When the popular and respected British classicist, Peter Jones, left university teaching 10 years ago, he contributed a valuable and prophetic farewell message to The Spectator (13 September 1997). 

Jones began by describing his first university job – at Cambridge in 1974. Surrounded by "like-minded colleagues with the best interests of the subject and our undergraduates at heart [and] with manageable numbers of students", he immersed himself in teaching, informal discussions, and student-led sporting and recreational activities that, taken together, occupied six or even seven days a week. The university was a lively place and university administrators willingly gave their "slightly baffled blessing" to the "lunatic classicists doing things their way".

Jones’ article then changes tone dramatically as he articulates a warning that has been echoed by many, but which simply cannot be renewed often enough. When students from those early days return to visit, he writes, they frequently appear puzzled at first and then they ask someone to explain what has gone wrong. 

 

It all began to go wrong, Jones believes, in the 1980s when universities managed to convince themselves that "the methods of business were the only way to guarantee success". The "coporatisation" of universities became all the rage. Jones writes, "That there is, of course, no fit whatsoever between the practices, values and aims of the educational world and those of the business world is apparent to an idiot child", but that fact has not prevented business values and business methods from slowly overpowering and smothering universities like some all-consuming lahar. 

 

The result, Jones observes, is that "since we are now to be regarded as businesses, our 'practices' and 'output' had to be checked, monitored, controlled, evaluated and subjected to 'market forces'. Enter the inquisition."  This brought the ambitious, upwardly mobile "administration supremos", along with an "exciting new breed of para-academic, the quality management team, with nothing to contribute to university life but a new, inane vocabulary of business-speak, their fantasy worlds built on their fantasy language, the object of derision among both academics and the more intelligent businessmen".

 

Dutifully bowing to government requirements and eager to squeeze greater "productivity" out of lowly academics, the supremos set about wrecking the place – firstly by doubling, then tripling, then quadrupling the number of students (sorry, "customers", "stakeholders", "consumers" – take your pick) in the system, and then by increasingly standardising everything so that "every course in every university should be made comparable in intellectual weight, method of assessment and time taken, with every other course in every other university in Europe and America too."

 

Millions of dollars were wasted in order to increase the number of third-rate graduates that are churned out and presented to the working world as "university trained". If quality really was a priority, Jones asks, why weren’t increased failure rates the corollary of boosting numbers? The answer, of course, is obvious: "universities will turn every cheek in their collective bodies" to prevent high failure rates because student numbers and higher student fees are the lifeblood of the system. Administrative supremos, who can barely conceal their contempt for lowly academics anyway, tut-tut if students who should never have been admitted to university are failed.  As the managers see it, that surely means that the academics are not adequately serving our "intellectually disadvantaged stakeholders-customers". There are an awful lot of intellectually disadvantaged stakeholders coming out of universities these days.

 

One obvious result of all this, Jones writes, is that "good, hard-working students (of whom there are still plenty) deeply resent the presence among them of increasing numbers of incompetent layabouts whom the regulations bend over backwards to pass." He concludes that it takes a seriously intelligent student to squeeze anything resembling a real university education out of a system like this.

 

Obviously, Jones did not embrace retirement with a deep sense of career satisfaction. His last few paragraphs are very personal and very honest: "I am too old for this anti-educational, anti-intellectual nonsense". He feels for his colleagues – the older ones trying to protect the integrity of a by-gone system and the newer ones "trying to build a career, against all the odds", often on limited-term contracts that give them little or no

 job security no matter how skilled and dedicated they may be. 

 

Peter Jones’ words cut so close to the truth that they have haunted me for a decade as I kept at least a part-time position (termed "Casual", which it isn’t) in university teaching after opting for voluntary early retirement in 1998. The situation was bad enough when Jones retired; it is much worse now.  As a "Casual" for the past 10 years, I have taught three or four times as many students as I did when I was full-time, but I have done so on less than one-quarter the salary. It is no wonder University Inc. has gone Casual!

 

All of this is not to deny that there are still good departments doing valuable and high-quality work (again, against all the odds), but it is to say that universities today seem much more concerned with marketing their "brand" and polishing their "reputation" than they are facing up to the very real deficiencies in their primary mission – which, whatever it is today, used to be bringing high-quality, advanced education to this and the next generation.

 

Neither Peter Jones nor any of the rest of us who share his long experience are under any illusion that things will change for the better. The corporate lahar is well and truly unstoppable. Not only do the supremos and the struggling academics not speak the same language or share the same values, but students sitting in packed lecture halls seating hundreds, sometimes even a thousand or more, have no idea what it is like to be in an advanced class of 30 with tutorial groups of eight.

 

Staff members micro-managed to the point where they have far less autonomy and responsibility than a kindergarten teacher, have little or no knowledge of the days when university administrators actually trusted their employees with 10 years of university education to write their own course outline. It is little wonder that the new breed of business-oriented para-academic has no sense of history and devalues the past. They have a vested interest in their vassals NOT knowing what the university used to be.

 

In 1998 Jones spoke prophetically. What we have witnessed is not just a change in style and methodology, but also a comprehensive redefinition of "higher" education with profound implications for all of us. In the end, Peter Jones could only declare, "Bugger the system. I’m off."

 

The corporate lahar rolls on – long live the lahar!

 

---

*Dennis Phillips obtained his PhD from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) in 1972 in U.S. diplomatic history.  He has taught American Politics and History at various times at three of Sydney's four major public universities. Since 1972 has been at Macquarie University. Two of his recent publications are  "Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: the Bush Administration and "the Rule of Law" Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 2006) and "The American Alliance: Myth and Reality" Australasian Journal of American Studies (July 2004). He also authored Australian Women at the Olympic Games (3rd ed., Sydney: Walla Walla Press, 2001).