Has it occurred to you that universities are fundamentally about the
pursuit of status? Almost every aspect of their activities focuses on
the acquisition of rank. And Christopher Pyne's proposed "reform" of
universities is about harnessing the status drive to help balance the
budget.
Ostensibly, unis exist to add to the store of human knowledge
and to educate the brightest of the rising generation. All very
virtuous.
When you think about it, however, you see that unis are
about the pursuit of certification, standing, position and prestige. The
main way they earn their revenue is by granting superior status to
young people seeking to enter the workforce.
In theory, a degree
proves your possession of knowledge in a certain area. Often in practice
it certifies little more than that you're smart enough and persistent
enough to have passed a lot of exams. Either way, try climbing the
employment ladder without one.
This makes universities gatekeepers
granting access to the good, well-paying jobs in the economy. Which
gives them a kind of monopoly power.
In the old days the
government paid them to teach, assess and certify young people; these
days the young people are required, to an increasing extent, to buy
their qualifications directly, making them customers as much as pupils.
Such
is the strength of the unis' monopoly over access to the good jobs that
most young people would be prepared to pay huge fees and take on very
large debts before they resigned themselves to a lifetime of low
socio-economic status.
The status symbols issued by unis are
themselves subject to a well-understood system of ranking: doctorates
rank above master's degrees, with thesis masters outranking course-work
masters. Then come bachelor's degrees, with honours degrees higher than
pass degrees and first-class honours higher than second class. Not
forgetting the ultimate status symbol: being awarded a university medal.
But
uni degrees are subject to a second, informal status ranking: employers
(and parents) tend to be more impressed by degrees awarded by the
older, bigger "sandstone" universities than those from younger,
outer-suburban or regional unis.
While in the public's mind the
unis' existence is justified by their teaching, few people become
academics because of a burning desire to teach. Academics want to do
research and, though some become good teachers and enjoy teaching, for
the most part teaching is regarded as an unfortunate distraction.
The
unis try to conceal the conflict between their priority (research) and
the public's (teaching) by claiming that academics at the forefront of
their discipline's research effort make the best teachers.
Students
know this is rubbish. It pretends good teaching doesn't require
possession of teaching skills and forgets that most undergraduate
teaching has little to do with the teacher's super-specialty.
Academics
know the fast track to the top comes from the quality and quantity of
their research, as evidenced by their publication records. Promotion
assessments - moving people up the status ladder from lecturer to full
professor - give little weight to teaching, contribution to public
debate or even the writing of textbooks.
The universities
themselves are driven by their desire to raise their status relative to
other unis by increasing the quantity and quality of their research. The
government publishes regular rankings of our universities and their
faculties, largely determined by their research output.
Universities
threaten to sack academics who fail to reach research output quotas.
They urge staff to compete for government research grants, granted
partly on the basis of previously published research. Staff who win
grants are rewarded with money they can use to pay part-timers to take
over their teaching obligations.
The quality of published research
is determined largely by the reputation of the academic journal that
published it. All journals are ranked, with American and British
journals scoring many points and Australian journals scoring few points.
(Since international journals are reluctant to publish research into
Australian issues, this means our government uses our taxes to fund a
universities-designed scheme that discourages our academics from doing empirical research on problems of particular relevance to us.)
In
recent years the eight sandstone unis' greatest motivation has been to
raise their position on a couple of regular international rankings of
universities. To this end they've come increasingly to offer senior
positions to American and British academics rather than locals, since
the foreigners are more likely to get themselves published in more
prestigious journals.
Some unis' drive to lift their international
reputation involves a policy of never hiring lecturers whose highest
qualification is a PhD they themselves granted. Cultural cringe, anyone?
How does this obsession with status-seeking tie in with the Abbott government's plan to deregulate uni fees? Watch this space.
