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After 40 years as a hardworking and productive academic, here I was on a Zoom call fronting two senior colleagues telling me I no longer appeared on the new 'organisational chart'. In short, I was being made redundant. It was no surprise really, as another 40,000 professional and academic staff were to suffer the same fate. And really by then I was over what university life had become: stressed, thankless, driven by meaningless metrics and bereft of social values. But how did we get to this and was COVID-19 but a ruse, a smokescreen for an acceleration of the processes of politicisation, corporatisation, marketisation and casualisation which had brought my beloved system to its knees. Here then is a personal/political reflection on what has occurred in Australian universities over the last few decades -- their long slow agonising destruction.

University law schools have been beset with a sense of schizophrenia ever since first established in the 19th century. They were unsure as to whether they were free to teach and research in the same way as the humanities or whether they were constrained by the presuppositions of legal practice. More recently, this tension has been overshadowed by the impact of the neoliberal turn and disinvestment by the state in higher education. Ironically, as government has provided less money to universities, it has arrogated to itself increased control over teaching standards and research productivity. At the same time, the mastery of the legal profession continues to be exercised through the specification of 11 subjects required for admission to legal practice, known as the 'Priestley 11'. Drawing on Foucault's idea of the self as a kind of enterprise, it is argued that law students have also assumed an element of mastery over what is taught and how it is taught. It is suggested that all elements of mastery are imbricated with one another so as to reify enterprise and capital accumulation within the neoliberal economy. [This article was presented at 'Satisfying Many Masters: Teaching into Professional Degrees in Law and Engineering in the 21st Century', University of Southern Queensland, September 30, 2019.]

Education Minister Tehan's recent announcement to double the cost of an Arts Degree has been a bombshell like no other in recent higher education policy. Many have rightly seen it as a policy that makes no practical sense -- if teachers are wanted, as is claimed in the overall policy, a sizeable number of these trained in the humanities are of course needed. More concerning though, is the perception that the decision is just another dismal episode in Australia's never-ending culture wars, where national policy seems to be driven, as much as anything, by a desire to vanquish one's ideological foes -- real or imagined. In this article, Tim Moore asserts Australians should fervently decry this latest plan by the Government and its motivations. In this piece however, he argues that Australia's critical gaze should be directed as much at their universities -- or at least at that class of administrator that has come to run them in recent decades. In the directions and strategies that have been pursued over this time, there has been little defence by Australian 'institutional leaders' of the broader educational mission of universities, leaving them seriously exposed to the anti-academic, anti-democratic policies now being imposed. Moore describes two notions that have been key in the directions that have been pursued, and which lie at the heart of the intellectual enfeeblement of Australian institutions. The first of these, is the so-called employability agenda, which has come to construct higher education in almost exclusively instrumentalist terms; the other, is the highly flawed notion that skills in university study can be unproblematically prioritised over the learning of disciplinary knowledge.

This article is a condensed analysis of the developing sustainability crisis of Australian universities. It is based on an address to National Council of the National Tertiary Education Union, Melbourne, 3 October 2014. Thanks to all my fellow-members, who have kept my hopes for the modern university alive.

This paper engages with current debate on the role of the university following COVID-19, exposing the ongoing corruption of traditional values of the tertiary sector, and the shift in teaching and learning expectations across the academy. It highlights the negative impact of the huge decline in government funding since the 1990s, salary inequity, ongoing job loss and decline in teaching and learning conditions within universities, alongside proven wage theft and exploitation of sessional and casual staff. Government neglect of the higher education sector is obvious in its refusal to support any university staff through JobKeeper funding. These issues, together with an ongoing public apathy towards the education sector, have demoralised, disenfranchised and fragmented this vital knowledge-rich professional cohort. The critique argues that government funding to the tertiary sector must be increased to positively incentivise and restore the role of the public university in a democratic society. There should be a clear recalibration of higher education within the public sector. Staff need to work together across disciplines and hierarchies to address proven dysfunctional practices within the academy with a strong, united voice. It advances some recommendations to recapture the spirit of the once idealistic university mission, while also addressing the many-stranded, utilitarian functions that are demanded in a complex, changing landscape.

This article attempts a critique of the higher education policy overview, with a particular view to how policy is made through that process. The higher education sector in Australia has become reliant for the answers to its most important policy questions on a process that has not delivered adequate answers, and which becomes less likely to deliver them with each successive iteration. Continually activating that process without addressing the reasons for its failure becomes an exercise in bad faith. The perpetual restructuring of the higher education sector has become an industry in itself. This article argues that the only way forward is a new--and as yet unrealised--policy consensus. The author's concern here is with the development of a self-sustaining policy overview process or cycle, arbitrary in its relationship to the needs and aspirations of higher education in Australia. The author notes the unsustainability of Australia's higher education system as presently configured, and concludes with a discussion of two interdependent phenomena: (1) a perpetual political cycle; and (2) a critically inadequate policy framework. (Contains 7 endnotes.)

Sixteen articles discuss the implications of Australia's Green Paper, a public policy statement recommending substantial changes in the higher education system to improve access. The issues discussed include labor force development, educational equity, women's education, and the financing of higher education. (MSE)

This paper proceeds from the view that managerial capture has already become a fundamental problem after a couple of decades of largely untrammelled managerialism in our public universities, and that this problem is likely to be compounded by further shifts towards deregulation and de facto privatisation, which is the direction that current federal government policy is trying to take in the higher education sector. Greater managerial capture and greater susceptibility to steering by corporate interests promote greater diversion from the public good missions of public universities and increasingly dysfunctional internal governance with grave consequences for workplace culture. The paper argues that a counter-movement to democratise public universities is overdue.

In this essay, the authors talk about higher degree supervision as a human relationship, and shares how to supervise a PhD. There's a tendency now to talk about supervision as if it's a technical process one needs to learn the rules of. This paper urges educators to think about this as a human educational relationship, which has all the ups and downs that any human relationship does. The paper aims to get people to think in a rounded way about supervision, not just a technical matter. It also aims to get graduate students to be thinking about the nature of this relationship, to see the supervisor not just as the authority figure or the bureaucratic figure, but as someone who is engaged in an educational interchange. (Contains 1 endnote.)

The major changes mandated by Australia for its higher education system and the apparent reasons for the changes are outlined, and the strategies adopted for change are critiqued. Changes relate primarily to administrative organization, governance, resource allocation, and accountability. (MSE)

If we want to combat contemporary "neoliberal" attacks on universities, we should start by refusing the way that their pseudo-rationalities already determine so many aspects of the intellectual and institutional regimes that we consider under threat. This paper sketches an analysis of those aspects of the internal practices of academia that reinforce the interests at the origin of the attack on public education, and that make it possible, and indeed expected, for universities' leaders to oversee the betrayal of their institutions' very raison d'être. How have the physical and intellectual geographies of academic professionalism prepared the ground for "neoliberal" reforms? How do the varied dispensations of modern higher education work against the ideal of open, democratic universities? How would university education, especially in the humanities, still exacerbate the privatisation and enclosure of knowledge in our societies, even if it remained public and accessible to everybody?

Successive waves of neoliberal reforms to higher education have taken their toll on the academy. This paper uses the zombie metaphor to discuss the causes and consequences of organisational change on Australian academics as a background to exploring zombiefication as a form of passive resistance and survival. The paper uses the literature and empirical research to chronicle the disintegration of the academic workforce and with it, the idea of a university as a social institution. The paper concludes with the author's reflection of her own desire to be emancipated from zombiedom.

How best to understand the curriculum problem in doctoral research education: that is the question that this paper engages. It begins by noting that curriculum as such is little referenced and inadequately theorised in higher education and certainly in doctoral education, and indeed has been described as a "missing term". The paper then reviews a now longstanding research programme in the latter field addressed specifically to research supervision, focusing on notions of pedagogy, textuality, subjectivity and knowledge. Over more than a decade and a half, a body of work has been produced in this regard, informed by literary and cultural studies, feminism and poststructuralist theory and philosophy, thereby opening up the field to new theoretical resources and perspectives. Following this, the paper goes on to draw more directly on contemporary curriculum thought and on what is called post-Reconceptualist curriculum inquiry to outline a curriculum-theoretical perspective on doctoral studies and research education, bringing together notions of representation, emergence, practice and futurity. It does so here with reference to both the PhD and the professional doctorate, but arguably has relevance for doctoral education more generally. (Contains 2 figures.)

The authors want to figure out what happened in Australian post-secondary education over the last 50 or so years and to predict what sort of arrangement their great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren, will encounter 50 years hence. To put this modest project another way: what in 2060 might a historian (assuming there are, then, historians) write about their topic over the previous 100 years? To help provide a testamentary source for a future historian, the authors have picked out three intertwined social and educational phases over the last fifty and-a-bit years, starting around 1957 and ending now. Then they make some guesses about the social order in 2060, and therefore about how Australian post-secondary education might be in that year.

There is a perception that radical change in the higher education sector is inevitable. This paper argues that the university model of higher education is fundamentally sound and by implication, is not necessarily subject to the same forces acting on other industries. If changes are to affect higher education, these are likely to come from forces seeking to capitalise on the success of the higher education model, and in doing so place the entire model at risk. This issue is discussed in relation to one real proposal as an example of the actual (rather than the perceived) threats to the university sector.

In 2008, the University of Melbourne rolled out its restructured undergraduate degree program offerings. Rather than offering a multitude of faculty-specific degrees, the University started to offer a limited number of generalist degrees that serve as developmental pathways to specialist masters programs as well as stand-alone employment preparation. While the other "Melbourne Model" degrees in arts, science, commerce and biomedicine primarily aligned with their cognate faculty, one degree, the Bachelor of Environments, was taught across four faculties. Three reviews of this unusual undergraduate degree have been undertaken since 2009 with each recommending that the degree reduce the number of common core first year subjects to one. However, the decision to reduce to one core subject proved difficult within the blurred boundaries of cross-faculty management structures. This paper analyses the strategies being used to reach consensus following the most recent review.

Discussion of a recent Australian report on technology in higher education, entitled "Learning for Life" and known as the West Report, finds unconvincing its claims about the imminent threat of "virtual universities" and the educational possibilities opening up through new communication and information technologies. An alternative vision of technology in Australian higher education is sought. (Author/MSE)

Examines distance teaching in Australian higher education, with particular reference to predictions made in the recent West Report ("Learning for Life"), arguing that discussion of technology and change in the universities must be framed in the context of the wider educational system, considering especially the government's construction of educational markets. Market mechanisms, policy formation, and equity issues are explored. (MSE)

Compares findings of two reviews of higher education--the 1997 Dearing Report on the United Kingdom's system and the not-yet-released West Review of Australia's system. Argues that both reports illustrate the parallel changes in the systems in recent years and guarantee further radical shifts in the direction of higher education systems in the 21st century. (MSE)

Examines models of academic work in terms of the concepts of "residual, dominant, and emergent" discourses and practices, and in light of changing roles of universities, particularly in Australia. Models discussed include those viewing the academic as bureaucratic professional, market professional who defines his own work but produces for the market, corporate professional, and worker. (MSE)

A recent political slogan has exhorted Australia to become the "Clever Country," a phrase that connotes entrepreneurialism and assumes that the country needs to correct past mistakes. As Australians of a century ago enriched the curriculum for self-development, the current generation must broaden higher education beyond a narrow utilitarian focus. (MSE)

Australian higher education has an elitist disregard for the needs, interests, and concerns of the rest of society, and operates under a system that is inherently unaccountable in any democratic sense. Dawkinism does little to change this, and the academic community appears unable or unwilling to question the status quo. (MSE)

With growing international interest in diversifying sites for pedagogical work within the doctorate, doctoral programmes of different kinds are being developed in different disciplinary, institutional and national settings. However, little is known about how the pedagogical work of these programmes is designed and enacted, and with what effects. In this paper, we present two cases of doctoral pedagogical work being undertaken within different disciplinary and institutional settings to describe how learning opportunities were designed and to theorise what it means to be engaged in doing doctoral pedagogy. Starting from the position that working from a design model supports systematic and rigorous documentation and development of pedagogy, we employ the twin concepts of design and action, drawing broadly on rhetorical and ethnomethodological understandings of pedagogy as social action. Of particular interest within the concept of design itself is the concept of enactment, the translation of designs into the practices of doctoral work. Together, the two cases become a resource for "slowing down" and making visible the practices of doctoral pedagogy that often go unrecognised because they appear so ordinary and everyday. This call for examining close-up existing doctoral education practices and relationships is attending to the "next challenge for doctoral education" (Green, 2009).

A proposed charter of academic freedom and institutional autonomy in Australian higher education is examined, including the origins of the proposal, interests of staff and management, international political context of the proposal, history and values of the academic freedom concept, role of Australian universities, and faculty association role. (MSE)

"The Dawkins era is over," Commonwealth Education Minister Julie Bishop told a Perth audience in late July 2007. This turning point in Australian higher education is not being driven by a decisive legislative change; the rapid abandonment of the old in favour of the new that everyone has seen before. It is as much the accidental result of policy as its intended outcome. The opening of the commercial international student market in the late 1980s created an opportunity to recruit full-fee students, and the abandonment of adequate grant indexation in the mid-1990s, which created a need to recruit full-fee students. It is these fees that now bring average revenue per student up to levels that make high-quality teaching financially feasible. While Australia has been very successful in the international student market, it now faces stiff competition from other nations. As such, it is imperative for institutions to think carefully about what they teach, how they teach it, where they teach it, which awards to confer and how much to charge. In this article, the author describes how the universities at Australia are standing up to face today's challenges. One such example is the University of Melbourne, which is the first to announce a major institutional reform that takes up some of the challenges in the current higher education environment. The Melbourne Model is part of a larger strategy called Growing Esteem. The author describes the mechanism of this strategy and the positive response of everyone to it.

Australian research funding, with increased emphasis on social and community relevance, is criticized inappropriately by both traditional and radical segments of the humanities and social sciences. Higher standards of research planning may promote more equitable and rational funding, and there is still room for humanities research in the new structure. (MSE)

Issues of early retirement of college and university faculty are examined as they relate to Australia's aging faculty population, and the conditions necessary to promote early retirement successfully in this context are considered. (MSE)

A discussion of the changing relationship between college faculty, the institution, and society concludes that, although the context of the interactions between them is evolving and faculty are shifting from a collegial to a managerial mode, there is little change in the formal conditions of academic employment. (MSE)

Just as Australian universities are losing their traditions and behaving more like an industry, the Australian Federation of State University Staff Associations has changed from an organization of like-minded professionals and is increasingly following the model of industrial trade unions. (MSE)

Australian higher education has experienced considerable controversy over issues of academic freedom in its history, but the equilibrium reached in the 1960s and 1970s is now threatened by a trend toward private ownership and participation in institutional matters and the threat to institutional and faculty autonomy that accompanies it. (MSE)

There are severe structural barriers to improving access to higher education in Australia. Free public higher education and increased funding to improve public schools, increase higher education's capacity, and augment financial aid are recommended. (MSE)

The origins and development of the free market theory of education are examined, and the problems in the trend toward increased privatization and reduced public funding of higher education are discussed, especially for the Australian system. (MSE)

The effects of a new minister of education and increased government control on Australian higher education are discussed, focusing on the implications for policymaking, curriculum, the academic profession, the relationship of research and teaching, and the overall quality and equity of higher education. (MSE)