|
May 25, 2007
Since 1996 policymakers in Australia have modeled the sector as a marketplace of competing firms, and institutions have gained greater discretion to earn money and spend what they earn. But if research universities, particularly, are to operate at the global cutting edge, creative independence is more significant.
One of the effects in this reshaping of the high education sector has been erosion of academic freedom has been half-disguised in the trade of powers between institutions and Canberra. One strand of thinking in cabinet apparently sees academic freedom as a danger that must be controlled, as shown in the intervention by the previous minister, Brendan Nelson, in Australian Research Council project decisions grounded in academic merit.
Another effect has been the ongoing cuts to the humanities faculties in the name of a tight budgetary environment with some universities closing down their schools of humanities, saying that if students want to choose a liberal arts degree, they could go elsewhere. Some are even closing down their social science departments.
Mark Bahnisch observes that he has:
always been perplexed and annoyed by the tone of much of the conservative criticism of university education in the humanities and social sciences (I deliberately omit the words logic and argument). Either pundits, pollies and culture warriors extrapolate from some personal or anecdotal experience of a few isolated sociology departments from the 1970s and early '80s and imagine an Althusserian circle of hell trapping innocent young minds in the cold dead hands of French structural Marxism, or they completely forget that teaching Australian literature and history was a radical thing to do in the '60s, and one that many of their forebears opposed.
The reality is otherwise. The problem is not the cultural left, or its dominance.
Mark Bahnisch says:
The story of redundancies and the failure to replace humanities staff at many universities, for instance, is a narrative not of insurgent postmodern hordes but of funding being diverted to matching funds for "strategic initiatives" and the creation of accounting models that allocate funding based on bums in lecture theatres rather than the intrinsic value of subjects and disciplines, while seemingly always facilitating a proliferation of pro vice-chancellors and a modicum of marketing staff.
|
