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vol. 63, no. 1, 2021 Published by NTEU

ISSN 0818–8068

Special Issue

Academic freedom’s precarious future

AUR

Australian Universities’Review

AUR

Australian Universities’ Review

Editor

Editorial Board

Dr Ian R. Dobson, Monash University

Dr Alison Barnes, NTEU National President

Guest Editor

Professor Timo Aarrevaara, University of Lapland

Professor Kristen Lyons, University of Queensland

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Professor Jamie Doughney, Victoria University Professor Leo Goedegebuure, University of Melbourne

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Professor Kristen Lyons, University of Queensland Professor Dr Simon Marginson, University of Oxford Matthew McGowan, NTEU General Secretary Dr Alex Millmow, Federation University Australia Dr Neil Mudford, University of Queensland Jeannie Rea, Victoria University Cathy Rytmeister, Macquarie University Errol Phuah, CAPA National President

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Australian Universities’ Review (AUR, formerly Vestes) is published by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) to encourage debate and discussion about issues in higher education and its contribution to Australian public life, with an emphasis on those matters of concern to NTEU members.

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vol. 63, no. 1, 2021 Published by NTEU

ISSN 0818–8068

Special Issue

Academic freedom’s precarious future

Australian Universities’ Review 2

Letter to the editor

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Letter from the guest editor Kristen Lyons

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Introduction to the Special Issue: Academic freedom’s precarious future. Why it matters and what’s at stake Kristen Lyons

ARTICLES & OPINION 8

What crisis of academic freedom? Australian universities after French Rob Watts

This paper is an exploration of a series of themes related to Hon. Robert French AC’s recent review of freedom of speech in Australian universities, and critically explores whether universities face a ‘crisis in academic free speech’.

19 Corporate power and academic freedom Andrew G. Bonnell

In this critical appraisal of corporate influence across universities, Andrew Bonnell examines the impact of corporate power for academic freedom and argues for the urgent need for transparent and accountable governance and oversight.

26 Precarious work and funding make academic freedom precarious Jeannie Rea

In her opinion piece, Jeannie Rea describes how university staff and students who speak out against state, military, religious and other powers face an increasing threat of attack, and reports on the vital work of Scholars at Risk (SAR) in defending rights and interests.

31 Freedom in the university fiefdom Richard Hil

Richard Hil is a scholar widely known for his erudite opinions. In this piece, he explains how constraints on academic freedom are built into governance structures of universities, as well as arguing that academics’ acquiescence to certain constraints upon their freedom is part of the slow violence of the managerial university.

34 A self-selection mechanism for appointed external members of WA University Councils Gerd E. Schröder-Turk

Through his careful analysis of university governance and legislation in Western Australia, Gerd Schröder-Turk exposes the enabling environment for a concentration of power and the maintenance of governance echo-chambers and argues that good governance is the basis for academic freedom.

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45 Slippery beasts: Why academic freedom and media freedom are so difficult to protect Fred D’Agostino & Peter Greste

Through an analysis of both academic freedom and freedom of the press, Fred D’Agostino and Peter Greste explore a diversity of threats that bear down upon the search for ‘truth’.

53 Beyond the usual debates: Creating the conditions for academic freedom to flourish Sharon Stein

In the afterword to the special issue section of this issue of AUR, Sharon Stein explores some of the intellectual, affective and relational conditions that might foster a vision for academic freedom that is also within the context of our ‘complex, uncertain and unequal world’.

57 ATARs, Zombie ideas & Sir Robert Menzies Robert Lewis

BOOK REVIEWS 65 The Idea of the University – A review essay The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts by Debaditya Bhattacharya (ed.)

Public Universities, Managerialism and the Value of Higher Education by Rob Watts Politics, Managerialism, and University Governance: Lessons from Hong Kong under China’s Rule since 1997 by Wing-Wah Law Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer & Catherine Link

75 The peasants are revolting No Platform – A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech by E. Smith Reviewed by Neil Mudford

78 And the students are revolting, too Berkeley: The Student Revolt by Hal Draper (Author), Mario Savio (Introduction) Reviewed by Neil Mudford

83 The tower of pong Bullshit Towers – Neoliberalism and Managerialism in Universities by Margaret Sims Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer and Norman Simms

87 Downhill for universities since Menzies?

Australian Universities: A History of Common Cause by Gwilym Croucher and James Waghorne Reviewed by Paul Rodan

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Letter to the Editor Dear Editor, Thanks to Paul Rodan for his thoughtful comments on my review of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (AUR, 62(2), p. 2).

Sadly, unexpectedly, and as widely reported in the international press, David Graeber passed away on 2 September 2020. I agree wholeheartedly with Graeber’s book and Paul Rodan’s comments, particularly on the issue of human resource management (HRM) that falls into Graeber’s category of being ‘bullshit’. Just three items might be mentioned in support of this commonly agreed notion: 1. In her 2006 book, Shelley Gare singled out HRM as a particularly good example of what she calls The Triumph of the Airheads (Media21 Publishing).

2. Research by the Tasmanian author Rob Macklin found that one of the most important things for HR managers is to remember the lies they told yesterday (HRM – Ethics and Employment, Oxford); and finally, 3. Perhaps the best illustration of a workplace under HRM remains Schrijvers’s The Way of the Rat (Cyan Books).

All three paint a pretty grim picture of HRM, but it is not all bad in the land of HRM. In his book Knowledge and Human Interests (1987), German philosopher Jürgen Habermas developed three knowledgecreating interests which guide not only knowledge and research but also the teaching of HRM. In my 2007 book (Communication & Management at Work), I applied Habermas’ theory to management – and by inference to HRM.

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The vast majority of HRM is dedicated to what Habermas calls an empirical-analytical understanding of work. Here, HRM wants to control workers by using performance management (KPIs, etc.). A minor part of HRM’s teaching and research portfolio is dedicated to an historicalhermeneutical understanding. Mostly, this is what critical management studies (CMS) does (e.g. Klikauer, CMS & Critical Theory, 2015). Finally, there is a truly criticalemancipatory understanding dedicated to ending domination and working towards emancipation.

Placed in Graeber’s framework, one might say, HRM’s first approach (control) is bullshit – albeit very dangerous bullshit; the second one (interpretation) is semi-bullshit; while the third one (emancipation) is a worthwhile enterprise. As someone once said, I am a pessimist 80 per cent of the time and an optimist 20 per cent of the time and I live and work for these 20%. One might be inclined to argue that David Graeber, Jürgen Habermas, Paul Rodan, myself and many readers of AUR are working for these 20 per cent and have an interest in ending domination and enabling emancipation.

Thomas Klikauer, Western Sydney University

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Letter from the guest editor Kristen Lyons As guest editor, it is my pleasure to introduce this issue of Australian Universities’ Review. Most of the issue is ‘special’, on the extremely important topic of academic freedom and its precarious future. My introduction to the special issue introduces the papers and their eight authors. These papers have been written from a range of perspectives, which cover the topic in detail.

Of course, AUR is AUR, and it is a journal that preaches to a broad church. There is also a timely article on the low entry scores required to get into education programs at Australian universities. Robert Lewis describes how the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rankings system works (ATARs), and his stated aim is to highlight the profound systemic problems of falling standards in school student outcomes; in part due to lowered ATARs as well as problematic standards in teacher education.

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Book reviews are an important part of AUR’s agenda, and this issue has several such reviews from ‘hardy perennial’ book reviewers Neil Mudford, Paul Rodan and Thomas Klikauer.

All in all, this issue of Australian Universities’ Review is a ‘must read’ in the challenging times in which universities and their workforces find themselves.

Kristen Lyons, Guest Editor Kristen Lyons is a Professor of Environment and Development Sociology in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland.

Letter from the guest editor Kristen Lyons

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Academic freedom’s precarious future. Why it matters and what’s at stake Kristen Lyons University of Queensland

Introduction Academic freedom – however elusive – is widely championed as the foundation of a good university. Academic freedom is held up as vital, to borrow from Hannah Arendt, in speaking ‘truth to power’, and axiomatic in the pursuit of the public, or common good. More broadly, it is understood as being vital for ensuring a healthy functioning democracy, and as an antidote to the contemporary dis-ease of post truth politics.

But just what is meant by ‘academic freedom’, and why has its defence – or at least some critical exploration of its politics – become so important? What forces threaten that freedom from both within and without the university sector, how have debates about academic freedom become fodder in the culture wars, and with outcomes that continue to drive the weaponisation and politicisation of universities? In guarding against the assault on academic freedom and its ripple effects, including the erosion of democratic systems of knowledge production, what forms of collective organising are being marshalled? More broadly, how might critical debates about academic freedom open up opportunities for a revitalised university that is equipped to grapple with the contemporary challenges that shape our ‘uncertain and unequal world’ (see Sharon Stein, this volume)?

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What’s at Stake – engages with these, and other issues and questions. In strident and lucid ways, each of the authors that have brought this special issue to life offers analysis and opinion that is set to shape the contours of contemporary and future debates and thinking on academic freedom.

A special issue on this topic is indeed timely, given amendments to the Higher Education Support Act were made in March 2021, just weeks prior to finalising this special issue. The insertion of definitions of ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘academic freedom’ – a dream realised for Queensland Senator Pauline Hanson as quid pro quo for lending her support to the Government’s steep fee increases for humanities degrees – (again) illustrates how acutely politicised academic freedom, and universities, have become. Similarly, the recent politically fuelled freedom of speech furore – demonstrated via protests on university campuses in response to a number of ‘reactionary speakers’, including widely disgraced men’s activist, Bettina Arndt – exposes how intertwined universities are in the culture wars (Funnell & Graham, 2020; NapierRaman, 2021).

Each of the contributing authors to this special issue – in rich and diverse ways – showcases the contestations related to discourses of academic freedom, as well as the right/ left ideological schisms and culture wars these ignite. In so doing, they locate academic freedom – and its curtailment – within broader structural processes and dynamics that are

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reimagining universities, both in Australia, and worldwide. denying salary supplements via its national JobKeeper scheme Corporatisation, neoliberalisation and managerialism, as for the sector’s 130,000 staff (Garnaut, 2021). Its hostility was examples (themes well documented by critical university further unmasked via skyrocketing fees to study humanities studies scholars, and previous articles in AUR), are each (as named above), while at the same time reducing the variously situated as bearing down upon the freedoms costs for science, technology, engineering and mathematics of individual academics, research agendas, institutional (STEM) degrees. These reforms have added to the Federal governance structures, and more.

Coalition Government’s sustained use of its arsenal against the Various contributors also tease out the interconnections humanities (Brett, 2021) and its politicisation of universities, between defence of academic freedom and the capacity of with outcomes that fuel a climate of anti-intellectualism. universities to play a part in building solidarities, relations and But it is women of all ages who continue to be responsibilities to diverse peoples and ecologies. This includes disproportionality affected by the global health pandemic, the responsibilities of universities in the context of the global and the Federal Government’s responses to it, including climate crisis, structural racism – as rendered bare via the global across the university sector (Wenham et al., 2020).

Black Lives Matter movement – and the culture of misogyny Demonstrating this, women are amongst those most affected and sexual violence that pervades contemporary societies, by the haemorrhaging of appointments across universities; including in the highest offices of the Australian Parliament. conditions tied to our high representation as casual employees, In the midst of these where the largest staff cuts have multiple and intersecting to date occurred (Wenham ... it is women of all ages who continue crises (Lyons et al., 2021), et al., 2020). Additionally, to be disproportionality affected by the contributors to this special the COVID-19 global health global health pandemic, and the Federal issue provoke thinking about pandemic has exposed the ways what the purpose of universities in which women’s academic Government’s responses to it, including could be, and whose rights (if work is systematically across the university sector any) and interests they might rendered invisible; evidenced, support? Similarly, they invite for example, via the consideration of the ways academic freedom is intertwined disproportionate citing of men as experts on COVID-19 with opportunities for fostering forms of teaching, research, quoted in the media in 2020-21 (Moodley & Gouws, 2020). advocacy and service that respond – with purpose, care, and Gendered structural forces have also driven the decrease in even love – in the face of current inequalities and injustices. women’s publications, a set of dynamics that – despite our best The hope, in some small way, is that this special issue will efforts otherwise – have persisted in this special issue. further move academics, policy makers and others, towards This special issue aims to draw attention to some of the engagement with these ideas. particular vulnerabilities facing women, alongside early career and First Nations researchers, and the intersectionality of Academic freedom and the COVID-19 these impacts for academic freedom. However, as editor of global health pandemic this volume I must provide a caveat for the analysis presented.

Despite a commitment to create space for the inclusion of The impetus for this special issue was sparked just months diverse voices to ground this special issue, the COVIDbefore the onset of the COVID-19 global health pandemic 19 global health pandemic had other plans. A number of turned all our worlds, including our universities, upside down. potential authors had intended to submit to this special issue, Australian universities, alongside universities worldwide, have but multiple pressing commitments – exacerbated in the been pounded by the shock waves of this pandemic. But the context of COVID-19 – meant they were unable to do so. aftershocks are expected to reverberate long after the onset of Future collaborations on this topic will no doubt be enriched this crisis, with implications that will likely bear down upon via the inclusion of additional perspectives – including academic freedoms for many years to come. showcasing the lived experiences of more women, Indigenous In Australia, the Federal Coalition Government’s response scholars and early career researchers – who can be expected to to the dire challenges facing the higher education sector have different experiences of academic freedom compared to because of the COVID-19 crisis is one of a number of those in this special issue, myself included. triggers for these aftershocks. In the face of haemorrhaging revenues tied to the loss of international students (estimated Contributions to this Special Issue at up to $7.6 billion nationally between 2020-2024 (Larkins & Marshman, 2020), the Federal Government repeatedly In the face of sustained structural inequalities across the refused to back the higher education sector, including by university sector – including as exposed in the context of the vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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COVID-19 global health pandemic – academic freedom remains an urgent priority. The contributors to this special issue take up an array of themes related to this.

Starting in Australia, the growing appetite for answers to questions related to academic freedom was signalled via the commission, in 2018, of Hon Robert French AC to report on the state of academic freedom in Australian universities.

The outcome of this led to French’s (2019) Review of Freedom of Speech in Australian Higher Education Providers, which recommended the adoption of a Model Code to ‘ensure a culture of free speech and academic freedom is strongly embedded in institutions across the Australian higher education sector’ (Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 2020). Rob Watts (this volume) takes up a series of issues related to this review, including how French understood ‘academic freedom’, and whether, in fact, universities face a ‘crisis in academic free speech’, as a ‘small but noisy claque of neoliberal commentators would have us believe’.

Andrew Bonnell then examines the impact of corporate power on academic freedom, through a critical appraisal of corporate influence across universities. He singles out big tobacco, big sugar and big pharma as each wielding power and influence across universities via funding, gag clauses and ghost writing, amongst other means. He also carefully traces some of the ways big philanthropy has been weaponised to advance the cause of particular commercial interests, including Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers and the John M. Olin Foundation in the United States, and the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation in Australia. In the face of such incursions across universities, Andrew Bonnell reminds us that ‘sunlight is a good disinfectant’, pointing to the urgent need for transparent and accountable governance and oversight.

Yet bringing the dark corners of the university into the light requires ‘freedom of inquiry, and a safe and peaceful environment’ ( Jeannie Rae, this volume). As she sets out, university staff and students who are engaged in teaching, researching and speaking out against state, military, religious and other powers, face increasing threat of attack. Reporting on the internationally significant work of Scholars at Risk (SAR) in defending the rights and interests of staff and students worldwide, Jeannie Rae makes interconnections between the erosion of academic freedoms and the demise of democracies.

Such risks are brought to life in diverse ways across international settings. It is also exposed in the Australian context. A recent Senate inquiry into underpayment and casualisation in Australian workplaces, for example, was told that underpayment was ‘embedded in the business model of Australian universities’ (Zhou, 2021a). The consequences of calling out this structural inequality, however, including the

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tangible ways this bears down upon the bodies of academic staff and teachers, has come at great cost for some. As part of this inquiry, educators described various consequences of speaking ‘truth to power’; including being removed from internal communications and email lists, and losing work (Zhou, 2021a). Speaking up, and speaking out, is arguably even more risky in the current university sector, in which over 17,000 staff have already lost their jobs, with more job losses expected (Zhou, 2021b).

In addition to these macro-level structural constraints upon academic freedom, Richard Hil describes the various pernicious small ways in which university staff experience the erosion and/or denial of freedoms, with outcomes that leave staff with barely space to breath. He sets out the ways constraints to academic freedom are built into governance structures of the so-called ‘modern university’, with graduate attributes and e-portfolios each turning critical thinking into commodified products, while performance reviews demand academics ‘sell’ themselves and their products. In this hyperindividualised work environment, stopping ‘productive work’ to share a cup of tea with a colleague – who, heaven forbid, might be a friend or ally – has become a radical act. That academics acquiesce to constraints upon their freedom is, as Rob Watts also explores, part of the slow violence of the managerial university.

So how might we gesture towards the conditions of possibility for a freedom of inquiry that these contributors variously call for?

Gerd Schröder-Turk potently makes the case for good governance as the basis for academic freedom. In its simplest form, this should include governing bodies and structures that ensure a diversity of views, including – not surprisingly – the perspectives from the academic body itself. Yet in his careful analysis of university governance and legislation in Western Australia, he describes how a self-selecting mechanism sets the conditions for a concentration of power and, somewhat ironically, the maintenance of governance echo-chambers that exclude those with firsthand experience of working in universities.

Fred D’Agostino and Peter Greste then invite us to move beyond the boundaries of the academy to explore the slippery beasts of academic and media freedoms. By anchoring their analysis of academic freedom in relation to consideration of journalistic freedom, they provoke thinking about academic freedom that moves beyond the current line-of-sight, to understand the diversity of threats that bear down upon the search for ‘truth’ better. They conclude that the battles that journalists have fought in defence of press freedom are only marginally removed from those the academy continues to struggle with. In bringing these diverse perspectives together, they offer new pathways and opportunities for considering academic freedom.

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In an afterword to this special issue, Sharon Stein then shifts our focus by asking what the necessary conditions might be for academic freedom to flourish? Alongside reflecting upon the contributions of each of the authors to this special issue, she explores some of the intellectual, affective and relational conditions that might foster academic freedom.

In so doing, she centres approaches that: embrace ecologies of knowledges and intellectual humility; lean into difficult conversations without compromising collegial relationships and acknowledge the interdependencies (between humans and the non-human world) as the basis for building meaningful relationships. These approaches, she posits, may provide a vision for academic freedom within the context of our ‘complex, uncertain and unequal world’.

Overall, the hope is that this special issue of Australian Universities’ Review – Academic Freedom’s Precarious Future.

Why it Matters and What’s at Stake will feed national – and international – curiosity and debate related to academic freedom, as well as critical thinking in regard to the responsibilities of universities for the common good.

Acknowledgement I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians and Elders past, present and emerging, of the lands upon which we live and work, and recognise these lands and the sovereignty of the First Nations have never been ceded.

I wish to thank each of the anonymous peer reviewers who gave generously to the process in ensuring the timely publication of this special issue, as well as all contributors, including those who considered submitting papers, but for various reasons were unable to do so. AUR will welcome your papers at a future time so that we might continue this dialogue, including in ways that expand the diversity of issues and themes discussed. Sincere thanks to Ian Dobson, for careful editing and review of all papers in this special issue: we would be three full stops short of a picnic if not for you, so many thanks. Thank you to the entire editorial board of Australian Universities’ Review for supporting this special issue and crafting the contours of its brief; like all good ideas, this special issue is a reflection of a collective of energies and efforts.

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References Brett, J. (2021). The bin fire of the humanities. The Monthly. March.

Department of Education, Skills and Employment. (2020).

Independent Review of Adoption of the Model Code on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom’. Retrieved from https://www. education.gov.au/independent-review-freedom-speech-australianhigher-education-providers French, R. (2019). Review of Freedom of Speech in Australian Higher Education Providers. Canberra: Department of Education and Training. Retrieved from https://www.dese.gov.au/ uncategorised/resources/report-independent-review-freedomspeech-australian-higher-education-providers-march-2019 Funnell, N. & Graham, C. (2020) Psychologist, clinical psychologist, doctor or none of the above? Will the real Bettina Arndt AM please Stand up! New Matilda. ( Jan 28). Retrieved from https:// newmatilda.com/2020/01/28/psychologist-clinical-psychologistdoctor-or-none-of-the-above-will-the-real-bettina-arndt-am-pleasestand-up/ Garnaut, R. (2021). Reset: Restoring Australia After the Pandemic Recession. Melbourne: La Trobe University Press.

Larkins, F. & Marshman, I. (2020). $7.6 billion and 11% of researchers: our estimate of how much Australian university research stands to lose by 2024. The Conversation. (Sept 22).

Lyons, K., Esposito, A. & Johnson, M. (2021 submitted December 2020) ‘The Pangolin and the Coal Mine: Challenging the Forces of Extractivism, Human Rights Abuse and Planetary Calamity’, Antipode Intervention. Retrieved from https://antipodeonline.org/2021/02/01/ the-pangolin-and-the-coal-mine/ Moodley, K. & Gouws, A. (2020). How women in academia are feeling the brunt of COVID-19. The Conversation. (August 7). Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/how-women-in-academia-arefeeling-the-brunt-of-covid-19-144087 Napier-Raman, K. (2021) Tudge introduces uni free speech laws, a throwback to forgotten culture wars. Crikey. (March 17).

Wenham, C., Smith, J. & Morgan, R. (2020). COVID-19: The gendered impacts of the outbreak. The Lancet. 395(10227), 846-848.

Zhou, N. (2021a). Australian University Staff Say They were Blacklisted after speaking out on underpayment. The Guardian (10 March).

Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/ mar/10/australian-university-staff-say-they-were-blacklisted-afterspeaking-out-on-underpayment?fbclid=IwAR2_xk_RnHnxiW_ ci-ixk_ziciRHsUXJANHqV8BlSd7IH2yeoXmenskrekg Zhou, N. (2021b). More than 17,000 jobs lost at Australian universities during Covid Pandemic. The Guardian, (3 February). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/03/morethan-17000-jobs-lost-at-australian-universities-during-covid-pandemic

Kristen Lyons is a Professor of Environment and Development Sociology in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. She has over 20 years’ experience in research, teaching and service that delivers national and international impacts on issues that sit at the intersection of sustainability and development, as well as the future of higher education. Kristen works regularly in Uganda, Solomon Islands and Australia, and is also a Senior Research Fellow with the Oakland Institute.

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What crisis of academic freedom? Australian universities after French Rob Watts RMIT University

They [the young] are asking for the truth. If we respond correctly, can’t we perhaps interest them in freedom? (Arendt & Jaspers, 1993, p. 451).

In 1988 hundreds of universities world-wide signed onto the Magna Charta Universitatum (1988). The Charter declared in stirring tones that ‘to meet the needs of the world around it, [a university’s] research and teaching must be morally and intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power’. In the same year this declaration of academic freedom was issued, the Hawke-Keating Labor Government published a White Paper called ‘Higher Education: A Policy Statement’. This paper launched the ‘Dawkins reforms’, a program of neoliberal policy changes that among many effects would render Australia’s public universities, including the nine Australian universities that had signed the Charter, more accountable to the Australian government than ever before (Bessant, 1995; Thornton, 2014; Connell, 2019).

The line of neoliberal policies unfolding since the late 1980s has been accompanied by persistent expressions of concern about the negative impact of these policies on academic freedom, affecting everything – the identity of universities (Considine, 2006; Gare, 2006), academic identity (Parker & Jary, 1995), academic teaching (Thornton, 2014; Hil, 2015), and academic research (Sardesai et al., 2017). Finally, and three decades on, a small but noisy claque of neoliberal and conservative commentators has been busily fabricating a furore around the notion that Australian universities are now caught up in a ‘crisis of academic free speech’.

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If we accept, as readers of crime fiction understand, that there is no such thing as a coincidence, we have a puzzle.

How are we to make sense of the coincidence of a global discourse of academic freedom and the rise of what some call the ‘neoliberal university’ triggering persistent and serious concerns about the relationship between neoliberalism and ‘academic freedom’? Given that relationship, how should we respond to the proposition that we face a crisis of ‘free speech’ in our universities?

The idea that our universities are now caught in a crisis of freedom of speech, has been tirelessly repeated by spokespeople from the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), the Centre for Independent Studies, journalists associated with Murdoch’s News Ltd., such as Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen, and by the weirdly ‘conservative’ journal Quadrant (Bolt, 2016; Albrechtsen, 2020). Oddly enough most of those propagating this idea have been non-academics. That said, a small number of ‘conservative’ academics such as Kevin Donnelly, Mervyn Bendle, and Sinclair Davidson unsuccessfully tried in 2008 to persuade the Senate inquiry into allegations of academic bias that there was a hegemonic project in universities to promote a Marxist, postmodernist, and feminist worldview (Senate Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2008). By 2018, this idea had morphed into the defence of free speech. The IPA had released no fewer

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than three audits of ‘free speech’, relying on a mixture of anecdote High Court, that there is no absolute ‘right to free speech’ either and a spurious quantitative audit of ‘free speech’ in Australian in Australia or in its universities. That said, he also reminded universities (Lesh, 2016; 2017; 2018). Displaying a talent for everybody that Australia’s Higher Education Support Act (at graphic misrepresentation that should have earned him a job in S.19‑115) (Commonwealth, 2003) requires all universities the Trump White House, Lesh claimed that he had given thirtyto have a policy upholding ‘free intellectual inquiry’ making five of Australia’s 42 universities (83 per cent) a ‘Red rating’ for ‘free intellectual inquiry in relation to learning, teaching and their policies or actions that were hostile to ‘freedom of speech’. research’ a condition of being registered as a university (French This claim relied on Haidt’s (2017) unwarranted assertion that 2018; French 2019). Instead, French recommended that universities cannot be simultaneously ‘social justice institutions’ ‘academic freedom’ be protected by the voluntary adoption of and be committed to practising free intellectual inquiry. Lesh a Model Code to be embedded in higher education providers’ and Haidt relied on the all or nothing fallacy that there are only institutional regulations or policies – a draft version of which two choices which, in this instance, relies on the non-credible he duly provided. Since then, many universities have adopted assumption that when university X, for example, declares it this framework. supports actions to mitigate Unlike some of the global warming, no member of protagonists, French refused Unlike some of the protagonists, French the university may thereafter to conflate ‘academic freedom’ refused to conflate ‘academic freedom’ and either criticise this policy or and ‘freedom of speech’. French ‘freedom of speech’. French well understood the scientific basis of the policy. well understood the conceptual the conceptual issues at stake in these A preliminary observation is issues at stake in these warranted here: like so many categories. French carefully categories. of his fellow defenders of free distinguished between speech, Lesh conflates ‘free ‘freedom of speech’, ‘academic speech’ with ‘academic freedom’. freedom’ and ‘free intellectual inquiry’. He acknowledged On one reading, this confection was just another minor initially that he had been asked to carry out an independent skirmish in the so-called ‘culture wars’. Yet the fabricated review of ‘freedom of speech’ in Australian higher education furore elicited a sympathetic hearing from the Morrison providers. In the second paragraph of his report, French Government. In November 2018, the Australian Government acknowledged that ‘contention about freedom of speech and commissioned Robert French, a former Chief Justice of academic freedom – what they mean and what are their limits – the High Court, an active scholar and Chancellor of the has varied in content and intensity from time to time’ (French, University of Western Australia, to report on the state of 2019, p.13). French also observed that the Higher Education academic freedom in Australian universities. In particular, Framework (Threshold Standards) 2015 (HE, 2015) also French was also asked to assess the effectiveness of university referred to something called ‘free intellectual inquiry’. policies and practices to address ‘the requirements of the French offered a thoroughly scholarly discussion in which Higher Education Standards Framework to promote and he distanced himself from the advocacy by right-wing thinkprotect freedom of expression and intellectual inquiry on tanks, commentators, and MPs like Senator James Patterson, Australian campuses’. all busily trying to weaponise a certain conception of free In this essay I address several questions. How did French speech (French 2019, p. 30-2). This may explain why his (2019) understand ‘academic freedom’? Does the impact of Model Code did not engage with ‘freedom of speech’. This neoliberal policies on Australia’s universities raise questions does not mean French ignored freedom of speech. French about academic freedom? How then should we understand observed that every member of the staff and every student at academic freedom? the university has the same freedom of speech in connection with activities conducted on university land or otherwise, French on ‘academic freedom’ in connection with the university, as any other person in Australia subject only to the constraints imposed by: The French report was released in April 2019. Unsurprisingly, • The reasonable and proportionate regulation of conduct French found there was no ‘freedom of speech crisis’ on necessary to the discharge of the university’s teaching and Australian campuses (French, 2019). Equally predictably, research activities. like most of his former High Court colleagues who • The right and freedom of all to express themselves and to uphold Australia’s legal positivist tradition, French did not hear and receive information and opinions. recommend introducing legislation guaranteeing a right to • The reasonable and proportionate regulation of conduct to ‘academic freedom’ or ‘freedom of speech’. This reflected his enable the university to fulfil its duty to foster the wellbeing understanding-cum-doxa acquired during his years on the of students and staff (French 2019, p. 297-98) vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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French observed that ‘free intellectual inquiry’ was a term of uncertain meaning but seemed to cover ‘some elements of “academic freedom”’. While allowing that ‘academic freedom’ ‘had a complex history and apparently no settled definition’, French treated ‘freedom of speech’ as an aspect of ‘academic freedom’ (French, 2019).

Apart from allowing that ‘freedom of speech’ is a necessary, i.e., essential, element of ‘academic freedom’ (French, 2019), French simply declined to enlarge on his understanding of ‘freedom of speech’ in his Model Draft. Most of his attention was given to ‘academic freedom’. Without clarifying the specific practices and evaluative criteria conceived e.g., in terms of the possibly different goods the practice of ‘academic freedom’ (and ‘free speech’) might give rise to, his Model Code simply offers an omnibus conception of academic freedom.

French (2019) understands ‘academic freedom’ as the freedom of academic staff to teach, discuss, and research and to disseminate and publish the results of their research without restriction by established scholarly consensus or institutional policy, in ways constrained only by scholarly standards: • The freedom of academic staff and students to engage in intellectual inquiry, to express their opinions and beliefs, and to contribute to public debate, in relation to their subjects of study and research.

• The freedom of academic staff and students to express their opinions in relation to the university in which they work or are enrolled free from institutional censorship or sanction.

• The freedom of academic staff and students to make public comment on any issue in their personal capacities, not speaking either on behalf of the university or as an officer of the university.

• The freedom of academic staff to participate in professional or representative academic bodies.

• The freedom of students to participate in student societies and associations.

• The autonomy of the university which resides in its governors, executive and academic staff in relation to the choice of academic courses and offerings, the ways in which they are taught and the choices of research activities and the ways in which they are conducted (French, 2019 p.226).

How then might we think about academic freedom in a time when many argue our universities have been subjected to a neoliberal makeover?

The neoliberal university?

There is now consensus that ‘something happened’ to universities in countries like Australia to say nothing of universities in Europe, Africa and South America over the past few decades (Altbach et al., 2009; Evans & Nixon, 2015; Curaj et al., 2018). There is less agreement about how this should be described, explained or evaluated. Some have pointed to the

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‘globalisation of universities’ (Orr, 2006; Marginson & van de Wende, 2006; Dagen & Fink-Hafner, 2019). Others highlight the ‘internationalisation’ of universities (Knight, 2006; Brooks & Waters, 2014). The most recent trend has been to represent universities as somehow being subjected to neoliberal policymaking, while some even talk about universities becoming neoliberal institutions. There is now a sizeable literature on the ‘neoliberal effect’ in Australian higher education – some of it benign (Marginson & Considine 2000), much of it more critical (Bessant 2002; Thornton 2014; Weller & O’Neill 2014; Hil 2012, 2015; Watts, 2016; Sims, 2019; and Connell, 2019).

It can be agreed safely that Australia’s universities were subjected to a full-scale neoliberal policy assault after 198889. Until then, Australian governments had fully funded universities while leaving them largely to manage their own affairs (Forsyth, 2014). The ‘Dawkins revolution’ initiated a policy process that inflicted purposeful and often deep cuts in government-funding to universities in parallel with the expectation that universities would increase their student intakes and fund that increase by reintroducing tuition fees backed up by a student loan scheme. There were also government-led exhortations that universities needed to produce more employment-ready graduates. This neoliberal project was essentially a ‘performative discourse’. By reducing public funding, the expectation was that this would trigger a wave of ‘market reforms’ in higher education (Bessant 2002).

However, there are many basic conceptual and empirical problems when trying to work out what has happened. (For the long version of this discussion, see Watts, 2016). The short version goes like this. Many observers including academics and policy-makers are now convinced that neoliberal polices have created a ‘higher education market’ that has ‘commodified’ higher education (Dill et al., 2004; Chau, 2010). Even critics like Ronald Barnett (2000) argue that ‘marketisation’ promoted a trend towards the commodification of teaching and research (Noble, 1998; Foskett, 2011; Ball, 2012).

Others even talk up the idea of the ‘McDonaldised university’ (Nadolny & Ryan, 2015). Others sensibly hedged their bets and preferred to talk about ‘quasi-higher education markets’ (Le Grand & Bartlett, 1993; Marginson, 2007) Yet, as writers like Roger Brown (2011; 2015) and Nick Foskett (2011) insist, even though policy-makers, university managers, and many academics talk about a ‘higher education market’, or the ‘commodification of knowledge’ this does not mean there is a real higher education market. For example, Kirp (2003, p. 2) says that ‘the notion that higher education is a “market” needs to be unpacked, because the system doesn’t look like the market portrayed in any Economics 101 textbook’. So too does the claim that, in ‘neoliberal universities’, knowledge and/or education have been commodified. This involves an elementary category mistake.

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As Stiglitz (1999) has argued, even under the conditions of a fully functioning capitalist economy, knowledge remains as close to being a pure public good as possible, and definitely not a commodity.

Then there is the argument that many universities have been corporatised. This has introduced novel elements such as a ‘culture of audit’, a preoccupation with marketing, and attracting ever increasing numbers of fee-paying students, especially international students (Apple 2007; Giroux, 2002, 2009. In Australia, Margaret Thornton makes the case that the forms and functions of the modern university have altered as ‘the model of the for-profit corporation began to take over from the not-for-profit corporation as the primary meaning of the incorporated university’ (Thornton 2012, p.

7). See also Thornton (2014); Weller and O’Neill (2014); Hil (2012, 2015); Sims (2019); and Connell (2019). One obvious concern was raised early by Kayrooz et al. (2001) and dramatised by the sacking of Ted Steele by the University of Wollongong when he made public comments about ‘soft marking’, involving the awarding of undeservedly high grades to students (Martin, 2002).

Though there is not the space to make the case here, a judicious view is that Australia’s universities have been subjected to a neoliberal policy make-over, driven by real budget cuts imposed by governments especially since 1999, along with a real shift to mass enrolments that has remade these universities. However, this has not resulted in anything deserving of being called a neoliberal university operating in a higher education market. Rather we need to acknowledge the many often contradictory effects.

One result has been the massification of many traditionally small universities, funded by student debt: aggregate domestic student debt was heading towards $69 billion by 2020. As the advent of COVID-19 has shown, the increasing reliance on international fee-paying students after 1997 has left many universities hostage to fortune, while unleashing significant levels of corruption in source countries like India and concerns about the quality of the education being offered in Australia.

The pursuit of budget surpluses and the diversion of teachingbased revenue to research outputs so as to boost the research output thereby enabling Vice-Chancellors to indulge in bragging about their university’s position in some global league ladder of ‘Great Universities’, has eroded ‘academic tenure’ and encouraged the increasing use of cheap, casualised academic teaching labour. For all the talk of freeing universities to compete in a market, universities have been subjected via a ‘culture of audit’ to a significant level of government scrutiny: in 2019 two universities (Charles Sturt and the University of Tasmania) were given only provisional registration status by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency after failing to satisfy the national regulator on a number of issues.

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adoption of the ethos, behaviours and language of business and competitive markets has also produced plenty of glossy, albeit meaningless, corporate strategies and big advertising budgets contributing to what Alvesson calls a ‘culture of grandiosity’ (Alvesson, 2014; Courtois & O’Keefe, 2015). As a result, our universities now are caught between …two narratives; one that prizes academic freedom, independence of thought and expression, heterodoxy and exploration to create new knowledge frontiers, [and] on the other hand, an increasingly intrusive series of regulatory regimes that seek to manage, steer and control the sector in ways that serve the interests of the state and the economy by applying specific ideational motifs about efficiency, value, performance, and thus the economic worth of the university to the economy ( Jervis, 2014, p. 156) Without denying the impact of neoliberal policies, or the effect of the corporatisation ethos, and if we follow the line of inquiry initiated by William Clark (2006), our universities today are best represented as palimpsests of three ideal-typical institutional forms: scholarly institutions, bureaucracies, and corporations. Each of these forms has its own distinctive practices and logics and each will be found within the one organisational frame, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the university being examined.

This makes it important to acknowledge that academics can orient to one or other of these logics of practice. Angelika Papadopoulous argues that any conflicts or ‘tensions in strategy and practice can be understood as conflicts between bureaucratic, corporate and scholarly logics’ (Papadopoulous 2017, p. 515). Equally, as Henry Giroux (2012) notes, academic workers can elect to become bureaucratic clerks administering or managing various systems. Some may become corporate boosters tirelessly engaging in self-promotion, pursuing career advancement in universities where research is now measured in terms of research dollars earned.

Of particular interest here is this question: what are the options for those who elect to take the scholarly path and what does the idea of academic freedom look like in our time for those who do this? It is to this question that I now turn.

Academic freedom: a revisionist account Sharon Andrews (2007) notes usefully that a conception of ‘academic freedom’ continues to be an important part of the modern Australian academic’s self-portrait. It seems that many academics still aspire to be understood as people committed to ‘nurturing critical thought’ and ‘advancing knowledge’ and believe that a conception of ‘academic freedom’ is still central to any defensible idea of the university. This conception of ‘academic freedom’ still refers to aspects of the ‘public university’ such as the claim that it serves a role as ‘critic and conscience of society’ or as a site of ‘public scholarship’. What

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is less clear is whether these conceptions are aspirational, descriptive, or something else altogether.

Sometimes this idea is wrapped up in elaborate, and usually nostalgic defences of the ‘traditional university’ understood as small, elite, self-governing institutions, a form which, by and large, no longer exists (e.g., Coady, 2000; Gaita, 2012).

More worryingly, as Andrews notes, there is the much larger question of whether those who profess a commitment to academic freedom have the courage to do it.

So firstly, what is meant by academic freedom? Secondly, how do modern academics give effect to any, or all of these practices said to be constitutive of academic freedom?

One immediate answer to the first question and based on a selective survey of the large literature on academic freedom, is that it refers to any or all of three quite different ideas (Moodie, 1996). The first idea is that individual academics ought to be free to take their own decisions and be free to pursue and present their ideas as teachers and researchers without interference, externally imposed penalties or restraint.

The second idea is that universities should be free to operate autonomously and without undue external interference from governments, or special interests, in determining what should be taught or researched. The third idea is that academic freedom involves academics as a group or groups having the capacity to engage in decision-making about such matters as: … the syllabus of a course, individual staff appointments, the admission or graduation of individual students, standards of academic performance, and the detailed allocation of resources between competing uses within a department or faculty--should be taken by or on the virtually mandatory advice of academics (Moodie, 1996, p. 131).

From their origins and well into the late twentieth century, Australia’s universities enjoyed a significant measure of corporate autonomy. It was accepted that universities should enjoy autonomy as institutions, governing their own affairs internally and making their own decisions on academic matters. As for what that meant it implied a link between teaching and research, a link I take still to be of the utmost importance.

In 1810, Wilhelm Humboldt, the great German reformer and creator of the first modern research university (now called the Humboldt University of Berlin) emphasised ‘the union of teaching and research in the work of the individual scholar or scientist’ (Anderson, 2010, p. 2). Humboldt argued that universities did their work best, and were most useful to society and the state, when they were freed from excessive external surveillance or control (Nybom, 2003). Let me briefly focus on Humboldt’s famous memorandum in which he proposed that universities in which research and teaching were carried out should take place in Einsamkeit und Freiheit (‘in loneliness and freedom’).

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While the concept of ‘freedom’ (freiheit) is acknowledged, the idea that academic work should take place ‘in loneliness’ (Einsamkeit) is possibly puzzling. That puzzle has been addressed by Elton (2008) who suggest that Einsamkeit refers to the apparently purposeless activity of universities (at least as far as the state is concerned). This is activity that leads indirectly, but constructively, to the well-being of the state and the formation of citizens committed to the ‘common good’. As Humboldt (1970, p. 3) put it ‘the inner organisation of these institutions must bring about and maintain an uninterrupted, always revitalising, but unforced and intentionless collaboration’. Humboldt’s prescription suggests that the best way for universities to serve the community and the university is to be left free from any interference from the state while engaging in public scholarship.

As for the modern idea of academic freedom, contemporary scholars like Fuller (2010) argue that it is only by preserving the autonomy of universities, that any university’s capacity to translate research into teaching will continue to promote the good that is knowledge itself. As Fuller sees it, the university is a universalising agent explicitly dedicated to ‘manufacturing’ knowledge as ‘a public good’ rather than promoting the more ambiguous idea of ‘knowledge’ for ‘the public good’.

Fuller spells out what he means when he says it is only by making research and teaching an integrated activity, that this public good can flourish. The production of that knowledge itself is produced according to the principle of public reasoning to a universal audience. Likewise, the teaching practices found in the university need also to be conducted on the ‘as-if ’ principle that all knowledge claims are directed to a universal audience that can check or criticise those claims.

Equally, by linking teaching and research, the currency of unresolved issues, continued controversies and new discoveries and inventions are not allowed to spread randomly like a virus i.e., both widely and haphazardly. Rather, the currency of controversies and new discoveries and inventions are incorporated into a regularly reproduced body of collective knowledge as represented by the university’s curriculum.

It was long seen as a virtue that, like the professions, universities stood outside the system of market relations, and cultivated both the higher values and ‘objective knowledge’ of a permanent kind. This sort of autonomy has been discursively represented in the language of classic AngloAmerican liberalism, which saw in a ‘civil society’ constituted out of self-governing institutions, the best protection of liberty (Anderson, 2010, p. 2).

Closely related to this story about institutional autonomy is the idea that academics as teachers, scholars and researchers should be free to pursue the truth, and to teach and publish what they researched as they saw fit, constrained only by the requirements of truth. The very conception of ‘objective knowledge’, based on rigorous intellectual criteria and subject

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to ‘peer review’, promised to protect universities from political is to be treated as a description, a normative prescription or interference. In most democracies, academic freedom came some sort of ‘as-if ’ justification. to include the right of academics to be active citizens, and This imaginary has a genealogy going back at least to to pronounce on political questions, making universities the Kant (1784). Kant made a distinction between ‘public’ and home of public intellectuals, and a creative and independent ‘private’ to defend the normative practice of scholars engaging cultural force. As Gappa et al., (2007, p. 226-7) note, this has in untrammelled ‘public deliberation’. In our time there are meant that academic freedom has been understood to include still many prepared to defend this position. The idea has the freedom of teachers to discuss their subject in classrooms, been tirelessly adumbrated in the USA from Arendt (1967; freedom to conduct research and publish its results and 2006) to Cohen and Yapa (2005) and Mitchell (2008). freedom to speak and write Habermas (1991; 1992; 1996) as citizens. This also includes treats universities as a crucial What too many academics do is conceive the idea that academics have part of the modern ‘public of ‘academic freedom’ as ‘freedom from’ the autonomy to plan their sphere’.

Menand (1996, courses, select the materials p. 4) likewise emphasises excessive intervention by governments or they will use, and decide the that: … academic freedom is outside interests, while actively, sometimes best methods to use to teach not simply a kind of bonus even enthusiastically, complying with the the materials to their students. enjoyed by workers within the sometimes bizarre requirements of policySimilarly, they can decide the system, a philosophical luxury makers and managers. best methods to examine their universities could function just topics and exercise discretion as effectively, and much more in searching out funding efficiently, without. It is the key sources for their research. legitimating concept of the entire enterprise.

In each instance, substantial autonomy is required in Recently Docherty (2011, p. 4) inverted Newman’s defence defining and structuring the core elements of their work. As of the university when proposing the ‘university of the idea’: Andrews (2007) points out, ‘public scholarship’ and ‘academic The university is above all governed by action of discovery freedom’ are frequently linked because of the commendable … such discovery and inventiveness – the adventure that is a impulse to regard the work of teachers and students ‘not as university – is shaped by an ongoing openness to possibility. the isolated, self-indulgent actions of a campus segregated The word that we usually give to such openness to possibility is just freedom … it is through the search for what we call true from society, but as the contributions of scholar-citizens with (in science), for that which we call good (in social sciences) membership in a larger community’. In this light, writers like and for that which we call beautiful (in aesthetics, arts and Cohen and Yapa (2005) claim ‘public scholarship’ involves, or humanities) that we practise this fundamental activity of ought to involve, scholarly and creative work which produces extending freedom in a just democracy. ‘public goods’ like accessible and valuable research and transformative teaching. Barnett (1997) goes much further again when he claims that academic freedom is essentially a So, what is actually happening? ‘critical’ activity: Though there are many ways we might now ‘skin the cat’, if By subjecting the curriculum content of higher education we were to ask how well the actual practices of Australian to criticism, we subject much of society’s cognitive structure academics conform with this imaginary, I suggest we will find (and thereby much of modern society itself ) to criticism. This an academic culture that has little connection with that idea. … is a condition of the maintenance of an open society in the modern age.

Rather, there is a gap between the imaginary and practice, a gap well characterised by Andrews (2007) in terms of a failure University academics’ discussion about ‘academic freedom’ to develop a practice of ‘public scholarship’. as part of a distinctive ‘imaginary’. Cornelius Castoriadis What too many academics do is conceive of ‘academic (1998) used this category to point to what John Thompson freedom’ as ‘freedom from’ excessive intervention by called ‘the creative and symbolic dimension of the social governments or outside interests, while actively, sometimes world, the dimension through which human beings create even enthusiastically, complying with the sometimes bizarre their ways of living together and their ways of representing requirements of policy-makers and managers. The evidence for their collective life’ (Thompson, 1984, p. 6). The category of this is to be found e.g., in the widespread use of ‘instruments’ the ‘imaginary’ also decisively reinstates a proper regard for such as the Course Experience Survey ostensibly used to the irrational and the undecidable into any theoretical frame assess the quality of teaching and learning in a unit of study while leaving open the question of whether this imaginary or the Course Evaluation Questionnaire (later the University vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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Experience Survey) which works like the National Student Survey in the UK, to evaluate a whole program of study such as a degree (Yorke, 2009). These ‘instruments’ work like many customer satisfaction surveys to establish whether students are satisfied with a module of study.

The passage in 2011 of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011 brought into existence Australia’s first sector wide higher education quality assurance regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. This set in place what Roger King called the ‘higher education regulatory state’ and the elaboration of numerous measures of research quality and research performance (King, 2007).

The introduction of digital academic management systems like Blackboard or Canvas to ‘deliver’ education, has further normalised new modes of surveillance and regulation courtesy of data analytics. Any cognitive dissonance elicited by pointing out how these signal a dramatic subversion of academic professionalism and autonomy is resolved by elaborating a culture of anguished, albeit ineffectual whingeing. For too many academics, academic freedom is understood in terms of what Isaiah Berlin called the ‘negative conception’ of liberty, as distinct from a conception of ‘positive liberty’. Let me creatively adapt this famous distinction.

Positive and negative academic freedom Berlin defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on a person imposed by other people. Positive liberty he defined both as freedom to, that is, the ability (not just the opportunity) to pursue and achieve willed goals but also as autonomy or self-rule, as opposed to dependence on others.

Berlin says negative freedom consists in ‘not being interfered with by others’, whereas the positive sense ‘derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master’. Berlin understood both concepts of liberty as advancing valid claims about what is necessary and good for human beings (e.g., Berlin, 1958, pp. 136–44). Both negative and positive liberty were, for him, genuine values, which might in some cases clash, but in other cases could be combined and might even be mutually interdependent.

As Andrews (2007) noted, claims by defenders of the traditional, i.e., elitist model of the university, such as Coady (2000) and Gaita (2012) that once we had ‘real’ universities and now we don’t, constructs an ‘as-if ’ binary.

Once upon a time our universities were small, filled with free scholars engaging in pure and unfettered scholarship, and teaching small numbers of students who were enrolled as students because they loved knowledge. Now we have instrumentalised, vocationally-oriented training institutes teaching intellectual philistines who just want a job. The result is an idea of ‘academic freedom’ characterised by elitism and social irrelevance threatened by its nemesis, a

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mass instrumental institution working in servitude to the market.

Defining the options in this restrictive way depends on a narrow conception of the university, the roles that it can and should play, and the public to whom it might properly relate.

A thinned out conception of academic freedom constructs real academic work as an activity that occurs in ‘splendid isolation’(i.e. Humboldt’s Einsamkeit) and is removed from any engagement with a public outside the university. Academic teaching or research is treated as if these were private matters, best conducted ‘outside of the public gaze and at a distance from public affairs’: [Any] conversation is private in that it is restricted to the initiated. On this account, freedom is constructed in negative terms i.e., freedom from interference in the form of demands to be useful or an assertion of authority by someone outside the institution. This model provides an intensely privatised kind of scholarship obligated only to preserve a regard for some ‘great tradition’ of intellectual effort (Andrews 2007, p. 61).

In constructing this binary what has gone missing is another option, namely ‘public scholarship’ which discharges an obligation framed in terms of the positive freedom enjoyed by academics who contribute to the public good.

Public scholarship which links teaching and research is precisely what Humboldt had in mind. It is what Jurgen Habermas understands to happen when intellectuals use: … arguments sharpened by rhetoric, [to] intervene on behalf of rights that have been violated and truths that have been suppressed, reforms that are overdue and progress that has been delayed [to] … address themselves to a public sphere that is capable of response, alert and informed (1991, p. 73).

Bohman (2005) too speaks to the democratic character of this conception of public scholarship: In a democracy all must be able to exercise their reason ‘without let or hindrance’ and not simply appeal as subjects to authorised agents who respond in light of their own criteria and grant entitlements in exchange for cooperation within existing practices. In some cases, it is necessary not only to criticise such norms but also to change the practices themselves. (Also, Docherty, 2011) And it is this conception of public scholarship that Alasdair MacIntyre spoke to when he identified universities as places: … where conceptions of, and standards of rational justification are elaborated, put to work in the detailed practices of enquiry, and themselves rationally evaluated, so that only from a university can the wider society learn how to conduct its own debates, theoretical or practical in a rationally defensible way (MacIntyre 1990, p. 222).

It is not enough to imagine academic freedom as the thoughtful, critical articulation of ideas, the demonstration

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of proof based on rigorous examination of evidence, the distinction between true and false, between careful and sloppy work, the exercise of reasoned judgment and so forth, all activities carried out in a private way. We need to imagine and practise a more expansive kind of academic freedom conceived less in terms of being free from interference (i.e., freedom from) and much more in a terms of being ‘free to’ pursue various public goods by engaging in those practices constitutive of rational and critical inquiry which involve in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault’s terms, speaking ‘truth to power’.

We need to remember that Arendt was horrified when in the ‘dark times’ of the 1930s she saw a generation of German academics embrace the Nazi regime. As she put it, ‘the problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did but what our friends did’ (Arendt, 2006, p. 11). As for Foucault he had been accused of being silent and unwilling to defend the ideas and the deeds of the new socialist government in power criticised for being a ‘silent intellectual’ (Tamboukou 2012, p.

855). At stake for both Arendt and Foucault was truth telling.

This is a practice informed not by a conventional conception of truth as correspondence, but one framed in Heideggerian terms as αλήhєια [Alethia] as ‘unhiddeness’ or ‘unforgetting’.

This was something to be achieved for Foucault by the practice of parrhesia, and by Arendt in the act of thinking, itself a dangerous act.

For Foucault (2011) parrhesia was ‘the courage of truth’ manifested when speaking the truth in extremely risky situations and defying any kinds of risk, including death. For Foucault it is in the act of parrhesia that a person assumes her right to speak, making this practice a quintessential precondition of positive freedom. As Tamboukou (2012, p. 853) notes there are four essential themes constitutive of parrhesia. First there is speaking the truth; then there is the courage to speak the truth in situations where there is a risk or danger for the truth-teller. Secondly, parrhesia is a form of criticism, either towards another or towards oneself that comes from below, from the less powerful. Finally, parrhesia as the telling of truth, is a duty freely embraced.

When Arendt saw in 1933 what the kind of disinterested value-free (wertfrei) style of academic scholarship common among German intellectuals led to, she was dismayed: This wave of cooperation made you feel surrounded by an empty space, isolated. I lived in an intellectual milieu… and I came to the conclusion that cooperation was, so to speak, the rule among intellectuals … I left Germany guided by the resolution that ‘Never again!’ I will never have anything to do with ‘the history of ideas’ again. I didn’t, indeed, want to have anything to do with this sort of society again (Bruehl-Young 1982, p. 108) Arendt slowly came to conceive of a different kind of active thinking. For Arendt, ‘thinking what we do’ was the vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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hardest thing we can ever do. For Arendt, thinking became an engaged activity motivated by an ethos of care and by amor mundi (love of the world). As her conversation with Karl Jaspers noted, there is an obligation that older academics have to their mostly younger students for that obligation that comes with the conception of freedom as a public act to promote the pursuit of truth (Arendt & Jaspers 1993, p.

451). Like Heidegger, Arendt understood thinking as a mode of connection in which ‘thinking is thanking’ (denken ist danken): both instantiate a freely chosen activity of care and engagement in pursuit of truth.

Without for a moment equating the ‘dark times’ Arendt experienced in the 1930s with the ‘dark times’ we now face, Stephen Ball (1995) reminds us how many contemporary academics have dealt with our version of the ‘dark times’. Ball highlighted the tendency of many academics to take refuge in various forms of ‘academic quietism’ and ‘intellectual isolationism’ (Ball 1995, p. 256) which he suggests are best understood as symptoms of the problem. Tamboukou agrees when she notes how ‘academic “resistance” has been translated into withdrawal from public academic spaces into archives, libraries and private studies: this is a strategy of hiding from the world and from each other’ (Tamboukou 2012, p. 860).

This is best understood as the exercise of negative freedom.

As Tamboukou argues, active thinking is a highly engaged form of thinking that prepares one to act in the real world (Tamboukou 2012, p. 857). Like Arendt, Tamboukou agrees that while thinking is too often conceived of as a form of retreat from the world and into silent introspection, active thinking involves a commitment to think responsibly: to move away from the comfortable bystander perspective and understand that it is only through engagement that we can rightly judge. Reframed as a positive freedom, our freedom as academics needs to combine parrhesia and thinking what we do and doing this in our academic practice understood as occurring in a public space.

This is why theorists such as Gutmann argue that, uniquely, academics can play a crucial role in linking education and democracy. This presupposes that they engage in their teaching as an ethical and political practice, and that it is tied to a mode of authority in which the ‘… democratic state recognises the value of political education in predisposing [students] to accept those ways of life that are consistent with sharing the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society’ (Gutmann, 1998, p. 42; also 1983).

On the face of it, the affordances of the new digital technologies should surely enhance the public qualities of this practice. Yet, as Bernard Stiegler (2015) has argued, the digital technologies have transformed the very conditions assumed to be indispensable to autonomous university education and research, thereby rendering suspect such traditional normative practices as reading, writing, reasoning and thinking critically

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(Stiegler 2015, p. 203-220). This points minimally to the need to discuss Stiegler’s argument.

Conclusion The kind of academic freedom at stake here is not to be confused either with normal scholarly critique or with overt dissent.

A small number of academics have been active in reflecting upon, analysing and writing about matters such as academic performativity, audit cultures and the McDonaldisation of the university. Nor is it to deny that in spite of dire warnings about the negative impact of the neoliberal cascade (e.g., Brown, 2015), what can be called the capacity for ‘academic dissent’ has never been entirely or effectively stifled in Australia (e.g., Anderson, 2008; Carmody, 2013; Heath & Burdon, 2013; Rhodes et al., 2018). There have been high profile cases involving academics who resisted managerialist power (e,g., Judith Bessant), or who became courageous whistle blowers (Gerd Schröder-Turk at Murdoch University), or who simply carried on expressing unpopular views and publicly criticising the work of their colleagues (Peter Ridd at James Cook University). These cases are significant because in each case, the academic involved was subjected to serious and sustained attempts to silence them by dismissal, or by taking disciplinary measures against them.

In the first two examples, the cases ended up in the Federal Court and were resolved in favour of the academics concerned (Bessant, 2014). There are also cases of effective collective academic resistance such as industrial action by academics at Sydney University attest.

Rather, I have emphasised a long-standing-crisis of academic freedom, one best understood as the absence of positive academic freedom. This does not have much to do with the confected crisis that conservative and neoliberal commentators allege is now a reality on our campuses.

Likewise, this doesn’t have anything to do with the nostalgic mythos sustained by defenders of the ‘traditional’ university.

As Henry Giroux (2009) says, to speak truth to power is not ‘a temporary and unfortunate lapse into politics on the part of academics’. Rather, ‘it is central to opposing all those modes of ignorance, market-based or otherwise instrumental rationalities, and fundamentalist ideologies that make judgments difficult and democracy dysfunctional’. Absent a detailed empirical study that I have yet to complete, I must leave it to the reader to ask themselves how often they see this kind of academic freedom practised in our universities e.g., in staff meetings, or in Academic Boards and Senates, or what happens when academics are asked to fill out the next management survey of staff morale or comment on the next meaningless university strategy plan.

Rob Watts is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University.

Contact: Rob.watts@rmit.edu.au

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Corporate power and academic freedom Andrew G. Bonnell University of Queensland

Traditionally, threats to academic freedom are associated with repressive government actions, and sometimes also with compliant university managers. In democracies, academic freedom can be undermined in more subtle ways. Where public funding for university research and teaching has diminished, universities have increasingly pursued relationships with, and money from, the private sector.

Private funding can come with expectations that have the potential to limit academic freedom. There is a body of literature that documents ways in which some pharmaceutical companies, in particular, have sought to exercise undue influence on research and publications by academics. So-called ‘philanthropic’ funding can also function as a Trojan Horse for corporate influence and the business or ideological objectives of donors. This paper examines the problem of corporate power on campus and considers possible remedies, including binding codes of conduct for universities’ relations with external partners.

Keywords: academic freedom; academic autonomy; research integrity; corporate influence; sponsored research

In 2016, a €100 million funding agreement between the Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung (Foundation), a research funding body sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Boehringer, and the University of Mainz gave rise to a scandal over the potential extent of corporate control over university research. Under the University’s agreement with the Boehringer Foundation (which had been made in 2012, and which was projected to be worth €150 million by 2023), the Boehringer Foundation was given a say in professorial appointments in the University’s Institute for Molecular Biology – with a representative of the Boehringer Foundation forming part of the selection committee, involvement in writing the job advertisements, and being able to effectively veto an appointment.

The Boehringer Foundation was also given an effective right of veto over publications based on the funded research.

The Boehringer Foundation also had the irrevocable right ‘to appoint a representative on the scientific board of the Institute for Molecular Biology and exercised detailed rights of oversight over operational matters (Kooperationsvertrag, 2012, clauses 1.21-1.22, 1.5, 5.4, 7.2). The University of Mainz sought to keep the agreement with the Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung secret, but journalists were successful in getting a court decision vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

to grant them access to the documents (Fokken, 2016). The President of the University of Mainz, Georg Krausch (who had signed the cooperation agreement with the Boehringer Foundation) conceded that the agreement contained ‘errors’ and did in fact allow a ‘right of veto’ to the Boehringer firm’s research entity (Feldwisch-Drentrup, 2016).

Critics such as Professor Christine Godt, Professor of European and International Economic Law at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, characterised the contract between the Mainz university and the Boehringer Foundation as illegal because of its breach of university autonomy, and even in breach of the constitution, because of the limitation on the freedom of publication of scientific findings, which contravened the constitution’s guarantee of the freedom of scientific research (Feldwisch-Drentrup, 2016). It was subsequently also revealed that another secret agreement between the clinic of the University of Mainz and Boehringer Ingelheim, relating to a longitudinal study of the health data of 15,000 people examined between 2007 and 2012, contained a clause stating that: ‘Further, it is contractually agreed with the principal sponsor of the study, Boehringer Ingelheim (BI), that all manuscripts must be approved by BI prior to their publication’ (Spiegel, 2016).

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In Australia, there have recently been intense debates about academic freedom and freedom of speech in universities.

These debates have not always been framed with care or precision and have often been highly selective in their focus.

Conservative media have focussed on students’ rights to defy supposed conventions of ‘political correctness’, the Morrison Government has campaigned against ‘foreign interference’ and has proposed highly intrusive regulatory procedures to free universities from the threat of interference by other countries’ governments, and right-wing think tanks have championed the right to advance heterodox scientific views, especially in relation to climate change.

Most of the public debate, and indeed most of the discussion within universities around academic freedom has been conspicuously silent about the huge pachyderm at the back of the lab, or in the classroom: the power and influence of private corporations in universities. On the contrary, governments have increasingly pushed universities to go to ever greater lengths to work for business and do the bidding of corporate ‘stakeholders’ and ‘clients’, and universities themselves are increasingly internalising this imperative and passing it on to their staff. Staff who were originally hired to conduct teaching and research are increasingly evaluated on such nebulous metrics as ‘engagement’ and ‘impact’, which increasingly refer to working with and for the private sector, and the growing scarcity of public research funding increasingly renders universities dependent on private funding for this core function. And yet, there has not been enough attention to the protocols that are needed to safeguard universities’ institutional autonomy, and academic freedom and integrity.

Elementary transparency is lacking, with agreements with private third parties typically cloaked in secrecy.

It is not being alleged here that the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation chose (or vetoed) specific professors, nor that it suppressed specific research findings. The point is that Mainz University and the Foundation concluded an agreement that expressly permitted such breaches of institutional autonomy and academic freedom. Defenders of the pharmaceutical industry justify confidentiality agreements based on the need to protect valuable patented or patentable intellectual property, but the relevant clauses are not confined to this, meaning that any research findings that Boehringer considered to be commercially disadvantageous could potentially be withheld from publication.

The pharmaceutical industry, to persist with this example, justifies its astronomical profits by reference to its commitment to research and development expenditure.

However, as Marcia Angell (2005), who edited the New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, showed in her book The Truth About Drug Companies, ‘Big Pharma’ tends to exaggerate the proportion of its revenue actually spent on researching new drugs, and most genuinely new discoveries

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(as opposed to ‘me-too’ drugs designed to extend the patent life of existing, already profitable drugs) have been made in publicly funded research institutes and universities. Angell also traced how the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and universities and research institutes has evolved since the 1980s (a change turbo-charged in the United States by the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which facilitated commercial partnerships between universities and drug companies, as well as the pro-business, deregulatory environment of the Reagan administration, and subsequent US administrations).

Prior to the 1980s, relations between university researchers and the drug companies were generally at arms-length, with researchers ‘largely independent of the companies that sponsored their work’ (Angell, 2005, p. 100). By the early 2000s, however, ‘companies are involved in every detail of the research – from design of the study through analysis of the data to the decision whether to publish the results’ (Angell, 2005, p. 100). Not only do universities and research institutes receive large sums in direct research funding from drug companies, but individual researchers also receive large amounts in consultancy arrangements, and it has become not uncommon for researchers and institutes to hold equity in firms that sponsor research. There is often a revolving door between the private sector and universities and research institutes, leading to researchers’ closer identification with the interests of the pharmaceutical companies.

Considering the increasing ‘alignment’ between researchers and corporate interests, it is worth noting the findings of a study cited by Angell that undertook a meta-analysis of the available English-language literature on industry-funded biomedical research that ‘assessed the relation between industry sponsorship and outcome in original research’ (Bekelman et al., 2003, p. 454). By ‘combining data from articles examining 1140 studies’, Bekelman et al. found that ‘industry-sponsored studies were significantly more likely to reach conclusions that were favourable to the sponsor than were non-industry studies’ (2003, p. 463). In Angell’s summary of the findings, industry-sponsored research was four times as likely to result in outcomes favourable to the sponsor than studies conducted by the National Institute of Health (Angell, 2005).

A 1998 analysis of studies on passive smoking found an even greater difference between the findings of industry-sponsored research and other, independent studies, with industry-funded research seven times as likely to find no evidence of harm from passive smoking than other studies (Barnes & Bero, 1998, also cited by Bekelman et al.). Such differences could result from a combination of conscious or unconscious bias in the design of studies and publication bias. Findings unfavourable to the sponsor’s products may not make it into published articles.

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off-prints of favourable studies for promotional purposes has authors attributed this statistical decline to increased vigilance even given some journals a financial incentive to publish such on the part of journals and increased awareness of the issue work. Bekelman et al. (2003) also found that the literature more generally, but the figure is still significant, especially showed that ‘industry ties are associated with both publication as the study relied on voluntary self-reporting, and it may delays and data withholding. These restrictions, often also be the case that individuals involved in ghost-written contractual in nature, serve to compound bias in biomedical publications are now more wary of admitting to the practice, research’ (Bekelman et al., 2003, p. 463). Bekelman et al.’s even anonymously (Wislar et al., 2011). analysis has been widely cited and corroborated by other The large trove of documents relating to ghost-writing on subsequent studies (Sismondo, 2008). The fact that the the Drug Industry Document Archive, hosted by the Library stream of citations to Bekelman et al. continues to the present of the University of California, San Francisco, testifies to year indicates that the relevance of the issues they identified the persistence and prevalence of the practice (University of has not abated.

California, San Francisco). Even if the trend is favourable, the In addition to the structural pressures that result in study by Wislar et al. shows that it is still possible for a great researchers seeking closer ‘strategic alignment’ with deal of corporate propaganda to be passed off as legitimate ‘stakeholders and industry partners’ (as the jargon of the neoacademic research. Indeed, in 2009 a number of ostensibly liberal managerial university would put it), in the interest peer-reviewed academic journals published by the world’s of maximising ‘engagement and impact’, and perhaps also biggest and most profitable publisher of scholarly journals, return on equity, there have Elsevier, were found to be been cases of more direct sponsored compilations largely The practice of drug companies hiring attempts by industry to exercise of reprinted articles dedicated people to ghost-write articles to which an influence on research to the promotion of one drug outcomes. company’s products (Merck’s) academics, keen to meet quantitative One strategy drug (Goldacre, 2012; Singer, benchmarks to demonstrate their ‘researchcompanies have used to expand 2009). active’ status, and doctors ... will append the market for their products is Ghost-writing is only their names, is not confined to a few by procuring and even ghostone issue that has arisen in notorious but isolated cases. writing articles on ‘Phase IV’, researchers’ collaborations post-approval studies, which with industry. A 2005 study push the idea that a drug can be

by Australian researchers effective for uses other than those for which it was originally found that: ‘Examples of possibly serious research misconduct approved. In 2004, the drug companies Warner-Lambert and were reported by 8.6% of respondents, equivalent to 21% Pfizer had to pay a settlement of US $420 million to resolve of those with an active research relationship with industry’ charges under the False Claims by their subsidiary Parke-Davis (Henry et al., 2005, p. 557). Apart from company personnel relating to that company’s breaches of the False Claims Act drafting reports (which some researchers apparently viewed as in relation to its promotion of the epilepsy drug Neurontin, unproblematic), other undesirable outcomes and/or potential which included the ghost-writing of numerous articles which integrity breaches included: premature termination of studies were then published under the names of physicians and (which might have sound reasons, such as adverse clinical researchers (Angell, 2005). symptoms, but also included commercial considerations); The practice of drug companies hiring people to ghost‘“unreasonable delay” in presentation or publication of results’, write articles to which academics, keen to meet quantitative and ‘failure to publish key research findings’: benchmarks to demonstrate their ‘research-active’ status, and In one case, a negative outcome (increased mortality) was doctors (keen to be opinion-leaders in their field, which can reported as a factor. One respondent noted that unpublished lead to lucrative consultancy and conference engagements) data were omitted from the company’s literature on the drug, will append their names, is not confined to a few notorious and another reported being discouraged from presenting adverse reaction data from an unpublished study. but isolated cases. It has been widely prevalent (Goldacre, 2012; Bosch et al. 2012). Academics who have put their Editing of a report to make a drug look better, concealment names to ghost-written articles include professors from a of findings relevant to the study’s conclusions, and alteration number of leading universities. A 2008 survey of contributors of patient data or statistics were also reported. Respondents to six leading general medical journals discovered that at least provided additional detail, describing omission of findings 21% of articles published in these journals featured ghost or from company literature, a favourable report being written ‘honorary’ authors. This was a lower figure than a previous about a drug that ‘didn’t work’ and under-reporting of adverse events. One respondent wrote: ‘It is common for adverse survey conducted in 1996, when the figure was 29%. The vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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event data to be favourably analysed and selectively reported’ (Henry et al., 2005, p. 559).

Sometimes researchers push back against corporate interference in sponsored research. Marcia Angell recounts the case of Dr James O. Kahn (University of California, San Francisco) and Dr Stephen W. Lagakos (Harvard), who in 1996 conducted research on a drug intended to treat AIDS. When they discovered that the drug was ineffective, the company sponsoring the research, a bio-tech company called Immune Research Corporation, sought to prevent them from publishing a paper reporting their negative finding, withholding some of the data (which were the property of the company under the contract) and sued Kahn and UCSF for millions of dollars (fortunately, unsuccessfully). The reaction of the company CEO was telling: ‘Just put yourself in my position. I spent over $30 million. I would think I have certain rights’ (Angell, 2005, p. 111).

Encroachment by industry on academic freedom and academic integrity has not been restricted to the pharmaceutical industry. The tobacco industry pioneered some of the methods used by industry to undermine the independence and integrity of scientific research, in ways that have been documented in great detail. In 1953, American tobacco leaders enlisted the aid of the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to develop a strategy to deal with the mounting scientific evidence of the lethality of their product.

Allan Brandt has characterised the strategy as follows: ‘what was radical about Hill’s proposed strategy was the desire to manipulate scientific research, debate, and outcomes’ (Brandt, 2012, p. 64). Rather than trying to discredit science in a frontal attack, the industry recruited sympathetic collaborators who presented themselves as ‘sceptics’ regarding the mounting expert consensus on the health risks of tobacco, sowing doubts about the evidence with the argument that there were always two sides to a scientific debate.

The industry and its PR people also set about creating ‘an industry-sponsored research entity’, reasoning that ‘offering funds directly to university-based scientists would enlist their support and dependence. Moreover, it would have the added benefit of making academic institutions ‘partners’ with the tobacco industry in its moment of crisis’ (Brandt, 2012, p. 65).

For this strategy to work, the industry not only had to recruit willing collaborators among the research community, it also had to keep a tight rein on the sponsored research enterprise: ‘From the outset, Hill & Knowlton exerted full control over the industry’s collaborative research program’ (Brandt, 2012, p.65). The Big Tobacco/ Hill & Knowlton strategy has been widely viewed as providing a template for other corporate disinformation campaigns, notably those of the fossil fuels industry.

Another industry in which industry-sponsored research has been found to be accompanied by conflicts of interest, declared

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or otherwise, and pervasive bias, is the soft-drink industry. A 2016 review of the research literature on artificially sweetened beverages came to the conclusions: Artificial sweetener industry sponsored reviews were more likely to have favourable results (3/4) than non-industry sponsored reviews (1/23), RR: 17.25 (95% CI: 2.34 to 127.29), as well as favourable conclusions (4/4 vs. 15/23), RR: 1.52 (95% CI: 1.14 to 2.06). All reviews funded by competitor industries reported unfavourable conclusions (4/4). In 42% of the reviews (13/31), authors’ financial conflicts of interest were not disclosed. Reviews performed by authors that had a financial conflict of interest with the food industry (disclosed in the article or not) were more likely to have favourable conclusions (18/22) than reviews performed by authors without conflicts of interest (4/9), RR: 7.36 (95% CI: 1.15 to 47.22).

Risk of bias was similar and high in most of the reviews (Mandrioli et al., 2016, pp. 1-2).

The food and beverage industry has been responsible for research into many kinds of products that invariably find beneficial, or at least no harmful, effects of its products, while non-sponsored, independent research has come to negative or at least more differentiated conclusions (Nestle, 2016).

Sometimes sponsored researchers don’t even need to bias their research to suit their sponsors’ agendas: when scientists studying the benefits of exercise are paid by the makers of sugar-laden soft drinks, they may be reporting genuine health benefits from exercise, but still be part of a strategy of misdirection by the industry, designed to shift the focus away from the health risks of excessive sugar consumption.

Private money and influence do not always come in the form of industry-sponsored research. There is also the influence of philanthropy, in all its guises. Philanthropy is generally seen as an unqualified good – after all the word means ‘love of humankind’. Often philanthropy justifies its name, when individuals donate money to advance knowledge, or to fund scholarships for disadvantaged students, or to fund research that has the potential to alleviate human suffering.

However, sometimes, donors’ love of humanity can be highly selective. As early as 1910, the railroad heiress Mary Harriman, believed to be the wealthiest woman in the United States, or perhaps the world at that time, funded the Eugenics Record Office, run by Charles Davenport, which was dedicated to preventing the ‘decay of the American race’ by propaganda and lobbying for both eugenics and immigration restriction. It also sought to offer training courses in the science of eugenics to recent graduates from elite colleges (Okrent, 2019).

Since Mary Harriman’s efforts at promoting eugenics and immigration restriction, the reach of wealthy individuals and corporations into university campuses has increased significantly. One of the features of the neo-liberal political hegemony from the 1980s to its current crisis has been the vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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engineering of public opinion in a pro-big business, ‘rightthe money, giving conservatives the resources to train a new libertarian’ direction through media empires such as that of generation of scholars, who would also be generously nurtured Rupert Murdoch and privately funded ‘think-tanks’, which, with lucrative grants and fellowships. usually with completely non-transparent corporate backing Beneficiaries of the Olin Foundation’s largesse included have endlessly waged a war of ideas and influence to drag the Harvard politics professor Samuel P. Huntington, who politics further to the right (Mayer, 2017; MacLean, 2017). headed the generously funded Olin Institute at Harvard.

Jane Mayer (2017) has described the way in which the wealthy Huntington was well-known for his thesis of the ‘clash of Koch brothers (Charles and David)‚ and other like-minded civilisations’ in which a reified version of ‘Western civilisation’ figures, ‘weaponised philanthropy’ to advance their campaign contended with rival cultural-religious formations for against welfare spending, taxation of the rich, regulation of hegemony in a new version of the Cold War. Huntington business, public education, and many other bêtes noires of the (2004) also wrote a book called Who Are We? The Challenges New Right. This war of ideas and influence, and the capital to American National Identity, which was viewed by many that fuels it, have not stopped at the gates of universities. critics as a proto-Trumpian polemical assertion of an essential One such ideological enterprise was the conservative ‘Anglo-Protestant’ American Identity, under threat from alien John M. Olin Foundation, set up by the eponymous arms Catholic-Hispanic and Islamic influences. and chemical manufacturer J.M. Olin, which between In addition to this ‘beachhead’ strategy for infiltrating elite 1973 and 2005 spent approximately half of its capital (of universities by giving selected conservatives the resources to about US $370 million) on recruit a new generation of what one analyst has dubbed like-minded researchers, the More recently, the Koch brothers set up ‘movement philanthropy’ Olin Foundation was also ‘free enterprise’ research centres at George – the strategic donation of successful in sponsoring ‘Law money for overtly ideological and Economics’ academic Mason University and West Virginia aims, seeking to build cadres programs in several leading US University, institutes that came with of right-leaning pro-business higher education institutions ‘strings attached’ including influence in activists in leading US higher in the mid- to late-1980s, professorial appointments. education institutions (Mayer, which Mayer describes as a 2017, p.94). William Simon, ‘stealth political attack’, citing a former Treasury secretary Olin Foundation executive under the Nixon and Ford administrations, became head of and neo-conservative James Piereson as stating: ‘I saw it [Law the Olin Foundation in 1977 and articulated a strategy of and Economics] as a way into the law schools – I probably creating a ‘counter-intelligentsia’ which would oppose the shouldn’t confess that’. While the program sounded politically alleged left/liberal (in the US American sense) domination of neutral, Piereson characterised it as having ‘a philosophical public and elite higher education institutions. Simon argued thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government’ that: ‘Capitalism has no duty to subsidise its enemies’, and (Mayer, 2017, p. 108; MacLean, 2017). that philanthropic foundations needed to stop ‘the mindless More recently, the Koch brothers set up ‘free enterprise’ subsidising of colleges and universities whose departments research centres at George Mason University and West of politics, economics and history are hostile to capitalism’.

Virginia University, institutes that came with ‘strings attached’ Instead, private funding bodies had to seek out those scholars including influence in professorial appointments (Mayer, and writers who ‘understood the relationship between 2017, p. 155; MacLean, 2017). The exposure of details of the political and economic liberty’ and ply them with ‘grants, Kochs’ funding arrangements at George Mason University grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and caused a major scandal in 2018, after student activists sued more books’ (Mayer, 2017, p. 102). the university to get greater transparency on its relations with The Olin Foundation developed the ‘beachhead theory’, donors. It was revealed that the Kochs nominated two out of i.e., the strategy of seeking to gain influence in elite universities five positions on selection committees for professorships in (such as Princeton or Harvard) by seeking out conservative the University’s pro-free market Mercatus Center, and that professors and endowing them with large grants that would the sponsors also played a role in the evaluation of professors enable them to wield more influence in their institutions and through their representation on advisory boards (Flaherty, attract disciples to their research programs (Mayer, 2017).

2018).

Wary of being seen to be openly attacking academic freedom That these issues are not confined to the United States and academic integrity by advertising for ideological warriors, has been shown by the recent history of the Ramsay Centre the Olin Foundation applied neutral-sounding names to for Western Civilisation in Australia (Bonnell, 2019). their funding programs, while nonetheless carefully targeting The Ramsay Centre has precisely followed the American vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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neo-conservative template of ‘movement philanthropy’, with its emphasis on conservative cadre recruitment and targeting funding at conservatives, at the same time as public universities’ humanities and social science schools are largely de-funded by the Liberal-National Party federal government.

While the Memorandum of Understanding between the University of Queensland (UQ) and the Ramsay Centre pledges support for the principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy, the agreement also allows the Ramsay Centre a seat on the selection committee for academic appointments – a blatant breach of institutional autonomy in itself.

With notable lack of transparency, the full agreement between UQ and the Ramsay Centre is secret, and requests by the National Tertiary Education Union under Right to Information legislation for a copy of the agreement have been denied on the grounds that the parties to the agreement signed a confidentiality agreement, meaning that a university and a donor can collude to avoid transparency obligations and to keep aspects of an agreement secret by the simple expedient of a confidentiality clause. There is therefore currently no way of knowing what other commitments UQ may have made that might compromise its autonomy, other than already giving the Ramsay Centre a voice in appointments.

Elsewhere in Australia, in a recent enterprise bargaining round, a couple of universities – including the University of Melbourne (under Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis) – sought to limit academic freedom by including the University’s ‘commercial interests’ as a factor that needed to be weighed against the exercise of academic freedom, wording that was successfully resisted by the National Tertiary Education Union.

In summary, declining public funding and government policy aimed at making universities more responsive to the demands of the private sector are both pushing universities into ever greater dependence on corporate and private money. There are, of course, plenty of cases in which private sponsorship of research is beneficial. Most private citizens who donate to medical research do so to address genuine public needs, and most such donors would not dream of trying to bias selection committees for professorships in medicine, for example, relying instead on the professional expertise of university medical schools. Genuinely armslength philanthropy can be a very positive thing.

However, the (recent) historical record shows that corporations of great wealth have often sought to use their funding of research in ways that will maximise their commercial advantage, even at the cost of the integrity of the research. Similarly, wealthy foundations have increasingly sought to exercise ideological influence over universities’ curricula and staffing choices through the strategic deployment of ‘movement philanthropy’. What can be done

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to safeguard university autonomy and academic freedom under these conditions of late neo-liberalism?

One response to the 2016 Mainz-Boehringer scandal in Germany was to call for the University to adopt a clear code of conduct to govern its relationships with outside bodies.

Such codes exist at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main ( Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 2008), and several other German universities. A code of conduct should include explicit commitments to academic freedom and institutional autonomy. These commitments should include clear statements of the right to publish – and duty to publish – research findings, regardless of the wishes of outside parties, and should explicitly prohibit any external interference in selection and staff appraisal processes.

They should also guarantee full transparency, with agreements between universities and outside funding bodies being published on university websites. As the adage goes, sunlight is a good disinfectant. Improved public funding is also essential to strengthen universities’ independence, autonomy, and backbones. Finally, governance reform is needed. Australian vice-chancellors’ remuneration is excessive by international standards, and has served to make VCs more aligned in their habitus and outlook with the corporate executives and company directors, with which university senates are now stacked, than with the community of scholars from which most VCs originally came. While governing bodies need access to financial and business expertise, they need to be more representative of staff and students, both to hold managers genuinely accountable and to ensure that governing bodies have access to enough knowledge and expertise in higher education and on the specific institutions. Rebuilding academic self-governance and rolling back the managerial and corporate capture of universities, is also an important measure to safeguard academic freedom.

Andrew G. Bonnell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of several books about Germany.

Contact: a.bonnell@uq.edu.au

References Angell, M. (2005). The Truth About the Drug Companies. New York: Random House.

Barnes, D. & Bero, L. (1998). Why review articles on the health effects of passive smoking reach different conclusions. JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, May 20; 279 (19): 1566-70. doi: 10.1001/ jama.279.19.1566.

Bekelman, J., Li, Y., & Gross, C. (2003). Scope and impact of financial conflicts of interest in biomedical research: a systematic review. JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, Jan 22-29; 289 (4), 454-65. doi: 10.1001/jama.289.4.454.

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Bonnell, A. (2019). The Ramsay Centre and “Western Civilisation”. An attempt at historical perspective. Australian Universities’ Review, 61(2), 65-71.

Bosch, X., Esfandiari, B., & McHenry, L. (2012). Challenging Medical Ghostwriting in US Courts. PLOSMed, 9(1), Jan. doi: 10.1371/journal. pmed.1001163 Brandt, A. (2012). Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics. American Journal of Public Health, January, 102(1), 63-71. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2011.300292 Feldwisch-Drentrup, H. (2016). Verkaufte Wissenschaft. (Science Sold). Der Freitag, 37. Retrieved from https://www.freitag.de/autoren/ der-freitag/verkaufte-wissenschaft Flaherty, C. (2018). Uncovering Koch Role in Faculty Hires. Inside Higher Education, 1 May. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered. com/news/2018/05/01/koch-agreements-george-mason-gavefoundation-role-faculty-hiring-and-oversight Fokken, S. (2016), Uni Mainz muss Verträge mit Boehringer Stiftung offenlegen (Mainz uni has to disclose contracts with Boehringer Foundation). Der Spiegel (online), 12 May. Retrieved from https:// www.spiegel.de/lebenundlernen/uni/uni-mainz-muss-vertraege-mitboehringer-ingelheim-stiftung-offenlegen-a-1091956.html Goldacre, B. (2012). Bad Pharma. How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients. London: Fourth Estate.

Henry, D. A., Kerridge, I. H., Hill, S. R., McNeill, P., Doran, E., & Newby, D. A., et al. (2005). Medical specialists and pharmaceutical industry-sponsored research: a survey of the Australian experience.

Medical Journal of Australia, 182, 557-560.

Huntington, S. (2004). Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity, New York: Simon and Schuster.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. (2008). Code of conduct of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University for accepting private third party donations. Retrieved from http://www.hof.uni-frankfurt.de/de/ about-us/house-of-finance-stiftung/stiftungskodex.html

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MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in Chains. Brunswick, Vic.: Scribe Mandrioli D., Kearns C., & Bero L. (2016). Relationship between Research Outcomes and Risk of Bias, Study Sponsorship, and Author Financial Conflicts of Interest in Reviews of the Effects of Artificially Sweetened Beverages on Weight Outcomes: A Systematic Review of Reviews. PLoS ONE 11(9): e0162198. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0162198.

Mayer, J. (2017). Dark Money. Brunswick, Vic.: Scribe.

Nestle, M. (2016). Food Industry Funding of Nutrition Research. The Relevance of History for Current Debates. JAMA Intern Med.; 176 (11), 1685-1686. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5400.

Okrent, D. (2019). The Guarded Gate, New York: Scribner.

Singer, N. (2009) ‘Merck Paid for Medical “Journal” without Disclosure’, New York Times, 13 May. Retrieved from https://www. nytimes.com/2009/05/14/business/14vioxxside.html Sismondo, S. (2008). How pharmaceutical industry funding affects trial outcomes: Causal structures and responses. Social Science & Medicine, 66, 1909-1914.

Spiegel, Der (2016). Streit um Einflussnahme von Boehringer Ingelheim auf die Uniklinik Mainz’. (Dispute over Boehringer Ingelheim’s influence on the Mainz University Hospital), Der Spiegel (online), 22 August. Retrieved from https://www.spiegel.de/ lebenundlernen/uni/uniklinik-mainz-weist-vorwurf-der-boehringereinflussnahme-zurueck-a-1108324.html University of California, San Francisco (N.D). Drug Industry Document Archive. Retrieved from https://www.industrydocuments. ucsf.edu/drug/ Wislar, J., Flanagin, A., Fontanarosa, P., & Deangelis, C. (2011).

Honorary and ghost authorship in high impact biomedical journals: a cross sectional survey. British Medical Journal, Oct 25; 343: d6128. doi: 10.1136/bmj.d6128.

Kooperationsvertrag. (2012). Kooperationsvertrag zwischen der Johann-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz [...] und dem Institut für Molekulare Biologie gemeinnützige GmbH [...] und der Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung [...[ zum Betrieb des Institutes für Molekulare Biologie gemeinnützige GmbH, gefördert durch die Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung, 2012. (Cooperation agreement between the Johann Gutenberg University Mainz [...] and the Institute for Molecular Biology non-profit GmbH [...] and the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation [...] for the operation of the Institute for Molecular Biology non-profit GmbH, funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, 2012). Retrieved from https://www.wdr.de/tv/applications/daserste/ monitor/pdf/2016/molekulare-biologie.pdf

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Precarious work and funding make academic freedom precarious Jeannie Rea Victoria University

During January 2021, students and staff at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul were arrested and detained for protesting against the appointment of a new rector who is an ally of President Erdoğan. University staff and students, along with journalists, civil servants and members of the judiciary have been targets of Erdoğan’s relentless smothering of opposition. While many have been jailed, many others have charges hanging over them, have been suspended or dismissed from their jobs and had their passports seized.

An initial focus of Erdoğan’s ire against universities was the Academics for Peace, who, in 2016, organised a petition protesting the persecution of the Kurds and calling for a negotiated just peace. Similarly, international organisations in support of academic freedom and workers’ rights – including Scholars at Risk (SAR) and Education International (EI) – debated whether an appropriate course of action would be to boycott interactions with all Turkish universities, or focus specifically on those doing the Government’s bidding, including by seeking to silence staff and students with tactics such as making students spy on their lecturers. At one stage, deans were dismissed across the country, and university senior professional officers have also been removed. The dilemma was would a boycott, stopping collaboration on research and publishing, or excluding participation in conferences have the unintended consequence of further isolating our Turkish colleagues.

Turkish academics urged international supporters to be very public about why they were boycotting collaboration – and why particular Turkish universities were targeted. This has meant clamouring to be heard in the crowded higher

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education space, alongside the even more crowded mainstream and social media spaces. Calling on our own governments to act is subsumed amongst competing priorities and cowardice.

And, of course, other governments and universities do not have clean hands. In Australia, university staff may not be rounded up, detained and dismissed for signing a protest letter, but we have seen our governments behave similarly to the Turkish Government in blatantly interfering in the allocation of government funded research grants.

Scholars at Risk Turkey’s Academics for Peace were awarded the Scholars at Risk (SAR) Courage to Think Award in 2018 ‘for their extraordinary efforts in building academic solidarity and in promoting the principles of academic freedom, freedom of inquiry, and the peaceful exchange of ideas’. (https://www. scholarsatrisk.org) SAR continues to protest against the ongoing attacks on university workers and students and has also supported academics fleeing Turkey to find safe havens in other universities around the world. SAR was established for exactly such a purpose, and over the past two decades, the SAR network has relocated many persecuted academics across the world. For its program to work, the cooperation of university senior management is needed to put the principles of academic freedom into concrete action. Seven Australian universities and the NTEU are SAR affiliates.

Rahil Dawood was the recipient of SAR’s Courage to Think Award for 2020. Dr Dawood, an Associate Professor

Precarious work and funding make academic freedom precarious Jeannie Rea

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in the Human Science Institute of Xinjiang University, solidarity actions and demand Australian universities back and founder of the Minorities Folklore Research Centre in such actions, but is that enough?

Xinjiang University, was recognised for her work, alongside that of other academics and students of the Xinjiang Jailed for teaching feminism Uyghur Autonomous Region, who continue to struggle for academic freedom and freedom of opinion, expression, When I listened to an Iranian feminist anthropologist speak belief, association, and movement. SAR reported that in of being jailed and then having to escape her country for December 2017, Dr Dawood told a relative of her plans advocating equality between women and men as part of her to travel from Urumqi to Beijing, and then disappeared. teaching, I paused a moment to reflect on my comparatively It is suspected that she continues to be detained at an petty frustrations at the persistence of sexism in the Australian undisclosed location. academy and its institutions. But I only paused a moment, as These are clear academic freedom cases. They are clear I know it matters to my sisters in Iran, and elsewhere, that we human rights and workers’ rights cases. They impact upon keep supporting feminist scholarship and fighting for justice all those directly involved and have wider implications locally and equity here. I just need to listen to the women in my and globally. In SAR’s 2019 annual report of the Academic classrooms, both local and international students, rail against Freedom Monitoring Project, SAR’s Executive Director, the injustices towards them as women, to be emboldened to Robert Quinn declared, ‘Attacks on higher education keep on teaching and advocating. Being a consistently nagging communities, regardless feminist is not very popular of their location, scale, or in Australian universities, but The attacks on university staff and students scope, hold consequences it’s also easier for me with an engaged in teaching, researching and for societies everywhere.’ He ongoing job and established continued, ‘In our increasingly reputation. speaking out against the state, military interconnected world, these It concerns me that too and religious powers, and for fairness, attacks erode an essential, many early career academics democracy, and equality, are increasing. global space where academics, have learned to be silent about students, and the public at feminism, and queasy about large can come together to even talking and researching understand and solve the complex problems that are affecting on gender. They know, and have even been warned, not to us all.’ (https://www.scholarsatrisk.org) jeopardise their opportunities. Young women say they do not The attacks on university staff and students engaged in want to always have to raise gendered discrimination and sexist teaching, researching and speaking out against the state, behaviour. Many young men can see what is going on but are military and religious powers, and for fairness, democracy, apprehensive about intervening. LGBTIQ students and staff and equality, are increasing. Violent attacks – including continue to protect themselves and one another by not being bombings and murder – wrongful imprisonments and out at university. I look for inspiration and courage to Chilean prosecutions, pressure on student expression and restrictions student feminists who bared their breasts to protest about on academic publishing and travel, are each common across sexism and gendered violence in and beyond universities. the world, from the US and Israel, to Hong Kong, Brazil I am currently in awe of the students and university staff of and Sudan. From the relative safety of Australia, we also hear Myanmar leading and joining the current mobilisation against of more cases of Australian academics being harassed and the coup – at great personal risk – to continue the fight for a detained while working overseas. As has been noted by many fair society, for equal rights and democratic institutions. academics and commentators, liberal democratic principles of free speech and movement, alongside academic freedom, are Rising up for Black Lives Matter very much a battle ground in the 21st century. Free movement of academics and students around the world is critical to So, we have to ask: why are our universities so quiet in freedom, of thought and action. comparison with students, staff and even university Seeking to make comparisons between being persecuted leaderships in many other places? Why didn’t our campuses for exercising academic freedom and freedom to organise ignite, joining the rising up (again) of the Black Lives Matter internationally, and here in Australia, can seem pretentious. movement in 2020? Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (I just read in an international student’s essay of the military leaders and activists argued that we had to take to the streets bursting into her university library and residential college despite pandemic public health restrictions. They argued that with tear gas and firing weapons in retaliation to an antiwe must seize the moment created by the brief spotlight that government protest.) We can, and should, encourage exposed the shame of disgraceful levels of incarceration and vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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deaths in custody of First Nations peoples in Australia. Bitter experience has taught that the spotlight would not linger – and it has not.

But in Australian universities, the call for decolonisation has not erupted, nor demands to dismantle the structures and institutions of white supremacy. The mumblings are certainly there, but let’s face the reality. Australian universities may have opened the doors to more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, staff and communities, but it is a constant battle to get in, and to stay in. At the same time, most university staff and students are able to go about their daily lives without thinking about history and racist legacies today. Meanwhile, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues are left to carry the load of expectations that they will alert the rest of us to respond and mobilise, while also carrying the heavy weight of their community responsibilities as well as intergenerational trauma – and facing racism and discrimination every day, including in universities.

Equity and access to academic freedom If racism, sexism, discrimination and harassment are part of your everyday experience at university, you do not have equity and access to practise academic freedom. ‘Academic freedom’ is not a philosophical debate, nor even a political one. It can be quite pragmatic. We can have debates about the extent of the extra licence and the privilege for academics to research, teach and publish without censorship. We do need clauses in collective agreements and policy and legislation recognising academic freedom. But this is often a discourse of, and for, the privileged. Scientists and other researchers in government employment envy the academic freedom of their university colleagues. They look to us to speak out, as they can be silenced and sacked if they do so.

Academic freedom is a responsibility, not a right. It is to speak truth to power; to honour the liberal university goal of working for the public good; and for the publicly funded university, in particular, to act in the public interest.

What then is stopping us speaking truth to power in Australian universities today? There are but a handful of academics and other university staff and students, who have been disciplined, suspended and dismissed for activities that arguably fall within academic freedom definitions. It is troubling that there are thousands of academic staff and students who are feeling censored, and censoring themselves, every day.

Precarious work and funding curtail academic freedom There are three big and intertwined obstacles to the exercise of academic freedom in Australian universities today, which are

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not unique to Australia but are often overlooked in focussing on the bigger human and professional rights picture. These are insecure employment, unreliable funding and pressure in partnerships.

Insecure employment Insecure employment is now the norm in Australian universities. Academics no longer have ‘tenure’ even when employed in an ongoing capacity. There were very good reasons for academic tenure, and they were not because of any commitment by employers to workers’ rights. Tenure facilitates the academic freedom to fearlessly pursue answers.

Academics were hard to dismiss, even if their research had gone down rabbit holes or they offended someone.

Today in Australia, most academic staff are employed on contracts – mainly sessional contracts – which are in effect the same as doing piece work. This has been extensively exposed, documented and analysed elsewhere. The reality of living from one contract to the next means that speaking out may mean no job next time around. Sessionally-employed academics are reluctant to make suggestions on changes to content or pedagogy as this may be construed as criticism by their supervisor. They are often reluctant to act independently in their ‘classroom’, and indeed are directed to stick to the script. Staff activity can be monitored and recorded in the digital classroom. Sessionally-employed academics are not usually really part of a course team and cannot initiate new or revamped units of study. They can only undertake the work assigned to them. They are not eligible to stand or vote for academic boards or councils and discouraged from getting involved in the university. Contracted staff have a little more opportunity to be part of the team but are still always conscious of keeping their heads below the parapet.

For research staff, academic and professionally employed, contract employment is highly problematic. When researchers had tenured positions, it was expected that they would call out, debate and even close down research activities that were judged to be dangerous or not independent. Whistleblowing was always dangerous and could backfire and end careers, but today even with whistleblowing protections, there is probably greater reluctance to jeopardise employment for both income reasons and being able to continue monitoring and intervening in a project. The tenure era though, was largely a pale male enclave amongst whom many resisted opening up research inclusive of the standpoints and experiences of women or First Nations peoples, because that could be deemed dangerous and challenge dominant paradigms. So there have been improvements in opening gates but is it just coincidence that pushing open the gates has happened alongside the shift from ‘tenure’ to ‘ongoing’ – with most staff not ongoing at all.

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Insecure employment practices of universities continue to on employing more secure staff. That increasing numbers contradict lofty proclamations of employment opportunity of universities are being found to have engaged in wage and equity. Researchers have produced the evidence that theft from the already vulnerable sessional academic staff is women are more likely to have careers stalled and stopped testimony to a very unhealthy obsession with employing staff through job insecurity. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander on the cheap. staff are more likely to be on contracts and experience systemic The responsibility of university councils and viceand systematic racism. chancellors is to advocate for more funding, rather than Senior academic and professional staff too are on contracts, continue acquiescing to government insistence on lower which also helps explain the timidity, bordering on cowardice, and lower expenditure on higher education. Universities are of our university leaderships. Most are on three-to-five-year terrified of offending and grants being further reduced. They contracts and will work to their KPIs with an eye on the next do not take positions critical of Government, or Opposition contract and promotion at their current, or next, university. policy, or pronouncements on anything – let alone on higher There is usually little long term personal investment in the education funding. university. Being brave means The impact of and how a pretty quick end to university we respond to climate The reliance on insecure employment is management and leadership change arguably constitutes explained by university managements as careers. the greatest crisis for our However, there continue universities today. So, maybe being due to government underfunding. to be idealistic and genuine this should be a measure of While this is largely true, it is also true commitments to the public whether academic freedom that university managements decide not good, but these strategies and means anything – and whether to spend their income on employing more initiatives are strangled because our universities are fulfilling secure staff. there are not resourced to make their mission to work for the them happen. Understaffing public good and in the public and overworking staff, interest – fearlessly speaking the majority insecurely employed, is the hallmark of our truth to power. Instead, we have timid governing bodies and universities. Restructures and job cuts are constant. So, managements reluctant to provide any ammunition for a another reason for reluctance in speaking truth to power is vindictive government to further cut funding. that staff are chronically overworked and stretched too thinly.

None of our Australian universities have declared a climate emergency. Climate scientists have called on universities, Unreliable underfunding governments and industry to do so. Even the UK Tory Government has. Our universities have not, and climate Government investment in public universities in Australia is change deniers continue to secure a public platform. We amongst the lowest in the OECD and continues to decline. should not forget that Australian climate scientists have not Students also pay higher tuition fees than most other only had to deal with constant funding cuts, but some also countries. The dirty secret that Australia’s universities ran experienced death threats just a few years ago. on the fees of onshore international students has now been In lieu of government funding, university leaders have exposed, as international students stopped coming in 2020 sought other avenues of income, and thus become much due to the coronavirus pandemic. more reliant on research partners, ‘philanthropists’, private, Increased competition over research funding leads to often corporate and civil society donors, as well as commercial conservative bids in areas of government determined priority partnerships. areas to the neglect of other areas and of blue-sky projects.

Universities cut the breadth and depth of course offerings and Pressure in partnerships are reluctant to experiment or to support courses and new or old areas of merit unless they are self-sufficient. Many of our There have been cases of censorship and disciplining of staff universities now have a very restricted disciplinary spread even whose comments are construed as possibly offending funding in their priority fields of study, and with very few ongoing sources, whether from our governments, foreign governments, early or late career academics. individuals, companies or organisations. Staff who speak out The reliance on insecure employment is explained are accused of potentially jeopardising an income source, and by university managements as being due to government thus not acting in the interests of their employer. underfunding. While this is largely true, it is also true that The request to remove social media posts from private university managements decide not to spend their income accounts, the refusal to allow events and particular speakers, vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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or insistence on particular event sponsors, are all examples of anticipating, and seeking to circumvent, offence from partners. There may not even have been a complaint.

It seems to be assumed that these partnerships, even commercial ones, are very fragile. Even implementing waste reduction strategies has been avoided in the past because it may upset commercial partners. These days many such companies are racing ahead on their own social responsibility and environmental sustainability commitments. The universities may well be left behind, still justifying partnerships with weapons manufacturers and big polluters.

So, the onus is also on university communities to not be intimidated by insinuations that they may be damaging university reputations, and thus the financial bottom line.

It is the students and the staff in ongoing jobs that are in the strongest positions to speak truth to power. Speaking out is unlikely to land you in jail in Australia but can still threaten your career and livelihood. But still, don’t we have a responsibility to stand up, act up and back up others?

Academic freedom is of little use as a concept if we do not exercise it; and fight the conditions that strangle it – in Australia, and in solidarity with university workers and students internationally.

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Follow Scholars at Risk at https://www.scholarsatrisk.org and Education International at https://www.ei-ie.org.

Jeannie Rea is an Associate Professor at Victoria University, Australia currently working in gender studies, international community development and planetary health. She was NTEU National President 2010-2018.

Contact: jeannie.rea@vu.edu.au

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Freedom in the university fiefdom Richard Hil

If your head’s in the freezer and your feet in the oven, it’s likely that, on average, your temperature will be just fine. This sort of perverse logic isn’t all that far removed from the question of academic freedom. Increasingly, today’s academics find themselves incarcerated in a Weberian iron cage with an executioner about to chop off their heads should they protest.

But hey, they’re told, you’re entirely free to express yourselves as long as you toe the line. It’s a familiar Hobbesian choice.

Not that universities will ever admit to it.

Despite all the lofty claims to the contrary, it seems that academic freedom across the world is under growing threat.

Academics in Hungary and Turkey have been persecuted while others in Russia, the Baltic states, Brazil, China, Egypt and the Philippines (to name a few) also face extreme difficulties (see Pills & Svenson, 2019). With the rise of populist authoritarianism comes the impulse to stifle dissent and rewrite common sense. Universities are often in the firing line, and governments the willing executioners.

In Australia, we’re seeing new fault lines appear in the academy as institutions are accused of left-wing bias or of peddling anti-Western sentiments. Meanwhile, the leading areas of critical inquiry – arts, humanities and social sciences – find themselves under assault from conservative elements.

The fact is that despite their often-cloistered appearance, universities tend to reflect general trends in society. They have, over the past 40 years or so, adopted a radical free market ideology that has drastically altered the character and functioning of the tertiary sector. The impacts of this way of thinking on university cultures have had far-reaching consequences on all aspects of scholarly work across the Anglosphere (see Reichman, 2019; Scott, 2019; Connell, 2019; Watts, 2017).

It’s in this context that the old chestnut of academic freedom has been well and truly roasted. But not according to today’s university manageriat; oh no. Despite mounting vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

evidence, they continue to insist that academic freedom – one of the most cherished of all tertiary values – remains an immutable part of institutional life. To suggest otherwise, they fume, is an outrageous slur. After all, how can the modern university retain its image as a bastion of free, critical thought if academies are muzzled? Still, as the manageriat likes to remind us, with freedom comes responsibility. You can’t just do your own thing or sound off when you work for a corporate entity, can you now? Reputations and brands have to be protected.

As you may be aware, yours truly has been on the case of Whackademia for some time now. My disillusionment with universities spans about 35 years. It began with me hearing claims by various vice-chancellors about their institutions’ tireless devotion to ‘excellence’ and ‘high quality’ education.

But here I was, along with my exhausted, yet dedicated colleagues, barely able to breathe as we sought vainly to cope with massive workloads, increasingly needy students, insensitive managers and totally unrealistic institutional expectations. Our daily experiences were defined by the cloying realities of neoliberal governance, administered through the Weberian-like isms of economic rationalism and managerialism. What most irked me were those glossy marketing brochures depicting happy, smiling academics attending to the supremely grateful students in hi-tech learning centres.

In stark contrast, most of the academics I knew were barely surviving. Many anaesthetised themselves with red wine, sleeping pills and a steady stream of complaint. Research was telling us that mental health problems among the nation’s scholars were on the rise and that job satisfaction was at an alltime low. Yet none of this seemed to matter to the manageriat – although they did promote various ‘wellbeing’ programs – who appeared hell-bent on brand promotion and balancing the books.

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I’m now more or less retired from academic work, although which loom over academics like a Damoclean sword. Fall I do continue to write books and articles like this one. My short and you’ll be required to please explain. Freedom academic friends, however, tell me that the neoliberal grip on to be interrogated. Freedom to acquiesce to institutional universities has tightened further over recent years. Core to performative measures. this is corporate compliance. This involves a complex web of Another aspect of neoliberal governance is the mangle of regulations, performance metrics and restrictive codes set out hyper individualism. Go into any school or department these in telephone directories otherwise known as policy manuals. days and you’ll find academics glued to their computer screens, The result is that the idea of unfettered academic freedom rarely straying to talk to colleagues. Tea breaks, staff meetings has all but disappeared. It’s not so much that academics and staff room booze-ups are things of the past. Competition are required to protect the corporate brand by not saying is the order of the day as academics vie with others over anything too ‘controversial’ (and certainly not about their workload allocations. It’s all rather sad really, given that own institutions!), or that they collegiality was once hailed have to run press releases and as the most rewarding part Core to this is corporate compliance. This other public announcements of an academic’s experience. involves a complex web of regulations, past gatekeepers, or that Freedom to be competitive and some academics are nervous disconnected. performance metrics and restrictive codes about upsetting international Ask most academics if they set out in telephone directories otherwise students, especially from feel free in the neoliberal known as policy manuals.

China. No, it’s all this, and university and they’ll likely more. burst out laughing. Ironic isn’t The constraints on academic it that the word freedom is one freedom are built into systems of university governance. How of the main pillars of neoliberalism yet never before has the so, you might ask? Let’s take three broad examples. university been so crushed under the weight of managerial It’s hard, if not impossible to avoid the choke hold of oversight. But academic freedom, defined by UNESCO as neoliberalism when it comes to pedagogy. Study guides the right ‘to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom are not only required to conform to the diktats of anointed in carrying out research and disseminating and publishing experts from Teaching and Learning, but they must also results’ should be a fundamental aspect of university life. It include criteria suited to the vocational aims of the modern also requires constant vigilance. economy through what are known as ‘graduate attributes’.

As Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of These are designed as measures of convenience for prospective University Professors put it ten years ago, academic freedom employers who peruse graduates’ e-portfolios for signs of should allow for open debate, the free exchange of ideas, critical thinking, intellectual rigour and an appreciation challenging others’ views, disagreeing with administrative of cultural diversity. The upshot is that critical thinking is rulings, offering latitude in course and program design, turned into a commodified product rather than something and being entitled to due process in front of one’s peers etc. that is experienced through active citizenship. This of course (Nelson, 2010). It doesn’t mean to bully, cajole, impose, fits into the neoliberal emphasis on job readiness, career and override, intimidate, or humiliate, nor does it mean to all things vocational. Hey presto, economism rules! Freedom break the law, to skip off one’s duties, to recklessly ignore to be a neoliberal clone. institutional policies and regulations (however tempting that Performance reviews are another example of neoliberal might be). creep. Officially promoted as an affable exchange between Getting the balance right between institutional interests the subject and line-manager, these rituals can be high-risk. and personal responsibly is difficult but not impossible.

Goals for the upcoming year have to conform to institutional Maximum autonomy in an institutional setting need not be expectations, these days including the requirement to haul contradictory. It’s the values that count here, and what we in significant sums of money through grant acquisitions, consider to be important in terms of academic work. The consultancies and the rest. Academics are also required to limits of that work have not and should not be defined simply sell their products, ensuring that units are sexy enough to by market-oriented, reputational considerations, or through attract would-be enrolees. Additionally, student evaluations top-down diktat. The application of relative freedoms should are closely scrutinised and woe betide a low score which be worked out through the active inclusion of academics and may require you to attend an upskilling course, or your students at all levels of university governance. The problem ‘performance’ can used to sabotage your promotion chances today is that this is largely the preserve of the managerial class (never mind that such voodoo metrics are less than whose stated commitments to academic freedom tend to rigorous). And then there’s the annual quota of publications collide with more instrumental concerns.

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The tension between the two is hard to reconcile, but if academic freedom has any meaning in the current environment it requires a radical redistribution of power and influence within and across the academy.

Richard Hil is Adjunct Professor in the School of Human Services and Social Work at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.

References

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Pills, E. & Svenson, M. (2019). Academic freedom is under threat around the world – here’s how to defend it. The Conversation, October 7. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/academic-freedom-isunder-threat-around-the-world-heres-how-to-defend-it-118220 Reichman, H. (2019). The Future of Academic Freedom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

Scott, J.W. (2019). Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press.

Watts, R. (2017). Public Universities, Managerialism and the Value of Higher Education. Melbourne: Palgrave McMillan.

Connell, R. (2019). The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing.

Nelson, C. (2010). ‘Defining Academic Freedom’, Inside Higher Education, December 21. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered. com/views/2010/12/21/defining-academic-freedom

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A self-selection mechanism for appointed external members of WA University Councils Gerd E. Schröder-Turk Murdoch University & Australian National University

The governing boards of Australian public universities, known as Senates or Councils, are bodies with broad legislated powers. The composition of these bodies is crucial to ensuring sound strategic management of universities and maintaining academic standards.

The key aspect of Council processes in Western Australian (WA) that this article seeks to highlight is the mechanism by which new appointed Council members are selected, and the dominant role that a committee composed predominantly of appointed members plays in this process, thereby creating a risk of a self-reinforcing selection bias. This is a noteworthy, but as yet unrecognised, effect of changes to State legislation in 2016. Changes to the legislated membership rules for key committees, particularly the Nominations Committee, mean the appointed members control the appointments of new appointed members. Such self-selection mechanisms carry the risk of reducing diversity amongst new appointments and consequently further increasing group homogeneity. Too high a degree of homogeneity, in turn, may negatively impact on the quality of Council decision making, particularly in relation to groupthink bias. In practice, membership of Councils in Western Australia is skewed to those without substantive experience in or affiliation with the higher education sector. This paper presents the conditions that may have enabled this shift in the expertise and competencies of University governing bodies and considers the consequences of this transition for the governance of universities.

Keywords: university governance, university councils, public governing boards, selection bias, groupthink

The governing bodies of Australia’s public universities, known as ‘Senates’ or ‘Councils’ and referred to in this paper as ‘Councils’, are decision making bodies with broad powers established in their respective State or Territory (or in the case of ANU, Federal) legislation. In this paper I focus specifically on the Councils of the four public universities in Western Australia: The University of Western Australia (UWA), Curtin University (Curtin), Murdoch University (Murdoch) and Edith Cowan University (ECU).1

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All of these universities are founded through WA State Government legislation, which in all cases establishes governing Councils with full control over their universities.

For example, the University of Western Australia Act states: [Council] shall have the entire control and management of the affairs and concerns of the University, and may act in all matters concerning the University in such manner as appears to it best calculated to promote the interests of the University.

(Section 13) (Western Australia, n.d.).

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The other universities have similar arrangements in place for the powers of their governing bodies. While Councils can delegate their powers, authorities, duties and functions to senior executive leadership teams, the Councils retain a responsibility for oversight of the delegations made. For example, UWA’s Senate Charter (University of Western Australia, n.d.) says ‘[The Council] is responsible to the public for the stewardship of the University as an institution of excellence and integrity, and for the custodianship of its future prosperity. It ensures that the University’s policies and procedures are consistent with legal requirements and community expectations’.

Similarly, the Murdoch University Senate Statement of Governance Principles lists among the Council’s roles and responsibilities the roles of ‘oversight of management’, ‘critically monitoring the management of risk’, ‘monitoring University performance against strategic objectives’ and (as a legal role) ‘ensuring that the university is acting ethically and in conformity with all legal requirements’ (Murdoch University, n.d.).

The oversight role that a University Council needs to fulfil differs significantly from the role of a typical company board in the corporate or commercial sector, owing to the complexity of the functions and expectations of a public university; to the diversity of the ‘stakeholders’, and to the widely established principles of academic staff integration in decision making. To elaborate: a. The complexity of the functions and expectations of a university is reflected in the breadth of legislated functions. For example, for ECU, these functions include: to provide courses of study appropriate to a university; to participate in the improvement of tertiary education; to undertake pure and applied research; to foster the general welfare and development of all enrolled students, and to serve the community and public interest by promoting critical and free enquiry, and several others (Western Australia, 1984). b. The diversity of the stakeholders relates to the functions of the universities as ‘public universities’ and to the absence of any financial shareholders or private owners.

This makes the question of who the stakeholders of the universities are more complex than for private enterprise and different to other public corporations. In financial terms, the universities report to the state government and parliament. In other respects, many other groups, including the public (as students or parents), industry (as future employers of graduates) and the federal government (as regulator and key funder of tertiary education), all have stakes in high-quality public education. c. The established expectations around the integration of academic staff in decision making are perhaps best illustrated in the 1997 UNESCO Recommendation vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel. It says: Higher education teaching personnel should have the right and opportunity, without discrimination of any kind, according to their abilities, to take part in the governing bodies and to criticise the functioning of higher education institutions, including their own, while respecting the right of other sections of the academic community to participate, and they should also have the right to elect a majority of representatives to academic bodies within the higher education institutions (UNESCO, 1997, p. 11).

How then, in this complex environment, does one best design a governance system that is effective in assuring competent oversight so that the university achieves its functions and complies with other requirements?

In this paper, I examine two of the many key precursors to effective oversight: the composition and competence of the governing body. Specifically, I address the need for the governance system to have a robustness that ensures that Councils include a diversity of views and that ensures a balanced integration of stakeholders, and mechanisms that prevent majority groups or factions from forming.

I highlight how changes to legislation in 2016 have weakened that robustness of Western Australian Councils, both in terms of balanced composition and in terms of poor integration of academic perspectives. The legislative changes referred to throughout this article are changes made through the Universities Legislation Amendment Act 2016. These changes were proclaimed in the WA Government Gazette of Friday 9 December 2016 (No 221). These changes came into effect in 2017. The legislation was debated in the WA parliament in 2016; quotes in relation to parliamentary debates in this article all refer to a debate of the legislation in the Legislative Council of Western Australia on Thursday 13 October 2016. They are represented as quotes from Hansard, from pages 7012b to 7035a (Parliament of Western Australia, 2016).

The composition and structure of WA University Councils The composition and structure of the Council of each of the four public universities is determined by the WA State legislation that establishes each respective university.

The composition of the Council comprises up to 17 members and consists of the following members: • One member elected by and from the academic staff of the university, • One member elected by and from the non-academic staff of the university, • Two members elected by and from the alumni community (or convocation),

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• • • • • •

Two members elected by and from the student body, for membership of Council or its sub-committees limit the The Vice-Chancellor as an ex officio member, ability of university staff and students to be considered for The Chair of the Academic Board as an ex officio member2, such appointment, while imposing few limitations on persons The Chancellor, external to the university.

Three Governor-appointed members, and Up to 5 members co-opted by the Council.

The group of appointed external Council Table 1 summarises the composition and describes members applicable eligibility exclusions.

The uniformity of the Council structure and composition The central purpose of this article is to examine the effect across all four public universities is the result of changes to the of the 2016 legislative changes that granted (or at least state legislation in 2016 which took effect in 2017. legislated) additional powers to two groups of Council The Chancellor, who chairs the Council, is elected by members, namely co-opted and Governor-appointed the Council and need not be a member of Council prior to members, who, together with the Chancellor, typically being elected. As per state legislation, Councils must have constitute a majority of the Council membership. Although a sub-committee with delegate authority in relation to the named differently, these two groups are in fact quite similar, nomination process for the appointment of new appointed for the following reasons. members. The specific names of this committee differ at the First, co-opted members and government-appointed four universities (see Table 2); this committee is here referred members are selected for membership of the Senate in similar to as the Nominations Committee. processes in which the Nominations Committee plays a Councils have several other sub-committees, founded dominant role. through policy or statute Table 1: Composition of University Councils / Senates in Western Australia rather than State legislation.

These committees typically Role # Term Exclusions perform an advisory role Chancellor 1 3 years to the Council in most Governor-appointed member 3 3 years ECU: must not be university staff or student. matters, rather than UWA: no exclusions having delegate authority or power. That is, the Curtin: no exclusions committees advise but the Murdoch: Must not be university staff > 0.5 ultimate decision remains FTE or student with Council.

Chair Academic Board or 1 ex officio All universities have, President of Academic Council under various names, Vice-Chancellor 1 ex officio Council sub-committees Elected Academic Staff 1 3 years UWA: must not be member of executive. tasked with Audit and Risk and with Resources and Elected Professional Staff 1 3 years Finance.

Elected student members 2 1 year ECU: Must not be university staff > 0.5 FTE Membership exclusions Elected alumni member (ECU, 2 3 years Murdoch: Must not be university staff > 0.5 for the sub-committees Murdoch & Curtin) Members FTE or student apply, so that not all of convocation (UWA) ECU: Must not be university staff > 0.5 FTE categories of Council or full-time student membership qualify for UWA: Must not be university staff membership of the subMember co-opted by Council ≤ 5 3 years ECU: Must not be university staff or student committees. In particular, exclusions applicable to the Murdoch: Must not be university staff > 0.5 FTE or student Nominations Committee (see below) were introduced UWA: no exclusions in the 2016 changes to the Curtin: sole or principal employment must not legislation and are of central be as staff member of university relevance to this article.

Composition of the Councils of the four public Western Australian universities, with exclusions or requirements for eligibility for the specific Most eligibility positions. The full set of requirements and exclusions is legislated through the relevant WA state legislation. The concept of a convocation is in place only at UWA, presumably owing to it and its State Act being much older than those of the rest of the WA public universities. exclusions or restrictions

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For the co-opted members, the Council’s Nominations Committee makes recommendations to the Council for suitable persons, and the Council appoints these persons as ‘co-opted’ members of the Council.

For the Governor-appointed members, the Nominations Committee directly recommends to the Education Minister, without further legislated consideration by Council, suitable persons for appointment. In practice and judging from comments made in parliament, it appears that the government consideration reduces to a ‘box-ticking’ exercise.

The Honourable Peter Collier (the then Education Minister) made the following comment in the WA Legislative Council on 13 October 2016 (Parliament of Western Australia, 2016, p. 7027):

Hence, barring exceptional circumstances and government intervention, the selection of Governor-appointed members is, in practice, vested in the Council’s Nominations Committee.

Second, legislated rules about who is eligible to be selected as a co-opted or government appointed member creates another similarity between these two types of membership.

Table 1 summarises the restrictions on eligibility for co-opted and Governor-appointed members. Except at UWA, existing restrictions limit or remove the ability of university staff or students to be selected as co-opted and governmentappointed members.

In practice, at all WA universities, the vast majority of co-opted and government appointed members are persons without any substantive professional connection to any university or to higher education (other than through their Any recommendation, not just from me but any Minister for Council membership). Specifically, amongst the 37 people Education, will exclusively come from a recommendation who are listed in the 2019 annual reports of the four public from a university. They might feel they need someone with WA universities, none, based on easily accessible public a financial background or something. It is just a convention that the minister appoints someone. It is the same with any information, appear to have an employment relation with board, but particularly in this instance. any university, and only two (listed as an Emeritus Table 2: Legislated composition and 2019 membership of the Nominations Committees at the Professor and an Honorary four public WA universities.

Professor) of the 37 have any university affiliation.

Nominations Committee Therefore, by all accounts, UWA ECU Murdoch Curtin it is fair to conclude that Name Chancellor Governance and Chancellor’s and Nominations a vast majority of the Committee Nominations Nomination Committee appointed members need to Committee Committee be considered ‘external’, not Composition Chancellor, Chancellor, Chancellor, Chancellor, only to the university on Pro-Chancellor, Deputy Chancellor, Deputy Chancellor, Pro Chancellor, whose Council they sit but ViceChairs of Resources Chair of Resources Chair of to the university system in Chancellor, and Audit & Risk Committee, Kalgoorlie general.

Chairs of Committees, Chair of Audit & Campus Council, Audit and Risk 1 member Council, Risk Committee, Chair Finance Third, the 2016 Committee 1 member of At least 1 other Committee, legislative changes altered and Strategic Chancellery, Senate member Chair Audit & the composition of Council Resources 1 or 2 persons with appointed by Risk Committee, sub-committees (or, at least, Committee relevant expertise (1 Chancellor who 1 member of formalised their composition needs to be Council is external to University through legislation). member) university Council; Critically, and pivotal to the 2019 Chancellor, Chancellor, Chancellor, Chancellor, argument advanced here, membership 2x co-opted, 3x co-opted, 4x co-opted Senate 4x co-opted this means that the co-opted Vice2x Governormembers, Council and government-appointed Chancellor appointed, 1x Governormembers3 members, together with 1 VC-nominated appointed Senate the Chancellor, are, at Chancellery member2 member1 least in practice, the sole groups of Council The table provides the formal name of the committee at the respective university, the composition of the committee (that is, the membership requirements to the extent that they are prescribed by the corresponding WA state legislation), and the actual membership of the committee members represented on for the year 2019 as the most current year for which annual reports are available (that is, the type of Council members, or others, who were the powerful Nominations part of the Nominations Committee).

1. Information on members of committee as per document Governance and Nominations Committee, downloaded 12 January 2021 and Committee.

(Exceptions referencing resolution UC197/25 Dec19; Council membership categories as per 2019 ECU Annual Report. are in place at UWA, where 2. Membership and Senate membership categories as per Murdoch University Annual Report 2019. the Vice-Chancellor is a 3. Data as per Curtin University Annual Report 2019 vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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member of that committee and at Curtin University where a VC-nominated Chancellery member is a member of that committee, see Table 2.)

In light of these similarities – and in the absence of any other Council regulations that distinguish between these two membership types – it seems reasonable to group both membership types together, and to refer to them as ‘appointed external members’, or perhaps more precisely as ‘appointed, in practice external, members’.

Together with the Chancellor (who is appointed in a similar fashion to the co-opted members or whose appointment creates a vacancy for a co-opted member), this group holds a majority of up to 9 of the up to 17 members of Council.

Nomination process for appointed members dominated by appointed members As we have seen above, the Nominations Committee has a powerful role in the selection of the appointed external members, both for co-opted and for Governor-appointed members. For all practical purposes and notwithstanding the ability of the minister/governor to override a recommendation, the selection for the Governor-appointed members is a decision of the Nominations Committee, and the selection of the co-opted members a decision over which the Nominations Committee has substantial control.

Legislated requirements and exclusions for membership of the Nominations Committee are in place that have the effect that the Nominations Committee is dominated by appointed members. These legislated requirements, summarised in Table 2, were legislated in 2016 and introduced in 2017.3 This means that the selection of new appointed members to the University Council is undertaken by a sub-committee that is itself dominated by appointed members, with that selection being confirmed by the Council on which the appointed external members have a majority.

This system creates, in my view, a significant risk of a self-reinforcing selection bias that could, in turn, result in a harmful level of group cohesiveness or group homogeneity affecting the quality of decision making.

Whether this risk manifests in an actual selection bias depends, in particular, on whether or not the group of appointed members is largely a homogeneous group of individuals with similar backgrounds, views, persuasions, ideologies, etc., that is, whether or not it is a group that, in other contexts, might be considered as a ‘faction’, a ‘section’ or an ‘interest group’.

This article asserts that the risk of a self-reinforcing selection bias exists and that it is inherent in the processes in WA Councils legislated by the university Acts. The article deliberately stops short of concluding whether or not the risk manifests in an

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actual selection bias. Such an investigation would require a more comprehensive study, presumably including a historical membership analysis, and a careful analysis of the homogeneity of the groups of appointed members, separately for each university. Such an analysis would also need to assert whether, and if so to what degree, committees with the functions of the Nominations Committee existed in practice prior to the legislative change in 2016 and whether or not, even without the legislative requirements, these were dominated by appointed external members.

In the context of this risk, it is worth noting a recommendation in a review of university governance, conducted for and by the Victoria Department of Education and by Stuart Hamilton (2002). His recommendation 11 suggests ‘that ... the nominations committee should fairly reflect the composition of the whole council’. While it is not clear how this could be achieved, given the small numbers of members, the inclusion of groups other than appointed members in the Nominations Committee would improve the system and lessen the risk of a selection bias occurring.

Importantly, the risk of a damaging self-reinforcing selection bias could, in principle, swing the majority of Council to any ideology: left or right, capitalist or socialist, tree-hugging or corporate-minded. All such majorities would impair decision making. Put simply, the risk is that an emerging dominance of a particular persuasion amongst the appointed members becomes reinforced through the system.

However, as we will see below, there are further exclusions and restrictions on Council membership or Council subcommittee membership and eligibility that mean that the risk of a dominance of perspectives commonly held by academic staff are suppressed, whereas the risk of a dominance of what perhaps could be described as ‘corporate think’ is enhanced.

Limitations on the representation and participation of academic staff The 2016 changes to the State legislation regarding WA university Councils also directly affected the representation and participation of academic staff of the universities in the Councils.

The most drastic of these changes was the reduction to a single elected representative for the academic staff: Out of up to 17 Council members, there is now only 1 elected academic staff member.4 Prior to the legislative change, there were three elected academic staff members on the Councils of the University of Western Australia and of Murdoch University and two elected academic staff members on the Councils of Edith Cowan University and of Curtin University.

This very poor representation of the academic body becomes particularly concerning in a situation in which the

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potential selection bias, described above, leads to a cohesive or homogeneous group of appointed external members that holds views that are contrary to the interests of the academic body.

The reduction in academic representation on the Councils is likely to be considered detrimental by the majority of academic staff. Even outside the academic community, the change was highly contested. Within the same parliamentary debate referred to above, the Honourable Lynn MacLaren argued (Parliament of Western Australia, 2016) that: [The] bill proposes to reduce the number of members on the governing councils and senates of the four universities from between 19 and 22 to 17. The reduction is applied disproportionately to the number of elected academic staff members, because there are three members on the University of Western Australia’s and Murdoch University’s senate, and Edith Cowan University and Curtin University have two. Furthermore, the bill changes how the academic representation is selected, from being elected to being appointed by the board chair or the President of the Academic Council.5 This remains a concern to us and is a diversion from the principles of open and transparent participation on these governing bodies.(p.

7021) The then Leader of the Opposition and later Minister for Education, the Honourable Sue Ellery, moved a motion seeking to amend the bill and increase the academic staff representation to two academic staff members, arguing: ‘I do think this is an opportunity for us to make sure that academic staff are properly represented. We should honour the traditions of the history of the independence of academia and make sure that academics are properly represented on the governing bodies of the universities’ (Parliament of Western Australia, 2016, p. 7029) The motion was defeated, leaving the single representative for the academic staff members as the sole, and thereby disproportionately weakened, voice of the academic body on each Council.

Further limitations on the representation of academic interests are imposed by further exclusions or limitations of the elected academic staff member from membership of the significant Council sub-committees. In addition to exclusion of the academic staff member from the Nominations Committee, there are exclusions from, or limitations on, other committees. For example, at UWA the Audit and Risk Committee is prescribed to only include external members (both Senate members and co-opted) thereby excluding the academic staff representative. At Murdoch University, the Senate Statement of Governance Principles requires all members of the Audit and Risk Committee and the Resources Committee to be external to the university.

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University, and perhaps others, Senate members (including the academic staff representative) cannot be observers of the Nominations Committee.

It is worth noting that, where this occurs, the exclusion of elected staff members from these sub-committees not only leads to weaker staff representation in decision making, but also limits the breadth of perspectives and situational knowledge accommodated in decision making processes. It may limit the range and relevance of information available to elected members in supporting important decisions. Such lack of ability to make informed judgements or form opinions in relation to Council matters may negatively affect their ability to carry out their Council duties particularly in relation to complex issues, such as assessing whether the university acts in an ethically appropriate manner.

Dominance of appointed external members on Council sub-committees The dominance of the Nominations Committee in relation to the selection process of new appointed members is perhaps the most striking demonstration that powers within the WA Councils are not evenly distributed and are rather skewed towards external appointed members at the expense of staff representatives including, in particular, that of academic staff.

The Nominations Committee may also have a wider remit than just the selection of future appointed Council members.

In some universities, either by regulation or by practice, the Nominations Committee has adopted other tasks, often central to the highest level governance decisions.

For example, at Murdoch University, the Senate Statement of Governance Principles defines the terms of reference of the Nominations Committee (whose full name is Chancellor’s and Nomination Committee) to include the tasks: to determine remuneration including bonus payments for ViceChancellor and senior officers; to recommend performance objectives for the Vice-Chancellor; to determine succession planning for the Vice-Chancellor and Senior Officers; to advise the Senate on amendments to University legislation; to review operating procedures of the Council; to advise the Chancellor on governance issues and matters of substance; and to provide advice to the Vice-Chancellor on strategic plans, and others.

The majority considerations above for the Nominations Committee and the membership eligibility criteria therefore apply to decisions on these important matters as well, in the same way as to the selection of new members. The effect is that, by policy, these important tasks are considered by a committee of which the academic staff member in the Council cannot, by legislation, be a member.6 As with the Nominations Committee, there are some eligibility conditions for other Council sub-committees that

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exclude the academic staff Council member from membership A social experiment on the emergence of of these committees. This has led, in practice, to a situation groupthink? where the vast majority of members of the key Council subcommittees are appointed external Senate members, rather The self-selection mechanism and the consequent risk of than elected staff, student or alumni members. a self-reinforcing selection bias, described above, create a The result of this is a situation where a) appointed members risk that the majority group of appointed external members together with the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor form becomes, in effect, a group with uniform and similar views, the vast majority of members of all Council sub-committees, professional backgrounds, ideologies and persuasions. This and b) appointed members together with the Chancellor increases the risk of a harmful degree of group homogeneity and Vice-Chancellor have a significant majority within the or group cohesiveness (and ‘groupthink’ in the extreme case) Council. negatively affecting the decision process.

This, then, implies a risk that recommendations by the Many of the conditions that have created the self-selection sub-committees to the Councils – developed without any mechanism are due to relatively recent legislative changes involvement of the elected members – become foregone (or, at the very least, were formalised in law through those conclusions and de-facto decisions. The Councils themselves changes). This creates an interesting opportunity for a study risk becoming mere ‘rubber-stamping’ organs. Decisions to address whether the risk arising from the self-selection appear to have been taken by a body – the Council – that has mechanism indeed manifests in the negative outcomes of at least a remnant representation of staff and students; yet, in harmful cohesiveness and group homogeneity, with reduced effect, the de-facto decision was taken by bodies – the subquality of decision making as an outcome. committees, perhaps appropriately called ‘super boards’ – that The theory of ‘groupthink’ goes back to work by Janis expressly exclude any representation of these elected groups.

(1971; 1972; 1989) in the early seventies, with a short I have sketched diagrammatic representations of the definition included in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary governance structure in Figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 represents as ‘conformity to group values and ethics’ as early as governance arrangements representing the Council as the central governance board composed of 17 members, Committees Council together with an indication of how Elected academic staff new appointed members are selected Elected non-academic staff Resources & Academic Board Chair for Council membership. Figure Finance Committee Vice Chancellor 2 represents an adapted version of Co-opted Figure 1 which represents the resulting Co-opted governance structure in WA university Suggest candidates for Co-opted governor appointments Councils together with practices Co-opted Nominations around the selection and with a clearer Co-opted WA Government Committee and/or Governor Chancellor demonstration of majorities. It shows Governor-appointed Selects & the strong majority of the appointed Appointment of appoints new co-opted Governor-appointed members external members, the Chancellor and Governor-appointed the Vice-Chancellor in the Senate (as the Elected student Audit & Risk hashed area corresponding to 10 out of Elected student Committee the 17 Council members) and the fact Elected alumni Elected alumni that the sub-committees are, in practice, composed only of appointed external members (as the hashed background in Figure 1: Diagrammatic depiction of Council Governance structure for University the sub-committee boxes).7 Councils at the four public universities in WA Perhaps a little provocatively, Figure This figure represents and highlights what the authors believe is the likely understanding of many as to how university 2 replaces the double arrows between governance is expected to work. A Council, made up of 17 members elected or appointed through different mechanisms but otherwise independent, has broad decision making powers bestowed on it by state legislation acts, thereby having Council and sub-committees – ultimate control over decisions, strategies, directions, public positions on matters, etc. of the university and of co-option indicative of the truly back-and-forth of new Council members. Subcommittees of the Council, by and large and with the exception of the Nominations Committee for specific tasks, have an advisory role to the Council rather than having power delegated to them by the advisory relationship of a committee Council. The government or governor have three ‘representatives’ on the Council that they select, perhaps considering with sub-committees – by single arrows. suggestions from the universities’ Nominations Committees and/or from Council. The voice of the academic body is These represent the flow of de facto represented only poorly through a single member, but the academic staff member’s voice (and vote) on Council is one of 17 independent voices (or votes). decisions being taken.

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1975. Groupthink refers to a psychological phenomenon where collective decision making becomes impaired and dysfunctional. Turner & Pratkanis (1998) describe Janis’ classic formulation as the hypothesis that [D]ecision making groups are most likely to experience groupthink when they are highly cohesive, insulated from experts, perform limited search and appraisal of information, operate under directed leadership, and experience conditions of high stress with low self-esteem and little hope of finding a better solution to a pressing problem than that favoured by the leader or influential members.

When present, these antecedent conditions are hypothesised to foster the extreme consensus-seeking characteristics of groupthink. This in turn is predicted to lead to two categories of undesirable decision-making processes.

The first, traditionally labelled symptoms of groupthink, include illusion of invulnerability, collective rationalisation, stereotypes of outgroups, self-censorship, mindguards, and belief in the inherent morality of the group.

The second, typically identified as symptoms of defective decision-making, involve the incomplete survey of alternatives and objectives, poor information search, failure to appraise the risks of the preferred solution, and selective information processing.

Not surprisingly, these combined forces are predicted to result in extremely defective decision making performance by the group.

In the context of a governing board, any occurrence of groupthink would pose a substantial problem in relation to good decision making. This is in particular the case for boards, such as Australian university Councils, whose composition does not correspond to any proportionate or democratic representation of stakeholders or stakeholder groups. In such cases, the quality of collective decision making rests on the capacity of all members to independently consider the matter in-hand drawing on access to relevant information, prior to reaching agreement. Groupthink affects this ‘independence of thought’ and may seriously compromise the quality of the resultant group decisions.

An awareness of groupthink and its associated risks is important for members of governance boards in order to avoid falling victim to it. However, even more importantly, the design of a governance system (through composition, appointment rules, etc.) should be such that it provides safeguards against groupthink and any dysfunctional forms of group cohesiveness or group homogeneity.

A particular danger is a damaging feedback loop where the emergence of a greater degree of (harmful) group cohesiveness – identified as a possible antecedent to groupthink – leads to a further enhancement of the degree of group cohesiveness. To quote Irving Janis

Elected academic staff Elected non-academic staff

Resources & Finance Committee

Academic Board Chair Vice Chancellor Co-opted Co-opted Co-opted Co-opted

Nominations Committee

Co-opted S gove elects w ith rnme nt tic k-off

Chancellor Governor-appointed Governor-appointed Governor-appointed

Audit & Risk Committee

Elected student Elected student Elected alumni

Appointment of new co-opted members

Decisions, Resolutions, Position, Strategy

Council

Committees

Elected alumni

Figure 2: A diagrammatic representation of the governance structures and arrangements in WA University Councils This figure highlights through the hashed background the strong and potentially self-reinforcing power of the appointed external members (co-opted and Governor-appointed members and Chancellor) and the Vice-Chancellor. Specifically, the diagramm illustrates a) the majority in the Council of 9 of 17 external appointed members, or 10 if the VC is included; b) the fact that these groups almost exclusively represent the membership of the Council subcommittees; and c) the practical reality that the nomination of new Governor-appointed members by the Nominations Committee is, in effect, a de-facto decision, subject only to a government/governor tick-off. The single arrows pointing from the sub-committees to the Council are intended to illustrate the risk that, in effect, the subcommittees dominated by appointed members become de-facto decision makers with Council’s role reduced, in practice, to a rubber-stamping exercise.

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The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink [...].

This article does not present a conclusion whether groupthink occurs within the Councils of Western Australia’s public universities.

This article also does not present any definitive conclusions as to the degree of cohesiveness or homogeneity amongst the group of appointed external Council members, but this might be a fruitful and feasible topic for future study. A preliminary analysis of all 37 appointed external members listed in the 2019 annual reports suggests several common features amongst these persons, based on an analysis of LinkedIn profiles, business news profiles, and public information on university websites: a majority of more than 60% list corporate leadership roles (such as CEO, CFO, senior executive,

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director, chairperson, partner) in the utility, mining, finance, banking, consulting, agricultural, property development or services sectors; more than 80% have a profile on businessnews. com.au; very few have substantive present connections of any form to any university (beyond their Council membership) or to the research sector or the tertiary education sector; only 20% list postgraduate qualifications beyond an MBA or master’s degree.

Members with a background in the technical professions (e.g. engineers or scientists), medical doctors or health professionals, education practitioners, public servants with policy background, research professionals are only a small minority amongst the appointed external members. These similarities between appointed members may be an indication of a selection bias, or they may be merely a reflection of the fact that these common features are the characteristics of successful careers in leadership roles in the ‘real world’. This is a subtle question for future investigation.

A further related risk of ‘homogenising’ the opinions held amongst external appointed Council members stems from the exposure of the external appointed Council members to university staff, which, for many external Council members, is likely restricted to interactions in the context of the Council.

The reduction of academic staff representation to a single member reduces the exposure of appointed external members to university staff other than the Vice-Chancellor and the executive leadership team, and thereby reduces their exposure to viewpoints held by university staff other than that of the Vice-Chancellor and his or her senior executive team.

The dangers related to groupthink or lack of independence of its members are well recognised in the various policy documents for university Councils (without any of them using the word ‘groupthink’). For example, the requirement for independence and diligence is stated in the Murdoch University Senate Statement of Governance Principles (Murdoch University, n.d.). It stipulates that Council members ‘will be independent in judgment and actions and take all reasonable steps to be satisfied as to the soundness of all decisions taken by the [Council]’ (p. 20), ‘will not allow sectional or factional interests to deflect the [Council’s] focus on the University’s general welfare’ (p. 20) and ‘must at all times act in the interests of the University and give precedence to the interests of the University over the interests of any person appointing or electing him or her’ (p. 15).

While such guidelines or regulations regarding expected behaviour are useful, they may not be sufficient to ensure the mandated behaviour. It is crucial that the governance structure and governance processes are designed so as to promote independent and informed judgment and to have safeguards in place against violations of it.

The mechanisms highlighted in this article represent a real risk for the quality of decision making in Western Australian

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university Councils. In my opinion, the West Australian universities and the West Australian Government would be well advised to rectify the self-selection mechanism in the Councils.

Concluding discussion In this article, I have highlighted aspects of the WA university governance and legislation that have the potential for the concentration of power in the appointed external members of the university Councils, through a self-selecting mechanism.

That is, decision making power is concentrated in a group of Senate members who have little connection to the university system other than through their Council membership. It seems that the legislative changes of 2016 (and other earlier changes) may have created the conditions for a WA experiment on the potential emergence of groupthink.

Ironically, this is directly contrary to the professed intent of the legislative change as articulated by the Honourable Peter Collier (then Minister for Education in the WA Liberal government) in the same parliamentary debate as referenced above on 13 October 2016 (Parliament of Western Australia, 2016): The whole point of the exercise was that even though they are universities and their role is in research and development, student exchange et cetera, they are also commercial entities.

It is, therefore, important that a broad range of skill sets is brought to those governing councils. (p. 7025) The self-reinforcing selection bias described above works expressly against this goal; without careful management it has the potential to lead to a bias in selection of members in favour of candidates who have similar views, skills, professional or educational backgrounds, etc. as the current appointed members of a university Council. It may, ironically, lead to universities being governed by a body dominated by a group with little first-hand professional experience in or in-depth exposure to the tertiary sector.

The Honourable Peter Collier also had something to say about academic staff representation on university Councils (Parliament of Western Australia, 2016): ‘There was a lot of pushback, from my perspective, to me from the universities, because they wanted [the inclusion of elected academic representatives] to be even more restrictive. There was a push – I will be honest – to not have elections. That was quite clear’. (p. 7025) This is a remarkable statement, that suggests that the ‘universities’ themselves wanted to restrict academic staff representation and, in particular, argued for a change that would have made the sole remaining academic Council member a member to be appointed by the Council, rather than elected by the academic body. A change to appointed academic

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members would have completely removed any reasonable staff representation on the Councils that is independent from and not at the mercy of the university leaderships. This proposition by the universities was considered unreasonable even by the Honourable Peter Collier (Parliament of Western Australia, 2016): ‘I considered that but felt that was unreasonable. I believe that students and staff need to elect their own representatives and they should not be appointed by the chancellor or vice-chancellor. I felt that the students and staff deserved that respect’. (p. 7025) The question that this raises is who is it that Peter Collier here refers to as ‘the universities’, and who is it that speaks for ‘the universities’. It seems likely that the above opinion (that it is preferable to remove elections and instead appoint academic staff members) is not an opinion that the majority of academic staff at any university would support. It therefore seems likely that this opinion rather was expressed by the executive leaderships of the universities, or perhaps by the senior Council members. This appears likely, considering that the Honourable Lynn MacLaren said in the same debate (Parliament of Western Australia, 2016) ‘Representative bodies of students and staff were not given an opportunity to provide any meaningful input into the legislation.’ (p. 7021) The Honourable Peter Collier said in the same WA Legislative Council debate, and in the context of his refusal to remove the elected staff positions on university Councils (Parliament of Western Australia, 2016): ‘There is nothing better than to have a bit of banter in any decision-making forum, as we know in this chamber as well, because more often than not it leads to a better result’. (p. 7025) This statement appears to describe the contribution of the elected academic staff members as ‘banter’, which according to the Cambridge dictionary means ‘conversation that is not serious and is often playful’ and the Oxford dictionary as ‘the playful and friendly exchange of teasing remarks.’

In my opinion, decision making bodies at universities should, aside from ensuring sound financial and commercial management, focus on the core purposes and functions of the universities which by and large are educational and academic in their nature. Academics are the experts in this area; their contribution to governance is not banter. Rather, to ensure that the academic voices and perspectives are central in the university Council’s decision making is good governance, and the best assurance that the Council keeps the core functions of the university at the heart of its decision making.

Finally, Peter Collier refers to a democratic parliamentary chamber in the above remark. Any analogy of a democratically elected chamber to a university Council falls short in the light of the core of this article. A democratic chamber is all about ensuring majorities, and the need to maintain majorities in future elections by virtue of good arguments that convince the public. In the university Councils, the mechanism for selfvol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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selection described here means that the group of appointed members – if assumed to represent a ‘faction’ of sorts – can simply maintain their legislated majority and dominance of the Council by their dominance in the selection process for appointed members, regardless of the validity or strength of their arguments.

Good governance is not a question of the broader university strategy; it is not a question of left or right, or conservative or progressive. It is not a judgement on whether a corporate business model is best suited for our universities or not. Good governance is simply, at least in the aspect covered here, the need to set up the governing bodies and governing structures in a way that ensures a diversity of views – including the perspective of the academic body – has fair consideration.

The described self-selection mechanism, whether as a risk or a manifest problem, works against that goal.

Acknowledgements This article is dedicated to my friend and former colleague, Dr Duncan Farrow who was employed at Murdoch University from the 1990s until 2021 and during that time held academic roles in Mathematics & Statistics including that of Associate Dean for Courses and Admissions. Dr Farrow is a formidable advocate for academic freedom, standards and integrity as well as for ethical practices in higher education and student wellbeing, with that advocacy being based on his sound and unpretentious expert analyses and understanding. Dr Farrow’s hopefully temporary departure from Murdoch University in 2021, and thereby from the Australian academic community, is a big loss to Australia’s academic community.

I am grateful to my colleagues and former colleagues Graeme Hocking, Anne Surma, Max Sully and Adrian Sheppard and to my wife Catherine Turk for comments on the manuscript.

This article represents academic work that the author has conducted in his role as a member of the academic community. For the sake of full disclosure, the author declares his membership of the Senate of Murdoch University, his membership of the National Executive of the Australian Institute of Physics, and his membership of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). The author does not suggest or imply in any way that the views expressed here represent the views of Murdoch University, of the Senate of Murdoch University, of The Australian National University, of the Australian Institute of Physics, or of the National Executive of the AIP, or of the NTEU. Gerd Schröder-Turk is an Honorary Associate Professor at Murdoch University, Western Australia, and an Honorary Professor at the Australian National University, ACT. Contact: g.schroeder-turk@murdoch.edu.au

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References Hamilton, S. (2002). The Review of University Governance. Victoria Department of Education. Retrieved form http://www.capa.edu. au/2002-state-victoria-review-university-governance/ Janis, I. L. (1971). Groupthink. Psychology Today. 5 (6), 43–46, 74–76.

Janis, I.L. (1972). Victims of groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Janis, I.L. (1989). Crucial decisions: Leadership in policymaking and crisis management. New York: The Free Press.

Murdoch University. (n.d.). Senate Statement of Governance Principles. Retrieved from http://senate.murdoch.edu.au/_document/ SGP.pdf Notre Dame University. (n.d.). Introducing Notre Dame University.

(Retrieved from https://www.notredame.edu.au/about/notre-dame).

Parliament of Western Australia (2016). Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Thirty-Ninth Parliament, First Session 2016, Legislative Council, Thursday, 13 October 2016. Perth: Parliament of Western Australia Retrieved from https://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/Hansard/ hansard.nsf/0/85C52EE0589ECAF34825805300185EE0/$file/ C39%20S1%2020161013%20All.pdf Turner, M.E. & Pratkanis, A.R. (1998). Twenty-Five Years of Groupthink Theory and Research: Lessons from the Evaluation of a Theory. Organisational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73 (2 & 3), 105-115.

UNESCO. (1997). UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel, Retrieved from https://unesdoc. unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000113234.page=2 University of Western Australia. (n.d.) Senate Charter. Retrieved from https://www.governance.uwa.edu.au/committees/senate Western Australia. (n.d.). University of Western Australia Act 1911.

Western Australia. (1984). Edith Cowan University Act, 1984, Retrieved from https://www.legislation.wa.gov.au/legislation/statutes.nsf/ main_mrtitle_282_homepage.html

Endnotes 1. There is a further university, Notre Dame University, that is established through Western Australian state legislation, namely the University of Notre Dame Australia Act 1989. However, by its own description it is a ‘private Catholic University’ (Notre Dame University). The governance structure is very different, involving the Trustees, the Board of Directors and the Board of Governors. The Catholic church has a strong say in the composition of these boards, and there is no elected representation of staff and students.

2. The President (Chair) of Academic Board is a professorial academic staff member elected by the Academic Board. At some of the universities in WA, a large proportion of ex officio executive members gives the university leadership teams significant weight in these elections.

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At Murdoch, 19 members (42 per cent) are elected by the academic staff, 2 elected from the professional staff, 8 are student members (ex officio office bearers of the Guild or elected) and 16 executive ex officio members (36 per cent). Murdoch data as per Academic Council Regulations as approved 25 Sept 2019; note that composition may change without change to regulations as it reflects structural or organisational changes in the university.

On UWA’s Academic Board, there are 12 ex officio executive members (12 per cent), 6 student members, 8 professional staff members, 12 members elected by the Heads of School, and 60 elected academic members (61 per cent, consisting of 39 professorial members and 21 others) (UWA data as per Academic Board Regulations approved 9 Dec 2019).

3. It should be noted that this article does not assess comprehensively whether there were ‘precursor’ committees to the Nominations Committee, set up at the various universities through university regulation, statute or policy (rather than through legislation) nor what their structure and membership was. Such a study is beyond the scope of this article and would require a careful analysis of and access to past agenda papers and university regulations. However, at least at Murdoch University, the 2014 annual report provides a clear indication that a ‘Nominations and Governance Committee’ existed but that the membership was considerably more diverse, and included both a student and a staff member.

4. A note on the use of the word ‘staff representatives’ for the Council members ‘elected by and from’ the staff is important. In this article, the term ‘staff representative’ is used with a full awareness that the role of this member is not specifically to represent the interests of staff. For example, the Murdoch University Senate Statement of Governance states (Murdoch University (n.d.)) ‘A [Council member] must at all times act in the best interests of the University and give precedence to the interests of the University over the interests of any person appointing or electing him or her’.

Representation of an interest group is not the role of any Council member.

5. Note that this part of the bill, the change from election to Council of the staff members to appointment to Council was abandoned and did not become legislation.

6. The question whether the Senate Statement of Governance Principles has the status of a policy is unclear. The Senate Statement of Governance Principles discusses the instruments of governance (in section 1.3) as acts, statutes, by-laws, regulations, rules, policies and procedures, yet it does not make it clear how the document itself fits in within this set of instruments.

7. The Vice-Chancellor may or may not be included in this group, and his or her inclusion does not alter the fact that this group can have a majority of members in Council. The mechanisms for selection of the Vice-Chancellor again centrally involve the Nominations Committee, thereby exposing it to the same exclusions of representation as discussed above. However, the Vice-Chancellor is, of course, clearly not an external member of the Council.

To elaborate: At UWA, Murdoch and Curtin, the President of Academic Board is, by regulation, elected by the Academic Board from among the academic staff and must be at the level of Associate Professor or Professor. The membership of the Academic Boards varies between the four universities, with varying degrees of elected academic staff members and with the following approximate numbers.

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Slippery beasts Why academic freedom and media freedom are so difficult to protect Fred D’Agostino & Peter Greste University of Queensland

It is easy to confuse academic freedom with freedom of speech, but it is illuminating to consider the responsibilities that frame academic freedom and thus distinguish it from the less constrained freedoms to speak that characterise our roles as citizens of democratic societies. In particular, scholars and scientists are subject to standards of rigour and integrity. While academics sometimes fail to live up to these standards, we consider a difficulty that arises even when they do. This is a collective action failure that arises because of the incentives that motivate choices of topics and approaches by scholars and scientists and it results in overconcentration of academic effort. Diversity within the academy is a potential antidote to this difficulty. We explore these issues from within our different professional perspectives and note some analogies between the situation of academics on the one hand and journalists on the other.

Keywords: Negative freedom, positive freedom, tragedy of the commons, groupthink, diversity

Periodically, the academy, and its friends and critics, pause to consider the idea of academic freedom. This is often connected with events outside the academy, as in the 1950s when ‘loyalty oaths’ were sometimes imposed on academics in the United States, or after 9/11, when security concerns were leveraged to permit oversight of ‘sensitive’ scholarly and scientific enquiries. Thirty years ago, from the very place where we write, a series of ‘managerial’ changes to the governance of Australian universities (the so-called ‘Dawkins Reforms’) prompted the Bulletin of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy to devote a special issue to discussing ‘Academic Freedom Today’ (Moens, 1991).

So-called political correctness (in the form of things like ‘de-platforming’, ‘speech codes’, ‘cancel culture’, and ‘safe spaces’) has recently provoked heated debate, while the Commonwealth government was so concerned about these matters that in 2018 the Minister for Education commissioned former High Court Chief Justice Robert French AC to set up an inquiry. (And a subsequent 2020 inquiry into the results of the inquiry, led by Professor Sally Walker AM.) Justice French’s findings yielded, among other things, a model code for universities, some of which have adopted it, with or without modifications. vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

On this topic we believe something already asserted by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), which said in its submission to a 2008 Parliamentary review, ‘The dialogue about protecting academic freedom needs to move beyond old debates about political correctness [already old thirteen years ago!] to the real threats that incursions on academic freedom can have for our universities and for our society more broadly’ (2008, p. 8). We aim to show how to move the debate beyond these hackneyed questions, though not, perhaps, in the direction that the NTEU had in mind in that earlier intervention.

Public airing of this topic frequently suggests that there is nothing more to the concept of academic freedom than the idea of freedom of speech (within a particular community), where this is read as a negative liberty, in the sense that Isaiah Berlin (1969) first proposed in 1958. Berlin thought of ‘negative liberty’ as an absence of enforced institutional constraints such as laws and regulations that explicitly limit certain behaviours. In this case it refers to the ability for people to say what they please, within broadly described legal limits. However, some notable discussants have been careful to distinguish academic freedom from such a libertarian conception of freedom of speech. Professor Carolyn Evans, Slippery beasts Fred D’Agostino & Peter Greste

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Vice-Chancellor of Griffith University, recently cautioned (2020): ‘We need to be careful … that we do not let absolute ideas of freedom of speech undermine the core purposes of the university’. French noted (2019, p. 116, emphasis added) that academic freedom confers a ‘qualified freedom of speech’ and that that was only ‘one of its elements’. We are with Evans and French on this issue. While there are issues about the proper domain of freedom of speech on campus, this is not what has usually been meant by academic freedom; free speech is not what we mean by academic freedom; and it is not a matter that we will discuss, except, perhaps, glancingly. Indeed, we will offer an account of academic freedom according to which scholars and scientists are free to explore and express ideas within the limits set by the stringent standards of rigour and objectivity to which they are subject.

French’s reference to ‘qualified freedom of speech’ as only ‘one of [the] elements’ of academic freedom is our starting point. What are the other elements of academic freedom that lie just outside our line-of-sight, and what does consideration of this whole notion – the complex ideal, with multiple elements – enable us to understand about the threats to it?

To answer this question, we need to consider the telos of academic freedom. Why is that freedom valuable to us, not just as members of the academic community, but as citizens of a democratic society?

One familiar kind of reason for academic freedom is an instrumental one. If we have academic freedom (whatever that might turn out to encompass), then knowledge will grow and, with that growth, the human condition will be bettered in various ways. This is not restricted to those kinds of improvements brought to us by scientific and technological advances, but encompasses, just as surely (if sometimes more obscurely), advances in humanistic and social scientific understandings of our situation.

It is already apparent that academic freedom couldn’t possibly deliver this if all it amounted to was the liberty of scientists and scholars to think, say or do whatever they wanted, without qualification … a radically libertarian conception of academic freedom. As Evans charmingly put it (2020), ‘Just as academic freedom strongly protects the articulation of unpopular views, it also places more demands on participants than a discussion in the campus bar.’

As is commonly acknowledged in discussions of academic freedom, but alas rarely properly emphasised, academic freedom (NTEU, 2008, p. 3, quoting the Global Colloquium of University Presidents) is ‘subject to the norms and standards of scholarly inquiry’ and (Evans, 2020) should be exercised ‘in the spirit of a responsible and honest search for knowledge’; its conduct and products (Bickel, 1975, p. 127) ‘must be judged by professional criteria’, being (American Association of University Professors [AAUP] 1915), in quaintly archaic diction, ‘conclusions gained by scholarly method and held

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in a scholarly spirit – the fruits of competent and patient and sincere inquiry … set forth with dignity, courtesy and temperance of language’.

These are (some of ) the elements that need to be added to the idea on unencumbered freedom of scholarly discussion if we are to understand what is at stake with academic freedom.

Crudely, these are the requirements of academic integrity, about which the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) has issued a Guidance Note that provides a good summary of conventional wisdom – often hard won from scandalous failures in the past – about the fundamentals of (specifically) research integrity. As they put it (TEQSA, 2019, p. 3-4): Good practice includes: • • • • • • • •

intellectual honesty in proposing, performing, and reporting research accuracy in representing contributions to research proposals and reports fairness in peer review collegiality in scientific interactions, including communications and sharing of resources transparency in conflicts of interest or potential conflicts of interest protection of human subjects in the conduct of research humane care of animals in the conduct of research, and adherence to the mutual responsibilities between investigators and research.

Breaches of research integrity include: • • • • • •

plagiarism falsifying or fabricating data deliberately omitting data to obtain a desired result using data from other researchers without due acknowledgement representing observations as genuine when they are not, and misleading attributions of authorship.

Berlin would regard these ideas about good practice and the avoidance of breaches as limits to negative freedoms. These clearly articulated norms and rules define the space in which an individual is able to operate. These formal requirements of the academy are often missed in debates about what can and can’t be said, but when they are added to the libertarian ideal of academic freedom (in a narrow, permissive sense), they together give us an ideal of academic freedom that is distinctive.

Taking these ideas into account – and some of them of course have analogues in relation to university-level teaching – we can say, roughly, that academic freedom amounts to the freedom of academics to pursue their enquiries and propagate the results of those enquiries in accordance with good practice and avoiding breaches of scholarly or scientific integrity.

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freedom, understood in this expanded sense, contributes to the realisation of its own telos. Honesty, accuracy, fairness, avoidance of fabrication and the like … all these are necessary conditions for the growth of knowledge through disciplined enquiry.

These principles find echoes in another institution that also regards itself as a truth-making enterprise. While journalism has always been accused of imperfectly applying its own standards, its telos is strikingly similar to the academy’s. Both journalists and academics consider their value to be underpinned by a commitment to a set of rigorous professional practices and standards that valorise their roles in developing and circulating useful and reliable knowledge. In cultural terms, journalism and the academy are worlds apart.

Journalists tend to mock academics, especially journalism academics (Anonymous, 2015), and few academics would consider journalists to be in the same league when it comes to rigorous research and analysis. But while journalists would choke on the purple prose of the 1915 AAUP statement, those phrases, invoking the ideals of ‘honest search’, ‘sincere inquiry’, and ‘temperance of language’, might well have come from an antiquarian journalism textbook.

It has to be acknowledged that these professional selfunderstandings and institutional devices are the consequence of long and complex historical processes, some of which are influentially documented by Habermas (1989). They are imperfectly embodied in actual practice, and they are increasingly under pressure as ‘legacy’ practices from newer cultural forms. We are not ‘essentialising’ the academy or the profession of journalism, but we are taking a stand to defend some hard-won institutional forms.

In essence, both professions idealise a search for ‘truth’; an attempt to brush away distracting ‘noise’, to uncover an important reality. Both require rigorous scepticism – a willingness to question and challenge established orthodoxies – and the courage to ask deep, and often deeply uncomfortable questions about why things are as they are, and how they could be improved. That is why the challenges to one should resonate powerfully with the other. The battles that journalists have fought in defence of press freedom are only marginally removed from those the academy continues to struggle with over academic freedom. And both professions will, if genuinely pursuing the truth, need to do so with an integrity that itself puts limits on a purely libertarian approach to professional freedom.

If academic freedom is driven by its telos, the same is true of press freedom. Its underlying purpose is to enable the media to act as a watchdog over the powerful, to interrogate disputes, circulate ideas and facilitate public debate and understanding.

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those who seek to control it. (The American newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst famously once remarked ( JPROF, 2019), ‘news is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.’) Journalism must be allowed the freedom to investigate almost all corners of society and government, with the fairly narrow exception of those that hold sensitive private, commercial or security information. It should be allowed to interrogate the complete range of political views, to allow the best of them to win in free and open debate.

Consider perhaps the most eloquent defence of press freedom ever written, from John Stuart Mill (1998, ch. 2), who argued in 1859: The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

There is barely a coat of paint between Mill’s argument, and Evans’ (quoted above), that ‘academic freedom strongly protects the articulation of unpopular views’. But just as Evans goes on to point out that academic freedom is not unqualified, the same is true of press freedom. With the power of the press, comes great responsibility, and while not every journalist or editor has honoured that responsibility with complete integrity, those higher standards of editorial independence, a bias towards transparency over secrecy, fidelity to the facts, and professional scepticism should all still apply.

And, as already mentioned, these standards, whether of the academy or of journalism are, crucially, superintended by a variety of institutional offices and processes. So, for example, research ethics committees oversee conflicts of interests and the welfare of subjects (whether they be human or other animals), while gatekeepers work hard for academic publishers and funding agencies to ensure fairness in the peer review processes. There are comparable offices and processes in the work of journalists – the ombudsman, the Australian Press Council, the desk editor, sub-editors, managing editor, and the like. Journalists’ codes of conduct establish much the same ethical framework as is articulated in the TEQSA Guidance Note (2019). The Australian Press Council’s (2014) ‘General Principles’ for example, cover ‘accuracy and clarity’, ‘fairness and balance’, ‘privacy and avoidance of harm’, and ‘integrity and transparency’. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s Journalist Code of Ethics (2018) crucially mentions correction of errors, honesty, avoidance of conflict of interests and avoidance of plagiarism. See also the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (2019) Principles and Standards. It is these institutional parallels, as well as (partially) shared teloi, that warrant our guiding principle that Slippery beasts Fred D’Agostino & Peter Greste

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looking at journalistic practice can illuminate issues about academic freedom (and vice versa).

Notwithstanding this institutional apparatus, we still from time to time witness scandalous failures of academic or journalistic integrity. There are infamous examples of made-up evidence in support of a news story or a research outcome, accompanied by retraction, discipline of the offending professional, and soul-searching about the guiding policies and the effectiveness of their implementation. For some recent journalistic scandals, see ThoughtCo. (2019) and for some scientific scandals, see Fanelli (2009).

These failures of integrity are, of course, abuses of the freedoms granted to journalists and/or scholars and scientists and they take a form that is itself easily and dramatically narrated, involving as they do individual miscreants and the failure of other individuals, holding gatekeeping offices, to detect (in time to stop) their misbehaviour. Indeed, they are the stuff of documentaries (e.g. The Crisis of Science 2019) or dramatisations (e.g. Absence of Malice 1981), so readily do they fit into the contemporary mythos.

The canons of academic and journalistic integrity provide a framework of constraints on the liberty of individuals to do as they please … they represent constraints on freedom in Berlin’s negative sense. We accept them because they are understood as means to the ends, the teloi, that define the relevant professions.

The pursuit of truth requires a commitment to integrity. And it is the application of this commitment that distinguishes the freedom that the scholar or journalist expresses through their work, from the free-wheeling discussion in the pub (or Evans’ campus bar), just as the constraint on harm to others (as in Mill’s Liberty) distinguishes freedom in a civilised society from absolute negative freedom … i.e., the freedom from all institutional constraints that amounts to anarchy.

Of course, within the constraints of academic or journalistic integrity, the widest possible freedom of enquiry and expression is also instrumental to the realisation of the teloi of these practices. While they depend on restraint – the commitment to ‘objectivity’, for example – they also depend on examination of the full variety of ideas and points of view.

While there is objectivity, in some sense, there should be no institutionally enforced orthodoxy in the practice of scholarship or journalism. We are rightly sceptical, for example, of news media or academic organisations that demand conformity to a ‘party line’; they may think they already have the truth, but experience has taught us to be wary of such claims. (More on this point below.)

All this is pretty straightforward. On the account so far sketched, we have academic or journalistic freedom when individual practitioners are free from overbearing institutional constraints to ‘follow the story where it takes them’, so long as they are guided by their professional standards and ethics.

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But we are worried about something that can happen in both professions, even when individuals act with integrity and even though they may experience themselves as being authors of their own destinies, and so ‘free’ in Berlin’s (1969: Part II) ‘positive’ sense.

In many cases, failures of journalism and scholarship don’t involve bad people acting, self-interestedly, in ways that cheat the system and violate professional integrity. They may involve self-interest, but self-interest in terms that are defined, indeed, precisely by ‘the system’ and internalised by the individual. The failures we want to add to the kinds that people already know about aren’t individual, so much as ‘collective action failures’, of the kind familiar, perhaps, in the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin, 1968). And, tragically, they don’t typically erupt into scandals, though their effects can be more damaging to the public good than more easily dramatised failures of personal integrity.

The tragedy of the commons involves three key ideas: (1) the institutionally recognised freedom of individuals (their negative liberty) to do as they like with a common resource; (2) their own individual estimations of where their personal interests lie; and (3) the degradation of the common resource that results as a joint effect from freedoms exercised in pursuit of (narrowly construed) self-interest. Hardin described an unregulated environment in which each farmer may graze their cattle on the commons ab libitum. Every individual farmer sees that it is in their self-interest to do so, whatever the other farmers do. But when all act in their individual interests, even when each can plainly see the collective consequence, the commons is overgrazed and tragically loses its value to each.

No-one has behaved without integrity, but the consequences of their individually sensible (and permitted) activities, are bad for the individual and for the collective.

What has this got to do with the freedom of individual scholars and scientists to pursue their own research interests or, indeed, with the freedom of individual journalists to follow the story as they understand it?

Consider the situation of the individual scholar or scientist, at liberty, because of their (negative) academic freedom, to research whatever topic they consider it best to engage with, and hoping to express themselves, to author themselves, through their choices. How can they choose? Well, with some topics, they are and with other topics they are not going …

• to be easily recognised as ‘one of the gang’; • to benefit directly from the work of others; • to have ready access to publication and grants opportunities; • to be sought out as a collaborator; • to have the quality of their work easily and reliably assessed by their peers.

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and method on that basis. So, as scientists or scholars consider described 9/11 as a heinous crime that needed to be dealt with what topic to research, it is predictable (and indeed observable, by the criminal justice system, rather than an act of war that empirically) that most will choose a topic that affords these demanded an armed invasion. In Berlin’s terms, the structural career-enhancing opportunities. But if most do choose these forces that drove journalists – and indeed most of the West – highly salient options, then there is every prospect that there to see the attacks on the World Trade Center in military terms will be, as was long ago observed (Chubin and Connolly severely limited journalists’ positive freedom to see alternatives 1982, p. 294), an ‘unproductive over-concentration on some or to even challenge the orthodox view. In terms of ‘fitting in’ few problems, while high-potential areas go underdeveloped.’ and ‘getting recognition’, all the incentives were aligned with There will, in other words, be ‘over-grazing’ of the knowledge this interpretation of the situation. commons in some areas at the same time that other areas of In 2003, in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan, the enquiry are neglected. And the logic is the same as in the US Government claimed it had evidence that proved Iraq environmental case. Each individual, acting within a domain had ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The then-US Secretary of personal freedom, and expressing themselves as the author of State, Colin Powell, famously addressed the United of their own professional narrative, is nevertheless steered, Nations to insist that Iraq was a threat to world peace by compelling incentives that are built into their situation, and that invasion was necessary. In a stinging piece for to behave in a way that produces, as a resultant from the CNN to mark the invasion’s tenth anniversary, journalist combined decisions of many such individuals, a collective Howard Kurtz wrote (2013), ‘Major news organisations action failure. If there had aided and abetted the Bush been a different, more diverse administration’s march to The pursuit of truth requires a commitment distribution of research activity war on what turned out to be to integrity. And it is the application of this across the various topics of faulty premises. All too often, potential enquiry, then more scepticism was checked at the commitment that distinguishes the freedom knowledge, contributing to door, and shaky claims of top that the scholar or journalist expresses more human betterment, could officials and unnamed sources through their work, from the free-wheeling have been produced. (See also were trumpeted as fact.’ Kurtz discussion in the pub...

D’Agostino, 2019.) found more than 140 frontSo, while issues of academic page stories published from integrity – not cheating the August 2002 until the war system – are important and already well-known limits to began on March 19 the following year that focused heavily on academic freedom in a simplistic libertarian sense, we need the US administration’s rhetoric against Iraq: ‘Cheney says to add another, less widely noted element in understanding Iraqi strike is justified’, for example, and ‘Bush tells United what (responsible) academic freedom in fact requires. For Nations it must stand up to Hussein or US will’. Kurtz called there are systemic effects involving common incentives (in it (2013), ‘the media’s greatest failure in modern times.’ Kurtz Berlin’s terms, limits to positive freedom rather than negative was perhaps being too hard on his colleagues. He implied it freedom), that can also limit the ability of free academic was a failure of professional integrity, rather than powerful enquiry to deliver on the telos of that activity. structural and social forces that simply made it too difficult If that is true in the academy, it is no less real for journalism. (or too uncomfortable) to see the war in any other terms.

Take the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in Like the tragedy of the commons, this groupthink wasn’t so New York. Those shocking acts of mass murder made it much a failure of individual integrity as it was an expression all but impossible for US reporters to see their country as of the incentives in play, given a strong cultural bias towards anything other than a victim, and the attackers as anything interpreting the relevant events in a particular way. While less than villainous. This is more than simple self-censorship. the Iraq war is a dramatic example, a terrorist attack isn’t the The incentives to adopt this narrative – to be recognised only thing capable of restricting Berlin’s positive freedoms by as ‘one of the gang’, to have publication opportunities – putting on blinkers or channelling an individual’s approach were so powerful in the aftermath of the attacks that this to self-authorship. interpretation of events became a deeply embedded world view There is, perhaps, one disanalogy between the academic and that catastrophically disrupted the ability of many journalists journalistic professions. Both have constraints on freedom of to ask difficult questions and challenge the government’s practice that are related to the teloi of the enterprises, and narrative. The phrase, ‘the War on Terror’ became so resonant both exhibit systemic failures because of the influence of in the collective psyche, that it became impossible to see the professional incentives for recognition and participation. But US response in anything other than military terms. Think journalism, though perhaps not the academy, also encourages how different the world would have been if the US had institutional conformity; the organisations that hire vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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journalists often have an established and enforced corporate ‘brand’ or guiding (and enforced) ideological orientation.

But even those organisations that claim to have no particular ideological position, are still vulnerable internal political cultures that in turn shape their world views. For example, Chris Kenny, a conservative columnist for Sky News and The Australian, often derides the ABC for ‘groupthink’ that he argues drives the national broadcaster to take socially liberal approaches to a whole range of issues, though he often singles out climate change (Kenny, 2018; 2020). The American sociologist William H. Whyte Jr described ‘groupthink’ thus (1952): ‘We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity – it is, after all, a perennial failing of mankind. What we are talking about is a rationalised conformity – an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well.’

In Kenny’s conception, the ABC’s groupthink has pushed the broadcaster and its staff to hire left-wing journalists from a narrow band of Australian society and has thus entrenched a narrow small-l liberal culture that is incapable of understanding why a significant proportion of Australian voters continues to support coal mining. He declared (Kenny, 2020) on Sky News that ‘the taxpayer funded ABC opinion leaders suffer from ideological groupthink and avoid inconvenient facts’, especially when it comes to climate change.

It is easy to dismiss Kenny and his colleagues at News Corp for being guilty of exactly the same problem he accuses the ABC of. Either by accident or design, News Corp appears to have adopted a conservative ideological position, developing its own right-of-centre cultural world view. For example, the website mediabiasfactcheck.com rates The Australian as ‘centre right’, Sky News and The Daily Telegraph as ‘right’.

Walkley Award-winning journalist Tony Koch wrote in The Guardian, 9 May 2019, ‘For 30 years I worked for News Corp papers. Now all I see is shameful bias’. But in the heart of the contradiction lies the legitimacy of the argument. The social and political structures of the institutions charged with freely developing our knowledge and understanding, of challenging the status quo, and asking difficult questions, are encumbered by an institutionalised way of seeing and interpreting the world, which is only reinforced by the set of professional incentives, also in play in the academy, that tend to promote ‘follow-the-leader’ rather than ‘be-the-leader’ behaviour by individual agents. Just as those institutional wheel ruts drive academics to plough certain fields of research and ignore others, so journalists are also pushed into particular ways of seeing that shape and direct the questions they ask, and the stories they tell. This is often a matter of corporate policy for media companies, but the influence of culture on an academic’s world view can be just as powerful as a journalist’s.

The ‘Foucault phenomenon’ of the 1980s and 1990s is a striking example, especially in the humanities and social

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sciences. Once Foucault’s work was canonised, it became an ‘attractor’ for academic work on a variety of topics. Showing some facility in deploying Foucauldian ideas became a sine qua non for those needing to appear up to date. Of course, the mechanism was not the top-down one of corporate policy and its enforcement within a specific institutional context.

(On this see D’Agostino, 2019.)

Of course, it’s no easy matter to suggest a way around this particular difficulty, but the idea of diversity holds the key.

In media, there has been a long debate about the need for diversity in newsrooms. The theory will be familiar. If homogeneous communities tend to develop homogeneous thinking, it follows that introducing people from different social, religious, ethnic or gendered groups is likely to keep the institution’s mind open, if not each individual’s. But while diversity in this sense undoubtedly has value, given the way institutional incentives for recognition and ‘fitting in’ work, there is no guarantee that a person from an African background will magically see the world in a way that is radically different from a European or Asian, particularly if they all grew up in the same schools, played football together, and shared university lectures.

Culture is key; and not just the culture of those who get hired. (See Sunstein, 2003.) Corporate culture can be as stubborn a thing to shift as an individual’s, and every employee is as involved in the culture as any other. All are vulnerable to the same structural and social pressures. Bosses tend to hire people who think like them because we are drawn to those who reflect our own values and world views. We like working with people who support our opinions; not those who challenge them. (This is the central finding of ‘social comparison theory’ in psychology (Suls & Wheeler, 2000) and it is a very robust effect.) And anyone who doubts the power of a self-reinforcing culture to head off in dangerously narrow-minded tangents needs only to look at the way one particular unit of the Australian Special Air Service seems to have convinced itself that war crimes were okay.

In the academy, the idea of ‘tenure’, of ‘jobs for life’ in effect, was touted as an antidote to the risks of venturing into unpopular or unfashionable territory. Without the risk of losing their job, a researcher is theoretically free to explore those territories without restraint. But tenure has turned out to be relatively weak, up against the power of cultural incentives to maintain conformity.

There are some areas, largely in the humanities and social sciences, where, because of ideological engagements, there is a diversity of realms in which recognition might be sought and hence, a potential structural solution to what is, after all, a structural problem. If many scholars are likely to respond to incentive signals and to want recognition for their work, then to secure diversity and sceptical challenges to taken-forgranted thinking, it will help, indeed help a great deal, if there vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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are different ‘schools’ of thought to which one might belong.

The individual scholar gets to be recognised within their favoured school, but, because the schools are different and often indeed opposed, each will keep the other honest so long as they engage with one another.

Much the same principle animates ideas about diversity of media ownership. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recently launched a petition calling for a Royal Commission to investigate the impact of Australia’s highly concentrated media ownership. It was driven at least in part by his concern about the way Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation narrows and distorts public debate in Australia. At least according to one landmark study (Noam, 2016), Australia ranks third in the world for the degree of concentration, (behind China and Egypt), and that was in 2016, before the Nine Network bought the Fairfax papers in 2019. It would be fine if News Corp’s ‘right-wing’ tilt cancelled out the ABC’s ‘left-wing’ world-view, but true media freedom requires more than simply weighing one bias against another. It requires an aggressive approach to protecting diversity of ownership across the media landscape and, within those organisations, deliberate mechanisms to encourage dissident thinking, and, within the general public, a commitment to actively sampling the diversity before forming the judgments that will engage them in the voting booth or in other political action.

On this account, then, academic and journalistic freedom are in the service of something … the pursuit of the truth. And while each is subject to those limits on positive freedom that are inherent in any system of social incentives, the pursuit of truth may still be possible if there is diversity in the approaches that are taken to finding it. That is a matter of our institutional arrangements, not of our individual integrity.

Academic freedom, journalistic freedom … these are not something for the individual; they are something for the society, in the service of the society. But they are real only if the social arrangements are in place that enable both integrity at the individual level and diversity at the collective level.

Only in that way can they put honestly arrived at but always only partial perspectives on the truth into contact with one another in a productive way. This is the social precondition for the ‘rigorous scepticism’ that is expected of both individual academics and journalists. It is too much to expect each individual to step outside their own culturally defined world views though. We need, at a minimum, the diversity that Rudd is calling for in the Australian media landscape, but also an aggressive approach to encouraging and rewarding dissidents and contrarians. But even that is not enough. We also need the civility among divergent parties – the ‘dignity, courtesy and temperance of language’ mentioned earlier – that will enable these parties to engage with one another in honest debate, rather than hurling barbs at one another across the Twittersphere or, even worse, simply retreating to their socialvol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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media echo chambers and ignoring one another. Anything less is not true freedom, whether it is journalistic or academic.

Fred D’Agostino is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at the University of Queensland, where he was President of the Academic Board and Executive Dean of Arts. He edited the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and PPE: Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and co-edited The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy. A relevant book is Free Public Reason (OUP, 1996).

Contact: f.dagostino@uq.edu.au Peter Greste is UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland. Before joining the university as professor in 2018, he spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent for the BBC and Al Jazeera. His memoir, The First Casualty, (Viking, 2017) explores what he describes as the ‘war on journalism’.

Contact: p.greste@uq.edu.au

References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2019). ABC’s Principles and Standards. Retrieved from https://about.abc.net.au/wp-content/ uploads/2016/05/CODE-final-15-01-2019.pdf American Association of University Professors. (1915). General Declaration of Principles. Retrieved from http://www.aaup-ui.org/ Documents/Principles/Gen_Dec_Princ.pdf Anonymous. (2015). Journalism academics: mocked by the media and stifled by universities, The Guardian, 7 May. Australian Press Council. (2014). The Australian Press Council’s General Principles. Retrieved from https://www.presscouncil.org.au/ statements-of-principles/ Berlin, I. (1969). Two Concepts of Liberty, in I. Berlin, Four Essays On Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bickel, A. (1975). The Morality of Consent. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Chubin, D. & Connolly, T. (1982). Research trails and science policies, in N. Elias, H. Martins & R. Whitley (eds.), Scientific establishments and hierarchies. Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Pub. Co. D’Agostino, F. (2019). Growth of knowledge: dual institutionalisation of disciplines and brokerage, Synthese, retrieved from https://doi. org/10.1007/s11229-019-02335-1 Evans, C. (2020). Freedom of speech on campuses should never be confused with undisciplined free-for-all rants, The Australian, 11 February.

Fanelli, D. (2009). How many scientists fabricate and falsify research?

PLOS ONE 4.

French, R. (2019). Report of the Independent Review of Freedom of Speech in Australian Higher Education Providers. Canberra: Department of Education and Training.

Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hansen, M.T. (2013). How John F. Kennedy Changed Decision

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Making for Us All, Harvard Business Review, November 22, retrieved from https://hbr.org/2013/11/how-john-f-kennedy-changeddecision-making

Noam, E. and the International Media Concentration Collaboration.

(2016). Who Owns the World’s Media: Media Concentration and Ownership around the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162, 12431248.

NTEU. (2008). Submission to the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee Inquiry into Academic Freedom.

Retrieved from https://www.nteu.org.au/indigenous_ed/article/ Inquiry-into-Academic-Freedom---August-2008-174

JPROF. (2019). ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed.’ Or maybe not. Retrieved from http://www.jprof. com/2019/05/28/journalism-is-printing-what-someone-else-doesnot-want-printed-or-maybe-not/

Suls, J. & Wheeler, L., (eds.). (2000). Handbook of Social Comparison.

New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Kenny, C. (2018). ABC groupthink distorts debate we need to have, The Australian, September 15.

Sunstein, C. (2003). Why Societies Need Dissent. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kenny, C. (2020). ABC’s ‘ideological groupthink’ is a bigger worry than climate change. Sky News, April 9, retrieved from https://www. skynews.com.au/details/_6139636856001

TEQSA. (2019). Guidance Note on Academic Integrity. Retrieved from https://www.teqsa.gov.au/latest-news/publications/guidance-noteacademic-integrity

Kurtz, H. (2013). Media’s failure on Iraq still stings. CNN, March 11.

Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/11/opinion/kurtziraq-media-failure/index.html

ThoughtCo. (2019). The Top 12 Journalism Scandals Since 2000.

Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/the-top-journalismscandals-2073750

Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance. (2018). Journalist Code of Ethics. Retrieved from https://www.meaa.org/meaa-media/code-ofethics/

Whyte, W.H. (1952). Groupthink. Fortune (1952). Retrieved from https://fortune.com/2012/07/22/groupthink-fortune-1952/

Mill, J.S. (1998). On Liberty. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Moens, G., (ed.). (1991). Bulletin of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy 8: Academic Freedom Today.

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Beyond the usual debates Creating the conditions for academic freedom to flourish Sharon Stein University of British Columbia, Canada

Contemporary conversations about the state of academic freedom in higher education are an important subject of both scholarly inquiry, campus dialogue, and public debate. This includes concerns from all sides of the political spectrum that unpopular views are being shut down or shut out of campuses, as well as anxieties that the corporate, neoliberal turn of higher education and the resulting decline of tenure and precarity of many academic jobs has made academic freedom effectively moot in practice, if not in policy. These and other concerns point to incredibly important conversations that need to be had and that are engaged in with nuance and complexity within the contributions to this special issue. However, for the purposes of this afterword, rather than enter directly into these conversations on the terms that are already set, I suggest the importance of stepping back to consider what might be missing. Protecting academic freedom is a vital element of ensuring that higher education can serve as a site for deep, rigorous, multi-voiced, and socially accountable inquiry into complex contemporary challenges (including the challenges faced by higher education itself ). Yet in our defence of academic freedom, we rarely ask: What would be the necessary conditions for academic freedom to flourish?

Conversations about academic freedom are never just about protecting the intellectual rigour of academic knowledge as an abstract object; they are also about the relational rigour of how, by whom, and to what ends that knowledge is produced, transmitted, circulated, and ultimately impacts both humans and other-than-human beings (Stein, in Lobo et al., 2021). In this afterword, I suggest the need to balance intellectual, affective, and relational dimensions of how we approach academic freedom. Specifically, I ask how we might vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

create the conditions under which academics, students, and the communities they engage with can address any issue, but especially pressing issues of shared societal concern, with more sobriety, maturity, discernment, accountability, and respect. To do so, I consider what kind of intellectual, affective, and relational conditions might prepare us to engage on these terms. I also consider the difficulties of creating and sustaining these conditions. Although I separate these three types of conditions to discuss them in more detail, they are also interrelated and interdependent.

Intellectual conditions What might be the necessary intellectual conditions that would allow us to have difficult conversations about complex and contentious issues of shared concern, and what might be the challenges involved in creating those conditions?

Each field of study and discipline has its own internal norms of what constitutes deep and rigorous scholarly inquiry.

Members of those fields and disciplines need to maintain the professional authority to adjudicate among their peers and students the extent to which those notions of rigour are met. Maintaining this depth and rigour is especially crucial in the current moment in which the effects of technology and social media have resulted in the production of information at an unprecedented rate. The inability to grapple with this information overload has led to selective and shallower engagements with knowledge based on what is convenient and consumable (Bauman, 2011).

While a field or discipline’s norms might shift according to external influences, the shift itself should be negotiated Beyond the usual debates Sharon Stein

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internally. However, it is important to note that what often happens in conversations among academics in different fields or disciplines is an un-reflexive tendency to apply our own notions of depth and rigour to knowledge that is produced within another field of study and assume that we can easily understand the knowledge that is produced within those other fields. Yet our expertise in one area of knowledge does not make us experts in every area. Part of this slippage of presumed expertise has to do with the tendency within modern institutions of higher education to position our own ways of knowing as universal and exceptional. While science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines might be well-known for their claims of universality and exceptionalism, this can be found in all corners of the university. This kind of academic arrogance (Andreotti, 2021) precludes both genuine curiosity about other perspectives, and genuine respect for those other perspectives.

Especially when the norms derived from western disciplines are imposed onto non-western knowledge traditions, it affects a renaturalisation of the presumed universality and exceptionalism of western knowledge, thereby preventing the possibility of a true equality of knowledges – or what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) called an ‘ecology of knowledges.’ For Santos, claims of epistemic universality result in the decontextualisation and devaluation of other knowledges, and in some cases the invisibilisation of those knowledges altogether (see also Ahenakew, 2016; Mika & Stewart, 2017).

By contrast, an ecology of knowledges is premised on an assumption that: all knowledge systems are both indispensable and insufficient; their relevance is context dependent; and their value should be measured not according to their alleged ability to offer a universally applicable description of reality, but according to what opportunities (interventions into reality) they produce. As a result, rather than approach knowledge from a position of absolute universalism, or conversely, embracing absolute relativism, an ecology of knowledges approach suggests the need to attend to the contextual relevance of any particular way of knowing.

That is, certain knowledges are better suited to answer some questions than others, while at the same time, some questions are fruitfully addressed by drawing upon and braiding the insights of multiple knowledge systems. If we fail to ask how this ecology of knowledges might inform responses to contemporary global and social challenges, the academy is likely to reproduce ethnocentric imaginaries of sustainability, justice, relationality, responsibility, and change (Andreotti et al., 2018; Stein et al., 2020).

For us to create the intellectual conditions under which we can have the opportunity to have a generous and generative dialogue between different disciplines, fields, and knowledge communities, we would need to develop a deeper awareness

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of the partiality and situatedness of each knowledge system, each scholarly field or discipline, and our own knowledge.

We would also need to foster a sense of respectful curiosity about what we do not (and may never) know, and humility about our capacity to understand other knowledges and fields deeply or fully. Intellectual humility – or recognising the limits of what it is possible to know beyond one’s own area of expertise – is crucial here, especially as otherwise we tend to reproduce patterns of selective engagement (only with what is convenient or fits our agendas) and impose our own disciplinary ideas of depth and rigour onto others.

Affective conditions In many cases, the topics that are addressed in conversations about academic freedom are highly politically charged. These are topics that many people feel passionately about in many different directions, which makes generative engagements with them from different perspectives extremely difficult. It also means that addressing these questions is extremely important – but again, the question remains, how can we address these contentious, important issues in sober, mature, discerning, accountable, and respectful ways? Part of the answer has to do with attending to the ways that these issues are not merely a topic of intellectual analysis, but also affective investments.

In other words, we would need to attend to the ways that engagements around these issues tend to activate within us embodied emotional responses that can make it difficult to not only hear but actually listen to other perspectives. When we fail to attend to the role of affect in these conversations, we often short-circuit the possibility of genuine conversation.

To foster the affective conditions for academic freedom to flourish, we might begin not only identifying our own affective responses to engagements around different issues, but also taking account of the ways that these affective responses impact others and potentially block the possibility of relationships premised on trust, respect, reciprocity, accountability, and consent (Whyte, 2020). In relation to the former, we would need to become more attuned to our own embodied responses to certain topics of conversation. We would need to not only learn to notice when these responses emerge, but also to ask: Where is this response coming from?

What personal anxieties, insecurities, fears, assumptions, hopes, desires, and defences might it be related to? Which of my own experiences, conflicts, and even traumas might be contributing to this kind of response? What structural and institutional issues of power, inequality, and systemic harm might be shaping these responses? Are these responses related to the content of what is being discussed, and/or the way it is being discussed, and/or my internal emotional state?

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‘acceptance without endorsement.’ That is, the first step is to relationships is not just between institutions, but also between accept that these responses are present, rather than try to repress communities and individuals. or judge them. Only then might we be able to self-reflexively This approach to relationships differs significantly from consider the effects of these responses on ourselves, on others, mainstream approaches premised on transactional, calculated and on the possibility of generative, genuine engagement, benefits that treat relationships as an instrument toward especially across difference. By observing these responses in achieving an end and seek a single predetermined pathway ourselves and taking account of their impacts, we can more of change. The approach that Whyte suggests, along with soberly assess what and how we might need to recalibrate many other Indigenous thinkers, is instead focused on the in order to have deeper engagements about controversial quality and integrity of the relationship itself. Ends are not subjects. Taking responsibility for our own responses and determined in advance but negotiated and woven through their effects is not about compromising our integrity, agreeing the process of walking together differently. Such an approach with whatever is being said, seeking consensus or harmony, or to relationships decentres the individual and the presumed avoiding conflict. Instead, it entitlement to unrestricted is about asking how we might and unaccountable autonomy, ...how we might create the conditions each contribute to creating the and suggests instead that, while under which academics, students, and the conditions in which we can we are all ultimately free to communities they engage with can address have difficult conversations make our own choices, we are without compromising accountable for those choices any issue…with more sobriety, maturity, collegial relationships. and the impact they have discernment, accountability, and respect. on the wellbeing of others.

Relational conditions For instance, for Jimmy et al.

(2019), this approach to relationship ‘invites the surrender The contemporary moment is characterised by both hyperof individual entitlement for a greater good and calls for an fragmentation and hyper-individualism (Bauman, 2011). This ongoing stretch-discomfort within a container of relational is not only about the polarisation of different perspectives in interdependence that is unconditional in its generosity over what have been called ‘echo-chambers’, but also the increasing time, but not open to abuse’ (p. 15). From this perspective, tendency for people to encase themselves in their own creating the relational conditions for academic freedom to individualised virtual reality bubbles. This shift has been thrive entails looking beyond individual and even group affected, in part, by growing social, ecological, economic, interests to consider our different accountabilities (as people and political crises that lack clear solutions paired with the and as academics) to many different communities, and fragmentation of knowledge itself that makes collective becoming attuned to the tensions and contradictions that responses to these crises appear increasingly impossible, and arise among these different accountabilities. Accountability in the idea of a common good and collective well-being appear this sense is not about deciding to whom we are accountable, increasingly abstract and out of reach. Academic knowledge but rather to acknowledging our interdependence with one production and teaching can be an important part of efforts another and all living beings on a finite planet. to address current local and global crises and enable creative, Fostering these relational conditions is slow and often sustainable responses that reimagine a common good and difficult work. It is particularly difficult to do in the context support collective well-being. of relationships where trust and respect have been continually However, these are not problems that can only be solved violated over long periods of time – for instance, between with more knowledge alone. In part this is because, as Indigenous and settler communities. To foster the conditions addressed earlier, different knowledge systems and knowledge for generative relationships between these communities that communities will not only derive different, often conflicting have been in historical dissonance tends to require additional answers to the question of how we might achieve a common effort, including: understanding and accounting for the effects good and collective well-being, but also different ideas of systemic, historical, and ongoing harms, and not avoiding of what constitutes the common good and wellbeing in this fact out of fear of guilt, shame, or conflict; a shared the first place. As Whyte (2020) notes, to derive ethical commitment to work toward trust, consent, accountability, and effective collective responses among these different reciprocity, and respect, as well as an understanding that these possibilities, especially in ways that attend to systemic, mean different things to different people (Whyte, 2020); historical, and ongoing inequalities, we would need to and a long-term commitment to continue doing the work of ‘establish [and] maintain relational qualities connecting social building generative relationships even and especially when it institutions together for the sake of coordinated action’ (p. becomes difficult or uncomfortable, without compromising 3). Furthermore, the work of establishing and maintaining one’s integrity or well-being ( Jimmy et al., 2019). vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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Concluding thoughts Creating the above conditions for academic freedom is unlikely to be a straightforward, linear, or painless process. However, if we can create those conditions, or at the very least commit to the process of working towards creating them, then we might be in a better position both to practise and defend academic freedom in today’s complex, uncertain, unequal world.

With these conditions in place, any idea could be discussed with more prudence: in more sober, mature, accountable, discerning and respectful ways – especially ideas that are difficult, contentious, and controversial. This, in turn, would be conducive to ensuring that higher education serves as a key site at which we might support the coordinated co-creation of more equitable, ethical, and sustainable societies.

Sharon Stein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia (Canada), and a Research Associate with the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University (South Africa). Her research examines the complexities, challenges, and possibilities of decolonisation, internationalisation, and sustainability in higher education. She is founder of the Critical Internationalisation Studies Network, and a founding member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective.

Contact: sharon.stein@ubc.ca

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References Ahenakew, C. (2016). Grafting Indigenous ways of knowing onto non-Indigenous ways of being: The (underestimated) challenges of a decolonial imagination. International Review of Qualitative Research, 9(3), 323-340.

Andreotti, V. (2021). Hospicing modernity. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Sutherland, A., Pashby, K. L., Susa, R., & Amsler, S. (2018). Mobilising different conversations about global justice in education: toward alternative futures in uncertain times. Policy & practice: A development education review, 26, 9-41.

Bauman, Z. (2011). Liquid modern challenges to education. Padua: Padova University Press.

Jimmy, E., Andreotti, V., & Stein, S. (2019). Towards braiding.

Musagetes Foundation.

Lobo, M., Bedford, L., Bellingham, R.A., Davies, K., Halafoff, A., Mayes, E., Sutton, B., Marwung Walsh, A., Stein, S. & Lucas, C. (2021).

Earth unbound: Climate change, activism and justice. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/00131 857.2020.1866541 Mika, C., & Stewart, G. (2017). Lost in translation: Western representations of Māori knowledge. Open Review of Educational Research, 4(1), 134-146.

Santos, B. S. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 45-89.

Stein, S., Andreotti, V., de Souza, L. M., Ahenakew, C., & Suša, R. (2020). Who decides? In whose name? For whose benefit?

Decoloniality and its discontents. On Education. Journal for Research and Debate, 3(7), 1-6.

Whyte, K. (2020). Too late for Indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 11(1), e603.

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ATARs, Zombie ideas & Sir Robert Menzies Robert Lewis

The December media frenzy over low standards of entry to teaching degrees has become an annual event on Australia’s news media calendar. The 2019 headlines were unforgiving: Teachers Fail Up! Sub-par students let into teaching degrees, and ATAR of 50? No Problem-Study Teaching [sic]. Commenting on the news that the Australian Catholic University, the University of Canberra and the University of Newcastle were lowering their ATARs – Australian Tertiary Admissions Rankings – to 49.65, 48.30 and 53.45 respectively, the NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell made the extraordinary acknowledgement, ‘Some universities are not doing their best to properly prepare teachers for our schools’ (Harris, 2019).

Launched in 2010 by the Gillard Labor Government, the ATAR system is the first national unified system for reporting the educational attainment of successive cohorts of Year 12 school leavers. The system is widely regarded as fit for purpose, being both predictive of academic success and rates of completion (Higher Education Standards Panel, 2017; Marks, 2007; Wilson, 2020; Shulruf et al., 2018). An ATAR is a ranking on a scale from 0.05 (lowest) to 99.95 (highest), based on a complex algorithm informed by a 50:50 composite of final year exam results and school assessments. The median ATAR depends upon the participation-retention rate of the cohort. In theory, if there were 100 per cent participation, the median-average would be ATAR 50. However, retention rates hover at around 80-90 per cent, falling to around 65 per cent in regional, rural and remote areas. Lower participation rates elevate the median to about ATAR 70. Generally speaking, an ATAR > 80 is well-regarded, whereas an ATAR < 50 places a student in the bottom 30 per cent of the cohort, and therefore far less likely to have the requisite foundation literacy-numeracy skills necessary to meet the demands of tertiary study.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Australian Institute for

Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) infer the minimum entry standards for initial teacher education be set at ATAR 80 and above, drawing prospective teachers from among the best and the brightest. However, this is not the trend, and neither side of politics has a serious national plan to redeem falling standards. Moreover, since its inception, the ATAR system has become increasingly politicised and dragged into ‘culture wars’ over access, funding, standards and social justice. The aim of this commentary is to highlight the profound systemic problems of falling standards in school student outcomes; in part due to lowered ATARs as well as problematic standards in teacher education.

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Lowered university admission rankings In 2012, the Gillard Labor Government ushered in the demand-driven domestic market with the idea of increasing access to university degrees for disadvantaged low socioeconomic status (SES) school leavers. With a nudge from the Bradley Review (Bradley et al., 2008), Gillard removed capped funding and discipline quotas on Commonwealth Supported Places (CSPs), except medicine. Opportunistically, many universities and colleges lowered ATAR entry requirements to boost their intakes of domestic students, especially in cheapto-run degree programs like teacher education (as well as health, IT and business studies), thus securing the lucrative CSP revenue stream. Between 2009 and 2016, there was a 33 per cent increase in domestic undergraduate enrolments.

(Birmingham, 2017).

The trend continued, despite some limitations on funding imposed by the Morrison Government in 2018, not long before release of the Productivity Commission’s report: The Demand Driven University System: A Mixed Report Card (2019). The Productivity Commission report attributed the significant and rapid enrolment expansion to deregulation

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and found that institutions other than the Group of Eight (Go8) procured most of the ‘additional students’ – an estimated 191,000 between 2009 and 2017 – who would not have attended but for lower standards of entry. Those students were mostly low SES applicants drawn from government secondary schools with low ATAR scores (< 70), many of whom lacked foundation literacy and numeracy skills and ‘underperformed academically’, dropping out ‘at rates of 57 to 70 per cent higher than other students’. The report stopped short of suggesting caps or quotas be reintroduced but acknowledged that targeting low SES disadvantaged students was not in their best interests due to high rates of attrition, low rates of completion, loss of income, accrued private debt, and so on (Productivity Commission, 2019, p. 37).

The findings of the Commission’s report fundamentally contradict the then Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan’s logic-defying proposition that low-ATAR degrees are a viable means for redressing social and educational disadvantage.

In his speech at the Sydney Morning Herald School Summit on 25 February 2019, the Minister talked up the Morrison Government’s approach to ‘closing the gap’, a key component of which entails supporting local Indigenous secondary students to gain access to teaching degrees and eventually supply local schools (Tehan, 2019). It sounds like a compelling progressive agenda, however if these students lack foundation literacy and numeracy skills, how are they expected to engage, participate and complete training?

The Productivity Commission signals very clearly that taking low SES educationally disadvantaged students as low-ATAR entrants into teaching degrees, or any degree, is a high-risk strategy with predictably low returns – a strategy most likely to fail many of these students who are unprepared for academic studies. The report states that ‘improving the preparation of university students requires raising the skills of school students’, that is prior to entry; but the Minister argues that skills prior to entry are less important than skills-sets after four years of university study (Hunter, 2019). He is adamant it is all about ‘outputs rather than inputs’. The report reaffirms the widelyheld-view that even a four-year degree cannot compensate for 12 years of educational underachievement. It suggests that, beginning with pre-school students, the logical approach is to build their foundation literacy-numeracy skills step-by-step, especially during the formative primary school years, and that this development is a necessary preparation for secondary and higher education (Productivity Commission, 2019. p.15).

This is a widely-held opinion also evidenced by recent research (Australian Council for Educational Research, 2011).

Regardless of public pressure, the Minister has not recanted, doggedly determined that low-ATAR degrees remain a permanent feature of the landscape, justified in terms of a highly problematic social justice agenda that raises special pleading to a new low. His position is not

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evidence-based, but ideologically motivated and politically expedient. In the absence of a commitment to fund higher education teaching and research properly, he persists with the demand-driven market model with its inherent flaws and contradictions. In 2016, the then NSW Education Minister, Adrian Piccoli, conceded that after Gillard, ‘universities were using teaching degrees as cash cows to accumulate Commonwealth government funding through HECS debts.’

He said, ‘universities were putting their reputations at risk, and there was no excuse for admitting such large numbers of substandard students’ (Bagshaw & Ting, 2016; Hunter, 2019). It beggars belief that, in pursuing this policy, no consideration is given to the profound and predictable impact on the teaching profession, teaching standards and student learning outcomes.

Falling standards in schools Ten years ago, David Gonski, author of the Review of Funding for Schools (2011), highlighted the ‘unacceptable link between low levels of achievement and educational disadvantage, particularly among students of low SES and Indigenous backgrounds’ (Gonski et al., 2011, p. xiii). He signalled that ‘a concerning proportion of Australia’s lowest performing students are not meeting minimum standards of achievement’.

He was not the first, nor would he be the last to register the problem. Twelve months later, former WA Premier Carmen Lawrence wrote: Australia’s school system is widely-recognised to be one of the most unequal in the world. The link between student background and educational achievement is more marked in this country. On average, differences in students’ backgrounds accounted for some 55 per cent in performance differences between schools across OECD countries, but in Australia the figure is around 68 per cent (Lawrence, 2012).

Ten years ago, Gonski recommended that ‘a systemic effort’ was necessary to remedy the crisis. Clearly successive national governments of both political persuasions have not done enough in this space. Predictably, recent reports evidence the results of historical neglect and dysfunctional intervention.

The 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) found that Australian students’ results in reading, science and maths were all in long-term decline. Back in 2003, Australia was ranked third in reading, fourth in science and ninth in mathematics, behind Japan but ahead of Switzerland.

Sixteen years later Australia is ranked 12th in reading, tenth in science and 20th in maths. In the latest 2018 study only 54 per cent of 15 year olds attained the national proficiency standard in mathematical literacy, a downward trend that is said to be ‘equal to the loss of more than a year’s worth of schooling [since 2003]’, positioning Australia alongside Latvia, Russia and the Slovak Republic, leaving our students more than three years behind their Beijing-Shanghai peers and three years vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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behind Singapore (Thomson et al., 2019). The PISA national responsibility rests not with the Federal Government, but project manager, Sue Thomson, has said, ‘This has got to be a elsewhere in the system. For many observers the Minister is wake-up call’ (Baker, 2019). not part of the solution.

The 2018 and 2019 NAPLAN further evidenced the same downward trend. Aside from marginal improvements Declining standards in teacher education in mathematics for Year 3 and 5 (above 2008 levels) there was a continued decline in writing skills among Year 7 and 9 Dr Rachel Wilson has published extensively on ATARs students (below the 2011 baseline). Nearly one-in-three Year 4 and the teaching profession. She makes the elemental point primary school students did not meet the intermediate literacy that ‘within teacher professional accountability systems benchmark, 36 per cent in Year 8. The Grattan Institute’s internationally, both assurance of high standards and stability Peter Goss has said, ‘In Year 7 a third of the kids might still in those standards are minimum starting points for successful be in that learning-to-read stage and yet they are expected to education systems’ (Wilson, 2020, p. 5). However, many start covering more and more content.’ He added, ‘Secondary students enrolled in teaching are of an ‘unknown academic school teachers are not specialists in teaching kids how to standard’. In 2017, applicants’ ATARs were reported for read.’ Even if individual literacy only 17 per cent of the cohort problems were identified, they entering teaching degrees, It sounds like a compelling progressive are unlikely to be fixed. The and no other indicators were agenda, however if these students lack 2015 Trends in Mathematics available. ‘More than 65 per foundation literacy and numeracy skills, and Science Study (TIMSS) cent of entrants would have had Australian students flatan ATAR granted within the how are they expected to engage, participate lining in mathematics and prior two years, but this data and complete training? science, with conspicuous was not recorded if entry was gaps in achievement between on a basis other than ATAR’ Indigenous and non-Indigenous students remaining as they (Wilson, 2020, p. 9). were 20 years ago! (Thomson et al., 2017; Martin, 2019) The available data shows that, for teacher education, the The PISA scores also highlighted falling standards at the number of low-ATAR entrants (between ATAR 30-50) has extremities of the performative scale, among the brightest increased five-fold over the past decade; and those between students at the top and those at the bottom end, suggesting that ATAR 51-60 has tripled. Those with ATARs of between 70 this downward trend is sector blind and system-wide. Rachel to 90 have fallen. Only 51 per cent of high ATAR students Wilson, University of Sydney academic, whose recent report, who began their studies in 2012 completed within six A Profession at Risk (2020), highlights declining conditions for years. Teaching is a minimum three-year program. Overall, teaching and learning in NSW schools, made the comment: completion rates for low-ATAR entrants are much lower ‘When we look broadly across Australian education at the than among those with higher ATARs (Baker, 2020). Lowest moment, there are lots of really disturbing indicators in terms completion rates are among those enrolled in online courses. of declines in performance… Those indicators are systemOver the past two decades, some initial teacher education wide, they’re not [only] among disadvantaged students, and providers have moved away from dedicated primary or they’re across all states and territories’ (Robinson, 2018). secondary degrees to ‘one-size-fits-all’ three or four-year The Director of the Australian Mathematical and Sciences programs; a retrograde trend seen to be a further consequence Institute (AMSI), Tim Brown, has also raised the alarm of market forces. over falling standards across secondary schools, signalling When the quality of recruited undergraduates declines the critical shortfall in secondary maths and science teacher and ‘less able’ graduates enter the school system, their lack numbers. Brown has said that ‘urgent action is needed to of expertise, particularly in relation to literacy and numeracy strengthen the teacher workforce and reverse the trend’ pedagogy and STEM, can profoundly impact student learning (Watson, 2019). outcomes (Wilson, 2020, p. 35; Fitzgerald & Knipe, 2016).

In Federal Parliament on 19 December 2019 the call Wilson and Mack (2014) have reported on the contracting for urgent action was met with bullet-point apologia from numbers of primary and secondary students studying STEM, the Education Minister, who boasted of the billions being and the commensurate increase in school leavers undertaking spent on Australian schools – disproportionately less on teacher education degrees without achieving adequate maths public/government schools – while countries like Estonia, or science, a trend which is likely to generate ‘a vicious cycle he maintained, have achieved more with less (Hull, 2019). of declining engagement’ (Wilson & Mack, 2014, p. 35). The Evidently, the Minister would have the public believe that reverse of this trend is always a possible alternative (Wilson, the national crisis in school education is not his problem as 2020, p. 48). However, since the rapid expansion in initial vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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teacher education­­programs post-2012, reportedly there has been a corresponding rapid decline in the quality of provision and graduate outcomes (Maslen, 2013; Lloyd, 2013).

In 2014, only two years after the onset of the demanddriven system, the Tertiary Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) reported, ‘National standards are weakly applied’ across the 48 providers of initial teacher education programs. ‘Whilst there are examples of excellent practice, there are also significant pockets of objectively poor practice’.

Furthermore, programs were operating ‘without providing practical teaching experience in schools.’ The review noted that there were ‘gaps in crucial information (such as ATAR entry data)’ and ‘insufficient support for beginning teachers.’

Recommendation 2 stated reassuringly (!), ‘The Australian government acts on the sense of urgency [sic] to immediately commence implementing actions to lift the quality of initial teacher education… The full impact of the implementation of the Accreditation Standards will not be in place until 2023’ (Craven et al., 2014. p. xvii, emphasis added)! Australian Catholic University Vice-Chancellor Greg Craven told the press, ‘There is no doubt that some courses are substandard…

Some universities may stop offering teaching degrees altogether and that would be a good thing [sic]… The process of accreditation is much laxer than we would like. We have excellent national standards – the problem is they are not being applied.’ But TEMAG were soft on transparency and standards, and solid on institutional self-regulation. On the question of low-ATAR entry, Craven lined up with the Minister, ‘You can’t select quality teachers by looking at a mark branded on their forehead [ATAR] when they are 17 [years old]. What matters is how teachers come out of university, not how they go in’ (Knott & Cook, 2015).

In 2015, facing a tsunami of public criticism, concerns that initial teacher education graduates were unprepared and complaints that ‘some programs lacked rigour’, the then Federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne resorted to the unprecedented introduction of a pre-graduation literacynumeracy test (Hurst, 2014; Knott & Cook, 2015). It was and remains an extraordinary admission of failure on the part of government – a self-evidently damning proposition – the necessity of testing the basic literacy and numeracy skills of prospective teachers just weeks prior to graduation!

In 2016, when the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE) was first implemented, one-in-ten pre-graduates failed to pass! The following year the failure rate dropped to five per cent (Doyle, 2017).

In 2018 it was back up to ten per cent. Late 2019 private tutoring colleges reported an influx of enquiries from pregraduates (prospective teachers) wishing to improve their English and maths skills before sitting the LANTITE. All of this presents woefully poor optics around the quality of undergraduates exiting initial teacher education programs,

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raising doubts about the quality of prospective teachers in training as well as many who have already entered the national school system.

The politicisation of ATARs In September 2018, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) obtained a confidential report that showed that applicants with an ATAR 19 or below were being admitted to teacher education degrees. The author, retired professor John Mack, released the data and commented, ‘It was clearly not in the interest of universities to make this data available, [as] it evidences that the general quality of applicants has gone down’; he added, ‘It was worrying that offers were made to students that would have exceptional difficulty coping with first-year university’ (Robinson, 2018). His report also suggested the scale of the problem was much greater than expected. For instance, in 2015, ‘students who scored in the bottom thirty percent of school leavers, with an ATAR 50 or less, made up half of all those offered places in teaching degrees’ (Conifer, 2019). Mack’s leak to the media was clearly in the public interest, as breached accreditation standards were reported as early as 2013 but no action was taken (Ingvarson, 2013; Craven, et al., 2014).

In a number of significant reviews supposed to investigate falling standards in teacher education, ATARs did not rate a mention – a remarkable omission (TEMAG, 2013 ; Bahr & Mellor, 2016). Other studies acknowledged that the ATAR system had become highly politicised, even if conceding the inherent utility of ATARs. Notably, some Victorian universities and colleges abandoned ATAR-based selection, adopting instead psychometric or personality testing (Lloyd, 2013; Wurf & Croft-Piggin, 2015), marginalising ATARs as a common currency for reporting standards of entry to teacher education.

Perhaps the most disturbing behaviour has been the overt disparagement or demonisation of the national ATAR system ( Jones, 2013; Craven, et al., 2014; Devlin, 2016; Australian Council of Deans of Education, 2019; Park, et al., 2020; Zaglas, 2020). Some voices from mostly non-Go8 universities have pressed the message that ‘ATARs are just a marketing tool’, more or less irrelevant for entry to a university program.

A prominent voice among them is the Chancellor of Western Sydney University and former Howard speech-writer Peter Shergold, who has been running the line that ‘ATARs are distorting both the final years of schooling and students’ subject choices’, grimly declaring that ‘the ATAR will face a slow death over the next five years’ (Zaglas, 2020). He advocates for a new mode of matriculation, the Learner Passport, to replace ATARs (Park et al., 2020). In another op-ed piece the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University, Anne Jones, has justified lower ATARs as a ‘flow-on effect’ due to increased vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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enrolments, not the other way around: lower ATARs increasing enrolments. She concedes low ATAR entrants need to be supported, and concludes assuredly, ‘That’s not about dumbing down’, perhaps inviting the reader to logically draw the opposite conclusion ( Jones, 2013).

Increasingly ATARs are being connected with the issue of ‘precarious futures’ for young people, critiqued for being ‘out of step’ with the culture, values and incentives of the business world. The authors of Beyond ATAR – A Proposal for Change (O’Connell, 2019 ) and The Australian student voice on the soft skills needed for the future – And how universities can integrate these skills into their teaching (OUP, 2020 ) are touting the alternative to Shergold’s Passport: learner profiles, which are supposed to replace ATARs and report an individual’s competencies and ‘soft skills’: emotional intelligence, critical thinking and creativity. This next wave of neoliberal prescriptions is being funded by the likes of Oxford University Press, or consortia of corporates, not-for-profits and universities, their collaborations sometimes un-authored and/or subject to disclaimers to assure the reader they are thoroughly independent. Typically endorsed by a line-up of vice-chancellors, corporate high-flyers and state officials, they all enthusiastically embrace unfettered entry to the higher education marketplace, and the demise of ATARs. Despite what some may say, the ATAR system is not broken per se (even if much abused) and doesn’t need ‘fixing’.

According to the Productivity Commission report, ‘the ATAR remains important for Year 12 applicants’ entry into the most selective courses’ (Productivity Commission, 2019).

The Go8 and other high performing universities continue to promote high ATAR cut-offs, both for selection and to distinguish their degrees from the market competition. In so doing they maintain academic standards and the positional value of their degrees, as well as their reputation in the global and domestic marketplaces. In general, perceptions of courses and institutional reputations underscore students’ selections, as course entry ATARs ‘serve as a proxy for quality’ in the eyes of prospective students. (Marginson, 2004, p.185)

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testing, the LANTITE, an admission that significant numbers of prospective teachers were not up to scratch! Add to this the social costs to private individuals and wastage of taxpayer dollars; then the spectacular undermining of the status of the teaching profession. Notwithstanding further disruptions due to the pandemic, it is highly unlikely that future PISA and NAPLAN studies will do anything but continue to report declines in literacy, numeracy and STEM results, as much the legacy of policy ineptitude as ‘force majeure’.

Falling standards in school student education are obviously not solely attributable to ‘low-ATAR teaching degrees’, however teaching standards should be under the spotlight.

Teachers are widely acknowledged to be the key drivers of improved learning outcomes, and so too the reverse is always possible. The renowned Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire, reminds us that we may fail in our work with predictable (even if unintended) consequences for our students.

‘Incompetence, poor preparation, and irresponsibility in our practice may contribute to their [students] failure. But with responsibility, scientific preparation, and a taste [love] for teaching, with seriousness and testimony to struggle against injustice, we can also contribute to the gradual transformation of learners into strong presences in the world.’ (Freire, 2005, p.62)

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman speaks of ‘zombie ideas’ – ideas that are not held in good faith but are ‘brought to life’ to undermine political debate – ideas that should have been killed off by the evidence, but just keep shambling along, negating or suppressing rational discourse. The recruitment of low-ATAR (< 50) entrants to teaching degrees is such a ‘zombie idea’. The full weight of nearly a decade of low completion rates should be sufficient impetus to kill off the idea. This level of attrition speaks to the fact that a university degree cannot be both remedial and ‘higher education’, as further evidenced by the precipitous resort to pre-graduation

The actual impact/s of ten years of ‘low-ATAR teaching degrees’ are impossible to quantify in meaningful terms, given the lack of transparency around ATAR reporting.

The continuing practice of recruiting applicants below the published ATAR settings via alternative pathways, matureage entry, ‘forced offers’ and the like, impedes accountability around standards, falling or otherwise. Ten years ago, before the rise of the demand-driven market, there were legitimate concerns around the underrepresentation of disadvantaged minorities and low SES students. Today there is no doubt that this ‘progressive agenda’ has improved the numbers, but at what cost? Some public good has surely been served where academically competitive low SES students have achieved and completed degrees. But there is a sense in which credentialing and market economics, when applied to higher education, no longer confer upon the recipient any guarantees of employability. Recent graduates are taking jobs that not so long ago might have gone to high school graduates. When all is said and done, neither neoliberal prescriptions nor higher education are necessarily the solution for the vicissitudes of global capitalism in the throes of stagnation, still capable of producing unparalleled profits and pauperisation (Means, 2015).

For the Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan to acknowledge publicly the crises and instabilities in the national education system might prompt further questioning around falling standards, and the interrogation of his legacy and that of his predecessors. There is perhaps no less

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disturbing evidence of crisis and instability than high attrition in teacher education programs and among those graduating and recruited into schools. Recent reports estimate that some 30-50 per cent of teachers entering the school system leave within five years (Dadvand & Dawborn-Gundlach, 2020).

High staff turnover most profoundly disrupts the education of students attending majority low-SES disadvantaged government/public schools in regional, rural and remote areas. The inextricable nexus between teacher education and falling teaching standards in schools, particularly for these areas, has become a ‘chicken and egg’ situation: prospective teachers with low ATARs recruited from disadvantaged low SES majority schools then become ‘less able’ teachers who teach in disadvantaged low SES majority schools. This is not a solution but looks for all intents and purposes to be an exercise in ‘creative destruction’ or class decomposition. As Wilson and others have argued, this trend only generates a ‘downward spiral of disengagement’ (Wilson, 2020), lowering standards – a form of educational or intellectual disenfranchisement, or ‘dumbing down’.

While the conditions conducive for learning continue to be eroded for the two-thirds of all school-aged children attending comparatively resource-poor public schools, this is a disastrous situation. Only an elite among the broader population can secure access to the most prestigious schools and ‘a world class education’, leaving Indigenous and non-Indigenous working class Australian children stripped of a basic human right: a comprehensive secular education that might enable them to reach their full potential. Not even foundation numeracy and literacy skills are guaranteed, despite all the promises and motherhood statements.

In June 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Education Minister set in train fiscal measures to incentivise university degrees in areas of predicted employment growth, like teaching. Instead of confronting the evidential crises that permeate the national school system, instead of developing a national plan to raise standards or announcing a Royal Commission into the system-wide crisis dating back some 20 or more years, he looks to another instalment of neoliberalism, to feed public perceptions and reassure universities that they are supported when struggling with the collapse of the international student market. Impoverished low-ATAR teaching degrees, just like micro-credentials, are emblematic of instrumentalist designs on higher education, which look set to manufacture intellectually hollow training credentials for the surplus population or precariat. In the absence of viable public policy that might get ahead of the curve and address issues around structural unemployment, environmental degradation, climate change, the war economy and ‘the social dilemma’ of corporatised popular culture, young Australians are being subjected to ‘a holding pattern’ of lifelong training, to be job ready…

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Teacher education should be the flagship of quality university degree programs because of its importance for societal and economic development. After all, education is a public good, and higher education institutions should accede to the moral imperative of serving the national interest. As far as the ATAR system is concerned, it should be used for a better purpose, to raise standards of entry, to lift the status of teachers and to improve the effectiveness of teaching, and thus ameliorate student learning outcomes across Australia’s primary and secondary schools. However, this is not the present trend. The Australia Institute’s chief economist, Richard Denniss argues that the neoliberal pendulum has swung too far to the right, and questions whether it is so desirable for our public universities to turn a profit. He argues that ‘no public good has been more commodified than a university degree’ which ‘has come at the expense of the university sector’s ability to explain the broad contribution it makes to society’ (Denniss, 2020). By shedding standards and diminishing the cultural value of the institutions of higher education and mass public schooling, there is a sense in which the state is trashing the post-war social contract, and failing to meet its mutual obligations to workers, their communities and Australian society. Even the longest-serving Liberal-Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, despite his association with the complicated history of state aid, recognised the transformative potential of education. In his words (from 1964): ‘Our great function when we approach the problem of education is to equalise opportunity to see that every boy and girl has a chance to develop whatever faculties he or she may have, because this will be a tremendous contribution to the good life of the nation’ (Furse-Roberts, 2019).

Robert Lewis is an English literacy teacher, formerly working in primary, secondary and higher education in Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Hong Kong.

Contact: unswil@hotmail.com

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Baker, J. (2019, December 3). ‘Alarm Bells’: Australian students record worst results in global tests, Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au/education/alarm-bells-australian-studentsrecord-worst-result-in-global-tests-20191203-p53gie.html

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Martin, L. (2019, August 28). NAPLAN results 2019: Year 7 and 9 Writing have declined. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www. theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/aug/28/naplan-test-results2019-year-7-and-9-writing-skills-have-declined Maslen, G. (2013). Teacher training at the crossroads. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au/education/ teacher-training-at-the-crossroads-20130301-2fb2j.html Means, A. (2015). Generational Precarity, Education and the Crisis of Capitalism: Conventional, Neo-Keynesian and Marxian Perspectives.

Critical Sociology, 1-16, Sage Publishers.

O’Connell, M., Milligan, S., Bentley, T. (2019, November 2). Beyond ATAR – A Proposal for Change. Position Paper. Analysis & Policy Observatory. Koshland Innovation Fund, Melbourne. Retrieved from https://apo.org.au/node/261456 Oxford University Press (2020). The Australian student voice on the soft skills needed for the future – And how universities can integrate these skills into their teaching. Retrieved from https://apo.org.au/node/261456 https://apo.org.au/node/261456 Park, A., Donaldson A. & Kewley, L. (2020, August 11). ‘Slow death of ATAR as students head for ‘job cliff ’. Retrieved from https://www.abc. net.au/news/2020-08-11/slow-death-of-atar-as-school-leavers-headfor-jobs-cliff/12529898 Productivity Commission (2019). The Demand Driven University System: A Mixed Report Card. Commission Research Paper, Canberra.

Robinson, N. (2018, September 18). Students with lowest ATAR scores being offered places in teaching degrees: secret report. ABC News.

Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/studentslowest-atar-scores-teaching-degree-offers-secret-report/10200666 Shulruf, B., Bagg, W., Begun, M., Hay, M., Lichtwark, I., Turnock,

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A., Warnecke, E., Wilkinson, T. & Poole, P. (2018). The efficacy of medical student assessment tools in NZ and Australia. Medical Journal of Australia, 205(8). Retrieved from https://www.mja.com. au/journal/2018/208/5/efficacy-medical-student-selection-toolsaustralia-and-new-zealand Tehan, D . (2019, 25 February). Speech at the Sydney Morning Herald Schools Summit. Retrieved from https://ministers.dese.gov.au/tehan/ sydney-morning-herald-schools-summit Tehan, D. (2020, August 13) . Putting Students’ Interests First, Minister’s Media Centre, Dept. of Education, Training & Employment.

Retrieved from https://ministers.dese.gov.au/tehan/growth-demandjob-ready-degrees Thomson, S., Wernert, N., O’Grady, E. & Rodrigues, S. (2017, March).

TIMSS 2015: Reporting Australia’s results. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research.

Thomson, S., De Bortoli, L., Underwood, C., & Schmid, M. (2019). PISA 2018: Reporting Australia’s Results. Volume I Student Performance. Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

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Wilson, R. & Mack, J. (2014). Declines in High School Mathematics and Science Participation: Evidence of Students’ and Future Teachers’ Disengagement with Maths, International Journal of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education, 22(7), 35-48 Wilson, R. (2020). The Profession at Risk: Trends in the Standards for Admission to Teaching Degrees, February 2020, (pp. 5-62). Sydney, Australia: NSW Teachers Federation.

Wurf, G. & Croft-Piggin, L. (2015). Predicting the academic achievement of first year, pre-service teachers: The role of engagement, motivation, ATAR and emotional intelligence. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 43(1), 75-91.

Zaglas, W. (2020, June 11). Relying solely on ATAR ‘profoundly distorts educational experience: Peter Shergold, Campus Review.

Retrieved from https://www.campusreview.com.au/2020/06/relyingsolely-on-the-atar-profoundly-distorts-the-educational-experienceshergold/

Watson, L. (2019). Transparency is Needed on Nation’s Maths Teacher Crisis. Media Release, Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute: AMSI. Retrieved from https://amsi.org.au/2019/05/10/transparencyneeded-on-nations-maths-teacher-crisis/

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REVIEWS

The Idea of the University – A review essay The Idea of the University: Histories and Contexts by Debaditya Bhattacharya (ed.)

ISBN: 9781138055384 (hbk.), London: Routledge, xix+287 pp., 2019.

Public Universities, Managerialism and the Value of Higher Education by Rob Watts ISBN: 9781137535986 (hbk.), London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, xxi+358 pp., 2017.

Politics, Managerialism, and University Governance: Lessons from Hong Kong under China’s Rule since 1997 by Wing-Wah Law ISBN: 9789811373022, Singapore: Springer, (hbk.), xxii+223pp., 2019.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer & Catherine Link

Three contemporary books examine the fundamental changes occurring in and around today’s universities. The first book argues that the origin of the modern university lies in Europe. Starting with such a European perspective, Debaditya Bhattacharya’s edited volume The Idea of the University highlights the essence of the modern university. This concept hinges on modernism’s idea of a university dedicated to enlightenment (Kant, 1784). Such a concept was strongly influenced by Wilhelm Humboldt (1767-1835; see Nybom, 2003). Humboldt’s Bildungsideal [education ideal] favours a unity of research and studies directed towards the two Enlightenment ideals: the rational individual and the world citizen (MacIntyre, 2009). Bhattacharya’s volume shows the damage that has been done to Humboldtian universities in the USA and India. The book also illustrates why and how Humboldt’s Enlightenment university has been defeated by the neoliberal university.

The second book – Rob Watts’ Public Universities, Managerialism and the Value of Higher Education – presents an insightful overview of many changes experienced by universities in three Anglo-Saxon countries, namely Australia, vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

the UK and the USA. The book delivers one of the more comprehensive overviews of the current state of universities.

The last book positions Hong Kong’s universities since the hand-over from British rule to Chinese rule. Wing-Wah Law’s book focuses on the emergence of university managerialism since 1997 – an ideology that has infected many, if not most, universities (Aspromourgos, 2012).

This review starts with Bhattacharya’s The Idea of the University before taking a look at the Anglo-Saxon universities and finishing with the highly instructive case of Hong Kong.

The Idea of the University In the preface to The Idea of the University, Debaditya Bhattacharya writes that today’s universities exist at a time of a ‘resurgence of right-wing forces across continents [fostering] a climate of rabid anti-intellectualism’ (p. vx).

Perhaps even more than its right-wing populist offsider, the ideology of neoliberalism has done very serious damage to ‘Humboldt’s idea of a university’ (p. 1). This damage comes through preventing universities from conducting research

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‘uninterrupted and unforced’ by external powers (p. 3).

Originally, many university systems ‘took inspiration from the Humboldtian model’ (p. 6). Against that sits today’s neoliberal university. It is a university defined by ‘the logic of production and consumption’ (p. 11) with a ‘fetishisation of performance’ (p. 15; cf. Avigur-Eshel & Berkovich, 2019) often mutating in what Fleck calls impact factor fetishism (Fleck, 2013). Performance and competition have been fostered by external agencies including the World Bank (Federici, 2009).

The World Bank’s The Challenge of Establishing WorldClass Universities (Salmi, 2009) basically takes the twenty most elitist universities and tells the rest to be just like them.

It is a bit like telling a slightly overweight middle-aged businessman who plays golf once a month, that you too can be Tiger Woods. Following such illusions, many local universities around the world have been made to believe they too can be world-class universities. This is not going to happen. On a more serious note, the 2008 ‘World Bank’s World-Class University report [had the] mission of poverty reduction’ (p. 13). At the same time, the World Bank is ‘promoting the development of private tertiary education’ (World Bank, 2009 p. 12). In a quasi-tautological move, the World Bank believes that poverty can be reduced by privatising universities so that university fees prevent the poor – and in some countries a growing (India) or dwindling (USA) middle-class – from accessing higher education.

Because of the World Bank’s privatisation policies, there were ‘1100 per cent fee hikes for certain courses’ (p. 24) at certain universities. Surely the fact that ‘universities impose costs on students’ (Chomsky, 2014, p. 2) is a welcoming development for the World Bank and neoliberalism. For those universities that refuse to be privatised, there is always managerialism’s ‘model of punitive audit for public universities’ (p. 28). Overall, the World Bank supported the transition from public funding to private investment. By and large, the World Bank’s neoliberal ideology is based on three principles (p. 48): 1. The principle of value – capital appreciation and the capacity to attract new investors.

2. Skyrocketing tuition fees…that stratify societies; and 3. The idea that privatisation breaks apart teaching and research, decreasing the value of scholarship.

‘The conversion of universities from public to private purpose, in both research and education, has been shaped by the demands that accompany private funding’ (p. 53).

For students, the public-to-private conversion means that ‘privatisation limits access and funnels the historically excluded towards technical training rather than broad education in the science and letters’ (p. 56). The poor continue to labour while the rich attend expensive universities. This seems to be the neoliberal model of the World Bank. Meanwhile, one of

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neoliberalism’s key goals has been achieved, namely that ‘we are…losing universities as sites for the generation of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word’ (p. 58).

Apart from the pre-designed loss of democracy, poorer students are deterred from entering university so that the poor are trained to work. Like during the 19th century, they are simply confined to Learn to Labour (Wills, 1977). In short, ‘the only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus value for the capitalist’ (p. 63). Not even the ideological words of sophisticated human resources management talking of high performance work systems – HPWs can alter this fact.

HPWs aren’t designed to alter that fact. They are designed to camouflage the profit-making imperative of companies, corporations and ultimately capitalism (Baig et al., 2018).

That the world centres around private profits can be experienced in private kindergartens, private schooling, and the private ‘surplus university’ (p. 63). These institutions condition (HR, 2010) young people just ‘as the neoliberal university trains them in the rhythms of flexibility and selfexploitation’ (p. 65). These surplus universities operate as ‘teaching factories’ (p. 67) where an ‘accelerated learning process’ (p. 69) creates ‘students [who are] self-financing entrepreneurs’ (p. 70). Meanwhile, ‘the figure of the teacher is merely that of an administrator’ (p. 74) delivering prefabricated, modular and testable knowledge to Excellent Sheep (Deresiewicz, 2014).

Today’s students – now reframed as customers – are trained (not necessarily educated) in ‘the neoliberal university obsessed with the factory format – as represented in its obsession with…academic performance, and rankings (Avigur-Eshel & Berkovich, 2019) based on technological upgrades such as e-learning’ (p. 83). With the e-learning of the ‘digital diploma mills’ (Federici, 2009, p, 454) or not, this signifies what social philosopher André Gorz calls ‘the despotism of the factory’ (Gorz, 1970, p. 2) – a ‘tyrannical system’ (Chomsky, 2014, p.

4). Factory-like e-learning is a classical euphemism. Learning hardly takes place inside an e – electronic. It takes place in classrooms (Robinson, 2010). Instead of learning, what takes place inside the neoliberal university is ‘the enclosure of knowledge’ (p. 93). This is embedded in ‘the dismantling of public education at all levels [which] has been the hallmark of neoliberal structural adjustment’ (p. 94; cf. MacIntyre, 2009). All this fits into ‘a neoliberal configuration driven by privatisation [and] state disinvestment’ (p. 104) marking ‘the triumphalist narrative of liberal capitalism’ (p. 106).

Inside the neoliberal university, one finds ‘corporate-style managerial regimes [with] bureaucratic mechanism [and] strict surveillance’ (p. 109; cf. Zuboff, 2019) often signifying ‘private educational factories’ (p. 112). On many occasions, one gets the impression these university factories are running on the premise that ‘people who think too much are dangerous’ (p. 125). To prevent dangerous thoughts, ‘teachers

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and students are [placed] at the mercy of petty bureaucratic… administrators’ (p. 133). University managerialists have assured that ‘the arts, humanities and social science have been diminished…while professional, business and vocational education have expanded’ (p. 135). University graduates should function – not think.

As universities have set up marketing departments spending millions on advertising, universities have become ‘profitmaking teaching shops’ (p. 137). One university has recently spent $20 million simply to rename the university to ‘enhance their branding’ (p. 151; cf. Kimbrey, 2015). At least the money spent on changing the university’s logo wasn’t wasted on research and teaching. Meanwhile, many universities ‘make money off degrees that are as lightweight as the paper on which they are printed’ (p. 137; cf. Klikauer, 2018a). To an overwhelming degree managerialists parrot the World Bank’s hallucination of being a ‘world-class teaching and research institution’ (p. 143).

Still, the ideology of the World Bank creates very serious problems. Apart from the fact that, ‘the possession of a PhD or a DPhil is too often the mark of a miseducated mind’ (MacIntyre, 2009, p. 348), a PhD candidate at an Australian university was recently told not only to complete her PhD thesis but also to have three A or A* publications.

This follows the A*/ABC ranking of journals according to which five per cent of journals are ranked A*/A, 15 per cent B and 50 per cent are ranked as C (Dobson, 2014, p. 232).

The focus is on the top five per cent. The PhD candidate’s university managerialists required her to do that even though there are plenty of academics who will never publish a single A or A* publication – let alone three of them (Klikauer, 2020). Managerialists believe that an unknown PhD from an unfamiliar local university in a distant city can push their university towards being a ‘world-class’ university (p. 143; cf.

(Dobson, 2014, p. 239).

According to the Australian 2018 list used to ‘calibrate academic work’ (Dobson, 2014, p. 229) and to classifying academic journals into A* (best), A (good), B (okay) and C (bad), there are roughly 250 A and A* journals in the field of management (coded #1503: business and management). The 250 journals within the 1503 code include journals such as Applied Psychology, Acta Psychologica, Demographic Research, Health Services Research, Higher Education, International Migration, Journal of Communication, etc. Let’s do the maths: if each A and A* journal publishes four issues per year containing six peer refereed articles, there may well be about 6,000 A or A* articles published per year.

Globally, there are about 15,000 business schools. If one assumes that each business school has fifty academics (and many schools have more), that would make about 750,000 management academics globally (50 x 15,000 = 750,000).

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year (750,000 / 15,000 = 125). Beyond that, not all academics even submit an article each year. Only about 60 per cent of all academics submit an academic article to a peer-reviewed journal per annum. In our assumed case, this means 60 per cent of 125 = 75. Still, 75 academics per A/A* journal article.

While junior academics are pressured to publish in A/A* journals, senior academics are often less likely to care about such a pressure. In a replication of the bankers’ dilemma (those who need a loan cannot get one and those who do not need a loan can get a loan), a publication dilemma is established: those who cannot publish are forced to publish while those who can publish do no longer want to publish in A/A* journals. In any case, many A/A* journals have about 75 submissions per acceptance. This is a just under two per cent acceptance rate or a 98 per cent rejection rate at top tier journals.

Many top tier journals pride themselves on their high rejection rate. In any case, an artefact of the volume of submissions is not a statement of quality. It is a statement of the success of managerialism (Klikauer 2019). Finally, there is also the well-known bias of disciplinary gate keeping journal editors favouring star authors. Much of this aids the madness of numbers, measurements and rankings.

Unfortunately for Albert Einstein who published his Theory of Relativity [Relativitätsprinzip] in 1908 in a journal called Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität und Elektronik, this journal is not an A* journal. The 2018 list only includes the Jahrbuch fuer Wirtschaftswissenschaften (ranked: C). According to university managerialists, Einstein’s theory of relativity should not have been published – it is worthless (Einstein, 1908).

Just as, by the same reasoning, is Einstein’s E=mc2 formula published in the Annalen der Physik (1905) – another non-A* journal.

All this explains two things: firstly, the numerical impossibility for many business school academics to publish in an A/A* journal (hence the high rejection rate of A/A* journals); and secondly, it shows managerialism’s madness telling unknown PhD candidates with no track record to publish in A/A* journals. Worse, university managerialists have told senior academics not to publish in B/C journals.

Unknown to managerialists, there are many B/C journals that are of extremely high quality – just not in the eyes of managerialists (Dobson, 2014, p. 233).

For managerialism, ‘the very idea of excellence consists in its internal manipulability’ (p. 148). Inside the university, managerialists can easily manipulate PhD-students and academics while ‘mobilising structures of surveillance and control’ (p. 149). Just as one can control a lab rat in Skinner’s box by dangling a carrot in front of it, one can also control PhD students and aspiring academics by dangling a full-time job in front of them. The rat will jump, and the PhD candidate will try to publish in A/A* journals (Lemov, 2006). This support’s

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managerialism’s ‘fantasy…of people-as-human-capital’ (p.

157) – a mere cost factor for managerialists. The fact that ‘in a reasonably functioning university, you find people working all the time because they love it’ (Chomsky, 2014, p. 5) is an alien thought for managerialists.

In other cases, university managerialists are eager to establish ‘structural feudalism’ (p. 171). This is something that follows what real management calls strategic business units (SBUs; cf. Govindarajan, 1986). In Managerialism’s rational choice theory of endless games of chance (Abella, 2008), these SBUs can be pitted against each other. A mathematics department can be set against engineering or social science or against the arts. The possibilities are endless for the local warlords called department heads or deanlets (Ginsberg 2011). Uncontrolled, managerial deanlets can transmit the pressures installed by top-managerialists downward. The Harvard Business Review calls this ‘kiss upward and kick downward’ (ChamorroPremuzic & Sanger, 2016). No wonder the neoliberal university increasingly becomes a prime site of bullying (Lewis, 2004). Even the corporate psychopath thrives under these conditions (Klikauer, 2018b). Beyond that, the product flowing from much of this is that ‘social justice is no longer the responsibility of…the university’ (p. 174).

In the managerial university, ‘the cultural Bildung model of Humboldt’ is no longer of value (p. 185). Bildung now takes place elsewhere. During Humboldt’s times and before Managerialism took hold, ‘for students, the campus was the universe’ (p. 188). In many cases, a campus has been replaced by a parking-lot-university that students drive to and then go home straight after class. Meanwhile, other managerialists call impersonal and dehumanising office blocks Vertical Campus.

The linguistic madness – or perhaps the reality camouflaging ideological constructs of university managerialists – knows no boundaries (Orwell, 1948).

Inevitably, this leads to politics. The ‘mundane question of how academic research is controlled by grants cannot be divorced from politics’ (p. 201). This also links to the World Bank’s ideology that ‘higher education should be completely released to private capital’ (p. 213). It makes universities functional additives to capitalism. Deprived of a real campus, real teaching, real learning, and no civic engagement ‘higher education [no longer] provides the space for young people to become citizens’ (p. 245). Now universities provide vocational training between school and work (Klikauer, 2016) ‘promising their students a gateway to superior career possibilities’ (MacIntyre, 2009, p. 350).

The original ‘universitas magistrorum et scholarium – the community of teachers and scholars’ (p. 247; Habermas & Blazek, 1987, p. 11) has long been eliminated in favour of control and competition. University managerialists ‘leave no stone unturned to maintain surveillance’ (p. 269). They have created ‘a system of rewards and punishment based on a

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sense of good and bad, positive and negative’ (p. 270). Their surveillance system follows Greece’s ργος Πανόπτης – the allseeing Argus Panoptes. It is pan (all) and potikon (to see). In the panopticon, managerialists see all, measure all and control all (Kindsiko, 2018, p. 50). In short, university ‘Managerialism disrupts existing social relations between educational actors, only to reconstruct them in a new system of control’ (AvigurEshel & Berkovich, 2019, p. 3) – the all-seeing panopticon.

Meanwhile, external control has led to the fact that ‘in 2011, funding in the US for humanities research was less than half of 1 per cent of the amount that the science and engineering studies had access to [a fact that is somewhat] echoed in Britain…and Australia’ (p. 272). One of the dire consequences of engineering’s over-funding lacking a philosophical-ethical foundation is that science can genetically modify a human baby but to the question should we do that? we have no answer (Habermas & Blazek, 1987, p. 10). Equally daunting is the fact that Debaditya Bhattacharya’s book on The Idea of the University makes abundantly clear that the original concept of the university has been thoroughly demolished by neoliberalism and its evil twin brother of managerialism. All of this leads to the inevitable conclusion that public universities have been privatised while others are still-to-be-privatised. In both cases, managerialists behave as if universities were forprofit companies (Mandell, 2002). Whether private or public university, the destructive ideology of Managerialism has taken hold in many universities. Meanwhile, higher education has been reduced to vocational training. How neoliberalism and managerialism have achieved the same thing in the USA, Great Britain and Australia is illuminated in Rob Watts’ book.

Public Universities and Managerialism In the preface to Public Universities, Managerialism and the Value of Higher Education, Rob Watts notes that ‘it is increasingly difficult to find universities where learning, as opposed to education and training, is the main goal’ (p. ix; cf. Habermas & Blazek, 1987). Perhaps this is because, ‘higher education is now a commodity’ (p. 10). Learning has been replaced by something that can be sold: an employmentrelated degree. Managerialism’s apparatchiks have convinced many that ‘selling higher education [is important and universities] work in a highly competitive market’ (p. 14; cf.

Klikauer, 2015a).

The much-acclaimed educational market has ‘redefined the university in terms of purely economistic calculations [based largely on] consumer satisfaction’ (p. 29), i.e. a multiple-choice survey through which students evaluate courses. It is the application of management’s customer-is-king idea to private and public universities. Under managerialism the ‘distinction between private and public universities is fast becoming blurred’ (p. 31). Today, many, if not most, public universities

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operate as if they were private for-profit entities. Their focus has truly shifted from philosophy, science, research and teaching towards ‘budget responsibility, efficiency [and] accountability’ (p. 32).

Rafts of willing executors carry out managerialism’s imperatives every day. Staunchly, they stick to managerialism in a Columbus-like fashion. Watts writes ‘until his death, Columbus insisted that he had actually discovered a transatlantic path to India and threatened to hang any of his crew who dared disagree’ (p. 44). University managerialists seem to follow this. Challenge the managerialists and managerialism’s core beliefs and you are done. Gone are the days of ‘Kant’s unrestricted freedom to use his own rational capacity and to speak his own mind’ (p. 47). Kantian philosophy has vanished into thin air. Long gone are the days when ‘universities stood outside the system of market relations and cultivated both higher values and objective knowledge’ (p. 53). In the managerialist university, knowledge’s value lies in its saleability (Sandel, 1998).

Useless to managerialists are universities ‘constrained only by the requirement of truth’ (p. 54). Instead, university managers focus on things that can be measured, controlled and sold. Hence, numbers are relevant. These are numbers of publications – pure output – for example. Ask a colleague ‘how did she become a professor? And the answer is like to be “oh, she published a lot”’. These output publications are a valuable source for university marketing just like the number on some ranking (Amsler & Bolsmann, 2012). With the rise of the managerialist university, many ‘wannabe universities are offering merely professional or vocational courses’ (p. 80).

This brings in money.

Under managerialism, much of this has become ‘social plumbing’ (p. 83), as universities are increasingly mere shells of what they once were. They are no longer dedicated to science, wisdom, philosophy, and truth. Now they are dedicated to vocationalism like any other vocational college or training school. Many activities previously organised by academics have been handed over to managerialists (Grubb & Lazerson, 2005). In the case of vocational training, these vocational training regimes are supported by external agencies, so-called accreditation agencies. Vocationalism also means a ‘trend toward occupational-professional programs combined with short-term cyclical movements’ (p. 86). These are courses in which students are forced to use ‘textbooks with all the right answers’ (p. 89; cf. Harding, 2003). It produces ‘clueless students’ (p. 92) ready for corporate consumption (Lyons, 2018). Such students no longer see ‘the value of knowledge in knowledge itself ’ nor do they see universities ‘as emblems of democracy’ (p. 96; cf. Klikauer, 2016).

Deprived of its original sense, ‘Plymouth University [for example] promotes its vision to be the enterprise university… having a world-leading…enterprise culture’ (p. 105) – a vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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managerial hallucination. Much of this is based on the hegemonic belief that ‘the market is intrinsically more efficient than government; to gain greater efficiency, government should be redesigned according to market methods and incentives’ (p. 115). In many cases, such ideologies are straight out of Pinochet-loving Friedrich Hayek and his neoliberal catechism (Hayek, 1944; 1978). Inside universities, neoliberalism comes along as managerialism (Shepherd, 2018). Managerialism means high fees while academics are substituted through ‘the hiring for temps’ (Chomsky, 2014, p. 1). Managerialism’s unsavoury realities are camouflaged through announcements such as ‘students [are] at the heart of the system’ (p. 119).

The second impact of Hayek’s neoliberalism has been that ‘governments required that higher education double its enrolment…without any additional public funding’ (p.

123). This has been achieved largely through hiring more managers while casualising teaching – ‘some [academics] have to apply [for their own job] every year so that they can get appointed again’ (Chomsky, 2014, p. 3). This is accompanied by stagnating academic wages, the worsening of working conditions, work intensification, larger classes and moving research towards external, i.e. state or industry, funding.

Both are seen by managerialists as the ‘most important output’ (Dobson, 2014, p. 231). Meanwhile, the growth of universities has been successful. Indeed, ‘student numbers in Britain almost doubled between 1990 and 1996 [while] real funding per student fell by nearly 30 per cent’ (p. 124).

Following neoliberalism’s ideological catechism, ‘in 19952005 Australia was the only OECD member state to reduce total spending on tertiary education’ (p. 131). The loss of funding was compensated by a gigantic influx of oversees fullfee-paying students. In Australia, higher education became the third largest export industry after iron ore and coal (ABC, 2019). In other words, ‘higher education is an export industry’ (p. 147) and the prime location ‘for production of a commodity’ (p. 149) – just like iron ore and coal. Universities fulfil ‘the neoliberal project that is a political project’ (p. 153) even though neoliberalism is sold to us as an economic theory.

Just add the prefix neo to the political idea of liberalism and you get neoliberalism – the master ideology of untamed competition.

Under neoliberalism and managerialism, research is based on ‘the competitive pursuit of excellence’ (p. 156). Now, researchers are often prevented from working collaboratively.

Instead, they are pitted against each other. Teaching and research have become based on three core principles: a) promote competition; b) privatise higher education; and c) achieve economic autonomy (p. 161). The goal is to convert a ‘public good [into] a private good’ (p. 165) even though ‘knowledge is predominantly a public good, not a private good’ (p. 166). Just imagine if Albert Einstein would have kept

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E=mc2 private and Alan Turing would have done the same – millions would have starved to death. Unsurprisingly, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz argued ‘knowledge is close to a pure public good and far away from being a commodity’ (p.

166; cf. Stieglitz, 1999). Undeterred, university managerialists march on (Klikauer, 2015b).

Despite managerialists’ enforcement of the neoliberal ideology of competition, top universities are ‘not driven by competition’ (p. 170). Next to neoliberalism’s market malfunctions, internally managerialism means ‘the rise of the manageriat’ (p. 181). As in all other cases where managerialism has taken hold (Klikauer, 2013), the number of managerialists will rise. Hence, ‘between 1975 and 2005 American colleges and universities increase[d] the number of administrators by 85 per cent and the number of non-teaching staff by 240 per cent...by 2014 there were two non-academic employees for every full-time (or tenure-track) academic staff member’ (p. 185: cf, Chomsky, 2014, p. 1). At the UK’s University of Bradford, 63 per cent of all employees are support staff. ‘The University of Wolverhampton had 62 per cent, and Durham and Aberystwyth University had 61 per cent... in Australian universities, there are 1.3 non-academic staff members to every academic staff member’ (p. 186), equivalent to 57% of all employees being support staff. In other words, universities are a place where managerialists manage themselves with a few remaining academics.

Meanwhile, university managerialists are busy with being busy (Rosenfeld et al., 1995) and, on top of this, they invent and manage things like ‘strategic plans, target setting, benchmarking, academic audits, quality assurance, annual performance review, performance indicators’, etc. (p. 192).

The large overhead of university managerialists is financed by fee-paying students and ‘a continuous worsening of the staff/student ratio’ (p. 194). This means that more students are crammed into larger classrooms with a casual teacher in front of them, Alternatively, teaching has been moved online (Edmondson, 2012) – something even more cost-effective.

Fee-paying students create what managerialists call ‘teaching surplus’ (p. 195). It means students pay more than they get in return (Hil, 2015). This also means that managerialists can use the income generated from students for other purposes such as, for example, themselves (Michels, 1915), the marketing of the PR university (Cronin, 2016), and the fostering of a ‘culture of audit’ (p. 196). Audit culture is another instrument used by the all-seeing Argus Panoptes. It is also used to camouflage ‘the arbitrary exercise of managerial power’ (p. 198). One such an area for managerial power is found in corporate mission statements (p. 201): ‘Mission statements for universities were almost unknown until the late 1980s but have become near universal in 2016.

Perhaps nothing captures the pathos of modern universities

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as managers set[ting] about employing consultants and PR specialists to say what makes their university ‘unique’ or ‘special’, just as nothing expresses the loss of purpose that those charged with running the modern university now display as they attempt to express their claims to purpose and distinctiveness’.

Conceivably, mission statements are a clear sign that the neoliberal university has truly lost its sense and purpose.

It becomes even more obscene when universities advertise themselves by telling students ‘begin, build, and believe’ (p.

204). Not surprisingly, university marketing comes along with the following: ‘there is a nearly complete inability on the part of the senior managers to say what learning is, or why truth matters combined, with an unwillingness to see or to say why higher education remains a fundamental public good’ (p. 209). Instead, ‘a school or program looks to be successful when all of the metrics which an audit culture generates are favourable’ (p. 231), like: • high student entrance numbers, • high completion rates, • satisfied students who are attractive to employers, and • excellent customer satisfaction numbers, apparently signifying good teaching quality.

Customer satisfaction is achieved when students fill in a student feedback questionnaire. Here, ‘the assumption is that students are best placed to evaluate teaching quality’ (p.

241). It follows Managerialism’s customer-is-king ideology.

It is highly contestable that students are reliable judges of academic teaching ability.

Research on managerialism’s customer-is-king found ‘that 32 per cent of students each semester did not take any subjects with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week, and that half of the sample did not take a single subject requiring them to write more than 20 pages over the semester’ (p. 244). These are the valued customers-as-kings sitting in judgement over academic staff. To an ever-increasing level, academic staff no longer consists of full-time scholars. Instead, the managerialist university depicts this: ‘back in 1969, almost 80 per cent of college faculty members were tenured or on tenure track. By 2015 the numbers had essentially flipped, with two-thirds of faculty now non-tenured and half of those working only part-time, often with several different teaching jobs. This is something that modern universities refuse or fail to acknowledge: it doesn’t align well with the glossy brochure-speak in their corporate advertising.

It is also something of a public-policy scandal. No one in their right mind would go to a hospital staffed predominantly by low-paid, third-year medical students’ (p. 246).

Much of this has a negative impact on students and academics. American academics, for example, ‘spend twice as many hours on teaching as they do research’ (p. 247). This is thanks to something managerialists call ‘workload formulas’

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(p. 248). As a consequence, ‘universities are unhealthy place in which to work’ (p. 251). University managerialism comes not just with a heavy price for academics, it hits students as well.

For example, ‘student debt in England will increase to around £100 billion in 2016–17, £500 billion in the mid-2030s, and £1000 billion (£1 trillion) by the late 2040s’ (p. 269). Such a ‘debt is a trap, especially student debt, which is enormous’ (Chomsky, 2014 p. 2). Next to user-pays regimes and financial loan pressures, there is also a lot of pressure ‘to go to university [that is] strongly influenced by…[family] expectations’ (p.

279). Based on years of schooling (Bowles & Gintis 1976), parents and students have been convinced that ‘knowledge is a thing that can be delivered in on-line modules or memorised for subsequent regurgitating in a short-answer test’ (p. 291).

All this indicates that ‘academic capitalism’ (p. 302) is truly with us. Expectedly, ‘in the academic capitalist regime, higher education has two economic roles. Apart from generating revenue for academic organisations, its task is also to produce the kind of knowledge that facilitates the global economic competitiveness of corporations’ (p. 304).

Given the imperatives of neoliberalism and managerialism ‘to satisfy certain interests, the modern managers of universities now have no interest in telling the truth…this means…no Vice-Chancellor (or university president), Dean or Head of School/Department has any interest in telling the truth about the impact of public policy on the quality of work done in their institution’ (p. 339). It is no surprise then that Noam Chomsky comments, ‘how about management? Most of them are pretty useless or even harmful anyway, so let’s get rid of them’ (Chomsky 2014, p. 4).

It appears that the managerialist university moves further and further away from ‘the central point made in this book, that knowledge as a process is a deeply human and a public good’ (p. 349) [and] that ‘universities ought to be spaces for public scholarship, rational debate, and dissension, and they ought to play an indispensable role in nurturing a wider democratic and humane culture’ (p. 351). These virtues are slaughtered on the altar of neoliberal managerialism even in places like Hong Kong as the last book under review shows.

Politics, Managerialism, and the University The foreword of Wing-Wah Law’s book on Politics, Managerialism, and University Governance starts with ‘education has frequently been seen as a prime vehicle for advancing democracy’ (p. v). Historically, the rise of universities has often been accompanied by the rise of democracy. Some have argued that an increase in educational levels will inevitably lead to a rise in a middle-class seen as citoyens – open-minded democratic citizens (Rosenow, 1992). Subsequent to that is ‘the belief that the free exchange of ideas furthered the advancement of society’ (p. vi). This vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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takes place what German philosopher Habermas calls the open democratic sphere (Kellner, 2000).

As a consequence, even democratic states often have a tension-filled relationship with universities found in ‘the interplay between politics, managerialism, and higher education’ (p. 1). Still, with the rise of the managerialist university, democracy has been moved into the background. Meanwhile, managerialists foster – or perhaps enforce – ‘quality assurance and accountability’ (p. 2). This is not for CEOs, ‘antiquated hierarchies’ (Habermas & Blazek 1987, p. 6) and ‘the layer after layer of management’ (Chomsky 2014, p. 1). It is for academics working under such a regime. With the elimination of democracy from university administration came ‘the subordination of academic governance to corporate governance’ (p.

3). On this the historian of economics, Tony Aspromourgos notes in one of the finest pieces ever written on The Managerialist University (Aspromourgos 2012, p. 48), ‘the managerialist model cannot serve as a substitute for traditional approaches to quality assurance, which ultimately rest upon embodying in all individual and collective academic activity, professional norms and ethics of conduct, collegially regulated by the community of academics’.

The ultimate goal of managerialism is the complete destruction of the collective academic community. In many countries, this goal is supported by a ‘triangle of coordination spanning from ‘states, to markets and academic oligarchies’ (p.

4). The point is, however, that these oligarchies are managerial rather than academic oligarchies (Murray & Frijters, 2017).

Quite often, they are furnished with professorial titles by the managerialists, which are generously handed out to those who support Managerialism (Thaw, 2013). In short, the horizontal collegial approach is annihilated in favour of ‘a top-down approach’ (p. 4). In his book, Law also says that ‘Managerialism lacks an agreed-upon definition’ (p. 5). Still, Wikipedia provides a sensible explanation: Managerialism combines management knowledge and ideology to establish itself systemically in organisations and society while depriving owners, employees (organisational-economical) and civil society (social-political) of all decision-making powers. Managerialism justifies the application of managerial techniques to all areas of society on the grounds of superior ideology, expert training, and the exclusive possession of managerial knowledge necessary to efficiently run corporations and societies. (coincidentally citing Klikauer (2013) in Managerialism – Critique of an Ideology) One might also argue that managerialism can be presented as a formula: MA=MEI (Micocci & Di Mario 2018, p.

54) where managerialism (MA) equals the product of management (M), expansion (E) and ideology (I). In short, there is no managerialism (MA) without management (M), just as there is no managerialism without expansion into, for example, universities in Hong Kong. Finally, it is virtually impossible to think of managerialism without mentioning

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ideology ever since Enteman’s seminal work Managerialism: the Emergence of a New Ideology (Enteman, 1993). Still, managerialism has replaced ‘the two dominant models of universities governance – bureaucratic and collegial’ (p. 7) that used to define university administration until the 1970s.

The ‘collegial model considers universities as a collegium or academic community, one which allows the full participation of academics’ (p. 7). Managerialism ‘shifts [a] university as a republic of academics’ (p. 8) towards ‘implementing NPM [new public management] measures’ (p. 8), where NPM is the application of managerialism to public entities. Such attacks on universities and knowledge aren’t new.

After the unsavoury threat to torture Galileo Galilei by the Catholic Church significantly delayed the advent of vital scientific knowledge and progress (Chalmers, 2013), it became increasingly clear that ‘the most cherished feature of the university is that it derives its authority from human reason and wisdom, rather than from external authorities, such as the state and churches’ (p. 10). Managerialism threatens this. With managerialism, the state has actively planted its managerial henchmen into the very structure of the university. If Galileo Galilei and Albert Einstein fail to publish in A/A* journals and fail to attract external funding (Gove 2015), university managerialists will place those two no-goods on a PIP – a performance improvement plan, the first step towards dismissal (Klikauer 2018c).

For managerialism, another hindrance is ‘tenure [that used to be] an important mechanism to protect individual and collective academic freedom’ (p. 11). Academic freedom is a worthless concept for managerialism just as is the idea that universities should educate future citizens engaged in public discourse. Whether such citizens are ‘legal citizens, minimal citizens (someone who just votes), active citizens (someone who participates), or transformative citizens (e.g. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandel, etc.) is of next to no relevance to managerialism’ (p. 12).

One of the best expressions of what such a citizenship means is Henry Giroux’s UWS Hamilton Graduation Guest Lecture (2017).

The Giroux lecture encourages ‘academics [in their] duty to defend higher education as a democratic public sphere’ (p.

13). In this defence, too many academics have fallen into the trap of attempting to deal with managerialism on the basis of what they are trained in and do every day. They argue their case and provide supporting evidence. Managerialism is not about arguing a case and it is neither about providing evidence.

Managerialism is about ideology and power – organisational power and managerial power (Magretta, 2012). The ideological power of university managerialism is also found in ‘the concept of consumerism and academic entrepreneurship’ (p. 16). Students are seen as revenue-generating customers while academics are seen as entrepreneurs. They are made

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to fit into Hoyle and Wallace’s (2005) second versions of entrepreneurial managerialism (Magretta, 2012, pp. 70f.).

For many universities, the neoliberal toolkit came with a hefty reduction in state support but not so in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong universities did ‘not face severe budget cuts’ (p.

57). Furthermore, ‘Hong Kong academics enjoyed academic freedom’ (p. 59) – an increasingly rare commodity.

Still, slowly but surely even Hong Kong universities eventually fell under managerialism and ‘the introduction of competition between…institutions for research funding’ (p.

63). The mantra is let the market decide. All too often, one of the outcomes of the free market is that we will have even more medical drugs against obesity (a lucrative market) and but next to no drugs against malaria. Put crudely, poor children in our Planet of Slums have no market value (Davis, 2007). This is the inhumanity of neoliberalism. In any case, neoliberalism’s so-called market is based on ‘research outputs alone’ (p. 64).

Just like a car factory, the more cars roll off the assembly line the better. Hence, managerialism ‘treats university staff as if they were workers in a factory’ (p. 66). The principles of management and the ideologies of managerialism work in factories and in universities just as much.

Another effect of markets is that they create a system that is geared towards ‘stabbing each other’s back to compete for scarce research resources’ (p. 188). Managerialists measure this through attracting grants (money) and A/A* journal publications. In Australia, research grants also follow neoliberalism’s competition-is-good ideology. This means that academics invest weeks, if not months writing grant applications to the Australian Research Council perhaps unaware that ‘75 per cent’ (Dobson, 2014, p. 230) or even up to ‘80 per cent of them don’t get funded’ (Lowe 2019, p. 49).

This is a colossal waste of time. Another unknown side effect is a ‘preference for publications in English journals over [nonEnglish] ones [has] demoralised [non-English] scholarship’ (p. 189). Managerialism’s ‘performance [and] funding-based research assessment’ (p. 190) strongly favours US journals that are often highly ranked.

To conclude, all three books support the ‘E’ in managerialism’s formula of MA=MEI. Managerialism remains highly expansive (E). Managerialism expands deeply into universities. The three books show this vividly in the case of the UK, USA, Australia, India, China, Hong Kong and in many other parts of the world. Managerialism has infected businesses, companies and the public service (hospitals and schools). At universities as well, managerialism’s ‘business model means what matters is the bottom line’ (Chomsky 2014, 1). Most crucially, university managerialism is taking universities back where they once were. These are the dark ages of external influences over research, knowledge and truth.

These are also the days of Galileo Galilei. It was a time where an external agency – the Catholic Church – could define

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truth. A mere 350 years after Galileo Galilei, the Catholic Church actually apologised (Cowell, 1992) – admitting that the earth is not at the centre of our solar system and that the earth moves.

The similarity between Galileo Galilei’s time and today is that this time around, there is another external threat.

It is no longer called the Catholic Church; rather it is neoliberalism. There is also a crucial difference. Today, universities face a more hideous form of control over truth, namely an internally operative managerialism. Unlike in the past, the attack no longer comes exclusively from outside. Neoliberalism has planted a corrosive agency inside universities. Worse, this time around we might not have 350 years to correct certain misbeliefs (Shulman 2006).

What we are facing is the rapidly looming prospect of the Uninhabitable Earth (Wallace-Wells, 2017). Scientific truth is facing (Oreskes & Conway, 2010) an interesting symbiosis of corporate mass media (Smythe, 1977), conservative and populist politicians, and the $200 million spent annually by oil and gas corporations to defeat knowledge about global warming (McCarthy, 2019). Universities, science, knowledge and truth are under threat.

Thomas Klikauer teaches MBAs at the Sydney Graduate School of Management, Western Sydney University, NSW Australia.

Contact: T.Klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au Catherine Link is a lecturer at WSU specialising in hospitality and work integrated learning (WIL), in particular, simulations and student outward mobility.

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The peasants are revolting No Platform – A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech by E. Smith ISBN 9781138591677 (hbk.), ISBN 9781138591684 (pbk.), ISBN 9780429455131 (ebook), Routledge Studies in Fascism and The Far Right, Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group), London & New York, 230 pp., 2020.

Reviewed by Neil Mudford

The great thing about this book is that it shows us, in abundant detail, the longitudinal development of anti-fascist and anti-racist efforts and tactics over the last century. We rarely hear much at all about left-wing political thought and behaviours from anyone other than their opponents, so this is a refreshing read. The detailed focus is on left-wing university students curtailing the spread of fascism, in the first instance, by preventing its advocates from delivering their insidious message, a practice employed from the 1920s onwards. In the 1970s, the tactic came to be known as ‘no platforming’ and was broadened out to include racism and then to a wider range of issues and ideas that also cause damage and hurt to the victims. I will consistently use this term in quotation marks in this review, just as Smith has done in the book.

At the time of writing, the relevance of this topic could hardly be greater. In 2020 came the huge surge in urgent and passionate mass protests against racism across the United States. These were supported by protests around the world and broadened out to local racism of which there is no shortage. They were also opposed with counter-protests. In January 2021 came the month of alarming incitements by the then US President Donald Trump culminating in his supporters attempting to violently disrupt and overthrow the US Government. Then, perhaps most startling of all, the major social media companies finally responded to this, and Trump’s years of aggressive, right-wing bullying outpourings, by ‘no platforming’ him.

Much of the book concerns itself with considerable detail of ideological battles within and between left-wing groups over the anti-fascist and anti-racist struggles. Despite the sound of that sentence, the story is engrossing. The author’s skill in story-telling helps carry it off and the intensity of the competing arguments conveys the intensity and dedication of the protagonists. Another factor that kept me glued to the tale is that those years of political battles and intrigue were really about the deeper story of a fight for freedom from tyranny and hate. With such a theme and the author’s fine ability to bring the story to life, we have a tale that is well worth the read. vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

The book concludes that these efforts over so many years were a vital factor in keeping Britain free of a mass expression of fascism. Not that the fight is over, or ever will be, and that is part of the importance of this book. Even apart from the immediate events, the problems and challenges are, in essence, the same today as they were a hundred years ago and that is why the book contains important lessons for our times.

Part of the fascination of the topic is the sometimesimponderable questions behind it. It is the unanswerable nature of these that maintains an endless debate about the rights or wrongs of banning speakers in a university setting or in the wider world of the public press, television, the internet and, now, social media. One central question in all this is whether there are some ideas that are indeed so abhorrent that they should not be propounded. In a university setting, in particular, this immediately sounds odd. In the practices of university teaching, learning and research, everyone agrees that arguing this way and that is the bedrock of sorting the ideological wheat from the chaff.

A moment’s contemplation, however, brings to mind any number of ideas that almost everyone can agree are ‘out of bounds’ and must be opposed. Slavery and legalised murder, for instance, would surely be candidates. Just as an aside, a distant Australian ex-patriot colleague of mine did once say, at a conference in the 1990s in Virginia, USA, in relation to 19th century USA, ‘Slavery wasn’t so bad, I reckon.’ The other eight of us at the dinner table ‘exploded’. Outraged and disgusted we gave him a short but comprehensive ‘serve’, stormed out and left him there. We spontaneously ‘no platformed’ him, I now see.

Immediately though, in relation to the above example, we recognise that slavery was accepted practice for centuries.

Therefore, we have to recognise that what is beyond the pale can vary with time. When a point of view is dangerous, damaging and completely offensive, time-dependent though this may be, I think a respectable argument can be made that total opposition is the morally and politically correct response.

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How best, though, to counter the offending views? This book explores the ‘no platform’ approach that seeks to prevent the views being expounded at all, if possible. Would it not be better, though, to debate, counter and roundly dismiss those views? Surely, if your counter arguments are sound, you can verbally crush your opponents and win in an intellectually admirable way?

Of course, this alternative is always available and has its attractions. For one thing, no-one could accuse you of denying anyone their ‘free speech rights’. The historical record shows, however, that those involved in anti-fascist and similar struggles have concluded that the debating path is ineffective and even a trap. There are a number of reasons for this.

For one thing, as the sports of debating and parliamentary interaction show, if the protagonists’ aims are to win the debate, rather than to find the truth, then the logical and factually supported outcome is not guaranteed at all. Rather, the result depends strongly on rhetorical skills, emotional appeals, prejudice, etc. The proponents of the obnoxious views we are thinking of here are interested in persuading rather than providing logical proof. On top of this, the impression conveyed to the audience can vary greatly. Hence, inviting the group in risks the furtherance of their agenda of persuasion and recruitment. ‘No platformers’ would contend that fascists, for example, have no valid arguments and persuade only on the basis of emotion or misplaced grievance.

Another consideration is that providing a university venue for a group with obnoxious views blesses them with the undeserved prestige of having expressed their views in a respected seat of learning.

Historically, the first and abiding target of the ‘no platform’ tactic is fascism. Why should this idea be, or not be, ‘banned’?

The arguments are several.

Fascists wanting to expound their beliefs argue that universities ought to be willing to debate all and any beliefs.

They say that banning the presentation of fascist arguments exposes the weakness of their opponents’ counter arguments and that the ‘no platformers’ are hypocritical in supporting free speech in most areas of debate while blocking it for fascism. One of the latest jibes is that students, or others, are ‘snowflakes’ – that they are, supposedly, ‘naïve and politically correct students who are unable to engage with “challenging” ideas’ (p 2).

Those favouring the use of ‘no platform’ against fascism counter this by arguing that implementing fascism would end all free speech. Therefore, curtailing free speech to combat fascism in fact protects the broader right to free expression.

Additionally, the advent of fascist government would cause many people suffering and injury on a national scale and the benefit of avoiding this fate more than outweighs any free speech considerations. The latter is arguably the more important principle. The author puts it nicely as follows:

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For militant anti-fascists, a victorious fascist movement means violence and death for those specifically targeted by fascists, as well as the denial of a voice for everyone else. Thus fascism needs to be denied a platform in its embryonic stages. This was the basis for the original implementation of the NUS’ ‘no platform’ in the 1970s and a principle maintained to this day. (p 215) Though no platforming began as an anti-fascist tactic, it has been applied more widely in recent decades, beginning with explicitly tackling racism in the 1970s. Since then, sexist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic speakers have found themselves ‘no platformed’. The rationale for this is much as for fascism – that the victims of attacks on these grounds can suffer great damage and hardship without any justification and through no fault of their own.

Opponents of ‘no platforming’ complain about this expansion by supposing that there was a ‘pure’ time when only fascism and racism were targeted and contrast this with the present when they say the policy is being ‘misused’ against transsexual and queer denialists. The book shows clearly, however, that the current state results from a process of constant development, that the policy was always contested and that the underlying principle is the same – ‘no platform’ for ideas that damage people.

One thing that must be said about ‘no platforming’ is that Smith reports throughout that the tactic was used to exclude only the most egregious speakers, although it must have been tempting to use it against all one’s opponents. Tories, for example, were almost always allowed to speak. There were exceptions including explicitly racist conservatives such as Enoch Powell.

The central complaint from the targets of ‘no platform’ throughout its whole history is that they are denied their right of free speech. Apart from the injustice that can be caused by free hate speech, the truth is that the targets seem to get loads of other opportunities to spread their ideas. This is abundantly evident in our own time. We hardly ever stop hearing these complaints in the mainstream media, for instance, from those who would be ‘no platform’ candidates if they chose to speak at universities. Smith cites Sara Ahmed (Ahmed, 2015) expressing this in a most pointed and satisfying way: ‘Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.’

Smith points out that ‘no platform’ is itself an expression of free speech. It is a way of debating the unhealthy views by demonstrating that there are people who passionately disagree with the speakers. It might not be the most articulate method but it gets the message across just like other protesting actions do. When it comes to lack of platform, you have to wonder about left-wing political activists. Are they not continually vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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‘no platformed’ by the mainstream media? When do you hear socialist notions conscientiously examined in the mainstream media, let alone communist ideas? Our major trading partner has a nominally communist government but all that is said about this is that its government is authoritarian. There is never any discussion about how or whether their communist political system was a factor in them becoming the world’s factory, for example.

Mainstream media is controlled and run by big business.

Consequently, they are inherently opposed to ideas that inhibit their power and earnings and consequently do not publish them. In fact, they go further than failing to explore the ideas. Instead, at the mere mention of a left idea, they disparage it in the strongest terms as unrealistic, oldfashioned and discredited. Whereas, Laissez-Faire Capitalism is promoted as sensible, natural, the only workable way, good for everybody, etc. and even the ‘modern way’ in spite of this model being hundreds of years old.

By contrast, when there is a racist issue, for example, the reaction is to report that the instigator denies the racist tag.

‘I am not a racist,’ says the purveyor of racist talk. A bit of tsktsking might follow but we rarely, if ever, see fulsome pieces in the mass media saying how abhorrent, unacceptable and damaging racism is.

Part of the asymmetry in the images of the left and right in the public imagination derives, I believe, from the ability of conservatives to successfully mock and belittle left-leaning people. Conservatives seem somehow to have a well-honed ability to develop or purloin words and phrases and use them in sly ways to denigrate progressive thought and attitudes while reinforcing the notion that everyone is irritatingly cramped by left morality and politics. ‘Politically correct’, for example, is the term you use to mock any progressive attitude, such as inclusivity or gender-neutral language. The long standing African American Vernacular term, ‘woke’, has lately been quickly transformed from denoting awareness, especially of racial discrimination, to being used, it seems to me, to intimate that someone has recently become irrationally sensitive and comically adheres to progressive notions that are innately puerile. ‘Social justice warrior’ is another example of the same ilk. Laughter might be the best medicine, but it can also be a powerful poison.

The considerable power of mockery is used against the left in these terms but I can’t think of any equivalent terms that mock and belittle the right. Somehow the left is always seen as looney but the rabid right, even while unfair, narrow, perverse or misguided, always seems to be credited with holding its views earnestly and with conviction.

The arguments amongst the political organisations in the book about how to counter the damaging views went through cyclic changes, as you would expect. Street demonstrations, leafletting, picketing and incessant heckling in the lectures or vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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debates that did go ahead were some of the most favoured ‘no platform’ enforcement actions. A unique protest technique was employed by student Philip Gratier at Cambridge University in 1960 during a speech on South Africa by the prominent fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. According to a report in the Cambridge student paper, Varsity (30 April, 1960, p 1), Gratier was ‘one of the twenty-strong bodyguard’ deployed by the Cambridge University Conservative Association who hosted the event. In spite of this, Gratier ‘walked up to Sir Oswald and said, “Have a jelly my friend.” Then he thrust the green jelly into his face.’ Innovative, but it never caught on.

As usual, when it comes to active, physical protest, the protesters are often portrayed as violent though it seems such acts were rare. This and the enforcement tactic of ceaselessly heckling the toxic speakers no doubt made the demonstrators seem unruly and uncouth but that is the story of all protesting.

The irony is that the ‘no platform’ policy was instigated partly because of the violence done to the victims of the political beliefs it is designed to suppress.

On the other hand, Smith reports many violent acts by the pro-fascist groups and the police against the left students.

Indeed, one student died as a result of a clash with police at the Red Lion Square protest in 1974.

There is also the fact that those complaining about the ‘no platform’ policy use middle class methods of newspapers and parliamentary speeches, outlets that are largely unavailable to student protestors. This raises a question concerning the matters canvassed in the book. I don’t remember seeing much at all about support for the students by parliamentarians or other public figures. Surely, though, the students were not alone in opposing fascism. After all, the period covered spans the Second World War fought against fascist regimes.

In the 1980s, moderate student groups had some success in using ‘polite’ methods of ‘no platforming’ by convincing universities to officially block or uninvite toxic speakers. The Thatcher Government, however, attempted to counter this by passing the Education (no.2) Act with clauses designed to force universities to allow all speakers in, in the name of ‘free speech’. Fortunately for progressive politics, the Act proved to be ineffective. The students ignored it and continued with their protests. In the final chapter, Smith records that, as of 2017, the UK Government’s Office for Students is trying to replicate the intentions of Thatcher’s Act in response to the current conservative push to champion ‘freedom of speech’ but he doubts that this will be any more effective than the Act. The book is a most interesting contribution to political history but there are a number of related issues I would like to hear something about. For instance, the author provides an abundance of detail concerning the arguments within and between the left groups who developed and enforced ‘no platforming’ and their actions are reported thoroughly as well.

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fascists and other like groups attempting to field their speakers at universities and other venues let alone their thinking. Is the author enforcing a printed version of ‘no platforming’, I wonder? He doesn’t say so and there must be ways to convey the gist of their behaviours while avoiding advertising their wares.

Another question I have is whether the right-wing student clubs ever tried to ‘no platform’ left-leaning speakers? The absence of any mention of people in the 50s and 60s trying to muzzle Communists seems strange when anti-Communism was at its height in those years. Did Communism’s many opponents consider that the raging anti-Communism of the mainstream media was sufficient suppression?

Another gap in the book’s reportage is that it says very little about what the public thought of the ‘no platform’ tactic and policy and the associated political action.

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All in all, though, the work is a most interesting contribution to our knowledge of progressive action. I wonder what the world would be like now without those efforts?

Neil Mudford is an Adjunct Senior Fellow with the University of Queensland. He is also a member of the Australian Universities’ Review editorial board.

Contact: neil.mudford@bigpond.com

Reference Ahmed, S. (2015, February 15). You’re Oppressing Us! Retrieved from Feminist Killjoys: https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/02/15/you-areoppressing-us/

And the students are revolting, too Berkeley: The Student Revolt by Hal Draper (Author), Mario Savio (Introduction) ISBN 978-1-64259-125-5. Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL, USA, 298 pp., 2020.

Reviewed by Neil Mudford

Introduction This is a book written 55 years ago and yet the lessons it can teach us are just as relevant and the stories it tells are just as riveting as when the type bar last hit the ribbon for the original manuscript.

So many things have changed since then but the need to campaign and protest to retain, establish or recover political and other human rights never ends. Primary author Hal Draper, contributor and foremost student leader Mario Savio and others provide us here with eye-witness accounts and incisive analyses of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) struggle by university students at the University of California Berkeley to assert their right to engage in political action. They fought an intelligent, noble and, on their side at least, non-violent fight for the right of students to organise, campaign, work and collect donations on campus for causes such as the Civil Rights movement that was in full swing back then. Well, almost non-violent; Draper notes that ‘Savio was charged with biting a policeman in the leg during the October 1 [1964] scuffle around the Sproul [Hall] doors – an act which he admitted to be ‘excessive’ and informally explained as due to momentary irritation at having his head trampled by policemen’s heels.’ (p. 109).

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The huge and dramatic actions profoundly affected the nature of student protest in the USA and around the world and have been said to have largely defined student protest in the 1960s. Besides the huge scale of the actions, the mass student involvement, the arrests and trials and the associated police violence, much of their actions’ significance consists in the students’ use of the non-violent protest techniques learned during participation by some of their number in the Civil Rights Movement itself.

It is timely that this work is being republished, especially with the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement the rise of which emphasises the fact that African-Americans are still denied the rights and social standing of Euro-Americans even where such rights are theirs on paper. On top of that, there seems to me to be a surge in public protest action over other issues such as climate change and refugees. Extinction Rebellion (XR), for example, is an active and determined group whose techniques bear more than a passing resemblance to those used at Berkeley.

The techniques and strategies of the Berkeley struggles are still powerful tools for change and this book is a rather rare chance for us to learn about them and be inspired by them. vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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The book has several sections. The first is written by Mario Savio. It is referred to as an Introduction but it is, above and beyond that, a thoughtful and broad-ranging summary of the importance for all social groups of the struggle for free speech and civil rights and the place of the Berkeley events in this struggle. Savio provides us with a sweeping perspective of the state of social oppression and discontent of his time that, unfortunately, seems to quite accurately describe current troubles and dilemmas as well.

Hal Draper authors the book’s 188 page main section in which he recounts, in marvellous detail and style, the chronology of the dispute from its origins in the Berkeley administration’s repression of undergraduate political activity through to the huge student sit-in at Sproul Hall, the violent pre-dawn mass arrests by 600 police and the student strike that finally won the day for the students.

Throughout, Draper acknowledges the vital aid provided

by Pacifica Radio, station KPFA which broadcast live from the scenes of protest, extensively interviewed the participants and clearly amassed a significant collection of oral history recordings on the spot. Draper was able to draw on these recordings as a rich and vibrant source of information for the book.

The last third of the book consists of a section entitled ‘Voices of Berkeley’ in which are presented key contemporary documents, pamphlets and reflective analyses concerning the actions. Like Savio’s Introduction, these short works reveal a great depth of understanding of the events’ political dynamics and the broader context of the uprising. It is clear that those participating in the actions thought deeply about them and developed an impressive understanding of what they were doing, as you would hope to see from the denizens of an institution of higher learning.

The origins of the revolt Over the years leading up to the revolt, the University of California (UC) administration had imposed severe restrictions on political activities by student clubs. For example, the student ‘government’, the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), was forbidden to take stands on ‘off-campus’ issues, ‘except as permitted by the administration’ (p. 20). Clubs with an interest in social issues were labelled ‘off-campus clubs’ and were prevented from holding organisational meetings, collecting funds or recruiting on campus.

Only a few years before these events, Berkeley staff had been subjected to McCarthyist demands that they sign loyalty oaths. Some refused and lost their jobs. Draper comments that the university lost many good staff because of this. In spite of this, practically no-one believed the FSM, formed as part of the actions here, was communist dominated or led. vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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This state of affairs was at odds with Berkeley’s reputation, in the world beyond the campus gates, as a ‘liberal’ campus; that is, ‘small-l liberal’ in Australian parlance. Similarly, the UC’s Chancellor, Edward Strong, and President, Clark Kerr, were considered ‘liberal’ administrators. As central players in the administration’s role in the dispute, however, they behaved as anything but liberals.

Draper explores in detail Kerr’s character and belief system, in relation to universities, in his extensive pamphlet The Mind of Clark Kerr – His View of the University Factory and the ‘New Slavery’, written in the thick of the dispute and reproduced in the final section of this book. In his Introduction, Mario Savio acknowledges this pamphlet as ‘contributing mightily to the movement’s understanding of the extent and depth of the injustice by which the “multiversity” runs’. (p. 7).

Draper acknowledges that Kerr had a liberal side to him, more so in his younger days, and still in his rhetoric and public pronouncements but now largely absent in his actions of relevance here. Draper encapsulates the contradiction nicely when he says, ‘...Kerr is sensitive to the real relations between Ideals and Power in our society. Ideals are what you are for, inside your skull, while your knees are bowing to Power.’ (p. 26).

Draper’s analysis focusses in part on Kerr’s published theories on the contemporary and future role of the modern university as expounded in The Uses of the University (Kerr, 1963) of which he is chief author. This work seems to have had a profound influence on the development of universities over the intervening decades and ran to its 5th edition before Kerr’s death in 2003.

According to Draper, Kerr’s view was that the modern university is destined to serve society and industry as a producer of tertiary educated workers. In many ways, this has now become the standard model for a university. As part of this model, the corporate world outside the university would naturally become the arbiter of what students should be learning at university and aiming to become on graduation.

It is then a short step for a compliant university to yield to pressure from that sector to curb students’ political activities lest these interfere with the production of desirable graduates or the sector’s more immediate business interests. Certainly, the UC administration’s clear preference was to repress the students rather than rebuff the urgings of these external interests.

Draper points out that other facets of Kerr’s view of the modern university are that it should primarily exist as a business and that administrator quality is a critical factor in ensuring its business success. Sounds familiar now but it seems to have been a new idea in 1963.

Reactions to The Uses of the University are many and varied.

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was quite perceptive and therefore illuminating. Draper and the FSM considered the vision abhorrent and de-humanising.

The campaign by the groups that banded together and created the FSM began as a struggle for the right to engage in political activities. As the protestors’ understanding grew, they began to see that the university’s operational model as the fundamental source of the problem. The students were angered by the notion that their role in this scheme was as feedstock for corporate America’s workforce rather than as human beings possessed of citizens’ rights and deserving of a thoroughgoing and well-rounded education.

During the year before the dramatic actions that form most of Draper’s history here, the Berkeley students were highly active in protests centred around the Civil Rights Movement.

Actions included picketing and protest at various nearby businesses with racially discriminatory hiring practices, a sit-in at the US District Attorney’s office to protest federal inaction on investigations into the murder in Mississippi of three Freedom Summer volunteers and a picket line at the Oakland Tribune run by William Knowland. Knowland was the state manager for the deeply conservative Republican Presidential Nominee and later Presidential Candidate, Barry Goldwater.

Additionally, some students were collecting money on campus in support of a more moderate candidate. This violated the oppressive university rules on engaging in political action and on seeking donations for the same. Note that the students in these particular actions must surely have been Republicans, illustrating that all shades of the political spectrum were being affected.

These last student actions against Knowland’s newspaper and Goldwater are thought to be the trigger for the piling on of pressure on the UC administration to come down hard on the students which it duly did. Clearly, the students were annoying a wide range of powerful establishment figures who responded by exercising their own free speech rights in the hidden and highly effective ways available to the powerful and influential. They insisted that the university curb their students.

The administration then embarked on heavy handed enforcement of its rules with a level of ineptitude that almost defies belief. For example, they would attempt to impose harsh penalties while circumventing any disciplinary procedures prescribed in official and long-established university rules. They would impose these penalties on a selected few ‘offenders’ (read ‘student leaders’) while rebuffing others who were openly confessing to the same rather trivial crimes and demanding to be similarly punished. They would unilaterally alter the rules but, so often, would shortly after have to retract or modify them because of flaws within them such as logical impossibilities. The litany of missteps just goes on and on from the start to the finish of the whole affair. The administrators seemed never to learn from their mistakes.

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Draper points out that this tremendous incompetence on the part of the administration helped immeasurably in the ultimate triumph of the students’ efforts, especially at some crucial junctures. At times, the student movement was on the point of exhaustion or despair when the administration swooped in with another completely outrageous assault that reinvigorated the movement.

This brings up something of a puzzle in Draper’s views of Kerr’s political nous. Draper portrays him as clumsy in his handling of the dispute with the students, but later credits him with considerable understanding and cunning around the time Kerr resigns.

All this is not to say that the students ran a smooth, efficient and straightforward operation. Draper puts it nicely, in the following, concerning the Free Speech Movement: Even in the first stage, one of the most prominent characteristics of FSM functioning was the interminable, indecisive discussions of the leading committees at critical junctures. The picture of the FSM drawn by some in terms of sinister superefficiency and generalship so brilliant as to put the administration to rout, is one of the most ludicrous misrepresentations in this story. Time and again, the Executive Committee and Steering Committee of the movement discussed literally for days, coming finally either to no firm decision or to a decision which was negated the very next day by events, so that the actual policy was improvised. At such times the policy problems of the FSM were most often solved not by its councils but by some new ‘atrocity’ by the administration. (p. 190).

Nevertheless, the FSM campaign was run with high levels of inclusivity and thoughtful analysis, as the Voices from Berkeley section of the book shows.

Draper also advances another reason for the students’ success and that is ‘They were able to win so much because they didn’t know it was ‘impossible.’ A certain amount of naivete and inexperience was as a shield and a buckler to them.’ (p. 189). Had the students known the power of the forces ranged against them, they might well have given up before they started. Certainly, they were told by many that they couldn’t win or were ‘asking too much’.

About the students Several notable comments can be made about the participating students’ attributes and their behaviour as the revolt unfolded.

In his Introduction, Savio says of the student population, ‘Of course, there is a natural receptivity for politics at Berkeley simply because this is a state-supported university: a good percentage of the student body comes from lower-middleclass or working-class homes; many who can afford to pay more for an education go, for example, to Stanford.’ (p. 3) Thus the students were drawn from social backgrounds likely vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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to predispose them to take action on issues bearing on social justice. Indeed, Savio was a machinist’s son.

The broader US political and legal environment also played a part. The United States Constitution confers a number of rights on its citizens. Among these are the 1st Amendment which protects free speech against government censorship and the 14th which provides for equal treatment under the law and prohibits the imposition of laws that deny citizens their rights. As we keep hearing, these protections are taken very seriously by US citizens. Elsewhere in the world, protests aimed at overturning unjust laws or demanding fair and equal treatment do so on the grounds of natural justice. By contrast, the students undertaking the protest actions of interest here were in fact demanding that the law be upheld. This didn’t stop opponents charging that Anarchy was breaking out at Berkeley or that Law and Order must be enforced, meaning their protests ought to be suppressed.

They were a very intelligent group and brought their intellectual prowess to bear on solving the problems they faced during the campaign. In fact, surveys showed that there was a positive correlation between student involvement and high academic achievement. They produced canny tactics, clear thinking and flexible manoeuvring that outshone their opponents in the university administration time and again.

Many of them were ‘first timers’, that is, they had not previously engaged in any similar action. In spite of this, they showed tremendous discipline, sense of community and mutual support with their fellow students. Even when the going became intense with students threatened with disciplinary action, with significant police brutality, with the need for longitudinal commitment, they were steadfast.

The students’ detractors had difficulty berating and dismissing them outright. Typically, the students were high achievers rather than ‘drop-outs’ or ‘beatniks’. Also, the movement was clearly not directed or led by Communists or other establishment bêtes noires.

The movement was supported by clubs and students of all political colours even though the public generally thought of the movement as left-wing. Although many were politically inexperienced, there was nevertheless a solid core of experienced activists whose knowledge of protest techniques and campaigning were vital to the movement’s success. In particular, there were those, such as Mario Savio, who had experienced the political turmoil and violence of the Freedom Summer project that was part of the Civil Rights struggles in Mississippi. The techniques of passive resistance learned there were a vital element of the students’ armoury at Berkeley.

Then there were those, such as Draper, with skills in political analysis as demonstrated by the extensive analysis from Draper and others in the final section of the book. Thus, those directing the movement’s progress gained from a refined analysis of the issues and options available to them. vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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Initially, only undergraduate students were involved.

Part of the reason for this was that the administration, under President Kerr, had managed to hive off the graduate students from ASUC some time before. Once the movement gathered pace though, graduate students became interested and involved. Many graduate students worked as Teaching Assistants (TA) and were therefore both students and staff members. One of the longer term outcomes of the action was that the TAs formed a union affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

Faculty support was slow in coming but was fulsome when it did and played a significant supporting role in the final stages of the main events of the revolt.

Mario Savio Mario Savio’s role in the actions deserves special mention (see Wikipedia, 2020). As mentioned above, he had experience gained with the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi.

More than that, he was clear and firm in his views on the need to tackle the social problems he saw around him, and he knew how lead in the best sense of the word.

The students seem to have quickly recognised his leadership talent and responded enthusiastically to him. There were a number of other influential leaders, but he was pre-eminent among them. So much so that, according to Wikipedia, the news media in 1999 revealed that the FBI tracked him over the decade following as the nation’s most prominent student leader, covertly collecting information on him and placing him on a list of people to be detained without a judicial warrant in the event of a national emergency.

Draper attributes Savio’s natural elevation to leadership and the students’ acceptance of it by saying of Savio, that he is Not a glib orator, retaining remnants of a stutter, rather tending to a certain shyness, he yet projected forcefulness and decision in action. This was the outward glow of the inner fact that he was not In Hiding – he was in open opposition, and he had no doubts about it. (p. 44)

The Board of Regents In mid-November 1964, the University of California Board of Regents also played a direct and open role in the affair supporting the ‘no negotiation’ approach of Strong and Kerr that pertained throughout the whole period. The Board acceded to Strong and Kerr’s suggestions to launch new legal actions against the students, to shrink the already narrow limits of their political freedom and to increase the severity of the administration’s response to protest. In his article the ‘The Regents’, in the book’s last section, Marvin Garson provides a long list of the links of many of the Regents to powerful business interests. He then argues that, when students and And the students are revolting, too Reviewed by Neil Mudford

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faculty challenge vested interests, they should expect the Regents to side with the latter rather than support university independence of thought and free speech.

Indeed, this is the subject that makes up the bulk of Savio’s famous and inspiring ‘bodies on the gears’ speech at a noon rally on December 2, 1964 (see Wikipedia, 2020) made, unrehearsed, as he reported on the Board’s complete rejection of the protester’s demands ahead of the huge sit-in, mass arrests and police brutality in the pre-dawn of the next day.

Big sit-in, mass arrests, trials & convictions The students won their fight but at quite a cost. In the penultimate mass action of the revolt, approximately 1000 students staged a peaceful and mostly self-organised mass sit-in in Sproul Hall. Governor Brown sent in 600 police at 2 a.m. on December 4. Brown, by the way, was ex-officio on the UC Board of Regents. The police allowed anyone who wished to depart to do so and avoid arrest. About 200 students left after warnings from the Chancellor and the police but 800 or so remained and were arrested. It is a tribute to the passion, conviction and bravery of the students that they suffered what they did for their beliefs. The police spent the next 24 hours arresting the remaining students, with considerable police brutality, and carting them off to a nearby prison for charging.

As Draper notes, in spite of vindication of the students’ struggle, the arrested sit-inners were convicted of trespass and resisting arrest – going limp = guilty, mind you – and punished with fines and, in some instances, gaol sentences.

In keeping with the University’s approach of targeting the leaders, the list of penalties shows that Court punished leaders more severely than others.

Appeals were pending at the time Draper was writing. I haven’t been able to chase down the result of these amongst the mountain of information on the Movement and the

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protests. This is but a book review after all. The lengthy court proceedings were nevertheless, in themselves, considerable punishment for peaceful protesters trying to secure their political rights.

Conclusion The Revolt was a highly influential action that made great strides for the cause of the right to peaceful protest. The book provides us with a great deal of information about the actions and times and conveys the excitement, uncertainty and passion of the Movement. The students certainly received an important and unexpected education.

Neil Mudford is an Adjunct Senior Fellow with the University of Queensland. He was a ‘first-timer’ student protester at La Trobe University in the late 1960s and a veteran of the second Waterdale Road anti-Vietnam War march of 16 September 1970 (www.moadoph.gov.au/ blog/asserting-the-right-to-protest-the-waterdale-roadmarches/#). This had significantly less international influence than the Berkeley protests but did have a single ‘one up’ on Berkeley: one La Trobe protestor, Larry Abramson, was arrested at gunpoint. He was charged with offensive behaviour.

Contact: neil.mudford@bigpond.com

References Kerr, C. (1963). The Uses of the University. Harvard University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.com.au/ books?id=RSGdAAAAMAAJ Wikipedia. (2020, November 25). Mario Savio. Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio

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The tower of pong Bullshit Towers – Neoliberalism and Managerialism in Universities by Margaret Sims ISBN: 978-1-78997-812-4, Peter Lang Publisher, Oxford, x+196 pp., 2020.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer and Norman Simms

Ever since neoliberalism and managerialism arrived at universities, the ivied halls have deliberately been changed from places where people wanted to go to places that people endure. As a new caste of managerialist, corporate apparatchiks, and CEOs – albeit the latter with a range of titles – took over (Murray & Frijters, 2017), students eager to learn became customers eager to get the stamp of approval for a job (Hil, 2015). Inside The Toxic University (Smyth, 2017), the most willing executors of managerialism (always to be found in administration) were promoted into management. Others, less manageable, were downgraded, side-lined, dismissed, retrenched, and casualised. Simultaneously, academics, who originally constituted ‘the university,’ became a necessary evil, a cost, but one to be reduced. Based on her decades of experience in academe, Margaret Sims’ book outlines how this process was inexorably and relentlessly carried through.

Today, many academics go to work, to a place that ‘makes [their] stomach churn and [their] blood pressure sky-rocket’ (p. 3). Sims says, she got the idea of using the word bullshit from reading management emails, something she has done for the better part of the last twenty-five years. While the term bullshit has become ever more prevalent ever since the US philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a book On Bullshit (2005), the word has entered the scholarly arena, the champion of the dispossessed, ready to take on the lions (liars and their prevarications) of managerialism. Recently, bullshit became truly popular in other gladiatorial combats through Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018) and Spicer’s Business Bullshit (2018).

There are many very justifiable reasons to call universities bullshit towers, places run by those with bullshit jobs engaged in the business of bullshit. What corporate apparatchiks in universities do may appear as bullshit, it is nevertheless dangerous bullshit (in the sense of meaningless and obscurantist discourse). Much of the bullshit we see – many see it not just from afar as a theoretical ‘cloud of unknowing’ but experience it first-hand as a traumatic shock to the system – is created by a corps of corporate apparatchiks.

These corporate apparatchiks do not really work in a proper corporation (one that produces or distributes things) but have taken on the ideology of a corporation (a consolidation vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

of managers who merely self-aggrandise and self-perpetuate).

They transfer the ideology of neoliberalism into the idea of a university to the point that it becomes not just another ideology to compete for mental and bureaucratic space, but the very ideology of managerialism (Klikauer, 2013), the one that replaces knowledge, tradition and intellectual ambition.

Sims is correct when saying, ‘Neoliberalism…is an ideology’ (p. 5). Reading through the godfather of neoliberalism F. von Hayek’s catechism The Road to Serfdom (1944), indeed one gets the distinct impression that his short(ish) booklet isn’t on academic economics at all but an insidious ideological pamphlet. At the end of his long life, Hayek himself admitted that his main success had been the influence he had on journalists, working economists, and politicians. One of Hayek’s outstanding successes was ‘the removal of state responsibility’ (p. 7), which is now to be read as ‘the state or status of responsibility.’ In neoliberalism, this new condition of statelessness means privatisation. In managerialism this means shifting responsibilities (liabilities, consequences and burdens of guilt) to workers, ideologically camouflaged as empowerment (another meaningless buzz word, like agency).

For university managers, it means taking credit for what academics have achieved (as scholars and teachers) while blaming them when things (the financial and structural integrity of the institution) go wrong. This remains one of the most important rules management has ever invented.

Of course, in the old days of a more equal (collegial) life at university, to be an academic was to enter into venerable learned profession, a career in creating and evaluating knowledge and passing on the improved ideas and the refined skills to the next generation; therefore, it could not continue once managerialism moved in lock, stock and barrel. From then on, it proclaimed to the animals in the farm: ‘No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal’ (p. 8). Any university boss or corporate henchman will tell you that empowerment and collegiality are important.

And, of course, at the same time, they say that ‘any viable sense of agency [is] undermined’ (p. 8). Simultaneously, ‘dissent is perceived as traitorous, and as such, a legitimate target for punitive action’ (p. 8). That’s just because some animals are more equal than the others.

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This managerial gobbledegook comes along with a ‘curriculum [that] is simplified, so that students obtain good grades and respond with high customer satisfaction ratings’ (p. 13). Both are important for academic promotion and for the marketing of The PR-University (Cronin 2016).

Surveys (not objective, careful meditations on the subject) are also used to indicate quality (a diaphanous mode of bovine excreta). In that game, everyone, except (naturally) the student (or customer), is a winner. The ideology of quality assurance (Aspromourgos, 2012) is highly useful to force academics into ‘standardising their teaching’ (p. 13). This is not the only reminder of Henry Ford’s car factory with assembly-line manufacturing. What in a car factory is called SOS (Standard Operation Sheet) is called standard teaching and the ‘standardisation of assessments’ (p. 13). Following Ford, it creates standardised academics and students, readymade for the standardised world of consumer capitalism. Best of all, it creates a standardised illusion of thinking, bullshit framed within appropriate jargon.

Self-evidently, the language of managerialism ‘often sounds profound but its weighty sounding words hide a complete lack of clarity and meaning’ (p. 17). Managerialism does this deliberately. It is a valued strategy to obscure issues so that the managerialists can blame academics when things do not turn out as planned. It allows corporate apparatchiks to claim misunderstandings and to extract (or abstract) themselves from the scene. The advancement of the learned language of managerialism can be gauged in rafts of managerial buzzword generators available on the Internet (Watson, 2004; 2009).

It is equally important for corporate apparatchiks to master the babble of managerialism because it shows ‘leadership potential’ (p. 18) and belonging. Managerialists have no problem at all with ‘spreading not only the bullshit language, but the meaningless ideas upon which it is based’ (p. 18). This is a crucial point. While academics are trained to examine words and concepts, to detect holes and contradictions, for managerialism all of this is worse than irrelevant. It is threatening. Managerialism operates on ideology and power. Holding power allows managerialists to blame academics when they misunderstand the bullshit language of managerialist obfuscation. It forces academics into a position of having to interpret what is said by corporate apparatchiks.

Beyond that, it reinforces a much-valued power asymmetry in which managers tell academics what to do, as though a gang of monkeys typed out the lectures for the lecturers to read out to their students. It is power play which corporate managers enjoy, as academics, not just students, are regularly on the receiving end. They are the winners, further cementing their power. In a second move, academics can be exposed as incompetent. Thirdly, whatever the once-respected professors say provides valuable information that can be used against fellow academics. Big Brother is always watching you.

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For the corporate apparatchiks running universities, academics are not much more than human resources, materials, tools, chattels, (unfortunately) still a necessary and above all a costly ‘function,’ the rest is pretence. The occasionally issued invitation to participate in the university’s organisational affairs means nothing to managerialists except gaining insights into academia and the gathering of information to be used against those down Fayol’s chain of command (1916). From the standpoint of the managerialist, academic involvement is unwarranted, as it simply gets in the way. Nothing should get between a managerialist and his maker. Based on decades of excruciating experience, Sims is correct in saying, ‘Once in the management group, the language of bullshit must be spoken to maintain one’s position. The language of bullshit speaks the neoliberal managerial culture into reality’ (p. 21).

Using the mystifying language of managerialism means expressing a manager’s conformity to the esprit de corps of managerialism and a readiness to further the spirit of managerialist culture. This culture, by the way, isn’t culture at all. It is ‘organisational’ pathology (Schrijvers, 2004) sold as ‘culture’ [sic], a key term when enforcing the ideology of Managerialism. Managerialism assumes that organisational culture means shared values. These are the values of managerialism – not the values of academia or students.

Still, when all is said and done, ‘language [is] a powerful tool used to shape and re-shape realities, beliefs, and worldviews … it acts as a complete tool of social control’ (p. 21). This is exactly what managerialism is about and how it sees language. The language of managerialism is a vital tool to establish social control over universities. This is even more the case in organisations in which profitmaximisation, euphemistically labelled ‘shareholder value’ under managerialism, is not the prime goal of a university.

Free from the demand to generate profits, university managerialists can freely go about cementing managerialism into all the nooks and crannies of higher education. Much of this ‘concretisation’ (or intellectual constipation) comes at the detriment of students and academia as a (w)hole. That all of this is damaging to Alexander von Humboldt’s idea of the university is of no concern to corporate apparatchiks so long as they can fly business class and get picked up by a chauffeured blue Maserati with license plates depicting the corporate logo of the university.

Of course, the language of managerialism has been sent to earth by higher beings ‘further privileging’ (p. 31) the new cast of managerialists. In the simplistic world of managerialism where in-group is set against out-group, ‘those who are not fluent in bullshit language are positioned as undeserving outsiders’ (p. 32). For the in-group, it means that ‘managers gain confidence through having the right words to say and rarely seek to delve into any deeper meaning (partly because such a deeper meaning rarely exists)’ (p. 42). Managerialism

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remains a shallow affair based on ideology and power, not deeper meaning.

The lack of deeper meaning reaches into the teaching part of the university as well. Sims says, ‘In many instances senior managers are completely unable to define what learning actually is’ (p. 57). Of course, top managers in a car factory are unable to define how an ABS braking system actually works, or American presidents to understand the workings of the US Constitution. This mere technicality of knowing what you are talking about is of no concern to corporate apparatchiks.

These mechanical things are for people down the line. What concerns the managerialists is ‘the development of policies and procedures designed to standardise the ‘product’, and standardised tool to measure compliance and performance’ (p. 57). Performance management remains a vital component of managerialism and for corporate apparatchiks.

The fact that performance management is quite useless is irrelevant (Klikauer, 2017). The point is to use the illusion as a tool to further the cause of managerialism and to demonstrate to academics who ‘runs the show’. The point is power – not organisational performance (Guest et al., 2013). As William Shakespeare would have his dramatis personae explain at the end of their performance, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of.’

Beyond that, the system of performance management gives managerialists yet another punitive tool to be used against academics. If a management-defined failure lies in the area of teaching and research, it will ‘generate…a Unit Action Plan’ (p. 59) or, even worse, a performance improvement plan (PIP) – the first step to dismissal. Corporate managerialists call this, we will performance manage her out of here and my way or the highway (Ryan, 2016). The system has other benefits for managerialism because ‘academics spend more and more of their time each day demonstrating to managers what they are doing, rather than having time to actually do it’ (p. 63). This creates ‘accountability’ (p. 63) – a key term for managerialism.

What is relevant is accountability, not teaching, research and attending an academic conference, for example.

In the good old days (for lecturers) or the bad old days (for managerialists), an academic ‘would pop [his or her] head around the Head of School’s door to get approval and sign a piece of paper’ (p. 63) to attend an academic conference. Now, as Sims shows, managerialists have turned this into a 15-step application, vetting, and reporting process. On her list, Sims (p. 63f.) hasn’t even mentioned the final conference report to be submitted to management.

Of course, there are ‘millions of dollars…wasted by excessive compliance demands’ (p. 65). The European Union has even calculated the millions of euros lost and the time wasted every year as academics are forced to apply for funding grants for research projects. Regularly, if one project applicant gets funding, plenty of other applicants do not. More than that, vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

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nothing is either lost or wasted, since the whole process makes it more necessary that managerialists run the whole show, thus demonstrating their sublime power to create nothing (ex nihlo). They can dream up endless funding plans, conjure forth funding criteria, generate new assessment procedures, appoint more judges to vet proposals, etc. This keeps academics busy with filling in forms while corporate apparatchiks can set up special management departments assisting academics in the writing of funding proposals.

Meanwhile, the underlings of the corporate apparatchiks have also been kept busy with inventing ever more policies and procedures. Sims’ own university has no less than ‘64 policies, 62 rules, 106 procedures, 31 guidelines (plus an additional 17 guidelines) … eight protocols, four codes, three plans, two statements … 328 documents specifying how things should be done and by whom’ (p. 69). For what purpose? one might well ask. To camouflage the neoliberal ideology. In brief, to respond to the demand for less red tape.

To oversee all this, corporate apparatchiks have invented plenty of managerial positions such as ‘a sourcing and category manager, an asset compliance manager, a content optimising officer, a process innovation co-ordinator’ (p.

76f.). Consequently, universities are full of managers and increasingly fewer (full time equivalent) academics, casualised or otherwise. At Sims’ university, the apparatchik component was a staggering 62% in 2006. By 2017, it had grown to more than 68%’ (p. 78). Increasingly this is a common feature that defines today’s universities as sacred spaces for bullshit managerialist and not ivory-towered academics.

Much of this gives managerialists tremendous power beyond their sheer numerical strength. Therefore, ‘dissenters are casually dismissed as poor team-players, trouble-makers or malcontents’ (p. 95). Of course, the system of managerialism and its overpaid university bosses (p. 107) can call upon external assistance, usually framed as ‘independent advisers’ (Klikauer & Campbell 2020). One such support agency is Price Waterhouse Coopers which in 2016 stated, ‘Academic freedom and democratic governance of universities interfere with the efficient exercise of managerial prerogative and must be reduced in influence’ (p. 95). Unlike neoliberalism that seeks to use democracy, managerialism is outright antidemocratic. What managerialism seeks is efficiency, not democracy. Like the Fascists, they will make the trains run on time.

It relentlessly advances what Sims calls ‘PICO, which stands for power, influence, control’ (p. 111). The increased power of corporate apparatchiks inevitably leads to bullying (p. 113). Expectedly, ‘around 80% of bullying in higher education is perpetrated by managers’ (p. 114). It gets even better as ‘management perceive themselves as the university’ (p. 122). In the end, ‘the educational environments…are increasingly dogmatic and oppressive, and worse still, dogma

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and oppression are being delivered in the name of freedom and creativity’ (p. 128). Sims’ exquisite book ends with the inevitable necessity of ‘challenging the system’ (p. 169).

Hayek, F. A. (1944). The Road to Serfdom. London: G. Routledge & Sons.

Thomas Klikauer teaches MBAs at the Sydney Graduate School of Management, Western Sydney University, NSW. Contact: T.Klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au

Klikauer, T. (2013). Managerialism – Critique of an Ideology.

Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Norman Simms is a retired professor of the English and Humanities Department at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and is the editor of an online journal called Mentalities.

Klikauer, T. & Campbell, N. (2020). The Politics of Framing and the Framing of Politics. Counterpunch. Retrieved from https://www. counterpunch.org/2020/05/11/the-politics-of-framing-and-theframing-of-politics/

References

Hil, R. 2015. Selling Students Short: Why you won’t get the university education you deserve. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Klikauer, T. (2017), Eight fatal flaws of performance management.

Management Learning, 48(4), 492-497.

Murray, C. & Frijters, P. (2017). Game of Mates: How Favours Bleed the Nation. Brisbane, Queensland: Cameron Murray.

Aspromourgos, T. (2012). The managerialist university: an economic interpretation. Australian Universities’ Review, 54(2), 44-49.

Ryan, L. (2016). The Truth About ‘Performance Improvement Plans’. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/ lizryan/2016/04/08/the-truth-about-performance-improvementplans/#455b4b8d3b36

Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schrijvers, J. (2004). The Way of the Rat – A Survival Guide to Office Politics. London: Cyan Books.

Fayol, H. (1916). Managerialism Industrielle et Générale (Industrial and General Managerialism). London: Sir I. Pitman & Sons, Ltd. (1930).

Smyth, J. (2017). The toxic university: zombie leadership, academic rock stars and neoliberal ideology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cronin, A. M. (2016). Reputational capital in ‘the PR University’: public relations and market rationalities. Journal of Cultural Economy, 9(4), 396-409.

Spicer, A. (2018). Business Bullshit. London: Routledge.

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Guest, D., Paauwe, J., & Wright, P.M. (eds.) (2013). HRM and Performance: Achievements and Challenges. Chichester: Wiley.

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Watson, D. (2004). Watson’s dictionary of weasel words, contemporary clichés, cant & management jargon. Milsons Point: Knopf.

Watson, D. (2009). Bendable Learnings: The Wisdom of Modern Management. Sydney: Knopf.

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Downhill for universities since Menzies?

Australian Universities: A History of Common Cause

by Gwilym Croucher and James Waghorne ISBN: 9781742236735 (pbk.), New South Publishing, Sydney, Australia, 278 pp., 2020.

Reviewed by Paul Rodan

This history, commissioned by Universities Australia (UA, formerly the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee – the AVCC) deals largely with universities’ relationships with each other and with state and (later) commonwealth governments. They are seen as the key players in the creation of today’s university system and in overseeing the key policy developments in the sector. Thus, this is an account at the institutional and leadership levels rather than one delving into the social and political aspects which would be found in a more broadly-based approach, such as Hannah Forsyth’s A History of the Modern Australian University (see Rodan, 2015).

The authors remind us that the first universities in the colonies were as much a part of the British network as of anything distinctively Australian. They trace the development of a more formalised cooperative relationship (within the obvious constraints of distance) to 1920, when a Conference of Australian Universities was held in Sydney. Federation and then World War I had played an important role in promoting a more national outlook. The AVCC would be formed in 1935, but it is worth noting that it was not until 1949 that every university employed a full-time vice-chancellor.

Wars complicated life for universities, with the need to manage categories of exemptions from conscription (which in WW II could include overseas service), course completion rates and the like. Political oversight and intrusion were everlurking, and one wonders at the extent to which course failure rates were minimised by the risk that such failure could result in earlier military call-up for the poorly-performing student.

Government funding of universities varied from state to state (some students paid fees; some were on various sorts of scholarships), but all were affected by the Great Depression as governments imposed savage cuts on expenditure. But the Commonwealth had commenced its inexorable move towards greater involvement (with research grants) in the 1920s and, as in other policy areas, this grew during WWII, with the introduction of student financial assistance being a significant development. The authors highlight the creation of the vol. 63, no. 1, 2021

Universities Commission in 1942 as reflecting this enhanced role.

An important milestone was the 1946 referendum which gave the Commonwealth power to provide ‘benefits to students’ – allowing for the provision of scholarships and living allowances after this could no longer be covered under war powers.

Commonwealth reviews and inquiries (notably the three Ms- Mills, Murray, Martin) played a prominent part in the post-war growth period and these are covered in considerable detail. The figure of Prime Minister Robert Menzies looms large in this era. His present-day Liberal successors would probably find quaint his contention in 1950 that ‘the University’s function was to educate individuals in culture and learning and not to create technical experts’ (p.

78). Importantly, he maintained the Chifley Government’s Commonwealth scholarship scheme, which was the only means of entry into university for many students.

The importance of these scholarships cannot be overemphasised. Mythology tends to suggest that prior to Gough Whitlam’s abolition of university fees, it was mostly the fee-paying children of the rich who walked the hallowed halls. This is simply not true. By 1972, around three-quarters of students were either on commonwealth scholarships (with means-tested living allowances) or on quite generous teacher training bonded scholarships. As an undergraduate in the early 1970s, I knew no-one paying fees, although it was possibly not something one was likely to own up to, since it invited the conclusion that for some, parents’ wealth was making up for inability to secure a merit-based scholarship.

On the international level, the 1950s and 1960s saw the height of the Cold War and its impact on universities included the growth of suspicion in some conservative circles about the loyalty of staff. Australia’s first foray into the provision of education for ‘overseas’ students, through the Colombo Plan, represented some soft power diplomacy in that ‘war’.

The authors devote considerable space to outlining the creation of the Colleges of Advanced Education (CAE)

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sector in the late 1960s; useful reading, given ongoing misunderstandings of the binary system which existed preDawkins.

The Whitlam and Fraser Governments are dealt with in the same chapter which emphasises organisational and funding arrangements as well as the impact of Labor’s fee abolition and the efforts of Fraser to reverse some of those reforms. This section is especially acronym-heavy, a reminder of the special place of that feature in Australian post-secondary education.

For the historical record, it might have been helpful if the authors had included more complete details of the CAE mergers imposed by Fraser’s ‘razor gang’ as they have (very helpfully) done with the University/CAE mergers/ amalgamations enacted under John Dawkins. And, they omit to record that Fraser’s proposal for the reintroduction of fees for second and higher degrees (p. 151) in fact failed to become law, being defeated in the Senate – to the distinct benefit of this reviewer and (I suspect) more than a few readers of this journal.

The authors do well to identify the role played by the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT) in securing university status (a state government prerogative), becoming Curtin University in 1987. This highlighted the contradictions within the binary system and left Dawkins facing similar ‘conversions’ in every state unless he took some national action. This is not to defend everything Dawkins did, but to acknowledge an important part of the context.

His other ‘reforms’ are recounted in considerable detail, but consistent with the theme of the book, the focus is more on the funding and organisational aspects than on the social and political implications (including Labor differences of opinion) of the end of free tertiary education.

Sections on the Howard, Rudd/Gillard and current government policies deal mostly with the emergence and role of the internet, more inquiries, funding models, participation rates, contested notions of the university and internationalisation. It is a useful account of a period of substantial change, with commonwealth government control well-established, a far cry from the commencement of the narrative in 1920.

The book was obviously written before the devastating impact of COVID-19 in universities and the Federal Government’s contentious changes in institutional funding and course fees, and its refusal to provide financial support for university employees. This reflected an ongoing Coalition hostility to the sector (evident long before the pandemic), but this animosity is unaddressed by the authors.

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The book’s subtitle – A History of Common Cause – reflects the authors’ contention that the Australian university system is essentially a success story, owing much to cooperation and collaboration between institutions and overall positive relations with government. For some, this may be too sanguine a view, overlooking the contested nature of much of what is chronicled. There seems to be minimal acknowledgement that a clash of values between political actors plays some role in how policy debates and decisions evolve from era to era, with the demand-driven system being an example which comes to mind. Similarly, there is no exploration of the potential for the existence of university sub-groups (GO8, ATN et al.) to expose UA members to government ‘divide and conquer strategies’. Granted, the book does not claim to be a political history, but there is almost a politics-averse approach which may leave some readers concerned that the picture is incomplete.

That said, the book is a valuable contribution within the focus it adopts. It is commendably free of typo and editing errors, with one exception. In the index, the NTEU is recorded as the National Territory Education Union – which would seem to suggest specialist representation for members in the NT and ACT! A commissioned history is unlikely to offer a robust critique of the hand that feeds it, but the celebratory tone of the volume possibly jars more at the end of 2020 than might have been the case a year earlier. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed universities’ flawed risk management with their over-dependence on international students in general, and on those from China in particular. Moreover, the inability of vicechancellors to offer a serious challenge to the Government’s culture-wars-driven assault on the humanities and social sciences (through massive fee increases) serves as a reminder of their modest record in terms of advocacy and defence of their institutions. Harsher critics might ponder why most of them are paid more than the prime ministers and ministers who routinely do them over.

Paul Rodan is an NTEU life member and was a member of the AUR editorial board from 1999 to 2020.

Contact: pkrodan@gmail.com

Reference Rodan, P. (2015). Review of Hannah Forsyth’s A History of the Modern Australian University. Australian Universities’ Review, 57(1), 72-73.

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We’re passionate about helping our members save for an exceptional retirement. And now your family can join our award-winning* fund too.

A UniSuper Personal Account offers your family great value for money with a range of investment options, low fees, excellent service, flexible insurance and a national financial advice team.

See what’s to love at unisuper.com.au/personal.

Prepared by UniSuper Management Pty Ltd (ABN 91 006 961 799, AFSL 235907) on behalf of UniSuper Limited (ABN 54 006 027 121, AFSL 492806) the trustee of UniSuper (ABN 91 385 943 850). This information is of a general nature only. Before making any decision in relation to your UniSuper membership, you should consider your personal circumstances, the relevant product disclosure statement for your membership category and whether to consult a qualified financial adviser. *SuperRatings awarded UniSuper 2019 Fund of the Year.

Chant West named UniSuper 2019 Fund of the Year. Visit unisuper.com.au/awards for more information.