The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But…

The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But the neoliberals got to them years ago, with New Public Management (NPM). Actually co-designed in Oz, an attempt to run public institutions…/1 https://t.co/xDKXTRc8uc

…in a more ‘business-like’ manner. As with other corporatised public bodies, like those responsible for major infrastructure, a dead giveaway is always astronomical salary inflation at the senior management level, which is of course very ‘business-like’. /2

For those extra 30 pieces of silver, the new senior managers, often recruited from the locals (academics in this case) at first, then gradually replaced with business people over time, as we see here with Jennifer Westacott, gradually replace the existing culture with…/3

…something out of a textbook from an MBA program. The senior layer of the institution is decoupled from everybody else, and is invited to Canberra regularly for drinks and the pretence of Cabinet’s ear. (In reality most politicians despise unis and their management.) /4

Now individually cashed-up to the top 1% of society, VCs then obediently play the NPM game of trying to ‘compete’ with each other for customers (what we used to call students). They’re much more likely to fight each other than they are the government, who then (rightly) see…/5

…them as a whining rabble. That was the strategic intent. Divide and conquer. At the same time, as they’ve done in schooling for years as well, the inevitable hit the core work of the institution takes is blamed on poor ‘quality’, and the government then sponsors regulators…/6

…(in this case TEQSA) to generate fabulous, continuous messaging about apparent quality issues in universities, to deflect all attention away from government policy. Gormless academics even line up to work with TEQSA to compile checklists of standards, and to become TEQSA…/7

…’experts’, patrolling institutions, including offshore campuses, casting judgment upon what they see. Often failed academics themselves, looking for mid- to late-career salary boosts and escape from the classroom. Meanwhile the Board or ‘Council’ (or occasionally ‘Senate’),…/8

…of each university is gutted of any actual university expertise, and stacked with ministerial appointments and career Directors, who need to regularly look at the front page of agendas to remind themselves which institution they’re in on a given day. Their background is…/9

…nearly always in business of some kind, and the idiocy of modern corporate governance says this is a good thing, not having a clue how the business works you’re governing, the theory goes, gives you greater objectivity. Less known is that universities have another…/10

…Board, the Academic Board (or Senate), which historically was the scholars themselves, governing their institutions. You will struggle to find a University Board who doesn’t have explicit contempt for this second body, and governments even more so. NPM above all else was…/11

…about eviscerating Academic Boards. Today these bodies still pretend to play some role in Universities, but it’s symbolic. Hilariously their mission is to ensure the ‘quality’ of the institution’s output, without any meaningful power to impact that quality at all. /12

Literally a box-ticking body, dutifully running down the list of TEQSA Standards, hectoring colleagues to comply, with the locus of control and agency miles away in Canberra. Because NPM says the main products of university are now ‘job-ready graduates’, few even remember…/13

…the actual function of a university in society, namely to continuously test and question the status quo. The core product of a university is knowledge, always knowledge. It’s why the old governance model in universities, which ran for more than a thousand years pre-NPM,…/14

…put that old collegial academic board at its centre. There is no neat, MBA-driven way to attest to the quality of knowledge, it’s always a contested, peer-review process. To govern an institution driven by peer review, you need peer review as your governance mechanism too. /15

The institutions are now effectively castrated. The most passion you’ll now get from experts is in their hatred for their own internal institutional administration. Again, divide and conquer. /end