Australia faces academic crisis as profit-driven policies erode university standards
By Huw Watkin
* APU was interviewed for the South China Morning Post
*Published in the Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post: 9:00am, 15 Sep 2024
The backlash has been shrill and unrelenting: cuts to Australia’s international student intake are racist and risk destroying the soft-power it has acquired as a global destination for higher education; an assault on the country’s university sector that threatens local student enrolments; an act of economic vandalism that will cost tens of thousands of jobs and billions in export income. A spectacular feat of self-harm.
But absent in the torrent of protest has been any concession to what critics say is the biggest threat to the sector’s integrity: the entrenchment of a corporate culture that has prioritised profit, enriched university executives and private consultants, and left academics marginalised, demoralised and burned out.
“University administrations are dominated by business people who generally have little experience of (universities), are contemptuous of teaching staff and unforgiving of criticism,” said one academic in Western Australia who requested anonymity for fear of repercussion. “They have undermined security of employment, eroded pay and working conditions, and imposed ever-increasing teaching and administrative workloads … (they) have made academic life untenable. I would not recommend a career in academia to anybody,” he said.
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Australian’s universities have long been held in high esteem. In the decades following World War Two they enjoyed broad support as seats of learning that taught “universal” knowledge which fostered broad understanding of a complex world. The sector grew steadily in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and by the early 1980’s was providing free education to Australians while hosting at most 25,000 international students a year.
But nearly four decades of “reform” has left some three million local graduates burdened with AUD75 billion in student debt, and built a behemoth that caters to hundreds-of-thousands of international students, each of whom pays tens- if not hundreds-of-thousands of Australian dollars in tuition fees. Turbo-charged by policies producing “job ready” graduates and a path to permanent residency, Australia’s tertiary education sector has morphed into a transnational business which last year generated some AUD36 billion in economic activity.
International students now comprise 30 percent of Australia’s university student population, second only to Luxembourg. At some institutions they make up nearly half of undergraduates and 80 percent of postgraduates. More than a million foreign nationals – nearly four percent of the population – currently live in Australia on student or graduate visas.
Proposals to cut future international student numbers are currently being scrutinised by parliament, but are expected to soon pass into law. One of several measures implemented to curtail visa abuse, ease a housing and cost of living crisis, and spread enrolments more evenly across the sector, the legislation limits international student starts at public universities next year to 145,000, similar to the number prior to the Covid pandemic.
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However, academics interviewed by the Post say the measures will do nothing to arrest a “corporatization” of the sector which has seen the ratio of teachers to students fall from one to 14 in the early 1990’s to one to 23 today. According to Education Department figures, non-academic staff numbers have meanwhile grown to comprise 60 percent of all employees, many working in large and extravagantly funded marketing and PR departments focused on brand promotion and student recruitment amid fierce competition between institutions.
“University administrations have become obsessive about their international reputations and student recruitment as sources of profit,” said Tim Moore, a former associate professor at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology who, disillusioned, recently opted for early retirement. “Unlike government funding, the huge financial resources that come from international student fees allow for discretionary spending,” he said. “This has led to the burgeoning of non-academic staff on wildly extravagant salaries, while the wholesale redirection of resources away from teaching faculties has caused great resentment.”
The list of academic grievance is long: the arbitrary and often vindictive exercise of power by managerial bureaucracies; pressure to pass failing students, particularly those in the international cohort; wage theft of at least AUD160 million, and the destruction of established career paths replaced by short-term and casual contracts. But excessive vice-chancellor pay has become a particular lightning rod for criticism.
Australian vice-chancellors now earn an annual average of about AUD one million, higher than their peers in the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand. Many are paid considerably more: Monash University’s vice-chancellor last year earned nearly AUD1.6 million, and the University of Melbourne’s nearly AUD1.5 million. The recently retired vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra received AUD1.8 million. Research by the National Tertiary Education Union found that in 2023 the highest paid vice-chancellors in Victoria earned six-times more than the state’s most senior professors.
Former Ass Prof Moore notes the shift of resources and power away from faculty and towards management accelerated from the mid-2000’s when a market ideology was enthusiastically imposed on the sector. He said academics who had historically performed governing functions were purged from university councils and replaced with figures from business. “Another consequence is that any criticism about the direction a university is taking is scarcely tolerated,” he said. “Academic freedom within universities is much diminished, and faculties, once the locus of vigorous and critical debate, the lifeblood of any university, are … a shadow of their former selves.”
Recent research by Academics for Public Universities (APU) found less than a third of university council members have any educational expertise. Alessandro Pelizzon, a founding APU member and an associate professor of law at Queensland’s University of the Sunshine Coast, said another consequence has been increasingly autocratic councils that are focused on property development and other investments, and whose decisions are protected from scrutiny by lax governance requirements. “Despite enabling legislation establishing them as public institutions with primarily non-commercial goals, Australia’s public universities now mimic commercial organisations that have much less transparency required by law of the models they have come to resemble,” he said.
James Guthrie, professor of accounting at Macquarie University in New South Wales, added management now routinely invokes the concept of commercial-in-confidence to restrict public disclosure of income, investments, expenditures, and debt. In a working paper to be presented at an October conference, he details an issue at the core of governance concerns: the links between university management and consultancy companies that have in recent years deeply infiltrated the workings of Australia’s public sector.
“Our research vividly demonstrates how the surge in consultants … has given rise to managerialism and marketization. Instead of enhancing public services, consultants have fostered a dysfunctional system that undermines public sector institutions, including public universities, erodes professional integrity and independence, and heavily favours significant accounting firms.”
According to Prof Guthrie’s paper, current or past employees of these companies have also been appointed to university councils in significant numbers. A review of just a handful of university websites found they included senior executives and advisors at the University of South Australia, the University of Tasmania, the University of Melbourne, the University of Newcastle, and the University of Wollongong.
A 2023 investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper meanwhile found that large partnerships were the most common suppliers of consultancy services to several public universities. It found their expenditure on consultants from 2019 and 2022 increased by nearly 20 percent, and that in 2022 six institutions paid consultancies AUD178.5 million. Extrapolation of that figure to Australia’s 37 public universities suggests the sector spent more than AUD one billion on consultants in 2022 alone.
The findings have intensified concern that large sums are being diverted to consultants who critics say often lack sufficient knowledge of education to provide useful advice, and illustrate the marginalisation of academic staff – an absurdly perverse outcome given they are repositories of expertise across the knowledge spectrum.
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The result has been a collapse of morale, with one recent survey finding declining mental health among Australian academics, with large numbers self-reporting anxiety, depression, and burnout. Research conducted by Queensland’s Bond University in 2022 found “managerialism” is particularly marked in Australian universities and has left academics feeling powerless and overworked amid increasing scrutiny of their work that is often measured against unrealistic benchmarks.
Australia’s government continues to consider reforms to the university sector proposed in the so called University Accord released earlier this year. But while university PR departments work hard to burnish Australia’s image among prospective foreign students, its reputation among the global academic community is said to be at an all-time low. “Alot of us think Australia’s university system is now beyond repair,” said an internationally recognized Victorian academic who requested anonymity because his previous public statements have resulted in disciplinary action. “Many of my colleagues are hoping to leave Australia, and while the sector is bragging about its excellence, the international academic community knows what is going on. Apart from highly paid executives, no-one is coming here to pursue a career,” he said.
