A shorter (and less opinionated) version of this was published in The Conversation today.
No problem with the modifications required to make it suitable for their audience, but I still like this version better.
The erosion of our universities’ social licence, we are told, is lining up as 2025’s ‘hottest topic’ for higher education. That claim is made by Future Campus’s Tim Winkler, pointing to concerns expressed by both Jason Clare and Peter Dutton. This draws upon an established narrative within the political class that the universities are ‘out of touch’ with their communities, and that the reputational damage they have incurred in recent years has resulted in the sector’s rapid slide down the league tables that tell us which institutions Australians trust the most.
While one might acknowledge the political convenience of such a narrative at a time when academics and peak bodies are calling for significant changes in direction for higher education policy, there is certainly evidence that public support for the universities, and what they currently offer, has declined significantly.
The idea that organisations might require a social licence is a curiously old-fashioned one. Predating the rise of neoliberalism, it holds that businesses, in particular, should not be so fixated on their bottom line as to overlook their responsibility to provide a social benefit to their communities beyond that of just providing commodities or generating profits.
Recently, the idea of the social license has resurfaced in the community reaction against the hyper-profits generated by large corporations, the expanding gap between the remuneration paid to these corporations’ CEOs and to the rest of their workforce, and what appears to be businesses’ accelerating disregard for the social consequences of their profit-seeking strategies that peaked under cover of COVID. The behaviour of companies such as Qantas and ‘ColesWorth’ have loomed large in these debates.
It may be a bit of a stretch to properly apply this notion to the universities. They are national educational institutions established with public funds expressly to serve the common good. Recently, however, their current level of interest in doing exactly that, as well as their behaviour as public institutions, has been questioned. They have been found to engage in the systemic underpayment of staff, they have attracted criticism for the ‘excessive’ salaries paid to vice-chancellors and their senior executives, and they have been castigated for their structural over-dependence upon international student income and for their commercialisation. In a notable intervention at the end of 2024, a scathing parliamentary review accused the University of Tasmania of failing to prioritise its ‘core functions’ of teaching, research, and service to the community over its commercial objectives.
These days, then, there is reason to ask how well our universities perform these core functions for the benefit of the national community. Not just for business or ‘the economy’, mind, but for society and the community at large.
At the same time, and while our politicians readily line up to express their concerns, it is highly disingenuous of them to blame only the universities for what they choose to describe as the erosion of that social license.
The outcomes our politicians now lament are actually the products of a long term and bipartisan political project, prosecuted by successive federal governments. Universities have been coerced into behaving like profit-seeking businesses in order to generate income to compensate for the reductions in government contributions to their funding. The contortions required of university management to work with that project have been considerable but the end result is that most of our universities have ended up behaving a lot like our businesses do.
The policy settings have shown them the way to go. Teaching foreign students is more profitable than teaching domestic students, research collaborations with business and industry are more profitable than collaboration with communities, and commercial, rather than academic, considerations are preferred in institutional decision-making. In a competitive and marketised sector, the interests of individual institutions rather than those of the nation inevitably prevail.
Such settings have loosened the universities’ attachment to something like a social licence. The losses incurred as a consequence have wound back generations of accrued cultural and educational capital for the nation and, in the end, diminished the public’s confidence in the universities’ utility and institutional legitimacy.
This is what happens when governments try to turn not-for-profit public institutions into commercial operations.
Peak bodies within the sector acknowledge that damage has been done. Most agree that some of that damage is due to failures of governance although there is not necessarily agreement on what those failures are, what they might mean, and how they should be addressed.
However, the most fundamental cause of the damage about which our politicians profess to feel concern comes from the corrosive effects of several decades of commercialisation and the political disregard for the sector’s contribution to the public good. If government is serious about arresting the erosion of the social licence, then it would be helpful if they stopped behaving as if this has nothing at all to do with them.
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