Rethinking Academic Work in the Global Era

Australian universities are being transformed by profound long-term changes. Inevitably, these changes are reshaping academic work and the academic profession. Universities in Australia entered a period of accelerated transformation in the late 1980s. Foreshadowed in policy circles by the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission’s (CTEC) report on EfŽciency and Effectiveness in Higher Education (CTEC, 1986), this period was shaped above all by the Green and White Papers issued by Commonwealth Minister John Dawkins (1987; 1988) and the mergers, managerialism and marketisation that followed. For a while, it seemed that the norms of academic work were Ž xed, amid a university system in which every other element—the map of institutions, institutional identity and developmental strategy, systems of management and the organisational cultures of universities, the Ž nancing of institutions and their economic relationship with students, the course mix, the character of postgraduate education, relations with employers, and so on—was subject to rapid change. The internal life of the academic profession seemed to be protected by its traditions, by its institutions such as tenure, peer review, and autonomy in curriculum matters; and by a certain self-imposed inertia. The reform process started from the outside and took some time to work its way into the day-to-day practices of academic staff. However, this inner sanctuary of academic work is no longer secure from the processes of organisational change. The argument of this paper is that, to the extent one can talk about a single academic profession, the academic profession in Australia is undergoing a profound transformation, though this transformation has yet to be adequately researched and analysed. In many respects, the traditional practices of the Australian academic profession are in crisis. It is uncertain what the future of academic work and academic professionalism will be. Indeed, it is plain that more than one future is possible. The processes of transformation and crisis in academic work have four dimensions, which overlap with each other: