Chris Duke

Is there an Australian Idea of a University

This paper considers the idea of a university as it exists and is discussed in Australia at the beginning of the 21st century. Australias history and partly derivative culture provide the relatively unintellectual context for sceptical utilitarianism in relation to a system which has expanded rapidly and is frequently described as being in crisis. Resource constraints and pressures to marketise and become more entrepreneurial have increased managerialism at the expense of a perhaps mythical ideal of a community of scholars. Different interests, influences and ideals jostle in a process that continues to determine the character of higher education, and the character of the different institutions that comprise the sector. The influence of national politics is recognised, including the possibility of softening the extreme free market position of recent years.This paper considers the idea of a university as it exists and is discussed in Australia at the beginning of the 21st century. Australias history and partly derivative culture provide the relatively unintellectual context for sceptical utilitarianism in relation to a system which has expanded rapidly and is frequently described as being in crisis. Resource constraints and pressures to marketise and become more entrepreneurial have increased managerialism at the expense of a perhaps mythical ideal of a community of scholars. Different interests, influences and ideals jostle in a process that continues to determine the character of higher education, and the character of the different institutions that comprise the sector. The influence of national politics is recognised, including the possibility of softening the extreme free market position of recent years.

The morning after the millennium: building the long-haul learning university

Lifelong learning remains a powerful and valid concept important for the evolution of higher education and the university in the changing context of globalization, 30 years after its first popularization around 1970. Like the related concept of the learning society, it suffers trivializing fashion and reductionism. As we move into a phase of universal tertiary education, it is all the more necessary to understand how to enable universities to become learning organizations playing a distinct role in a fast-changing world. Enterprise is an essential associated characteristic, rather than a betrayal of the essentially academic. Universities need to function as open systems, building partnerships and sharing networks in and beyond their localities, and playing leading roles in the creation of learning regions and in new modes of knowledge protection. A grasp of these issues points the way for universities to survive as valued and unique social institutions adapted to and playing an active part in the making of knowledge societies.

Networks and Managerialism: Field-testing competing paradigms

Australian universities under stress are pulled between competing paradigms of managerialism and networking. External pressures towards homogenisation contradict the national requirement for higher education system diversity. Managing complexity requires a degree of self-confidence which reinstates collegiality and administration above managerialism and enables the institution effectively to engage with its local-global environment. This paper draws out the competing paradigms. It then sketches the purposes, processes and outcomes whereby UWS Nepean rejuvenated and energised itself to cope with the changes of the late 1990s and the demands of the new entrepreneurialism, without succumbing to economic rationalism. It suggests how changed culture may result in changed behaviour and greater productivity via networking. Structure is less important than shared purpose, culture and morale. Process matters, but can lead to displacement, so that means become ends and outcomes are lost to the procedural outputs of strategic planning

Trapped in a Local History: Why Did Extramural Fail to Engage in the Era of Engagement?.

Extramural liberal adult education (LAE), as conceived in the particular UK tradition, was doomed by its high-minded origins and its privileged status, and contributed little to the new concepts of éducation permanente, lifelong learning, the knowledge society, the learning society and region, or to the new understandings of university engagement and regional development becoming prominent with the new millennium. The recent introduction of equivalent or lower qualifications (ELQs) is likely to bring about the complete demise of the tradition. Meanwhile ‘the university’ grows and changes in diverse and important ways and directions little informed by the commendable and abiding purposes for which extramural LAE was founded, although this might benefit from the socially informed liberal perspectives of and the facilitation skills honed in extra-mural departments (EMDs). University engagement in regional development has become unbalanced towards the (neo) liberal economic and the technical/skills agenda. Universities as well as regions are the poorer as a result. As the world experiences new forms and intensities of economic, environmental, geopolitical and cultural crisis, rebalancing in favour of a wider civic mission becomes the more urgent.

A university of the people: a history of the university of Western Sydney

If … I appear to introduce rather freely the personal note, my defence is that under the circumstances this is inevitable. (Drummond 1959, p. viii)I may plead a similar defence. For a short period ...

Winning the university engagement narrative

Engagement is one of the current big themes of university and higher education (HE) policy discourse, featuring among the sector’s leading hot topics. New book titles multiply; new and renewed terms jostle for position; senior management appointments proliferate. These books offer an opportunity to ask what and who is driving the agenda: who, in the currently fashionable metaphor, is defining and controlling the narrative. The books approach engagement from different ends of the telescope; or rather, one with a telescope, the other with a microscope. They have a linked genealogy: both are connected with the ‘global coalition of engaged universities’ known as the Talloires network, created in 2005. The Talloires Declaration is reproduced on pages xxiii–xxv of Watson et al. Each of these co-authored books draws on a wealth of practical experience. Lead author for The Engaged University, David Watson, was for many years vice-chancellor of the University of Brighton. As deputy CEO at another former polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University, he had previously pioneered modular degrees in the UK. Watson made Brighton a UK leader in this field, sufficiently robust and sustainable—culturally embedded perhaps—to remain there at the time of a large Talloires Conference gathering in Madrid in June 2011, where the Watson et al. volume was distributed. His three co-authors are US leaders of the Talloires network. The three co-authors of Becoming an Engaged Campus are led by Jim Votruba, President of Northern Kentucky University (NKU) since 1997; his co-authors are long-serving senior NKU staff. Both books are thus written by committed university leaders with the authority of practitioner experience. As books by experienced ‘believers’, they are with those who see the glass of engagement and the socially responsible university as at least half full. The same global and national scenarios, and the same kind of case study or ‘storytelling’ approach, can be used to support less sanguine positions, more on lines of ‘the demise of the public university’. The opening context-setting chapter of Votruba et al. concludes with the tenuousness INT. J. OF LIFELONG EDUCATION, VOL. 30, NO. 5 (SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2011), 701–709

Towards the Third Generation University: Managing the university in transition, by J.G. Wissema

under social democracy’ (29). The EU is seen not only as a location in which this process plays out, but as a mechanism by which nation-states within the EU are educated or disciplined to this end: the open method of co-ordination, fundamental to the Lisbon Process, for instance, enables the EU to intervene in and shape national policy agendas. Dale proposes an interesting distinction between a European education space and European education policy. The former is an ‘opportunity structure’ framed by treaties, policy frameworks and community history; the latter is the product not only of the Commission and its Directorates-General, but also of member states’ policies and preferences and by ‘existing conceptions of the nature and capacity of “education”’ (32). This, he suggests, means we should not think of European education policy as acting solely at the national level; though there is, of course, a fundamental difference between the activities and concerns of the Commission’s Education DG and a national ministry of education: we should shed ‘methodologically nationalist and statist assumptions’ if we are to understand the growing role of Europe in educational governance. While Dale deploys this argument at a predominantly theoretical level (Chapters 1 and 6), Robertson explores and develops it in relation to two extensive empirical case studies: European higher education policy (Chapter 3) and public–private partnerships (Chapter 5). Unquestionably these chapters are innovative, and constitute the theoretical core of the book. Other chapters address similar concerns, but without the same unity of theoretical perspective. Drawing on Habermas and Danish experience, for example, Palle Rasmussen’s account of lifelong learning as ‘social need and as policy discourse’ (Chapter 4) sees limits to how far policy-driven lifelong learning policies can colonise the life-world. The ‘policy discourse... tends to disconnect learning from people’s real-life contexts and experiences, because the policy-makers implicitly regard these as barriers to modernity, competitiveness, innovativeness and so on’ (97). Other chapters address a range of topics: Europe and paradigms of educational development (Chapter 7), equality and the European social model (Chapter 8), languages (Chapters 9 and 11), the role of intellectuals (Chapter 10), and European educational policy from the perspective of ‘performance, citizenship and the knowledge society’ (Chapter 12). Regrettably, in view of its rich diversity of contents, the book is provided with no index. The perspective offered in Globalisation and Europeanisation, particularly as developed by Dale and Robertson in their chapters, is important; the book deserves to be influential. It draws on a rich vein of theoretical scholarship, and uses this to illuminate significant areas of development in European education. But just as perspectives illuminate, so they conceal. The strength of their contribution is to show that Europe is an active player in processes of globalisation, and that globalisation and Europeanisation are workers on the same line. They do, however, seem sometimes to revel in their originality and discoveries – conveying the impression that the processes are inexorable and even uncontested. But if organisational sociologies have more to contribute than is evident from this collection, Dale and Robertson demonstrate clearly how political economy can deepen the analysis of European education.

Links between Further and Higher Education: The Case of New Zealand

This article sketches distinctive and partly unique features of New Zealand society, its recent history, and its adult, community and tertiary education system, as a prelude to considering linkages. The absence of a distinct further education (FE) sector analogous to the British further education colleges (FECs) or Australian technical and further education (TAFE) institutes combined with a recent period of extreme economic rationalism to privilege competition over collaboration. A sharp change of direction in 1999 is leading into a new more planned tertiary system under a Tertiary Education Commission in 2002. This is likely to reward and drive up inter-institutional collaboration, probably also more sharply differentiating roles within the more planned tertiary sector. The article concludes by reflecting on distinctive strengths and shortcomings, and on lessons from New Zealand of possible interest elsewhere.

Lost Soul or New Dawn? Lifelong Learning Lessons and Prospects from East Asia

Most learning takes place in communities, neighbourhoods and workplaces. Here practical solutions to big problems work or fall down. We may call this the iron law of social learning, recognised in ‘community development’, ‘community capacity-building’, ‘workplace’, ‘work-based’ and ‘work-integrated’ learning. Language is problematic, the gap between words and deeds often large. Will social learning allow richer ‘third generation lifelong learning’ in Asia? Could it retain the hard economic edge of second generation lifelong learning while recovering the broad vision of the first generation inspired by Unescos Faure and Delors Reports? That initial vision was of a perceived imperative for survival in and of a stressed world. There are in some societies roots in older traditions and forms of knowledge; foundations for wider and deeper lifelong learning known as indigenous knowledge and knowing. What might this look like? Current globally dominant policies are of mainly European and American origin, like the neo-liberal ideology and policies that survived the global financial crisis. Will ‘business as usual’ continue, with lifelong learning meaning vocational and education and training, and old paradigms still imported into Asia? Or might a reverse flow of influence from what we call the East and South wash over the North and West?