The business end of the university
Time's Up for crappy governance (fingers crossed). Why did anyone think it was a good idea?
Around a decade ago when I was fairly new to my academic job, I made an uncharacteristically politic decision1 to attend the annual Politics Dinner, which each year featured a lecture from an Australian politician.
That year it was my (then) least favourite politician. Christopher Pyne was then the government minister responsible for higher education under what we thought was surely the worst Prime Minister we would ever see (oh, the innocence). Pyne had an absolutely terrible idea about uncapping fees for undergraduate students, which was a way to compel a generation of young people to mortgage their future earnings to prop up the annually-escalating present value of salaries for university execs.
Politics (Australian and Comparative) was among my cluster of teaching at the time. When I walked into the room one of my Politics 101 students was there.
Feeling a little smart arsey, mostly because I was there to hear Chrtopher Pyne speak,I asked the student: What is the difference between horizontal fiscal equalization and vertical fiscal inequality? Poor young fella was stricken, until I told him I was joking - it was an early lesson in ways not to be a teacher, in fact.
I sat in my designated place on a front table and introduced myself to the woman on my right. I was tempted, I told her, to performatively read Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, which I happened to have in my bag. I love that book, she said.
To my left was a Liberal party bloke, a staffer as I recall. I introduced myself and quickly told him that I had recently published a history of universities.
Image: Cover of my first book, which journalist Julie Hare recently described as ‘the definitive book on the history of higher education in Australia’.2
He was not terribly interested.
Very keen, he was, however, to tell me with great gusto and unfailing confidence, that ‘universities are businesses’.
Which was pretty much the narrative of my book, except. You know. Critical ie well this is crap, isn’t it? and historicised, ie look how this happened…it wasn’t always like this, which also means we can do something else.
Liberal Bloke was likely around 20 years older than me and a guest of the university so I was polite. So it would seem, I said with distinctive non-commitality.
No, Liberal Bloke responded, now with a finger pointing in the direction of my face. They are businesses.
Oh for the confidence of a white middle aged Liberal Party Bloke. God-like, he was able to declare it and, just like Light at the Dawn of Creation, it was so. Universities became ‘businesses’.
Actually that is pretty close to how it happened. I’ll get to that in a minute.
But first, it seems likely, hopeful even (though I hardly dare invoke hope about universities any more) that the ‘business ideologues’ time is up. A few days ago the Australian government announced a Parliamentary Inquiry into the Quality of Governance in Australian higher education.
The union has been asking for this for ages, citing poor workforce planning (they sacked 4800 people 2020-1 and then hired 3600 in 2023), acting against the public interest (shutting down courses and research we need), seem immune to conflict of interest rules, paid millions to consultants all while making work insecure, and conducting millions of dollars of wage theft (officially $226 million and counting). Oh and, on average, each institution has six or more executives earning more than the State Premier, who surely has a job at least as complicated as theirs: they go on about how ‘complex’ their jobs are…which is really starting to sound like ‘too hard for me’. Time to give it to someone else?
Why are universities supposed to be ‘businesses’?
We sit here at the intersection of some 1980s ideas. One was that management was abstractable across industries - a telco manager had the skills to run a bank, law firm or a university, for instance. Another was that management was the answer to ‘ossified’ (a favourite insult at the time) old-fashioned policies and processes that inhibited the changes needed to produce greater efficiencies and the flexibility that would adapt to globalisation. And then there were academics and professors.
What I found when I did my history of professions was that managerial stuff was being rolled out everywhere. High paid, mostly male bosses began the process of disciplining an increasingly feminised professional class.
The result was reduced autonomy, especially in fields now dominated by women, which was getting to be nearly all the white-collar professions except engineering - and management. This was a kind of ‘moral deskilling’ where the virtue that was once imagined to inhere in the bosoms of individual professionals was turned into processes that were now controlled - tada! - by managers. These are key themes of Virtue Capitalists, published much more recently.
Universities were subject to this like everywhere else. Except more violently, I think, ‘cos academics are pretty unlikeable.
I mean, I love them (including you, lovely readers who also work as academics) and being part of that world. But if I say ‘dickhead professor’ you are likely to know what I mean. Academia is hierarchical and pretty much everyone thinks they are uniquely the smartest person in the room (the training has encourages this), making many academics horrendously arrogant, sometimes (perhaps especially when they are also feeling envious or under threat) treating one another (let alone everyone else, and worst of all students) in an unbearably patronising manner.
Academic hierarchy is also not the only profession that came under serious and justifiable criticism in the 1970s, paving the way for a class war (technically an intra-bourgeois) between managers and professionals for control of work, organisations and the world.
It did not stop, though, at undermining collegial decision-making by installing professional managers with no allegiance to the people whose teaching and research was ‘core business’.3 It extended to structures of governance.
During my PhD I interviewed retired senior managers who helped preside over this change in Oz. Some of it was ‘encouraged’ by government, where funding was contingent on supplanting collegial governance with bosses. But one fella told me he ran around talking to institutional leaders about making major changes to governance structures. Smaller (theoretically more agile) governance bodies with representatives from private rather than public enterprises would bring the spirit of capitalist business management into higher education.
It worked. And so, now we have this shit. F*cking Capitalism.
Must I list the shitty qualities that make for terrible learning experiences for students who are now trying to find a way to avoid it? Maybe, because despite the abundant evidence of its failure, those 1980s ideas, forty years or so later, are still circulating. Maybe in another newsletter - the ridiculous, silly and endless problems this has caused will make this post too long.
Needless to say, the problems are global. In July 2025 so the website tells me), Volume Nine (1900-now) of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Higher Learning, which I have been editing with Chris Newfield, will show how neoliberal managerialism has infected universities in South Africa and South America so that each acts as melodramatic representatives of the problem everywhere.
Aside: check out Chris Newfield’s blog, Remaking.
Shall we put academics back in charge?
Hierarchical collegiality was (and where it still exists, kinda is) a pretty shit system of governance. There were very good reasons to criticise it, which produced a moral crisis also affecting schooling, medicine, nursing, social work and even engineering, where the virtues that instated patronising hierarchies through society now needed decolonising, to be turned upside down. And they did.
Obviously, putting abstractable management in charge has produced even shittier outcomes from student experience perspectives, is horrifyingly wasteful and is now so obsessed with the ‘change’ that justified their rise that they have started undermining the ‘product’ that they once considered to be ‘core business’.
So, we need something new.
My favourite set of solutions is via Raewyn Connell’s Good University, which I think is absolutely the best account of the problem and what needs to now be done.
Universities need to be democratic in both structure and purpose.
Democratic organisation, Connell says is the way to make properly good universities that are also focused on supporting and strengthening democratic societies.
This will be tough, because government and managerial technocrats alike really don’t like giving up control, not only because who doesn’t like power, but also because it requires an uncomfortable level of trust in - well, democracy.
But there are some things that you kill by controlling them, but enable when you set them free. The work universities do is like this - teaching, discovering, sharing knowledge and innovation, creating enlivening space for learning and becoming - it all needs a serious degree of freedom.
‘In lodgings and taverns’ (said Eric Ashby once about the early university) ‘ideas were born and nursed’. They were often ‘vague and impractical’, he said, but by bring people together with some freedom to explore, disciplines grew and were changed, producing the medicine that now helps us live longer, the literature that expresses the ideas that make us, the accounting and engineering techniques that have boosted our lived environments and enabled accountability and transparency in organisations. There is an awful lot going on right now that needs all this learning, thinking and becoming - but that is currently impeded, largely by managerial hubris.
These days, democracy in higher education really needs to include the workforce beyond academia, not only because it is now highly trained for the most part, but because the librarians, administrators, accountants, technicians, IT workers, cleaners and gardeners are also core to the ‘business’. They (not abstractable managers who used to run a completely different kind of organisation…no wonder they are finding it ‘complex’) are the experts at their work - and the right people to help decide how these places really work best.
Unlike that time one of my institution’s executives very kindly invited me, fully funded, to the big expensive university management conference in Canberra and I literally answered ‘thanks, but I would hate that’. It was true, so there is that.
The day this was published I went to the Sydney Opera House (very unusually for me, but it was Gillian Welch) where I ran into the wonderful Pip McGuinness, who was the Editor responsible for this book’s publication. Her offspring asked how I knew their mum and I explained, and told them about Julie Hare’s description of it as ‘definitive’, in process, I said, ‘pissing off all my closest colleagues’. Soz guys, we work collectively in this as everything else and my book is WAY too short to be ‘definitive’.
‘Core business’ was another favourite 1980s/90s phrase, mostly used to justify outsourcing and reducing the working conditions of cleaners, gardeners and others insultingly and untruthfully deemed outside of the core ‘business’ of building and maintaining a university.
Thanks Hannah for your demolition of managerialism in universities. I entirely agree that there is
Thank you, Hannah, for your demolition of managerialism in university governance. I agree with you that there is no benefit in returning to 'hierarchical collegiality' as its replacement. As you say, we knowledge makers and seekers need to work and learn in universities that are 'democratic in structure and purpose.' But how do we get there? Well, I think I'm one of a very small group of academics and students in Australia who have had some experience of that process of democratising an academic department. I'm talking about what happened in the Department of Government in the University of Sydney in the 1970s. You can read about it in Michael Hogan's book, Cradle of Australian Political Studies: Sydney's Department of Government. (Sydney: Connor Court, 2015). See chapter 5, 'Real Politics in the 1970s'. In a nutshell, what we progressive staff did was to set up a Department Committee, separate from the 2 professors, with representation of general staff, part-time staff, and students (elected by course meetings). We drew up a constitution. We demanded to right to select the head of department. We set up the full range of subcommittees to recommend on matters relating to curriculum, assessment, etc. From the beginning the Department Committee acted with full legitimacy. We had pushed the professors aside, but they were sensible enough to acquiesce, and to become participating members of the Dept C'tee. Gradually, the student representatives stopped attending, but amongst the knowledge workers in the department there was real democratisation. We ran the place without hierarchy or managerialism. But what made this possible? As Michael Hogan makes clear, democratisation followed a period of intense political action, including two strikes, in support of student-staff campaigns defending radical curriculum initiatives in two other departments, for a women's course in Philosophy and for political economy courses in Economics. In other words, and too simply, we were acting in a time of general radical student action, and of new radical directions in knowledge formation. It was a very particular situation, but the point is that local democratisation requires a wider setting of political action and thought in order for it to happen.
Agree entirely on managerialism. I wrote my own definition in the early days of blogging, and drawing on the same experience as yours.
https://johnquiggin.com/2003/07/02/word-for-wednesday-managerialism-definition/
Relatedly, I'm writing a paper for the Australia Institute which I plan to use as the basis for a submission to the Senate inquiry. Part of that is going over the history back to C19. A couple of observations
* There was a brief window from the early 1970s to early 1990s when the system remained collegial, but the strongly hierarchical form (one professor with near-absolute power over each department, professors taking turns as deans etc) was significantly democratised. There was even some student representation. That was replaced by managerialism
* Although state governments haven't provided significant funding for decades, universities still operate under State acts of parliament, with Senates appointed by state ministers. That makes university management effectively unaccountable to anyone
I'll be advocating a unified national system of post-school education, encompassing both TAFE and universities, and broadly along the lines of the California. That would include a universal right of access, subject to an entry qualification based on capacity to complete the course, not on rationing entry. In essence, this would make university like an extension of school, rather than an optional add-on for an elite few.