News & Views item - March 2008

 

 

Perhaps Something that the Minister of Education and the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research and Their Reviews Might Consider. (March 13, 2008)

Yesterday Senator Kim Carr addressed the 38 vice-chancellors representing Universities Australia giving his views regarding the rights and obligations of university researchers.

He laid emphasis, as he has done ever since assuming his portfolios, on the need for useful research productivity (and yes basic research is important) but the concept of innovation must remain a focus.

 

Today Ms Julia Gillard addressed the Australian Financial Review Higher Education Conference and emphasised the importance of the role of higher education in "contributing to the innovation and productivity gains required for long term economic development and growth; and ensuring that there is a broad]based tertiary education system producing professionals for both national and local labour market needs".

 

What remains to be addressed is what will Senator Carr, Minister for Education Julia Gillard, and their cabinet colleagues see as being the appropriate intellectual infrastructure that our universities and our publicly funding research facilities should provide.

 

The correspondence below, reprinted from today's Nature, if nothing else ought to give pause.

 

 

 

Correspondence

Nature 452, 151 (13 March 2008) | doi:10.1038/452151c; Published online 12 March 2008

How academic corporatism can lead to dictatorship

G. A. Clark1

  1. Department of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-2402, USA

Sir

Michael Crow's Book Review of Daniel Greenberg's Science for Sale (Nature 449, 405; 2007) calls for a response because it reflects a worsening philosophical divide in US academia between those who regard universities as analogous to corporations and think they should be run that way (mostly career administrators) and those who see universities as primarily intellectual enterprises governed by academic core values (mostly line faculty). Asserting that the university is an idea not an ideal or an ideology Crow, who is president of Arizona State University, plays down or ignores most of the dangerous consequences of campus capitalism.

Faculty members would generally hold that universities represent ideals as well as ideas. These are manifest in a value system that is among the first casualties of academic corporatism. Derived from political corporatism, academic corporatism is an administrative strategy that is antithetical to the spirit that academics hold dear including openness, transparency, collegiality, meritocracy, rule-governed procedures, balanced curriculum, a level playing field for probationary faculty and participation by faculty in governance.

Like its political counterpart, academic corporatism often results in dictatorships, with ideas originating only from the top and nothing going the other way. Academic assemblies, unions and senates are eviscerated, neutralized or eliminated altogether. Faculty members are disenfranchised. There is a chilling effect on free speech and the notion of an open marketplace for ideas.

This can wreak havoc with a university's curriculum, jeopardize its intellectual and educational missions and compromise its future. As former Harvard president Derek Bok said: "The end to which this process could lead is not a pleasant prospect to behold."