The ‘idea of the university’: Australian conservatives and the public University

Abstract

In the period since 1986-7 it has become a truism that Australia's university system has variously seen 'crisis' or unprecedented change installed as a persistent and defining feature, a signification accorded authoritative status by a Senate Select Committee Report on Australian universities late in 2001. Federal government policy, in particular beginning with the so-called 'Dawkins' reforms' is widely believed to have sponsored this dramatic, possibly unprecedented transformation of Australia's universities. One salient feature of the period after 1945 is the undeniable transformation of Australia's 'public' universities from what they once were i.e., a site of education for an elite minority of the possible population of tertiary students into what they now are i.e., mass tertiary education institutions offering an unprecedented variety and diversity of undergraduate and postgraduate educational programs. It is difficult to say across a fifty year period which decade saw the most significant increase in the scale of university education. In 1946 there were just over 17,000 university students representing 2.3% of the age group 17-22. By 1966 the number of universities had doubled and the student population had increased by 500% to 91,000 representing 7.8% of the 1722 cohort. The next three decades have seen no less significant increases. Between 1975 and 1996, the number of Australians in higher education rose from 273,137 (1975) to 631,025 (1996). (In 2000 there were around 679,000 tertiary students). This increase meant that in terms of the participation rate in higher education, Australia which in 1975 was in the lowest quarter of OECD states had by the late 1990s moved into the top quarter of OECD states. Though there are many additional features that characterise this period of transformation, the shift to a mass tertiary education system is undoubtedly a central feature of the transformation of Australia's universities which provides a useful point of departure for this article.