Universities are in crisis. Federal and state government inquiries point to serious problems with governance, financial transparency and managerial decision-making. The pressure on university leadership, particularly well-paid vice-chancellors, is mounting.
After decades of public shaming, some university executives are finally starting to suggest that their “social licence” might require them to earn a more average wage.
It comes at a time of relentless, often unexplained staff cuts for professional and academic staff. In some cases, Safework NSW has issued “stop work” orders due to “psychological harm”.
Things are hardly better for students, who are facing a world in which affordable housing is often out of reach and intergenerational inequality has been exacerbated. They also face growing levels of student debt – which is needed, students are repeatedly told, so they can have a job one day, even as the threat of AI looms.
All this seems to have snuck up on vice-chancellors. But, in fact, the present crisis in universities was decades in the making.
Globalisation hits universities
Changes to the global economy in the 1970s meant that, by the 1980s, if you were making widgets in Dubbo, you might now order parts from Japan one month and Taiwan the next. Industries found themselves having to adjust quickly. Unable in general to control currency values, most tried to do things more cheaply to keep customers. Austerity measures were often disguised as “working smarter, not harder”, but mainly the outcome was laying down a path for enshittification (crappier materials or longer wait times).
By the second half of the 1980s, the federal government had stepped in to consolidate higher education institutions, spread the load of tuition costs and expand university enrolments. This shored up Australia’s rapidly changing workforce by preparing more people for white-collar professions rather than blue-collar manufacturing jobs.
That meant many more university students. Growth exploded again after 2000. It wasn’t just in Australia. Over the next 20 years, university enrolments worldwide more than doubled. And white-collar work grew rapidly.
More bosses in highly paid jobs
Globalisation meant that organisations needed lots more decision-makers. Among rapidly growing white-collar professional occupations, none grew as fast as managers.
With all those extra students, universities became big and complex, and the number of university managers multiplied. The relationship with government changed too. Management were asked to make decisions in response to complex “levers”, meaning systems of incentives and disincentives. While these measures sought to influence what management did, they were also a way of “market-making”, turning higher education away from what political leaders thought of as a “bureaucracy” to businesses.
Fans of managerialism reckoned the old ways were “ossified” – a word applied to banks and hospitals as well as universities – as if stuck in 1950s monotony. New managers would try to make organisations agile and flexible, to respond to the new global economy.
But, as I wrote in Virtue Capitalists, this put bosses at odds with other kinds of professionals, including academics, but also healthcare workers and others. Academics wanted to do their job well, while bosses sought ever more austerity, as globalisation demanded. This austerity didn’t seem to apply to their own salaries, which surged even as other workers’ wages stagnated.
Management started to see academics as a workforce to be tamed and controlled rather than collaborators in an educational mission.
The third change that led to the present crisis is the marketisation of education. It was in the early 1980s, when young people were temporarily reluctant to study, that universities started to advertise. The slump in demand didn’t last long, but marketisation only ramped up. This skewed the way that bosses saw the mission of the university. Rather than a set of teaching and learning relationships, universities were now a bunch of metrics to be gamed.
How do we fix things?
One thing that history shows is that things were not always like this, and they don’t need to be now. Change is difficult, as university bosses like to tell the people whose lives they upturn. What took decades to build will take some effort to unwind.
Higher education commentators typically see three possible solutions. The first is to make government fix it, usually with much more funding that we hope this time might go to something other than a shiny building. A second is to reorient policymakers away from market levers to the public good.
Those are a good start, but I prefer a third, which is to better connect universities to community, with more democratic internal decision-making systems.
University bosses, after all, are part of the problem. I don’t think much will change while they are the only ones in charge.
Hannah Forsyth is author of A History of the Modern Australian University (2014) and Virtue Capitalists: the Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World (2023). She is a member of the Australian Historical Association
