Bulletin

Issue: January/February 2006

Visitors

Focus on the future of universities

Universities, challenged by a variety of social forces, are undergoing a deep transformation in both their internal structure and their relationship to the rest of society.

This transformation is central to a more general intensification of social inequality, privatisation of public institutions, and reorganisation of access to knowledge.

These comments came from one of the world’s leading social scientists, Professor Craig Calhoun, who visited La Trobe University recently as keynote international speaker at a special forum dealing with the future of universities.

The seminar was organised by the University’s Thesis Eleven Centre for Social Theory, named after the highly successful Australian journal of social theory, Thesis Eleven, that celebrated its 25th anniversary late last year.

Professor Calhoun – President of the US Social Science Research Council and Professor of Sociology and History at New York University – said for universities to be effective institutions for the public good, required ‘not merely a defence of old habits or an embrace of new trends’.

‘We need a stronger analysis of how universities can be public, how funding shapes possibilities, what kinds of benefits can be achieved, how they are distributed and – perhaps most basically – how this can be addressed reflexively, in public discussion both within universities and on national and international levels.’

Co-presenter of the seminar was leading Australian higher education commentator, Professor Simon Marginson, recently appointed to the Editorial Board of Thesis Eleven.

Professor Marginson said Australia was the only nation in the OECD group of advanced countries that between 1995 and 2002 ‘both markedly increased private funding of tertiary education while markedly reducing public funding of tertiary education’.

‘Most of this private income is fed back into the business functions of universities, to keep the revenues flowing, rather than the core activities of teaching and research. This has skewed the priorities of universities. Some seem to have lost their way.

‘Now let me add that La Trobe has not entirely succumbed to this. In this university intellectual values are often stronger than is the case in most Australian universities.’

Professor Marginson said old definitions of the ‘public good’ and ‘public service’ were in eclipse. ‘But we have yet to settle on a new social consensus about the role of public universities let alone to resource it.

‘The Australian government seems to imagine that by stratifying universities between the research strong, the research weaker and the research non-existent, using university rankings and league tables, and introducing full fees for undergraduates supported by subsidised tuition loans, it will somehow replicate the peaks of the American system.

‘There is no evidence that stratifying higher education between high and low quality institutions and ramping up the competition leads to better teaching or research. None.

‘What we do know about inter-university competition between universities as producers of private goods, from the American experience, is that university incomes become squandered on the costs of competition itself.’

Universities had already become more efficient and responsive, but were now developing by ‘thinning out their long term capacity in teaching and research’. He concluded with a call for ‘a new consensus on the common benefits that universities create’.