BOOK REVIEW

Michael Wesley, Mind of a Nation

La Trobe University Press, ISBN 97817643706

BY HANS A BAER

Michael Wesley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Global, Culture and Engagement at the University of Melbourne, has written a readable and engaging overview of Australian universities which focuses on their development since the Dawkins reforms in the 1980s which paved the way to their increasing corporatisation. He seeks to examine the ‘complex, ambiguous, ambivalent place of universities in Australian life’ (p. 19), a worthwhile endeavour that many other scholars have explored.

In the Introduction, Wesley reports that Australia has more universities in the top 100 global rankings than any other country aside of the US and the UK, although he admits that these rankings are based largely on research productivity rather than quality of teaching. Prior to the COVID-pandemic, over 1.5 million students were studying at Australia’s 40 universities, most of them public, and one private specialty college, with roughly a third of these students being from overseas and full-fee paying. The latter statistic has propelled international education to Australia’s fourth largest export industry, only preceded by iron ore, coal, and natural gas. Incidentally, international education is Victoria’s leading export industry, as any stroll through Carlton and Melbourne’s City will testify.

For a while, according to Wesley, the COVID lockdowns were regarded by many Australians as a ‘perfect storm for Australia’s universities, exposing their corporate greed, contempt for academic freedom and freedom of speech, shameless courting of foreign students, bloated corporate salaries for VCs and senior managers, falling academic standards, architectural extravagances and intellectual arrogance’ (p. 4), although it is not clear to what extent he agrees with these or some of these charges.

Wesley observes that universities have come to play a role in the lives of an increasing number of Australians, with almost 55 percent of people aged 25-34 being tertiary-educated. Despite wide-spread reservations about universities, he cites a 2019 survey that indicated the nearly 80 percent of the respondents had confidence in Australia’s universities, as opposed to only 28 percent of the respondents who had confidence in banks, 27 percent in the federal government, and 20 percent in the mass media.

Ironically, as Wesley observes, universities remain largely outside the Australian public mind, rarely being featured in films, television, and music. He reports that voices from the right charge universities with exhibiting ideological bias and those from the left criticise them for their corporatisation, high VC salaries, and underpayment of casual employees. Furthermore, voices across the political spectrum express concern about the high numbers of international students and the quality of the student experience. I might add the quality of the student experience is marred by the fact that many students, both domestic and international, are forced to work part-time to pay for their student fees and living costs. University education should be a full-time endeavour as it was for many who attended Australian universities during the 1970s and early 1980s when university education was free.

Wesley maintains that Australian universities are too big, averaging out to 36,579 per university, with Monash topping out at 70,085 students. In contrast, he reports that ‘the same calculation reveals 13,740 students per university in the United Kingdom and 4,500 students per university in the United States’ (p. 18). Aside of the accuracy of the UK figure, the higher education sector in the US is quite diverse, ranging from mega-universities such as Arizona State University with over 100,000 students spread over its three campuses in the Phoenix metroplex and the University of Texas-Austin with over 50,000 students, to medium-sized state universities in the range of 10-20,000 students, to many liberal arts colleges with 500-2,000 students to even tiny Bible colleges with a few hundred students. Ivy League universities and other elite universities, such as Stanford and Chicago, are relatively small because they cater to the offspring of wealthy families. In essence, Australian public universities resemble US state universities in terms of their enrolments and as purveyors of mass education crucial to providing a skilled workforce for two capitalist economies.

Wesley acknowledges that despite much rhetoric that universities should be institutions that empower social mobility, ‘people from disadvantaged backgrounds remain significantly under-represented in Australian higher education’ (p. 23). Furthermore, he maintains that Australia’s universities exhibit their own social divide between a ‘secure, tenured academic class’, and an ‘insecure and often marginalised class of casual academics’ (p. 23). However, the social divide in Australian universities is more complex than this, consisting of the following layers:

• highly renumerated senior managers which include VCs, deputy VCs, pro-VCs, deans, and deputy deans

• Well-paid full-time academics on continuing contracts

• Full-time academics on short-term contracts

• Casual academics, some with PhDs and others with master’s degrees

• Post-graduate students serving as tutors.

In Chapter 1 (Money), Wesley argues that funding shapes much of the texture of Australia’s universities, dictating the quality of their architecture, their rankings, tuition fees, and grants. Although Australia’s universities experienced a rapid increase in funding during the Whitlam years, subsequent governments, both Coalition and Labor, decreased their funding for universities. In addition to tuition fees for domestic students introduced during the Hawke/Dawkins era, one major source of revenue that Australia’s universities began to rely upon increasingly for revenue was international student fees, largely to fill ‘what would otherwise become unsustainable shortfalls in infrastructure, research capability and student equity programs’ (p.49). While Wesley eschews the frequent reference to international students as ‘cash cows’, numerous commentators have argued that Australia’s universities are exploiting students from the Global South, even if most of them hail from families who are part of the emerging middle-classes, particularly in China.

In chapter 3 (Loyalty), he returns to the topic of revenue being generated from international students, most of whom pay full fees in contrast to domestic students. Indeed, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the US had some 987,314 international students, the UK 452,079 international students, and Australia 444,514 international students. Australia, with a considerably smaller population than the US and the UK, 17.9 international students per 1,000 population in contrast to the US with 3.0 international students per 1,000 population and the UK 6.7 international students per 1,000 population (Babones 2021: 67). In contrast to Anglophone countries, Germany and Scandinavian countries, do not charge tuition fees for either domestic or international students.

In chapter 3 (Loyalty), Wesley admits that some observers argue that Australia’s international education sector exposes international students to ‘labour exploitation’ (p. 89), thus transforming them into a ‘low skilled underclass in Australian society’ (p. 89). He does admit that ‘Australia’s universities have not done enough to properly accommodate and absorb the rising numbers of international students on their campuses’ (pp. 91-92), but he fails to specify measures that should be taken to remedy the problem.

Furthermore, while Australia’s universities boast of their commitments to environmental sustainability and climate action, they have not opted to document the greenhouse gas emissions generated by international education, whether in the form of administrators and staff flying to target countries to recruit international students or the emissions generated by the students commuting back and forth between their home countries, perhaps once or twice a year, and then their family members flying to Australia for graduation ceremonies (Baer 2024). Academic and student aeromobility remain the elephant the sky in discussions of the internationalism of higher education in Australia. To give Australia’s universities their due, some of them have started to tabulate emissions generated on the part of staff to attend a wide assortment of events overseas, but thus far there remain huge gaps in these modest efforts.

In Chapter 2 (Value), Wesley to his credit addresses the increasing corporatisation of Australia’s universities, observing that in the wake of the Dawkins reforms, vice-chancellors acquired a bevy of ‘chief operating officers, non-academic staff with management staff with management skills, and a range of deputy vice-chancellor’s, vice presidents and pro vice-chancellors with specialised responsibilities for different aspects of university operations’ (p.70). Furthermore, he acknowledges that university councils ‘shrank in size and shifted in composition and role, much more closely resembling corporate boards’ (p. 72), opting to appoint vice-chancellors with corporate-scale remunerations.

In essence, the corporate university has shifted from some semblance of democratic governance in which senior executives, including deans, were elected rather than being appointed. In essence, most staff, both academic and professional, under this scenario find themselves under the whim of the university senior managers. While I agree with Wesley’s observation that lacking a ‘broadly held sense of the value of universities to Australian society, the regulation-corporatisation spiral will continue to spin — to no-one’s satisfaction or benefit’, he does not point to a pathway out of this tragic dilemma.

In Chapter 4 (Integrity), Wesley explores a pervasive concern about what is being done and how it is done on Australia’s campuses, of which there are many more than forty given that many universities have multiple campuses, including overseas. Some of these campuses are bustling sites whereas others at times are devoid of students, many of whom are studying online. Wesley cites a study conducted by the ultra-conservative Centre for Independent Studies (Spitzer and Jacobs 2018). A Gov Galaxy survey revealed that of 1,003 Australian millennials (born between 1980 and 1996), 58 percent had a favourable view of socialism, with only 18 percent having an unfavourable view of it. In contrast, 59 percent of the respondents felt that capitalism is failing and that there is a greater need for government regulation. While the survey did not precisely define either socialism or capitalism, the study concluded that universities and the media are to blame for Australian millennial’s predilection for socialism and disenchantment with capitalism. Most academics on Australia’s campuses these days are proponents of socialism or harsh critiques of capitalism, although there exist pockets of radical academics in Australia’s universities, more often in faculties of arts and

hardly at all in faculties of economics and business, medicine, law, science, and engineering. Within the context of the corporate university, perhaps most academics in Australia’s universities find themselves in essence in one way or other doing the bidding of the corporate class, although they might not see it this way. Australian campuses are hardly hotbeds of social activism these days, although occasionally students may protest some issue or other and staff, particularly ones belonging to the National Tertiary Education Union, might conduct brief work stoppages protesting management’s resistance to demands in the enterprise bargaining agreement process.

While, as Wesley reports, the Australian National University and the University of Sydney rejected a bid on the part of the ultra-conservative Ramsey Centre to establish the teaching of a degree in Western civilisation, the University of Wollongong and the University of Queensland came to accept the Ramsey Centre’s proposal. Furthermore, whereas Western Sydney University has, since 2000, operated the Whitlam Institute, a think tank committed to social justice issues, the University of Melbourne has served for several years as the host for the Robert Menzies Institute which regularly hosts events featuring particularly Liberal Party stalwarts, either in the form of conferences, panel discussions, lectures, or book launches. The Australia Institute, a progressive but hardly radical think tank, is not based within any university. In Wesley’s view, while ‘many academics, students and supporters of Australia’s universities have been frustrated, distressed, and demoralised by the culture wars, with perspective we may see them as a welcome attraction of national attention to the role of universities in Australian life’ (pp. 132-133).

In chapter 5 (Ambition), Wesley reports that Australia’s universities have adopted a new ritual, namely one in which they ‘now regularly host visits to its campuses by important people — government ministers, foreign officials, prominent philanthropists and businesspeople — and takes them immediately to its glimmering innovation and commercialisation hub’ (p. 135). At the University of Melbourne, an exemplar of such a hub is Melbourne Connect which serves as a site of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology and rents office space to industry partners. As Wesley observes, Australia’s universities ‘have positioned themselves as an essential ingredient in the country’s ability to rise to the challenge of the fourth industrial revolution’ (p. 137), yet another indicator of their corporatisation. He also reports: ‘By mid-2020, both government and Opposition had endorsed the view that a prime rationale for Australia’ universities was to ensure Australia had adequate numbers of workers with the appropriate skills to ensure the economy’s productivity and prosperity’ (p. 160). To Wesley’s credit, he maintains that ‘Australia’s universities need to remain vigilant that the logic of competition, rankings, commercialization, and human capital buildings, if allowed to exercise rein, could distort the basic mission of higher education institutions’ (p. 162). However, he fails to define the basic mission of higher education, which in my view should first and foremost be teaching students to be critical thinkers committed to social justice, deep democracy, environmental sustainability, and a safe climate.

In chapter 6 (Privilege), Wesley observes that since their beginnings, universities have created hierarchy and privilege in Australian society, despite frequent rhetoric about seeking to evolve into more inclusive institutions, including for First Nations peoples. He argues that the ‘social stratification of the Australian tertiary education system cannot be put into the too hard basket’ (p. 184).

While Wesley observes that several parliamentary inquiries have examined the extent and abuse of academic casualisation at Australia’s universities, he fails to acknowledge the role of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) in calling attention to wide-spread wage theft’ in universities, particularly the University of Melbourne. In fact, there is no single reference to the existence of the NTEU on Australia’s universities. While the NTEU finds its strongholds in faculties of arts, education, and law, its role in seeking to create a fairer workplace for all staff needs to be acknowledged.

In his Conclusion, Wesley boldly asserts that Australia’s universities ‘must stand against the culture of transactionalism in higher education and strive to maintain the transformational relationship aspect of going to university in Australia’ (p. 204). I could not agree more, but what desperately is needed is a reversal of their on-going corporatisation and transforming them into bastions of deep democracy in which staff, both academic and professional, students, and the public, contribute. Time only will tell whether the present Australian Universities Accord process, one to which Wesley alludes in his Conclusion, will facilitate such a development.

Much thought needs to go into the particulars of a more socially just, democratic, and environmentally sustainable university, both globally and more specifically in Australia. Staff and student unions can play a role in this process. Academics should not only be able to elect their chairpersons, school heads, and deans, but also their top university leaders, whether they are called rectors, presidents, or vice-chancellors. Professional staff, students, and public need to be included in the governance of the university. Teaching should be the primary responsibility of academics.

Conversely, they need to critically evaluate the social relevance of their research to both teaching and social change. Full-time academics need to develop closer ties to casual academics as well as professional staff and move beyond the elitism that they often express toward them. Academics of all sorts need to engage in a sharp critique of the ties with industry and business fostered by the present corporate university structure and transcend them. Academics need to overcome the intellectual silos fostered by traditional disciplines, including my own disciplines of anthropology, and engage in interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary teaching and research efforts. Some progress has been made along these lines, even within the confines of the corporate university, but much more needs to be achieved.

An ecological and health anthropologist, Prof Hans A Baer is an honorary fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne.

Mind of a Nation is available from Black Ink book here.