Why are universities such strange places? I have two degrees. I have spent the last 10 years as a sessional lecturer and have connections to another university. And yet universities do not make sense as an institution.
The reason for this is simple. They are really two institutions uncomfortably jammed together.
Let’s start with the first, older institution. And let me also begin by saying that I value the skills and the dedication of the academics that I work with. They have an important role to play in society. And it’s not weird for the reasons given in the right-wing press. According to them, academia is some kind of Marxist commune where wheelchair-bound black, lesbian commissars burn copies of the Bible and Plato in 24-hour furnaces. Would that it were so exciting*.
This not true of all but many academics have never truly left the education system. They got the top marks at school. They continue to get the top marks. The want the gold star, the trophy, the award. They are status-driven and conformist. They grumble about the research publication KPIs that they have to meet but scrabble to publish in top journals and brutally judge those who fail. They remind me of cardinals in the Vatican, forever intriguing against each other. It is not an accident that the universities of Europe co-evolved with Churches. And all many of these people want to do is study the subject they love and argue furiously with the only other people in the world who understand them. As Sayre’s Law can be stated: “the fights in academia are so bitter because the stakes are so low”. This is the Ivory Tower.
Unfortunately for academics, universities have been immensely successful since the end of World War 2. Perceiving the need for an educated populace, states poured vast sums of money into their public university systems. The number of students in most Western states went from being a rounding error to a significant minority of the population. Where government largesse was insufficient, students either received money from their parents or borrowed money to join the academic arms race that became required to get a well-paying job in the service and technology sectors that blossomed during this period. The education sector became industrial in scale. In Australia alone, over a million people are attending our universities at any one time. This is the world of processes and bureaucracy. This is the world of the Bone Machine.
Many academics have been trained as scholars rather managers of industrial scale services businesses. This isn’t really what they signed up for. It is somewhat akin to forcing monks to run factories**. No one really planned this. It just kind of happened. Now let me be clear. I have encountered very competent managers who also happen to be academics but this is more by accident that design.
Is this arrangement best for the students? Or the academics? How long is it sustainable for?
*Perhaps the Ramsey Centre will give me some money to make their dreams a reality.
**Which may work in the limited context of Belgium brewing but isn’t as successful elsewhere.