Who decides what gets taught in universities?
27 November 2024
Opinion: Universities are restructuring themselves, but Nicolas Lewis wonders if they responding to government drivers or are their leaders interpreting universities anew?
In November this year the University of Wollongong announced the potential disestablishment of multiple teaching programmes. Faced with a $35 million drop in revenue for 2024, it is looking to save A$15-20m annually by cutting the equivalent of 90 full-time jobs.
Interviewed by the ABC, interim Vice Chancellor John Dewar referred to cutting or merging “unviable” teaching and research activities, but added that not all “unviable” programmes are being targeted.
The case illustrates how many universities around the world are dealing with funding pressures – cutting costs by generating economies of scale through standardising and genericising undergraduate course and programme offerings.
Vice chancellors and university managers will decide what goes, what is collapsed, and what is kept.
Similar processes are already underway in New Zealand universities, driven, or at least justified, by funding crises. Programmes have been cut or radically reduced at AUT, Victoria and Massey, and the University of Auckland hit the news in August with its course rationalisation initiatives. Government reviews of the science system and university funding models are set to intensify the pressures.
The question of who gets to decide what is researched and taught in universities should be a priority concern to all New Zealanders. It shapes how we know our worlds and how we make them.
The politics of knowledge
More than a series of objective facts, knowledge is a coherent assemblage of observations, analysis, theories, interpretations, and claims. It is rarely, if ever, unchanging, universal or neutral.
Rather knowledge is political, as are the conditions and practices of its making and its effects.
Though we recognise that knowledge is widely contested, we rarely think about the politics of its making. We also tend to discount its influence on culture, economy, the exercise of rule, and social futures. All are prefigured by what and how we know, which is why it matters so much who decides what knowledge is made and taught.
Universities are key sites in the production and translation of knowledge. When governments or other powerful actors (including vice chancellors) intervene in what they teach and research, we must hold them to forensic account.
Public universities
Universities teach students about their worlds and how to engage with them, stimulate their curiosity and creativity, and prepare them with specific and generic skill sets for later life. They also conduct research that questions existing understandings and creates new knowledge.
These two widely accepted missions set universities aside from other knowledge producers and disseminators such as technical institutes, industry training programmes, online courses, newspapers, think tanks, or social media sites.
Universities contest established knowledge. They question the world as it stands and as it is changing, and teach students to do the same. And they produce new knowledge that will shape future worlds.
Public universities are universities where these missions and the politics of knowledge-making they perform is contested in conditions that are not directly curated by powerful interests. Historically, they have determined independently what they teach and research – driven by curiosity and critique and guided by disciplinary institutions.
Public universities mediate between publics, knowledge, and power in a world where knowledge is political. In so doing, they also perform a range of more instrumental public work – supporting national economic development, stabilising social formations, underpinning democratic debate, training workers, providing individual and collective opportunity, and delivering cultural goods.
In New Zealand, all our universities are public – publicly owned and answerable to the public. Their special purpose as independent producers and teachers of research-based knowledge is set out in legislation.
But it is independence that is their distinctive purpose, and which has secured academic freedom and allowed universities to become pivotal social, economic, and democratic institutions for centuries.
New Zealand universities
In New Zealand, all our universities are public – publicly owned and answerable to the public. Their special purpose as independent producers and teachers of research-based knowledge is set out in legislation.
Universities are largely funded by government. Government funds their teaching by the number of enrolments in approved courses on approved degrees (some enrolments are worth more than others). Universities must deliver the courses but can then choose how to spend their income internally across all their activities.
Governments also fund universities to conduct research, with the quantum depending on the size and quality of their research staff. Universities can again choose how they allocate that income.
Finally, universities can also compete for ‘public good’ research funding in which they or their academics define projects that meet certain criteria, or for tightly defined research contracts from government agencies.
In defending their right to autonomy over what they teach and research, New Zealand universities point to a record of public good, including the skillsets they provide their graduates and the nation-building value of their research. Supporting national economic development programmes, health solutions, and social institutions have always been embedded in their core missions.
The University of Auckland, for example, led the Knowledge Wave, which governments have for over 20 years sought to surf. In recent years, all our universities have sought to embrace Te Tiriti as a platform for making knowledge for the new millennium.
Universities also pursue third mission activities, including more sharply focused research and teaching work for economic, social, or governmental actors.
New Zealand universities have largely managed tensions between different missions successfully and maintained their critical capacities and global reputations for knowledge-making and teaching.
The accommodations, however, are creaking under pressures from government to provide more for less.
Competing visions of the purpose of public universities have surfaced, including providing evidence for policy making, training workers for industry, or moulding students to fit policy imaginations or moral projects.
Accountability and its changing frameworks
Independence is rightly circumscribed by public duty. Universities are publicly funded – they must and should account for themselves.
Over the last three decades, the pressures to account have been framed in terms of a sharpening instrumentalism in the interpretation of public interest as well as neoliberal ideas about governance and the nature of public interest and who should be its stewards. This has produced a different form of accounting, as well as administration.
Competing visions of the purpose of public universities have surfaced, including providing evidence for policy making, training workers for industry, or moulding students to fit policy imaginations or moral projects. This repurposing has dovetailed with the governmental rationalities of marketisation and new managerialism.
The former has prompted an intensified competitiveness and a market governance that identifies students and governments as clients, while new managerialism is a body of ideas that insists that organisations should be run by professional managers following generic principles, templates, and models of ‘best practice’.
These practices have been widely adopted in state and public agencies to mimic corporate organisation. One implication is that teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, and other public servants are not to be trusted to shape the public goods they deliver.
New managerialism has been widely adopted by universities, especially in New Zealand. This dictates that they respond to the will of government (their funder/client) and distrust their academics to run the university.
Centralising control in public universities
Public universities are often very big and highly visible organisations, commonly with revenue in the hundreds of millions, students in the tens of thousands, staff and courses in the thousands, and hundreds of degrees. They are complex organisations to direct and manage.
Historically, universities have been governed by bottom-up academic institutions such as the discipline, the department, the laboratory group, the academic conference, or even the sub-disciplinary reading group routinely question and seek to enhance research directions and teaching practice.
In today’s universities these institutions may not be the most financially or administratively prescient ways of managing complex organisations, but they do offer a protection for the public university’s independence – its public purpose. They offer a collective means of determining what knowledge gets produced and taught and a check on the desire and will of powerful actors to control these things.
Arguably, it was their leadership that was imagined as safeguarding university independence under New Zealand’s Education Act.
However, following prevailing expertise in corporate organisation and the new managerialism, public universities everywhere have moved instead to centralise control of universities. Academics and academic institutions are no longer to be trusted to lead internal visioning or make crucial questions about what knowledge gets made and taught.
Central control is argued to offer better monitoring of practices, tighter discipline over spending and performance, and more agile responses to external change.
This has implications for who gets to decide what knowledge is made and taught.
Tightening the screws on knowledge production
Although recent governments have to date held back from seeking to direct too tightly what gets taught or and researched, they have chiselled away at university autonomy. They have squeezed funding, imposed funding directives, and increased the number of government appointees on universities’ governing councils. There exists a discernible and strengthening will to direct research and teaching.
The aim, or at least the effect, is to bend universities towards instruments of policy, or at best public interests as interpreted and stewarded by governments.
How will universities respond? Will they bend to this will, or even pre-empt or embrace it?
University executives buy advice from consultancies and read think-tank reports. They canvass policy and other signals to anticipate government desire. Their role is in part to buttress broader university objectives against winds of change.
In the face of changing government policy or shared understandings derived from consultancy and think-tank reports that they and governments both read, vice chancellors may restructure their universities proactively into a compliant mode, or even to pursue competitive advantage.
Moreover, their increasing powers now allow them to step beyond safeguarding university independence to impose their own visions of what makes a university and what gets taught and researched. The distinction is important.
Universities are clearly restructuring themselves. But it is less clear whether they are responding to government drivers or whether their leaders are exercising their new capacity to interpret the university anew – as a corporate entity
Carts, horses, and crises
In the turmoil of assaults on democracy, liberalism and collectivism locally and globally, we need more than ever to protect the independence and academic freedoms of universities. This will require societies to value and fund them to a level where the potential locked up in their multiple missions is realised.
We are not doing that, which is forcing difficult decisions on universities. But in making them, vice chancellors are now positioned to define for themselves a purpose for the public university by directing what it does.
Universities are clearly restructuring themselves. But it is less clear whether they are responding to government drivers or whether their leaders are exercising their new capacity to interpret the university anew – as a corporate entity with aims defined in their own KPIs and understandings of social change and universities’ role and potential commissioned from consultants.
Here the Wollongong example is salutary, especially as funding pressures intensify in New Zealand ahead of the current reviews of the sector. Vice Chancellor John Dewar is a partner at KordaMentha, the consultancy firm engaged to review the university and advise on strategic redirections.
KordaMentha outlines its purpose as to “help clients grow and maximise value, protect from financial loss and reputational damage and help recover value in tough times”. The University of Wollongong continues to invest in off-shore education facilities as it is dismissing academics and cutting courses.
The consolidation of asset management logics, cost-cutting directives, and management consultancy visions of the future into centralised university powers is embodied within the same person. It should fill us with fear for university independence.
It raises the question of whether funding crises represent a threat to university independence or an opportunity for a new class of university leader to accumulate power and influence. Who decides whether a programme is viable or unviable – and what is unviable but desirable as opposed to unviable but disposable.
As the election of Donald Trump demonstrates, we need urgently to hold to account those with a will and an emerging capacity to control the production of knowledge. This includes university leaders and the educated elites of the state, as well as right-wing populist governments.
As a country, can we trust today’s university leaders with our futures?
Nicolas Lewis is a professor in the School of Environnment, Faculty of Science
This article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland.
This article was first published on Newsroom, Fears for university independence – who decides what is taught, 27 November
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