Giles Pickford Explains: "Why Can’t a University Be More Like a Business?" (February 15, 2011)

Giles Pickford is a retired university administrator and is the current secretary of the ANU Emeritus Faculty (www.anu.edu.au/emeritus). The February 14, 2011 issue of Campus Review has published a short opinion piece by Mr Pickford in which he takes to task those in government and the business sector who claim that the time is now appropriate for universities to be run as businesses.

Put simply he says: "[P]eople who, although they have attended a university, have not understood them." And Mr Pickford, prior to his retirement, worked  as a university administrator specialising in the fields of event organisation, fund raising and public relations in general at the University of WA, UNE, AVCC, James Cook University, the University of Wollongong and the ANU. In his view the problem is one of reconciling three cultures: "The motive behind government is the exercise of power; the motive behind business is to make a profit; the motive behind universities is the search for and the imparting of truth... A good government will bring justice and peace to its people; good businesses will make the people prosperous; and a good university system will help create a civilisation."

This university administrator than makes a valiant attempt to try to get government and business to grasp the essence of the university: "[Universities] are like self-assembling molecules, and are therefore chaotic, inner-directed, uncontrollable and indestructible. [Yes,] the contemporary university at its periphery is becoming more business-like, efficiencies have been made, costs have been cut. But no government should think that because the universities have become more business-like, that they have become like business. They have not."

And in closing his argument Mr Pickford writes: "Governments insist they owe it to the taxpayer to interfere in the life of the university. They want to know that the taxpayer is getting value for money. Well, in my view they are. The taxpayer gives us a few billion dollars and we give them a civilisation. There is no other government activity that creates so much value."

It's a moot question as whether or not Mr Pickford has any chance of being heeded by the government or its opposition or rather is he just talking to the hand.