University staff have been thrown onto the back foot. For a long time many did not focus on what has happening in their Central Administration buildings or, if they noticed, reacted with amusement. When they realised that the move to corporatise universities was not a passing fad but a looming threat, the bellows of outrage started to come, accompanied by satirical pieces that reflected the underlying incredulity: `They can't be serious, can they?' The problem with satire is that reality keeps outstripping it. And it seems too subtle and sophisticated a tool for the situation: it appeals to and depends on shared values. In these times, many a satirical piece would not be recognised as such by some who are driving the change.
What has been largely missing from the debate is the very simple statement of basic principles and their logical implications. I suspect it has been missing because academics cannot believe that it is necessary to spell out, in words of not much more than one syllable, the fundamental assumptions of university teaching and research. It is embarrassing to have to move to this level, but the times call for drastic measures. I offer, then, four elementary lessons to our political masters and our own leaders, which will, as far as possible, be free of all the qualification and complication to which we academics are prone. Elementary lessons must focus on basics.
A university is not a business because the essential purposes of each are quite different and, indeed, incompatible. The business of business is to make a profit - the greater the profit, the better. This is perfectly appropriate and, in itself, outside the moral sphere. This is not to say that business people should not behave ethically, but that the basic goal of business has no moral dimension. (Anti-development conservationists might quarrel with that, but let's leave that complication for an advanced lesson.) Businesses make more profit by cornering more of the market than their competitors, so competition is an inherent and necessary part of achieving the goal.
Let's say, at this stage, that the essential purpose of a university is to increase knowledge. That is a simplification of the usual triad of conserving, disseminating and advancing knowledge, but if you think of dissemination (i.e., principally teaching) as a form of increasing knowledge (in this case, the students') and conservation as a necessary part of an overall increase, then it will do. Of course, `increasing' has to be understood as covering the whole messy, backtracking, challenging, proving wrong nature of knowledge growth. And, for the purposes of this argument, `knowledge' is used in its broadest sense, which includes `knowing how' as well as `knowing that' and so encompasses skills.
Increasing knowledge has a profound moral dimension, since it is accepted almost universally as contributing to human welfare. (The arguments against knowledge as a self-evident good will not be considered until the very advanced level of this course.) The procedures associated with increasing knowledge are governed by some of our strongest moral imperatives: honesty, integrity, accuracy, disinterestedness, respect for others, tolerance, openness and so on. Most importantly, the nature of the goal dictates a commitment to the common good that does not, logically, allow for competition at a fundamental level. If one is dedicated to increasing human knowledge through research, one cannot logically want to lock up certain bits of it for private use. Of course, this may be done just until one has a patent on it, but the field will not develop unless the knowledge is shared. In this case, the patent and the money which comes from it are by-products. They cannot represent a primary goal.
Teaching must depend ultimately on a commitment to students' growth in knowledge as part of the broader goal of contributing to the sum of human knowledge. If this is the essential reason for teaching, it doesn't make sense to want your students to learn more than other peoples' students. In the end, this defeats your basic purpose. Now, I can imagine that, in some private schools, this point might get lost in the short term battle to achieve the highest TER scores, but I am sure that, if you were to ask committed teachers in these schools whether they really want their students to learn more than anyone else's, they would, on reflection, answer that they want all students to learn as much and as well as they can. To wish otherwise is to betray the calling. And surely it is unquestionable that a government must wish to see all students learning as much and as well as possible. What sense then does it make for a government to force schools or universities to compete for the means to teach these students? Absolutely none. This is what has always been crazy about the reward/punishment system of quality assurance. In those universities which miss out on the prizes (and are therefore punished, no matter what the rhetoric), it is the students who suffer, because fewer resources can be devoted to teaching them. This is a denial of the purpose of the university.
What is important here is the distinction between goals, means and by-products. In a recent article, Neil Postman pointed out the confusion of these significantly distinct concepts in contemporary education, citing as absurd the statement by President Clinton that the goal of American education in the next century is to get a computer onto every child's desk. This cannot be the goal (purpose) of education, but merely a means to the end of increasing knowledge.
So, I take it that the goal of a school or a university (even a private one) cannot be to make money: this is both a by-product and a means to an end. The difference can be clarified by an analogy. Presumably the fundamental goal of doctors cannot be to make money. Their goal is to save lives and enhance the health of their patients; the money they earn doing this is a perfectly legitimate by-product. If a desire for profit supplants the primary goal and becomes the dominant motivation, we rightly judge that they have been corrupted - and that they cannot, in the end, be good practitioners. Doctors must also have a broader commitment to the general health of the community. Would any doctor want her/his patients to be healthier than other doctors' patients? Such a wish would undermine the whole enterprise. This is equally the case with education.
Since the purpose of an education system cannot be to make a profit and since competition is essentially incompatible with both its underlying assumptions and its procedures, a university cannot be just like a business. This is not to say that it cannot learn something from the business world about efficient practices in some areas. But a basic confusion of purposes will lead to disaster.
Customers are people from whom sellers wish to make money. Students are people whom teachers wish to see grow and develop intellectually. The two roles are completely different and incompatible to the extent that, if they become confused, the activity of teaching will be compromised and subverted. Of course teachers can charge for their services and are entitled to make a living from doing so, but if the dominant aim is to make money then what is offered to students is determined simply by what will sell and its price by what the market will bear. There is no reference to any other system of values. This is the meaning of the phrase, `The customer is always right'. It is not, as I used to think, a slogan for training staff to be polite. It is a statement of a value-system. In selling, there is essentially no basis for judgment beyond what will sell. If an article is rubbish, but people buy it, the seller has no moral responsibility to declare it is rubbish, or stop making it or charge a price appropriate to its quality: the judgment of the customer is absolute. And of course advertising can do a great deal to create a demand for products irrespective of their quality. Although there are some marginal limits on claims of fact that can be made in advertising, no-one is compelled to declare the limitations of their products or to assess objectively its quality in relation to others.
Obviously there are arguments that sellers who want a long-term business are well advised to care about the quality of their products, since presumably future customers will learn about defects over time (crap will out in the end). Given the power of advertising and the media, that proposition is debatable and, besides, a lot of people have got rich from short-term hit-and-run selling. But, even if the proposition is true, it is still only a more sophisticated version of a value system based on what will sell. This value system is quite appropriate to the free market, but totally inappropriate to education. At the heart of teaching lies the moral responsibility to ensure that what we are offering students is good. Exactly what `good' means is, of course, the subject of intense debate. My personal list would be something like: true, honest, challenging, questioning, ethical, complex, designed to meet their needs (which may not always coincide with their wants) and so on. The details don't matter here. The point is that the frame of reference is not only very different from what will sell, but in some cases opposed to it.
I have always been a strong advocate of systematic structures for exploring and attending to students' perceptions, judgments and wishes, arguing for the use of student questionnaires, for instance, when these were anathema to most academics. But they cannot be the final word. To take an example: if large numbers of law students want to study only black-letter law, to qualify themselves for practice as efficiently as possible, should those who believe in the importance of contextualising this study, through courses in legal philosophy or the social and political dimensions of the law, simply accede to their wishes? Or should these teachers try to persuade their students of the importance of this broader view, for their development and the good of the society in which they will practice? More simply, if most law students hate studying Contracts - as I'm told they do - should law faculties stop requiring them to take these courses? Obviously not - in education, the customer cannot always be right. Students come to universities expecting their teachers to direct their study to their benefit; that is why they come, to learn from people who should know a lot about what they will need in their jobs and in their lives. Of course, we have to keep listening to students, and we certainly haven't done enough of this in the past, but our decisions cannot be absolutely determined by what they want.
Another related reason for students not being constructed as customers is that a great deal of research has shown that at the heart of most effective teaching and learning is a caring relationship between teacher and student. This does not mean a sentimental feel-good friendship. It means care for the learning of individual students and an attention to the conditions in which each student can learn best. This relationship is fatally compromised if the learner becomes principally a source of profit. My soap-powder salesman does not care about me as a person, but simply as the writer of cheques, and the attempt to inquire after my children and their welfare (their names checked on an index card, as taught in the training sessions) is sickening in its grotesque attempt to ape friendship in the interests of profit. One of the saddest comments on our culture is that some good people have embraced the `student as customer' idea because they see it as the only way to encourage teachers to `care' about their students. We can apparently only care about people if they are potential sources of profit. They do not seem to realize that it will destroy the kind of `care' which is the basis of education.
Education cannot be a product because it is a dynamic process. A product is a finished object which is handed over to someone for their use. Delivery is a one-way transmission to a recipient. The fruits of education - understanding, wisdom, scepticism, analytical and creative skills, etc. - cannot be delivered to anyone. They must grow from within - stimulated and nurtured by writers, teachers and peers in a process which is essentially interactive and social. What can be packaged and delivered are the materials for use in a course, but it is a grave error to confuse these materials with the course itself. The course is a structured learning experience which must always involve engagement with other minds, whether on paper, via email or - still ideally in most situations - in person.
The conceptualisation of a course of study as a product is part of a widespread and powerful trend in this society towards the commodification of areas of life which previously have been seen in very different imaginative terms. A striking example was provided recently in the debate about the future of Wilson's Promontory in Victoria. As one letter-writer to The Age eloquently expressed it: `The Prom is not a "tourism product". It is a national park'. In this case, the concept of a product is appealing to exactly that exploitative view of nature that the national parks system is designed to protect nature against. Whatever the defects and/or merits of particular proposals for development, it is the mind-set which is extremely dangerous because, given free rein, it would destroy the very thing it is wanting to exploit. The same is true of the threat to educational values. To think of education in terms of products is to adopt a narrow, instrumentalist view which would, if unchallenged, undermine the learning which is supposedly the object of the exercise, because it misconceives the nature of learning.
Human beings have very slowly and painfully learned that their societies need dissenters. The most dangerous and corrupting situation for an individual leader, a government and the community as a whole is to have only `yes-people' advising on decisions and developments. To observe a powerful individual surrounded by sycophants is to watch the process of corruption take place before one's eyes, as the feedback received is grossly distorted to reflect only what the leader wants to see.
One of the roles universities have played (fitfully and imperfectly) has been that of challenger and `nay-sayer'. This is why the concept of academic freedom has been vital. Governments have tolerated and supported this role (fitfully and imperfectly) because of an understanding that it is necessary for the health of the society. This kind of tolerance and support has also operated within the institutions themselves. Whereas, in general, businesses have required that dissent takes place behind closed doors and that, in dealings with the outside world, loyalty to the company is a primary obligation, staff within universities - at least academic staff - have been allowed to question, challenge, even attack their own leaders. This too has been protected (fitfully and imperfectly) by the concept of academic freedom.
This tradition is now under threat from the new management systems being enthusiastically embraced by university administrations, which stress the need for corporate loyalty and commitment to platitudinous `boosterism': `we are the greatest, another first for X University, etc.' University publications have become extended advertisements; the millions of words churned out by public relations departments can only be described as propaganda, a form of communication which should be anathema in universities, of all organisations in the society.
It is in the long-term interests of this country for universities to be funded to make life uncomfortable at times for governments, bureaucracies, businesses, etc. They should also be allowed and encouraged to be rigorously self-critical, unafraid of giving negative messages to their potential `customers'. The great danger is that the pressure to market will lead only to an increase in advertising, not an increase in quality; and the rationale of advertising - to sell by manipulation of image - is fatal to the essential mission of universities, which is (if I dare to say it in these post-modernist times) the pursuit of truth(s).