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Rod Nillsen You can read the paper "Don't do what Australia has done", which appeared in Quadrant magazine November 2004. Please note that, at the time of writing, the paper as it appears on this site lacks some punctuation and italics, which were in the article as originally printed. The original title of the article as submitted to Quadrant was "A letter to Israel concerning John Dawkins", the latter being the Labor Minister for Education in Australia who introduced fundamental changes to higher education in Australia in 1988. The article was a development of my response to a message from a colleague in Israel, asking for information about how the changes instigated by John Dawkins have affected Australian universities in view of possible changes to government policy in Israel. The article may be accessed through the link above, or possibly by accessing Quadrant's website , For those interested in the situation in Israel, click here . Here are three quotes from the Quadrant article. "Once intellectual values have been reduced to market values, there is no reason to have a distinctive institution, namely The University, to reflect intellectual values and the notions of objectivity and truth and then, from the point of view of general public awareness, those values may cease to exist. Indeed, even within the university itself, postmodern thought effectively asserts this as being the case, and questions even the possibility of disinterested enquiry. Thus, in intellectual terms, postmodernism and market economics, when applied to the sphere of the intellect, produce very much the same situation, for both have the effect of reducing valid argument to mere opinion, and the attainment of insight to nothing more than individual preference and a question of how it is perceived and by how many. The only difference is that postmodernism achieves this effect by a direct attack, whereas liberal economics does it indirectly and by implication, often with a total lack of awareness of what it is doing. We could conclude from this that market economics, as applied to the intellectual sphere, is not 'conservative' at all, but rather is as radical and subversive as postmodern thought set out to be. Alternatively, we could conclude that postmodern thought, for all its 'radical' and "subversive" pretensions, is merely an application of the ideas of market forces and individual convenience to the world of the intellect. Of course, both have the same effect of trivializing the serious life of the mind." "Now, it would be a mistake to imagine that Dawkins was solely responsible for the changes in our universities---my view is that there were and continue to be strong external and internal pressures within societies like Australia to make such changes. The issue has many aspects, but society is now incredibly complex from both the technological and commercial point of view. Apart from funding issues and the wish to reduce government spending at all costs, changes in universities are driven by the need for more training (not education) to respond to this complexity---but it is not an intellectual complexity, it's a purely technical complexity. So we see an increasing technical complexity and sophistication, but a decreasing level of serious thought and discussion. But the increasing technical complexity of society imposes a need for people to be trained to manage that complexity, and thus there is an inexorable pressure to change the traditional function of universities. However, the technical problems we are likely to face, now and in the future, require a response that needs to be more than merely technical. Whereas at one time the universities might have provided such a resource, their subjugation to the immediate needs of society, as perceived by government, means there is much less chance of that possibility in the future. The fundamental issue facing university policy makers should be how to maintain a humane and serious intellectual culture in universities, a culture which should not be under continual siege as it is at present, while at the same time recognizing the pressures which exist and the necessity to respond to them." "An indication of how we should regard The University comes from Burke's view of the state, as found in his Reflections of the Revolution in France. He says (my italics)Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in all virtue and in all perfection.Burke's exalted view of the state sits uneasily with the prosaic materialism and spiritual void of our own culture, especially when our society tends to identify the state with politics. But the liberal economic mind is indifferent to Burke's challenge, and sees universities as mere objects for potential microeconomic change. If The University can be regarded with that other reverence to which Burke refers, only then will it be worth preserving as a separate institution with a distinctness from wider society." Rod Nillsen, October 2005 |