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Neoliberalism and the academic ascritic and conscience of societyTony Harland a , Toni Tidswell a , David Everett a , Leigh Hale a &Neil Pickering aa University of Otago , New ZealandPublished online: 26 Jan 2010.
To cite this article: Tony Harland , Toni Tidswell , David Everett , Leigh Hale & Neil Pickering(2010) Neoliberalism and the academic as critic and conscience of society, Teaching in HigherEducation, 15:1, 85-96, DOI: 10.1080/13562510903487917
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Neoliberalism and the academic as critic and conscience of society
Tony Harland*, Toni Tidswell, David Everett, Leigh Hale and Neil Pickering
University of Otago, New Zealand
This paper provides a critique of academic experiences of neoliberal economicreform at a New Zealand (NZ) university. The authors engaged in a collaborativeinquiry that was based upon a developing theoretical perspective of the reformprocess and how this affected their academic lives. We were keen to develop anunderstanding of liberal educational philosophy and how neoliberalism impactson this. In this context we examined the nature of compliance and an academic’srole in society. We conclude that universities in NZ are historically liberal and thatthere are limits to the neoliberal project due to the relationship that individualshave with knowledge and the pressures that come from being part of a worldwideacademic community that aspires to excellence in research and teaching. However,new compliance measures, such as Performance-based Research Funding, havechanged academic work and made a broader societal role for academics moredifficult. In serving society universities are required to accept a role as critic andconscience of society.We suggest that academics must be both critic and conscienceand that this responsibility can be fulfilled through our conduct, empowermentand speaking on behalf of others.
Keywords: neoliberal; liberal education; critic; conscience
Introduction
The neoliberal economic experiment of the late 1970s and early 1980s was embracedvigorously by New Zealand (NZ) and became the defining ideology behind tertiaryeducation sector reform (Kelsey 1998). In 1984 a period of intense transformationbegan in which the role of government was radically changed in line with thinkingin other Western economies. According to Evans et al., NZ set out to achieve‘a competitive environment in which markets can operate relatively free fromsubsequent intervention by government’ (1996, 1863). This ideology flowed intopublic sector restructuring that included education. The main pressures faced byuniversities have been a drift to commercialisation through a reduction in statesubsidy and an increase in user pays and private contracting (Peters and Roberts2000). At the same time, there have been increasing demands for accountability foracademic work in order to drive competition within the system, with the hope ofachieving greater efficiencies and redirecting work to meet economic needs. NZuniversities today are closely aligned with neoliberal thinking and practices world-wide, and knowledge has become a commodity central to the ‘knowledge industry’with academics and students recast as human capital in a global market place.
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1356-2517 print/ISSN 1470-1294 online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13562510903487917
http://www.informaworld.com
Teaching in Higher EducationVol. 15, No. 1, February 2010, 85!96
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The trouble with such change is that neoliberalism finds itself confronting a rivalideology in liberal education. Each has its roots in classic liberalism but liberaleducation differs in that State power is used to preserve individual liberty and freedomwhereas neoliberalism represents a new positive conception of freedom in which theState actively seeks to shape the individual as a competitive entrepreneur (Olssen andPeters 2005). Neoliberalism leans towards society’s economic project throughperformance measurement whereas the liberal education project is concerned mainlywith disinterested knowledge, critical reason and openness. Neoliberalism shiftsacademic life towards the authority of the market and is less concerned about freedomof thought and action. Barnett (2000) argues that academia is not sure if these ideo-logies are contradictory or complementary although it seems that the university iscontent to believe that even if values are conflicting, the tension can be managed.
Liberal educational values may be an essential condition for a higher education, inthe sense that higher learning and a critical approach to knowledge require a certainamount of freedom for the academic to teach and learn in broad academiccommunities that serve society (Beck and Young 2005). Such qualities do not alwayssit easily within the type of competitive frameworks that drive knowledge for the freemarket and so governments, in order to counter systemic inertia and deep-downideological resistance to economic reform, have intervened to create artificial marketsso that universities and their staff are forced to act more like private businesses andshift their activities towards economic ends. Examples from NZ include theintroduction of compliance models that have resulted in universities competing witheach other for students and research income.
Structural change of this magnitude has been complex and successive NZgovernments and private sector lobby groups may have misjudged the limits ofneoliberal reform and their aspirations for privatising tertiary education (Peters andRoberts 2000). Universities have not been keen to give up autonomy or fundamentalvalues and because educational activities are conducted in an international arena of‘world institutions’ (Peters and Roberts 2000), the freedom to make desiredeconomic or social change within the sector has been restricted. For example, NZuniversities tend to benchmark themselves against the elite research-intensiveWestern universities that have managed to retain a strong liberal character andthey must compete in this international market to attract and retain high-qualityacademic staff. Moving too far from the values of the elite institutions risksdiminishing NZ’s universities on the world stage. Consequently there has been lessroom to move than the radical reformers might have wished and aspirations to meetinternational standards for research, teaching and learning have ensured that NZ’ssmall university sector, despite following international trends for reform, hasremained unified and essentially liberal. These characteristics are embedded in theEducation Amendment Act 1989 (162) that defines the activities of a university:
(1) They are primarily concerned with more advanced learning, the principle aimbeing to develop intellectual independence.
(2) Their research and teaching are closely interdependent and most of theirteaching is done by people who are active in advancing knowledge.
(3) They meet international standards of research and teaching.(4) They are a repository of knowledge and expertise.(5) They accept a role as critic and conscience of society.
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Such broad liberal criteria are open to interpretation and it is difficult to ascertainwhat difference the Act has made to either educational practices or the reformagenda. Universities have had to adjust to reduced public funding, a change to amass higher education system, new audit and compliance mechanisms and a modelof Performance-based Research Funding (PBRF) that is similar in intention to theResearch Assessment Exercise (RAE) of the UK. The more the university becomesdependent on private income and focused on its economic project, the less likely itwill be to provide a public role and the call to be ‘critic and conscience of society’must be problematic for both academics and those wishing to promote furthereconomic change.
There is no doubt that neoliberal restructuring has changed the way in whichuniversities go about their work (e.g. Buchanan, Gordon and Schuck 2008). Reformhas ensured better economic responsiveness, reduced cost to the taxpayer throughuser pays and other private income, the reduction of institutional power and newmeasures of accountability to government and society. Reforms are presented asa strategy of deregulation in a devolved environment but they are actually processesof re-regulation resulting in new types of control (Ball 2003). A cost of State sectorinterference is that it not only counters the free spirit of neoliberal ideology, but alsodevalues the broader liberal educational purposes of a university in the sense that ahigher education for many students is now a private benefit focused on maximisingfuture wealth. However, another view is that change and the ‘modernisation’ of NZ’suniversities, however important economically, has been marginal to the centralknowledge project of excellence in research and teaching which has been protectedby the wider global academic community. Students can still access a world-classeducational experience and NZ seems a long way from the radical 1980s vision of aprivate university sector driven by profit (Kelsey 1998).
In this paper we report the experiences of a group of university lecturers fromdifferent subject areas as they explore the tensions between liberal educational valuesand neoliberalism, and the impact of the current reforms on practice. In this context,the research focuses on the changing nature of knowledge and the academic’srelationship to society.
The study
The five authors of this paper collaborated over a six-month period in a systematicreflexive inquiry process to examine the impact of the neoliberal-driven changes of thepast three decades and how these have affected our thinking and practices today. Thegroup was brought together at the University of Otago to provide a cross-disciplinaryperspective with our backgrounds in science, health sciences, philosophy, religiousstudies and higher education. Furthermore, each member of the group had moved toNZ to work and was therefore able to draw on earlier experiences of educationalcultures in the UK, South Africa andAustralia through careers that began at the onsetof the neoliberal changes of the early 1980s.
At the start of the project, members were given a comprehensive list of researcharticles and books on the topic and access to a reference collection to start theinquiry process. The principal research data were derived from five 90-minute focusgroup meetings. In each meeting we aimed to test our theoretical understandingagainst individual and shared experiences. Conversations were recorded, transcribed
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and distributed to the group before the next meeting. Individual written accounts ofdeveloping ideas and email communications were also used as secondary sources ofdata.
It was evident that two themes were of interest in the early stages of the project:‘the reform of the university’, and ‘accountability and compromise’. The first themedevelops thinking about neoliberalism and liberal education while the secondexamines accountability and the implications of measuring academic work. A thirdtheme that emerged later was concerned with knowledge and how this could beunderstood in terms of the purposes of a university. We called this the ‘care ofknowledge’ and included thoughts on the university’s role as critic and conscience ofsociety. All quotations are based on data from focus-group transcripts.
The reform of the university
NZ universities were established as public institutions that adopted the Westernmodel of education, based to a large extent on the modern German scientific researchuniversity of the mid-nineteenth century. The production and dissemination ofknowledge was seen as an end in itself as a service for society. Universities were at theforefront of the scientific and technical revolution and professional training. Theywere repositories of knowledge and served as guardians of an emerging democracy. Inthis context, the liberal educational project allowed the universities to contribute toeconomic progress and act on behalf of society on the principle that they were free topursue knowledge as they saw fit while standing outside the authority of thegovernment and the society they served (Dewey 1916).
To some extent, such a powerful and privileged position remains today and theuniversity is often criticised for being elitist and exclusionary although the liberalcondition may, to some extent, be necessary for an institution of higher learning. Thepursuit of excellence in knowledge and learning cannot be compromised andalthough the liberal university seeks to be democratic and inclusive, we recognisedthat not all will be able to take part in this project. Society does not offer an equalstarting point for everyone and if someone is part of a minority group they may beexcluded. If we take the extreme situation of South Africa during apartheid, thereexisted white liberal universities that were forced to exclude black academics andstudents. In more open societies, many who could benefit from a university educationlack the cultural capital required before such a choice can be made.
Although successive NZ governments have intervened to address participationconcerns, this has not been at the cost of preserving the economic functions of theuniversity which are understood by government to require an elitist orientation. As aconsequence, the recent expansion of student numbers has disproportionatelybenefited the middle and upper classes (see Keep and Mayhew 2004) and despitehaving the option of open entry at the age of 20, NZ universities continue to serve themore economically privileged class. This situation has been re-enforced by the removalof universal student allowanceswhichmakes the choice of a university educationmoredifficult for potential students from lower socio-economic groups (Boshier 2001).Students are largely represented by those who can afford to pay rather than theircapacity to benefit from a higher education (Kelsey 1998). Furthermore, open entry iscurrently under threat and the University of Auckland has recently introducedselective entry in order to attract the most qualified or able students. Other NZ
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universities may be forced to follow this competitive pathway and historically exclu-ded groups, such as Maori and Pacific Islanders, are likely to be further disadvant-aged. However, because academic standards need to be comparable to other Westernuniversities, it could be argued that NZ’s open system has simply shifted the selectiveprocess from high school to the end of the first year of university study. All can gainentry but those who do not make the grade at first year are either excluded fromsecond-year programmes that have strict entry requirements, such as medicine andlaw, or they fail their exams and leave.
Neoliberal reform of the universities seems to draw from the same roots asmodern liberalism as they both share opposition to any form of coercion of personalexpression. But neoliberalism diverges because it has to deal with a central paradox.In NZ and elsewhere the market forces in the public universities have not beensufficient to drive the reform agenda and successive governments have needed tointroduce various measures to ensure competition between individual academicsand institutions (Olssen and Peters 2005). The more government regulates for aparticular way of being, the more they coerce (Ball 2003). As a consequence, we nowexperience less genuine collegiality in our departments and have found that certainideas are more difficult to discuss with colleagues who are increasingly situated insome form of opposition, partly because of the direct impact of reform drivingcompetition, but also because of differing ideas about the value of reforms (Ball2003, Middleton 2008). In our experience, those who embrace neoliberal develop-ments are often quick to marginalise those who oppose them and since critique ofthe changing ideology of higher education has been virtually non-existent, margin-alisation of the individual becomes a more straightforward exercise. Usually liberaleducational values are written off as ‘idealistic’ or ‘old-fashioned’ and untilthe university community is prepared to talk about its values and work out whatthe university stands for, then someone else will decide on how its services should beused (Barnett 2000).
Accountability and compromise
When we first came to work at the University of Otago we all found that theinstitution had a much greater number of policies and rules than we had been usedto dealing with. In terms of compliance we experience regular university audit,divisional, department and course review, annual appraisal, a complex five-yeartenure process, research assessment and professional body audits. All these processesare evidence-based and consequently much time is spent compiling relevantdocuments so that we can be held accountable to others for our work. Account-ability was seen as a neoliberal control mechanism that had been embracedinternally by the university and founded on the neoliberal principle that where youhave no market, introduce one; where you cannot do this, introduce some form ofnon-free market accountability. A problem with the types of accountability that weexperience is that only things that can be measured are valued and this hascompromised both teaching and research. For example, the artistry inherent inphysiotherapy can make a huge impact on patients without the physiotherapist everbeing able to account for it.
Holding academics to account for the quality of their research typifies neo-liberalism and follows an international trend towards selective research funding that
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concentrates money where the most research is carried out. In NZ, the PBRF shiftwas important because the funding model in use at the time of change saw researchincome going to institutions based on student enrolments. Each student carriedan allocation for both research and teaching, which makes sense in a tertiary sectorthat legislates for research-led teaching. However, certain tertiary institutions weredeemed to have been allocated research money which they spent on teaching.Uncoupling research and teaching income streams and making the researchcomponent competitive redirected funds. In effect, income went to the universitiesat the expense of colleges and polytechnics, and of the eight universities Auckland andOtago received the major share. Neoliberal pressures do not affect all types ofinstitution equally and the gap between high-prestige universities and others willwiden over time because of the ability of the elite institutions to retain stronger levelsof autonomy and fare better in competition (Marginson and Considine 2000). PBRFhas played a pivotal role in ensuring competition between universities in NZ (Roberts2007) but unlike the RAE, individuals are accountable for their research and everyonewho teaches in a degree programme is evaluated. The Education Act requires thosewho teach in a university to be a researcher.
The benefits of PBRF were clear for us. Not only did our university come firstin the recent assessment exercise, it has gained both financially and in status whileexposing those researchers who were not as productive as they might have been. It issimply not possible for the individual to hide in this system and prior to PBRF it wasmuch more difficult for the university to deal with issues of research productivity.However, there have also been costs and we suggest that due to the high rewards forsuccess in PBRF, for both individuals and the university, there is now a much greateremphasis on research that has created a new separation of research, teaching andprofessional activities. This disconnection occurs in part because more time has to bespent on research and on the process of being accountable for it through compiling aportfolio of evidence. Much of the financial burden of this exercise is invisible becausethe huge workload involved is done by the academics. If we are compiling a PBRFportfolio or sitting on a review panel we are not even doing research, although theneoliberal might argue that the evidence-gathering exercise should also improveresearch.
We are now very careful with whom we collaborate and also more strategic aboutwhere our work is published. For staff appointments we place greater emphasis oneach applicant’s research potential and have reconsidered how we provide the kind ofsupport that will allow their research to flourish. In attracting good academics auniversity must offer certain conditions that are likely to include the freedom topursue the subject that the academic is passionate about. However, measures likePBRF have changed relationships between individuals, what we think of as acceptablepractices and the nature of some departmental conversations:
It gives you leverage to have different conversations. Now we are in a position whereanything against PBRF is unacceptable. So if anything is going to harm our PBRFrating in any way, it becomes an unacceptable idea.
While the system was generally seen as an improvement on the UK’s RAE, therewere concerns about its capacity to evaluate quality in a fair manner:
From a recent discussion I had with a PBRF expert, the system is potentially full ofholes. Who decides which academics go on each panel? Who decides which journals or
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publishing houses are to be the top in that discipline? What breadth of expertise do theyactually have in my area? What are the panel member’s own agendas? There are all sortsof potential holes that I can see and so it is not a level playing field.
We thought that the first round of PBRF in 2003 was a trial full of teethingproblems, the second partial round in 2006 reflected more honestly what was beingmeasured, and the third in 2012 will likely achieve the key goal of affording thegovernment confidence in allocating research funding to institutions on the basis ofquality research. However, any benefits are likely to diminish over time because thequality of research in well-funded institutions is unlikely to change much betweenexercises. Universities in NZ are ranked in a league table of eight, and for theiroverall quality they are benchmarked against institutions worldwide in exercises suchas the Times Higher Education Supplement QS World University Rankings, whichlists the top 200 institutions. The elite research-intensive universities inevitablydominate all such exercises and there is no doubt league table position is importantfor ambitious institutions.
All neoliberal accountability shifts power and this can be quite subtle. Forexample, our university changed its internal promotion requirements to align themwith PBRF criteria. Now, when the government changes the rules of PBRF, theuniversity and individuals will likely follow. So PBRF has ‘upped the research game’for each of us and we observed that our general ‘productivity’ has also increased inthe sense that we teach more students, do more research and are much moreproductive in our administration. However, there was a suspicion that standards,particularly in our teaching, had dropped in the past decade and that compliance-driven administration was counterproductive to the core activities of research andteaching. We shared an absolute belief in the centrality of the idea that a universityeducation should be based on research-led teaching and were of the opinion that themain threats to this practice were the narrowing of the fields in which research cantake place and restrictions on what now ‘counts’ as research.
The care of knowledge
Universities are mainly concerned with knowledge production and dissemination.In this context, the liberal educator would argue that academic work needs to be freefrom political or commercial interference and bias, in order for knowledge to bestserve society and the broader democratic project. These conditions require a pri-vileged position for academics as they make decisions about knowledge and service onbehalf of the society to which the academic community belongs. We were unsure ifthe knowledge we generatedwas based on what we saw in society or simply on what wewere interested in. Also, our various forms of disciplinary knowledge seemed to havedifferent bearings on society’s needs, the obvious example being the work done inhealth science compared with pure science.
We identified disciplinary research as the foundation of our practice and Bernsteindescribed this relationship to knowledge as an ‘inner dedication’ rather thansomething that can be externally regulated (cited in Middleton 2008, 134). Beingforced too far from this ideal was not acceptable but neoliberal pressures did thisby either tying us up in compliance or eroding our freedom to inquire into whatinterested us. Intellectual subjugation does not encourage effective thinking or sit
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easily within a democratic society. Altbach (2001) argues that a country’s commitmentto academic freedom is a barometer of wider political and social freedoms and a clearlink to an open democratic society. By way of example, a common experience weshared was being pressured to compete for external research income to work onprojects that we would not normally have chosen. Pressure came from the university,departments and colleagues although this coercion could be resisted to a certaindegree:
The case has been made that there is money out there, so let’s get it to be like everyoneelse. We are expected to do the work whether or not we are interested in it and evenunder conditions when we believe the funding bodies are simply wasting taxpayers’money and that the research has no benefit to academia or society.
I’m not entirely so noble that I would not go and stain my fingers with money if it’sreasonably close to my research interest.
It’s not really the type of research I want to do. I’ve grown to enjoy it. Near enough andtherefore a compromise.
The more we are answerable to government and industry through targeted fundinginitiatives, the more difficult it will be to step outside of this relationship and holdthese bodies accountable or provide a service for the rest of society. In the past,universities purchased our services on behalf of society and academics were cast aspublic intellectuals with the task of caring for knowledge (Goodson 1999). Nowacademia is more commercial and many forms of knowledge are reconceptualised interms of a commodity with a dollar value. One member of our group recentlyexperienced a situation in which a company would not release the results of theresearch to the academic ostensibly supervising the project, and then attempted tostop the thesis from being lodged at the university. This epistemological shift towardswhat Barnett (2000) calls ‘performativity’ has given the university a new purpose butcoercion of this nature is dangerous and academics need a degree of protection fromsuch pressures.
We also sensed the fragmentation of traditional knowledge areas and thatneoliberalism actively sought to break down disciplinary barriers, not necessarily topromote new types of thinking and knowledge (Rowland 2006), but for the potentialfor commercial gain. Subjects that have little obvious economic importance are likelyto become further marginalised in the university (Altbach 2001). We saw a strengthin our university’s system for allocating research money that allowed some funds tobe shifted to protect less valued knowledge areas or those less successful in PBRF(while academics worked to improve their research ratings). In this sense, theuniversity is looking towards society by preserving a broad range of subjects andwider educational opportunities. The impact of the RAE in the UK seems to havebeen more extreme with closure of departments and the loss of subjects. Once lostthese are very difficult to re-establish.
Academic communities are tied together through the singular pursuit ofknowledge and this is essential if academics are to make any contribution to society.These communities care about the quality of ideas and this is both liberal and elitistbecause not all ideas are given equal status at the end of the process. However, wehad some concern that these values seem to be progressively restricted to knowledgefields such as science and health science, and that the intellectual authority andspecialism that come from this advantage replaces spaces for the wider contestation
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of ideas in the academy and society. What seemed to be rare in our experiences wasbroad intellectual discourse and, especially, debate about the purposes of a highereducation.
We searched for clarity about the relationships between knowledge and society,and specifically the idea that we ‘accept a role as critic and conscience of society’ andwhat this could mean for practice in our disciplines. Understanding the ‘critic’ partseems relatively straightforward as academic practice is grounded in criticism andcritical thinking and academics can use these attributes to play a critical role withinsociety. Many commentators examining this concept deal with the ‘critic’ in isolationfrom ‘conscience’. Roberts (2007) has suggested that providing a conscience on behalfof any societal group is more problematic and talks rather of becoming an intellectualof ‘good conscience’ and living up to the ideal of being an intellectual which, forRoberts, seems to be about valuing ideas and realising these in our academic lives.A conscience might be thought of as an internal voice that reflects our ability todistinguish between right and wrong and is therefore a basis of our moral values.Developing such a conscience requires the ability to reason and being critical requiresa conscience if the position is accepted that our beliefs and actions depend on ourvalues. We therefore concluded that the Education Act does not charge academics toaccept two tasks, but a single task in that we have to be both ‘critic and conscience’ atthe same time:
If you want to be critic and conscience of society, it’s about having an awareness of whatthat society is doing and having the ability to critique it and then developing some sortof attitude towards it, some sort of conscience.
We also need to be aware of how our ideas are used in society and we might call thisa ‘downstream’ notion of conscience. In this context, conscience-type activities seemto be more obvious in certain disciplines, for example, moral philosophy comparedwith food science, and in some educational systems, for example, post-apartheidSouth Africa and NZ. Yet all academics need to work out the moral foundations oftheir thinking and how their choices and actions might impact on society becausethese are realised in our normal disciplinary teaching and research activities as wellas in our service roles. Dewey (1916) suggests that academics should not give societylessons in morals but should acknowledge that how they conduct themselves and livetheir academic values has broader social implications.
Universities, as part of society, have never reflected society at large because theyoccupy a position as gatekeeper to certain privileged forms of knowledge, inparticular, written evidence-based accounts. Such a position may exclude certainindividuals and groups, for example those who have traditionally encapsulated theirknowledge in oral cultures or rely on something other than evidence to justify theirthinking and action. In these situations, the purpose of academics serving society ascritic and conscience might be better achieved through creating opportunities thatallow these groups to have a voice that enables them to be their own critic andconscience. They can then look back on society and, importantly, become critical ofthe university. This is an empowerment role in which people become criticallyconscious through debate and contestation of ideas as they develop and care for theirown knowledge. The academic values the concept of critic and conscience on behalfof others.
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These challenges are also faced by students who have their role to play but in thecurrent neoliberal university many are making a personal monetary investment intheir education for increased lifetime earnings. Can we teach them to be critic andconscience of society when it seems difficult enough to encourage them to be curiousinquirers with their own ‘inner dedication’?
This formation of critic and conscience may seem far removed from the moreradical aims for education as an emancipatory project (Freire 1970). However, itstems from a deliberative process and reflects the thoughts and actions of the authorsof this paper and it is also likely to be more representative of our various disciplines,and perhaps the broader academy, than the call to be proactive in the politics ofdemocracy and social justice (Giroux 1990).
Concluding thoughts
This study allowed a group of academics from different disciplinary backgrounds toreflect on the impact of neoliberal economic and political reform on their academicwork practices. The starting point for the inquiry was the history of neoliberalism andthe conditions for a university as set out in the NZ Education Act of 1989. We foundthat despite nearly three decades of reform there was still room for just getting on withthe job of research and teaching although we were uncomfortable with the pressuresfor continuous change to these activities. The group wondered if change woulddiminish the liberal project to such a point that academic practices, as we understandthem, would no longer be enjoyable or tenable.
The main impacts of reform were engineered through compliance mechanismsand these affected the way in which we worked with knowledge. Compliance andaccountability were seen as part of life but there were costs, particularly with respectto time, and we were not convinced that there was enough evidence that beingaccountable genuinely improved the quality of work. However, it had changed ourworking practices and the way we think about these and, as Ball (2003) suggests, ‘theheavy sense of inauthenticity in all this may well be appreciated as much by theInspectors as the inspected’ (222).
Caring for our disciplinary areas was still the essential driver behind being anacademic and we recognised that epistemological freedom had been gradually erodedas knowledge became commodified. The liberal values encapsulated in the EducationAct were now more difficult to realise and we were unsure of how well we had everfulfilled our societal role, especially the call to be critic and conscience. This conceptis likely to be an irritation for neoliberal reformers and we know of pressures toremove it from the Act, however, those who wish to see a change may continue totolerate the status quo because academic commitments to liberal educational valuesare seen as an irrelevant concern (Olssen and Peters 2005) and such activities can bemarginalised by careful application of neoliberal techniques. For instance, ifacademics are kept busy being accountable for teaching and research and sourcingincome, they will have little time for their wider service roles.
We concluded that neoliberalism can only go so far in NZ for two reasons. Firstly,we need to work in an international community that judges quality in research. Ifreform goes too far along the free enterprise route, the university sector might nolonger be recognised on the world stage or be able to attract first-rate academic staff.The neoliberal view of knowledge as a global commodity ensures that universities
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and countries tend not to act in isolation. Secondly, the essential character of theuniversity is anti-neoliberal and there is a limit to what can be done to a large publicinstitution that has enough people with liberal educational values to resist unaccep-table restrictions on academic freedom. Yet universities are pulled in differentdirections and we have colleagues who seem more accepting of the neoliberal worldthan we are. When the question of taking part in this project was raised with oneparticipant’s Head of Department, the advice was ‘don’t let it interfere with yourresearch’. Later, when he found out that a draft of this paper had been completed, hisresponse was to ask ‘what’s the impact factor of the journal you are sending it to?’
Despite changes in the way knowledge can now be understood and the shifttowards knowledge forms that have more practical or economic utility, the quality ofthe basis of that knowledge in all fields has to be of the highest standard if it is toserve the university and society. Beck and Young (2005) propose that the conditionsthat insulate academics from reform pressures include historically strong externalknowledge boundaries, community values and a sense of ethical responsibility. Sucha culture of excellence gives the university a legitimacy and relative permanence thattranscends changing political and economic ideologies. These values are not dictatedby governments or driven by the free market but sustained through individualcommitment to academic ideals and the search for and care of knowledge in broadacademic communities. It is this that gives the university its firm foundation andvalue to society. However, because of neoliberal economic reform with its associatedaccountability instruments, the purposes of higher education are less certain andacademics are stretched thinly as they respond to different demands on their time.The quality of knowledge may be secure but the changes have impacted on otheraspects of academic work, in particular teaching and service. The shift in controlleaves academics with less freedom to act as critic and conscience and may finallythreaten the democratic role the university plays in society.
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