The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia

Reviewed by Paul James

Recently, for the first time, scholars outside the United States received the Outstanding Publications Award from the post-secondary division of the American Education Association. Simon Marginson and Mark Considine wrote their prize-winning book, The Enterprise University, as a critical assessment of Australian universities. But in the end, it is a politically unsatisfactory, though descriptively useful, book that stays too safely embedded within its public policy origins.

After two decades of denial or embarrassed silence, almost everybody in Australia, except the education minister and his cronies, now agrees that Australia’s universities are in upheaval. The portentous words of various commentators about the need to confront change now resound across the landscape. Take the following example from the March 3, 2000, issue of the newspaper The Age:

Australia’s universities are displaying the symptoms of deep demoralisation. A profound sense of disillusionment, bordering on despair, besets them. . . . Universities are confronting a higher education revolution that is likely to be swifter and more intrusive than anything they have faced before. The very idea of the university seems fragile.

These are fine and strong words. But their author is Alan Gilbert, who as president of the University of Melbourne pours public energy and money into projects designed to corporatize and commodify education. Like many of his confreres, Gilbert walks around his hallowed halls defending market-driven developments as the new way to build on the strengths of the old university.

I emphasize the relationship between words and practices for a reason. The Enterprise University is based on interviews with Australia’s senior university administrators, and I believe that the book has the same ambiguous value as the words spoken by those administrators. It is one of the best books written in Australia criticizing the market-driven nature of the contemporary university, and yet by its last chapter it becomes an apologia for market enterprise. It is an illuminating and critically charged piece of research into the university sector, and at the same time it is marked by a striking inability to think outside of neoconventional managerial terms.

The name of the book holds the key to understanding its tensions. When its authors reject the name "corporate university" in favor of "enterprise university" to describe the current trajectory of the university, they are doing more than correctly identifying that university administrators are as much interested in the prestige of being outwardly active as they are in the financial returns of the market. The authors direct their writing to revitalizing the enterprise university rather than to challenging its fundamental premises.

What starts out as a casebook on senior managers turns into a handbook for them—a guide to avoiding the most pressing indictment that our authors can make: "isomorphism." This substantial word does not entail substantial criticism, but simply means that universities are too similar to one another.

Despite all the concerns expressed in the book, the authors’ argument comes down to this: each university has to "avoid the imitate-or-perish imperative" and develop "a more distinctive product." Lest you conclude that the marketized term "product" was just a slip of the pen, let me add that the authors also regard students as "consumers": "That this involves closer ties with business and greater attention to the needs of consumers should not be in doubt," they write.

The book’s problem can be identified by examining three central trends to which Marginson and Considine offer only weak responses. First, universities are increasingly becoming corporations of rationalized flexible management and delivery of products (once called "teaching" and "research"). Universities now have a shrinking tenured faculty of high performers who manage teaching rather than necessarily doing it themselves. That faculty is pressured to apply for grants to get "teaching relief" in order to expand research output. The book says almost nothing about teaching, but it does have suggestions for research. "The first move is to develop indicators of activity, and formulae for the distribution of funds, that are discipline specific rather than universal," the authors write. "Another move is to create a second set of measures that focus not on research grants but on the outcomes and effects of research." Their sense of positive change thus involves further rationalized management and finer productivity indicators.

Second, universities are increasingly becoming institutions of intellectual training—that is, training in technique rather than critical thinking. Knowledge is increasingly treated as intellectual property for commercial exploitation. Staff members are treated as exploitable sources of intellectual capital. In response, and without intending to, the authors of The Enterprise University offer up a final resource to be corporatized: "In our judgement, the dimension underdeveloped by the contemporary university governance is the building of collaboration. The resource under-exploited is that of shared institutional purpose."

Third, Australian universities are becoming corporations of local-global extension. Public affairs and international education now mean little more than "globalized niche marketing." Instead of critiquing this process, The Enterprise University bows to its logic and concludes that "universities will need to become more effective local players and larger global players."

The corporate university as an institution is so embedded in these problematic changes that a complete rethinking of the ethos and governance of university education is necessary. Playing around with a few funding formulas or devising ways to create a more "distinctive product" is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Advocating a more innovative form of entrepreneurial management is like installing an electronically networked connection to enhance communication between the corporate bridge of the Titanic and the distracted and weary staff on the night watch. The darkness of the problem is indicated by the very inability of these two fine scholars to come up with anything but banalities when it comes to a vision of an alternative. It shows that under conditions of slow crisis, it is hard to write about the manifestations of the crisis from the inside.

Paul James is professor of globalism and cultural diversity at RMIT University, Australia, and is an editor of Arena Journal.

 Printer-Friendly Page