It's not the holy grail: it's just a very stupid policy

The Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University, Professor Ian Young, spoke at the National Press Club yesterday, where among other things he described deregulation of the university sector as the 'holy grail.'  I think the sub-editor on the Guardian website is pushing things a little hard when they say Professor Young speaks for the whole of the Group of Eight universities.

Deregulation of the universities only makes sense if one sees them purely as businesses that receive government grants.  This would certainly be in line with the rather narrow and myopic brand of economic theory that has ruled the game in education policy over the last twenty-five years, a period in which the universities have received real cuts in funding each year.  That's since 1989, pretty much the lifetime of a middle-stage graduate student in 2014.

The reality is that the universities are not businesses.  They aren't even particularly creatures of the Federal Government, even though they have been funded via federal structures since the late-1950s.  The universities are eminently state institutions, and originate from the need for locally-trained surgeons, engineers, lawyers, school teachers, scientists, and thinkers that became very apparent from the middle of the nineteenth century.  All Australian universities exist as a result of legislation in the various state parliaments, and up to the period following 1945 they were funded directly by their state governments.  It was the government of Robert Menzies that changed how universities were funded (which had flow-on effects for how the post-1958 universities were founded) and it was the government in which Paul Keating was treasurer that capitalised on the earlier structural change in order to bring us ultimately to the present situation of thinking about universities as businesses.

The motivations for these changes is a study in contrasts.  Menzies wanted the universities to have a wider reach, and for the cultivation of advanced knowledge in order to give Australia a way to face the socio-economics of the future with a better chance of success.  The universities were a vital part of advancing the national economy.  Keating's rhetoric was cloaked in social responsibility, but had the paradoxical effects that are inherent to the Labor Party, which has become a political entity in (unenthusiastic) search of its class base.  Keating himself might well have been able to distinguish between an institution and a business, but that is a largely academic matter in the light of his economics.  It was he who began the progressive de-funding of the universities after the introduction of HECS in 1987, which continues to the present.

Now, if a university is a business then Professor Young is quite right to be questing for the holy grail of deregulation as an ultimate reform that would benefit the ANU.  Like any responsible executive he should be looking for ways for his company to differentiate itself from competitors in the market, and to find ways of delivering the product with the best return.  Professor Young favours freedom to set fees according to the university's priorities, and to enrol a smaller pool of students, which implies the ability to be more rigorous about entry scores.

This is a category error that rests on two problems.

Universities are public institutions.  Government at all levels depend on the capacity of the universities to turn out not only the professional people -- the doctors, lawyers, engineers, and so forth -- but also to develop the pool of policy specialists who land up working in the public service, and for the more unscrupulous, in the party apparatus.  There is a direct relationship in the decline of our national politics and the successive 'reform' of the universities to force them to seek funding from non-government sources (Dame Elizabeth Murdoch -- of blessed memory -- has her name on so many rooms and buildings in the University of Melbourne I'm surprised the University hasn't renamed itself) and to behave like private businesses.  It should come as no surprise that the Vice-Chancellor of the ANU thinks he's a Macquarie executive.

Standards is a perennial conversation in any university, almost as predictable as pseudo-sociological articles about Gen Y in the Fairfax press.  Of course every student starting in a degree is duller and more illiterate than those of the previous generation, according to the despairing souls charged with teaching them.  It's a predictable lament you'll hear from frustrated academics from one end of the country to the other -- possibly with one honourable exception.  However, in Australia we believe in meritocracy, which boils down to the assertion that if you can get yourself into Arts/Law at Monash, that is what you will do, no matter if you've never read all the way through a serious novel in your life and spent your VCE years focussing on maths and sciences because they get higher marks.

Universities have ended up compensating for the narrowness inherent in school education at the moment when the inherited structures for broadening students' experiences have been eroded -- I remember the palling effect of John Howard's gutting of student union fees, and the universities have been stuck picking up the tab ever since without any assistance from government.  Students come from narrow horizons in school to a university setting where whatever enrichment they receive is provided at net cost to the institution.  The upshot of this is that attrition rates can be very high in some disciplines, and that gaps inevitably need to be filled for students who have come with the assumption that university will simply continue the narrowing of horizons they've come to accept at school.  Standards are as much a question of attitude as academic capacity.

University policy is a complete mess, which becomes a vicious cycle of social irresponsibility when it meets with the vindictive tendencies of whichever party holds government.  I think it would be better to deregulate politics and trash the neoliberal duumvirate known as the ALP.  This would undoubtedly clear the electoral marketplace for a more diverse range of political products, some of which are probably terribly old-fashioned in terms of social and education policy.  But, you never know: they might be just what we need at the moment, and it may not be a moment too soon.