Around a decade ago when I was fairly new to my academic job, I made an uncharacteristically politic decision to attend the annual Politics Dinner, which each year featured a lecture from an Australian politician.
That year it was my (then) least favourite politician. Christopher Pyne was then the government minister responsible for higher education under what we thought was surely the worst Prime Minister we would ever see (oh, the innocence).
Pyne had an absolutely terrible idea about uncapping fees for undergraduate students, which was a way to compel a generation of young people to mortgage their future earnings to prop up the annually-escalating present value of salaries for university execs.
Politics (Australian and Comparative) was among my cluster of teaching at the time. When I walked into the room one of my Politics 101 students was there.
Feeling a little smart arsey, mostly because I was there to hear Christopher Pyne speak, I asked the student: What is the difference between horizontal fiscal equalization and vertical fiscal inequality? Poor young fella was stricken, until I told him I was joking – it was an early lesson in ways not to be a teacher, in fact.
I sat in my designated place on a front table and introduced myself to the woman on my right. I was tempted, I told her, to performatively read Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, which I happened to have in my bag. I love that book, she said.
To my left was a (conservative) Liberal party bloke, a staffer as I recall. I introduced myself and quickly told him that I had recently published my first book, a history of universities.
He was not terribly interested.
Very keen, he was, however, to tell me with great gusto and unfailing confidence, that ‘universities are businesses’.
Which was pretty much the narrative of my book, except. You know. Critical (ie well this is crap, isn’t it?) and historicised, (ie look how this happened…it wasn’t always like this, which also means we can do something else).
Liberal Bloke was likely around 20 years older than me and a guest of the university so I was polite. So it would seem, I said with distinct non-commitality.
No, Liberal Bloke responded, now with a finger pointing in the direction of my face. They are businesses.
Oh for the confidence of a white middle aged Liberal Party Bloke. God-like, he was able to declare it and, just like Light at the Dawn of Creation, it was so. Universities became ‘businesses’.
Actually that is pretty close to how it happened. I discuss that further on my substack.
But first, it seems likely, hopeful even (though I hardly dare invoke hope about universities any more) that the ‘business ideologues’ time is up. A few days ago the Australian government announced a Parliamentary Inquiry into the Quality of Governance in Australian higher education.
The union (NTEU) has been asking for this for ages, citing poor workforce planning (they sacked 4800 people 2020-1 and then hired 3600 in 2023), acting against the public interest (shutting down courses and research we need), seem immune to conflict of interest rules, paid millions to consultants all while making work insecure, and conducting millions of dollars of wage theft (officially $226 million and counting). Oh and, on average, each institution has six or more executives earning more than the State Premier, who surely has a job at least as complicated as theirs: they go on about how ‘complex’ their jobs are…which is really starting to sound like ‘too hard for me’.
Time to give it to someone else?
Read further at: https://hannahforsyth.substack.com/p/the-business-end-of-the-university
{ 9 comments }
Dk 02.09.25 at 11:08 pm
My experience of the NTEU in the 2010s was that they would sell out anything and everything to do with academics or university organisation as long as they could get underperforming general staff a minuscule pay rise. I stayed a member, but they were totally ineffective regarding any academics’ concerns. I certainly hope they’ve improved since I’ve been out of academia.
J-D 02.09.25 at 11:18 pm
One of them is eleven syllables and the other is ten.
I await my no-prize.
engels 02.10.25 at 1:32 am
This post should have a trigger warning for UK graduates, students, academics, not to mention the taxpayers eyeing inevitable imminent bail outs.
Best I can tell an Australian state premier makes about £200 000. I recently read that Cambridge (UK)’s new vice-chancellor is on £577 000, a figure that compares well even against the management consultancy partners universities-as-businesses are wont to shower with cash. Her justification is that she would paid more in America.
J-D 02.10.25 at 1:59 am
This is the kind of comment which could only be made by somebody who regards general staff as a category as being underperforming and undeserving, which is a useful piece of information for anybody who wants to estimate the value of your contribution to the discussion.
Ted Nannicelli 02.10.25 at 11:14 am
“But first, it seems likely, hopeful even (though I hardly dare invoke hope about universities any more) that the ‘business ideologues’ time is up. A few days ago the Australian government announced a Parliamentary Inquiry into the Quality of Governance in Australian higher education.”
Don’t hold your breath. It’s not as if both the opposition and Labour government (not to mention the universities) aren’t already in bed with the big consultancy firms for whom everything is a matter of the bottom line. (And of course, it was a Labour government that re-introduced the idea higher education as a commodity for which one would pay.) The ‘business ideologue’ dogma has already been too deeply internalized by governments and universities themselves to right the ship.
Matt 02.10.25 at 8:52 pm
Like Ted, above, I’ll admit that I don’t see a huge reason to be optimistic that at parliamentary inquiry will result in good things for universities. Of course the LNC won’t want anything good. But given the way that Labor has made a complete hash of the situation around foreign students – having an incoherent policy, running scared and rushing things, and then, in the end, resorting to a lawless approach (*), I’m not at all hopefull that it will do anything that will be good for universities. Rather, I expect it will try to out-compete the LNC on saying that unviersities need to _really_ get down to being business-like. And of course few if any current Labor leaders seem to have much love for the humanities.
(*) When Labor failed to pass ill-concieved caps on foreign students, it decided that, once a university got close to what the cap would have been, it would simply slow-walk any further applications for student visas for that university, thereby putting in place a soft cap by simply refusing to do what the law says it should do. It’s a shamefully Trumpian approach, regardless of what the best approach for foreign students is, but doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone outside of the universites.
Alex SL 02.10.25 at 9:42 pm
I wish universities weren’t businesses, but I am very puzzled by the optimism on display here. It is likely that the next election will be won by the guy who sat to your left. Even if he doesn’t, is there any reason to assume that the future promises anything except death by a thousand cuts? Have any other reviews’ outcomes been implemented, e.g., on unfairness in school funding?
dk 02.11.25 at 4:34 am
@4 J-D
Not at all. I had great experiences with general staff that routinely went above and beyond at US institutions. It’s just Australian general staff that are incredibly hidebound, underskilled, and underperforming. At least that is the universal impression of academics in my area (physics).
I notice you didn’t address my main point, which is that general staff would sell academic staff priorities down the river for the merest pittance of a pay raise.
Ingrid Robeyns 02.11.25 at 9:29 pm
Engels @3 – “Cambridge (UK)’s new vice-chancellor is on £577 000, ” What the F#%k???
But sadly more evidence that universities are run as businesses, because there too, those at the top are always extracting more and more.
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