RICHARD HIL
NewSouth Publishing, 2012, 239 pages, $34.99 (pb)
Universities were better in the olden days, says Dr. Richard
Hil in Whackademia. As an Essex University student in the 1970s,
Hil joined the Socialist Workers Party (which expanded his political horizons)
and the Campaign for Real Ale (which expanded his waistline) whilst his
lecturers stimulated his intellectual growth.
With 25 years behind him as an academic in Australian universities,
however, he has seen the excitement of higher education stifled by
corporatisation and its business model which treats education as a commodity to
be sold, a degree as a “passport to a business career”.
The market assault on higher education in Australia was begun by the federal Labor government in the 1980s under the guise of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ and as an attack on ‘elitism’ and a sheltered workshop of pampered scholars who were not paying their way in Australia’s capitalist economy.
Under Labor’s ‘reformers’, the university workplace was
redefined by the values of “economic rationalism, commercialisation,
managerialism, corporate governance and other outgrowths of neo-liberalism”, says
Hil. Bureaucracy and corporate jargon
dominate - all the crud of Key Performance Indicators, performance reviews,
‘quality assurance’, marketing and promotions, and micro-management of
academics presided over by all-powerful corporate managers.
In a context of declining government funding, universities
search for revenue streams, the most lucrative being full-fee-paying overseas
students, whilst entry requirements for domestic students are eased and
‘soft-marking’ and ‘soft assessment’, especially for the semi-literate,
compromise quality in the quest to reduce drop-out rates and keep the
university’s market share of students, and their dollars, up.
The transformation of universities from places of
intellectual passion into dull commercial enterprises designed to serve
industry has seen the economic imperatives of the capitalist economy determine
which courses survive. As universities
become managed by the corporation for the corporation, the curriculum increasingly
suits vocational, market-oriented ends.
As the Business Council of Australia higher education
spokesperson and accountant at one of Australia’s largest accountancy firms,
demanding a lock-step customer-supplier business ethos, succinctly put it, “I
am your major customer – I take 750 of your product each year”. The liberal arts, especially, are on the
endangered list unless they can be tethered to the ‘creative industries’ of
visual design, media, publishing and advertising.
For Australia’s 120,000 academics, they have become cogs in
a grinding knowledge machine. Research
has become a distant dream as class sizes expand, bureaucratic monitoring and
reporting dogs every day and an administrative burden flourishes. Academics are “overworked, burnt out, not
coping, running out of energy, stressed out, not sleeping, and plain
knackered”. The 67,000 casual teachers
have the bonus of poor job security. Meanwhile, like other corporate CEOs,
Vice-Chancellors prosper, soaring into the million dollar salary atmosphere.
Hil argues for a return to a university of community,
collegiality, fun, soul, interest and delight.
To a republic of ideas and debate where critical thinking and clear
communication matter most. To education
for active citizenship in a vibrant democracy.
To a campus that is “critic and conscience” of capitalist society’s
unjust status quo.
Academics, like cats, are difficult to herd but, starved of
sustenance by government budgets, sedated by forms and tranquilised by
bureaucracy, there has been regrettable success in disciplining them. As Hil’s entertaining book shows, however,
there is a way out beyond just complaint – activism, small and large, for
education as intellectual discovery, for education for social change.
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