GRAEME TURNER Broken: Universities, politics and the public good. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

Australia’s universities are in crisis; in Broken Graeme Turner provides a diagnosis and a proposal for reform.  

Monash University has begun publishing a series of short monographs under the general title In The National Interest, which address contemporary challenges in Australian society. In the introduction to Graeme Turner’s Broken: Universities, politics and the public good, Sharon Pickering, Monash University’s Vice-Chancellor says

Australian universities are enduring and foundational pillars of society and democracy that make a crucial contribution to public debate. In the National Interest embodies Monash University’s purpose by extending knowledge and encouraging informed debate about matters of great significance to Australia’s future.

Turner argues that Australian universities are in crisis. His object in Broken is to document the dimensions of this crisis, explain how it came about, and offer solutions. His overall position is that the current operation of universities is not serving the best interests of Australia.

There has never been a golden age of universities. Turner describes universities of the mid-1960s, when he was an undergraduate, as being ‘conservative and Anglocentric’. Universities of this era were relatively small, and while there may have been large numbers in some first year lectures, tutorials were relatively small, often held in the tutor’s office.

In subsequent decades the size and number of universities grew. The key point here, according to Turner, is that they were not given enough funds by governments to accommodate the requirements of teaching. More universities were created in regional areas, and in the 1980s, under the reforms of Labor education minister John Dawkins, Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs), were transformed into universities.

The CAEs were teaching institutions concerned with vocational training, whereas universities combined both teaching and research. The transition of CAEs into universities was difficult, but this is not Turner’s major concern. There were four issues associated with the Dawkins reforms that have had a negative and continuing impact on universities. First, the preparedness of governments to fund universities declined.

[I]n the 1980s, the federal government was contributing something like 80 per cent of the sector’s funding; now it is closer to 40 per cent. Over the same time, the system has more than trebled in size (in 1990, 485,000 students were enrolled, and in 2022 there were 1.5 million).

Second, the government (and successive governments) wanted universities to orient their teaching away from ‘thinking’ to ‘doing’; to steer students away from courses that focused on thinking, critical analysis, and knowledge for its own sake, to courses that focused on getting a job. It was as if the Dawkins reforms were a Trojan horse for CAEs.

Third, the government sought to maintain control over universities, with increased levels of accountability and reporting, and pressure to pursue policies consistent with the government’s agenda. This has resulted in universities increasingly devoting resources to build bureaucracies to satisfy such reporting. Turner also quotes a government minister who told a journalist that ‘the government hates universities’.

Fourth, consistent with the adoption of neoliberalism in the 1980s, the Dawkins reforms required universities to be run as modern corporations. This has led to universities moving away from a collegiate form of governance to top-down hierarchical decision-making. And to many of those appointed to leadership positions coming from outside the academy who have, for example, no experience of the demands of undertaking long-term research. Turner observes:

Top-down hierarchical structures do not work well when the people in charge don’t necessarily know all that much about what the academics do, or, in some cases, what their disciplines do … [In addition, there have been] occasions when Australia’s vice-chancellors have done a poor job of, or have been uninterested in, publicly defending the central purpose of the university when put under political or media pressure.

Universities have had to find extra funds to overcome the decline in government funding. The major way they have done this is by increasing enrolments, especially of overseas students, who can be charged higher fees than local students. These funds are used to balance the books and subsidise the universities’ traditional research functions.

This has resulted in an increase in the size of universities. Courses that do not attract students are cut. The Morrison government substantially increased the cost of Arts and Humanities degrees, something that has not been reversed by the Albanese government. This has resulted in a hollowing out of Arts degrees, including foreign language courses.

There has been an increasing reliance on part time and casual staff. It is estimated that 50 per cent of teaching is done by casual staff, who are not provided with offices to meet students. There have also been reports of universities underpaying casual staff at a time when university administrators are being paid substantial incomes –  most vice chancellors are members of the million-dollar club and travel first class on overseas trips.

Both casual and fulltime staff have more students to deal with. The internet means that they are on call 24/7 and are subject to increasing reporting requirements and assessments. Then there are problems associated with doing research. Academics are encouraged to apply for research grants. Less than 20 per cent of applications are successful. The opportunity cost of making applications and administering the system is huge. Turner suggests that a better way to allocate research funds would be to provide block grants to universities to be distributed at the department or school level.

One of the most damning of Turner’s findings is that virtually all staff have given up on the university sector and can’t wait to get out, whether a casual with a recent PhD in a seemingly never-ending search for a fulltime job; a full-time tenured academic with increased teaching loads and course coordinating functions who has to fulfil accountability requirements, waste time on research applications that fail and has less time for research; or a head of school who has to implement lower budgets and deal with colleagues who resent being forced to do more to make up for the reduction in resources. This has potentially long-term negative consequences for the viability and reputation of Australian universities.

Students are not enjoying their time at university. Classes are large. Online teaching reduces the incentive to attend lectures or tutorials. Increasing numbers are dropping out. Turner also points to the problems of increases in course fees and the longer term implications of having to pay off student debt under HECS as providing an incentive not to pursue a university degree in the first place.

Forced into this situation by successive governments, universities have relied on overseas students for their funding. COVID killed this off. More recently the Albanese government has placed restrictions on the number of overseas students due to the housing crisis. This decision has had a negative effect on an increasing number of universities. There have been reductions in course offerings, research programs and departments terminated, and staff retrenched. Australian universities are in crisis; possibly the worst crisis they have ever experienced.

Turner sees Australian universities as having adopted ‘a one-size-fits-all’ approach to funding forced on them by the logics of the market.

Every university is forced to follow the money. So, every university wants a medical school (for the prestige and the research funding), every university wants a law school (for the high fees and low cost of provision), every university wants international students (you can charge them as much as you like).

He wants to move away from this neoliberal approach where universities compete with each other for scarce resources.

[We] could design a strategic plan for the sector that sets out different purposes and trajectories for individual universities … Australia needs an overarching structure and strategic plan to support diversity to eliminate unnecessary duplication, to manage the national requirements for skills and training, to maintain the viability of disciplines, and to dislodge commercial self-interest as the prime driver of the leading universities’ operation.

He would also like to see caps placed on the level of casual staff, lower-level appointments on casual contracts and the development of a process to transition from casual to permanent employment to provide a genuine career path for young scholars.

Graeme Turner hopes that politicians will adopt such a course of action to revive Australian universities from their current plight. Given the disdain for universities that exists on both sides of politics, however, this appears unlikely. For those who are concerned for the future of universities as institutions of thinking, learning and research, Broken: Universities, politics and the public good provides a clear and concise analysis of the problems that beset universities and a well thought-out program for reform.

Graeme Turner Broken: Universities, politics and the public good Monash University Publishing 2025 PB 96pp $19.95.

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things. He was a student and taught at Monash University from 1967 to 1972. They were the days!

You can buy Broken: Universities, politics and the public good from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: Australian universities, CAEs, Dawkins reforms, Graeme | Turner, international students in Australia, student debt, universities, university funding