Current debate about higher education and the role of universities tends to be dominated by super-efficient, economic rationalist thinking.
The Federal Government's review of higher education, for example, aims to ensure the system is 'contributing to the innovation and productivity gains required for long term economic development and growth', and that 'there is a broad-based tertiary education system producing professionals for both national and local labour market needs'.
Perhaps the time is right to wonder about alternatives to this view of higher education.
It might be strange to look for such an alternative in the words of a well-known economist and public servant, but in 1931, H. C. 'Nugget' Coombs, President of the Guild of Undergraduates at UWA., gave a report at a general meeting of the students. The secretary of the guild faithfully recorded both his words and his mood:
Mr Coombs spoke of student life and the attitude students should adopt towards the university as a whole ... [Coombs] enjoined the students to do things, not because they had to, but because it was worth while doing them ... The university was not a graduate shop to train men and women for professions, but the home of knowledge, where they could develop their intellect and ideas.
Universities in Australia have since become more or less what Nugget Coombs feared: graduate shops to train us for professions.
The well-documented and much-lamented stripping away of funding that occurred under Howard, and before then under Keating, has forced universities to seek funding from private and corporate sources, run lucrative fee-paying courses, and place a greater financial burden on students by pushing for increased HECS fees.
These complaints have been well-rehearsed over the past decade, and it is not my intention to drag them out again — not least because it is a painful reminder of the battles my generation of student activists failed to win!
In any case, for all the vitriol directed at him by ratbag student types such as myself, John Howard was not the first to let the idea of universities as places of community and higher learning fall out of his head. Coombs' speech suggests that even back then, higher learning occurred on contested turf.
Which is not to say the discourse surrounding higher education does not need changing. But looking longingly back at the halcyon days of student activism and campus philosophising makes it too