What is presently happening in universities, not just at Flinders University but elsewhere, will have – and is having – serious social impacts. Put simply:
• Troubled by decades of inequitable Federal funding cuts, universities, like Flinders, are transforming into businesses;
• This changes the way we think about public education: from a vehicle for public good (i.e. to be invested in jointly by the state and commonwealth for collective good, and accessible to the broader community), to a commodity (paid for by individuals for private benefit);
• These same governments are increasing support for the banks, the wealthy, the military and big corporations, while university managers are diverting much of the funds they do have, to upper management salaries and marketing campaigns while starving administrative support and teaching in many parts of the university;
• Together, this impacts education and teaching. For example, within this ‘business’ formulation, academic subjects are considered valuable to the extent that they hold exchange value on the market. The hard sciences, for instance, are typically more valued by university managers for their amenability to industry partnerships and patents;
• Subjects less amenable to outside funding; i.e., the humanities, social sciences, education, social work, arts, racial and ethnic or other minority studies, are increasingly devalued and are most at risk because they question power;
• The latter fields are those where social inequalities have historically been most vigorously addressed (i.e. poverty, racism, gender inequalities). These are areas where students learn to think critically and care deeply about social equity. They are also areas where women academics are most highly concentrated, and these areas are current targets of the greatest and most casualised workforce;
• Within this formulation, learning areas with highest market value (the ones that make the most money) are thus increasingly tied to outside corporate interests and funding, which in other parts of the world where this model has been applied, have given rise to ethical issues concerning ethics of research;
• Rather than develop critical, social-democratic thinkers with social and political consciousness, with the shift from ‘public education’ to ‘private investment’, universities are destined to develop future generations of workers who are technically trained, yet self-interested, and our societies will be impoverished as a consequence.
Universities have never been perfect institutions, but those like Flinders have had a proud record of making social equity a core part of their rationale. Current moves in higher education are deepening existing social inequalities, they are creating a precarious workforce that hurts minority groups the most, and they are positioning students-as-consumers who, if trends overseas are to be observed, will soon be subject to steeper tuition costs, making education an impossibility for many future students. Save our public universities, save our societies.
