outputs they were the outputs – the currency in which universities began to compete and view themselves.

All this led to a shift in power between management and academics; the latter’s monopoly of the pastoral-academic achievements of students was dissolved as management and student-as-customer became the stick and the stick by which academics were now brought into line.

Stephen Parker puts academic complaints that they are ‘worn out by it’ as the bottom of his list of what is wrong with the model. They are in fact worn out by these reforms, as all the research tells. They and their self-indulgent concerns are deemed to be elitist and old-fashioned whilst real ‘professional academics’ and ‘career academics’ will be the new breed to take over. Which of course begs the question, two decades after Dawrkins, who exactly are the academics who have been teaching for the last 20 years – gentlemen scholars, amateur dilettantes, people looking for pin money? What exactly do V-Cs mean when they say they are looking for professionals? They mean academics who don;t talk back, who buckle down to delivering the corporate goals.

So though real career professionals will now devise and produce on-line courses, they will be delivered by parademics (who wants a boring – and expensive – lecture?) to small groups of students (nice touch that, with class sizes at record levels). They can;t actually be left to set their own standards or report accurately on their achievements. Unlike the Finish school system where they “trust the numbers that [the teachers] show are real” (Pasi Sahlberg) here that would be like putting the cats in charge of regulating the cream. So large, expensive government institutions (staffed by ‘career academics no doubt) are set up to regulate the whole quasi-market.

One thing is clear; the future of higher education is not safe in the hands of vastly over-paid V-Cs with a self-interest in turning universities into a version of those privatised public entities which pay executives above market rates but which rely entirely on government regulation and monopolies. When this business model which was never going to work starts not to work they blame the university system per se and begin to undo centuries of work. Not with a view to the educational requirements of society but how it can be paid for within the funding model which made it fail.

All the talk about student centred learning (when was it not, what does that really mean?) hides the fact that what was free to previous generations is now not free. This is due to a series of political decisions about why students should pay and not the taxpayer (i.e previous beneficiaries) which have never been fully debated. Certainly not with the students who always demonstrate against but who, in this case, are not ‘centred’ in the debate.

The Dawkins reforms lumped many different institutions together, despite complaints at the time, and told them to get on an deliver higher education to the masses. Finding out that this massified, agglomerated system does not work simply results in the call for the abolition of the university model in toto.

I would suggest that those academics – and they are many – who have looked on in silence as the university system was systematically dismantled from the top start to do something. There are huge challenges facing universities and these are not to be reduced to the ‘disruptive innovation’ of the internet. They are not to be faced by more managerialism, more sub-contracting, more insecurity, more government bureaucracy, more sessionals, more quasi-markets. They are to be faced by having a debate in which the educational requirements of society as a whole, not just ‘industry’, are addressed.

Academics need to take a lead in this if their younger colleagues are to be anything other than sessionals, teaching and learning ‘experts’, administrators of Blackboard content, research leaders who don;t do research, or ‘career professionals’ in management and administration. The relinquishing of research to the private sector – which of course will not have any of the bureaucratic output mechanisms foisted on public universities – and the axing of courses that do not pay their way undermines a key purpose of universities. That is the possibility of a public, independent source of knowledge and critical examination of that knowledge not beholden to governments and corporate interest. This possibility – and it is always a possibility – is neither required not particularly welcomed in the corporate business model-that-is-not-working.

But if academics, increasingly demoralised, cannot fight their own corner as their status and aspirations are marginalised, then perhaps the university model has come to and end. Destroyed from the top and allowed to be so destroyed by academics unable to mobilise in its defense.

I agree that the current focus on “research” and the down-playing of teaching is probably unsustainable, particularly as “research” is taken to mean a bureaucratic counting of journal papers rather than genuinely new developments – research metrics rather than research. Activities such as the ERA are likely to become a thing of the past.

However, the focus on students as individualistic consumers, energized purely by a profit motive, is probably simplistic. In particular, it leaves no room for the nation to address what is genuinely in the national interest; if a topic becomes unfashionable for a year or two, all classes are closed and the academics in the subject are sacked, how does the country respond to a sudden need for expertise in that area, as circumstances change? And how does the nation maintain an existing pool of expertise in key disciplines; or is the intention simply to buy in expertise from overseas if and when required?

Secondly, this analysis does not really address the problem of bureaucratic creep; instead, it appears to focus its attention purely on the role of academics, as if they were the chief sources of cost in a university. They generally are not. Instead, and partly in response to increasing government surveillance and compliance protocols, universities are spending an increasing proportion of their income on bureaucracy and compliance software. No organization can function efficiently if it carries an excessive management burden, and this has to be addressed boldly.