Universities, Politics and the Public Good, Graeme Turner

Universities are among the institutions that we need to finance as a public interest. It is worth financing on their own and for national interests. Just like hospitals, oral or public schools. In recent years, however, in recent years, universities have difficulty reminding the governments and the public with sufficient force to direct the allocation of public financing.

Current policy settings and financing regulations do not reflect the importance of a high quality, wide accessible higher education system for a modern and sophisticated civil society. A well -educated population is a public interest in itself. This is not only any benefit to the individual – in terms of the benefits of the population as a whole for learning, innovation, adaptability, flexibility and social values.

However, the idea of ​​public interest lost an important ground and something else filled this area. Inside ShrinkageI have claimed that the definitions of the work of the national interest and the public interest are so narrowed in the last thirty years, and that the nation’s state or society is overwhelming with the state of the economy rather than the health of the society. Indeed, the situation of the economy operates as a proxy for the state of the nation, while national interest and public interest have been reduced to the interests and commercial values ​​of the business and resource sector.

This reshaped the policy context in which universities operate. As Hannah Forsyth stated in the history of Australian University, until the 1980s, “university planning became an economic policy and forced corporate and political leaders to think and manage universities differently”. He argues that what this new planning regime is doing is clearly to önemli positioning higher education as an industry, by searching for a financial award ”.

Neoliberal coercion towards the privatization of public sector institutions, organizations and services and marketing the relationship between these customized organizations and users was the biggest impact here. Among the neoliberal Orthodoxy, which came to dominate public policy since the 1980s, it was the preferred mechanism for the distribution of resources and opportunities between the market population. The commitment to the public sector insisted that the private sector is naturally more simple, more sensitive and more efficient.

As a result, governments in the world participated in large -scale privatization programs. They have marketed and commercialized the services managed by the public sector so far. These include public services and social welfare distribution such as railways and other transportation services, electricity. Public authorities responsible for providing basic services for the country – the inner water supply in the UK is one of the more excessive examples – often sold without much considering the possible negative consequences. What happens if there is no sufficient regulation to protect citizens against monopoly commercial practices, how to manage prices, if the prescribed competitive market does not emerge or if an enterprise that provides an important service fails (indeed, in the ultimately, in the special providers of some of the inner water resources of the UK).

There were many short -term attraction centers for national governments. Selling their assets gathered funds that could be spent elsewhere. However, long -term attraction was how these initiatives changed the cost of these services and institutions from national budgets. At the same time, it shifted the responsibility of their performance to the private sector. As a result, there were a number of skills necessary for the service infrastructure of the nation, where the government no longer takes responsibility.

Although the administration of Australia’s state universities was never privatized to this extent, it was part of it. Indeed, in some angles, they had the worst of both worlds. In many respects, even though it is increasingly market -oriented in a concentrated commercial sector, they were also unreasonable institutions that were subject to detailed government control over their activities and policy changes considered as a means of government policy. Among the results, they became much less simple, sensitive and efficient.

Over time, the requirements of the market have displayed the previous formations of the purpose of a higher education system financed by the public. What’s wrong with this? Initially, the university system should not be allowed to work like a market. On the contrary, the maintenance of an important information infrastructure requires a long -term commitment to a comprehensive information base that must be protected against short -term movements in the market.

There were many moments when Australia only understood it. When September 11 took place, Australia discovered that it had little expertise in Islamic history and cultures, so it was weakly placed to understand the forces behind the growth of radical Islam. This correction took years.

More recently, we have noticed that the management of AI’s impact includes not only technical information processing, but also includes a wide range of social, cultural, medical and ethical issues that have now been put only in a mixture. In 2024, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who dealt with something else about the gap in our infrastructure, alarm about the national interests that were risky by the elimination of the teaching of Indonesian languages, history and cultures from our schools and universities.

A “demand -oriented” system is structured as a way of managing the financing of license records.

The responsibility of the protection of these national interests should not be left to our universities. Since their interests are gradually redefined commercially instead of the public, they no longer act as indifferent custody of our national capacities in teaching and research – as an individual or a sector. Nobody. We constantly speak about the restoration of our “sovereign capacity ındaki in manufacturing. In addition, we should also consider how we restore our dominant capacity in information production and provide expertise.

Finally, let us remind ourselves how badly the latest instructions in higher education policy serves the citizens of the country. Here is one of the more disturbing examples.

In 2023, Richard Denniss of the Australian Institute, shocked the audience at the National Press Club when the federal government collected more in Hecs-HELP student credit repayments ($ 2.2 billion) from the Petroleum Resource Rental ($ 2.2 billion).

This hecs-help student loan arrangements were applied to expand access to higher education and shifted most of the cost of this access to their beneficiaries at a point where they could meet. The result of this policy is that years later, Australia’s children’s pursuit of a third -step education is that these commercial enterprises are more taxed by commercial enterprises that allow our natural resources to obtain our natural resources. For some of these children, the debt burden caused by their participation in higher education has reached up to $ 100,000, which is never foreseen when this policy is introduced.

If we were to evaluate only for the contribution of national interest or public interest, what would this be like a public policy?

This is an arranged quote Fracture: Universities for the benefit of politics and public Graeme Turner (Monash University Publications).