organizational change in australian higher education: process and outcome

Australian Educational Researcher Vol. 17, No. 3 1990

ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE IN AUSTRALIAN HIGHER EDUCATION:

PROCESS AND OUTCOME

V. Lynn Meek and A. O'Neill

A b s t r a c t . Change and social order, along with the related concepts of homogenization vis-a-vis differentiation of organizational types, have long caught the interest of social scientists. Theories of change and organizational differentiation abound. However, there appears to be a need for more research on how change threatens fundamental social classifications and how actors manipulate classifications and social taxonomies to protect their interests and restore order. The recent restructuring of Australian higher education provides an ideal case for exploring the effects of classificatory variation for the process has challenged cherished ideas about the essential characteristics of higher education. The extent to which the challenge has been met and repulsed by those threatened is the subject of this paper.

Recent restructuring makes Australian higher education an ideal case for the study of organizational change. In 1987, the Australian federal government began to introduce policies designed to alter the structure of the higher education system as a whole, as well as to reorientate the goals and functions of individual universities and colleges. Little at either the institutional or system level has been left untouched. Government policy, for example, has encouraged (if not forceA) a large-scale round of institutional amalgamation, a process which is likely to result in Australia's 24 universities and 47 colleges (1988 figures) reduceA to some 35 institutions. The so-called "binary system" of higher education which differentiated universities and colleges in terms of goals and funding has been abandoned. In the attempt to force efficiency and effectiveness, a managerial approach to institutional governance is replacing the collegial form of academic decision-making. An user-pays scheme in the fo.rm of a graduate tax has been introduceA, and individual institutions are forced, tO be more entrepreneurial. And SO o n .

It would appear that the entire structure and value system of Australian higher education is being transformed. But change is a slippery concept to grasp indeeA. As Nisbet (1969: 168) reminds us, "a mere array of differences is just that; not

2 Meek & O'Neill

change". And even more importantly, often "what is implied ... to be change is not change at all, but variation of classificatory type" (Nisbet 1969: 265).

Many analyses of shifts in social organization are directed to the revelation of linear or cyclical regularities: over time and in different places social scientists expect to find a procession of characteristic institutional situations realised in specifiable conditions. There is a pattern, a schema, and in principle it is transferable and controllable.

An allied presumption is that social formations are discriminable according to inherent rules or criteria. A social taxonomy, as Durkt~im (1982: 108-118) called it, is both part of and a precondition for a science of social things. Only the methodological problems of ascertaining the relevant empirical determinants limit our capability to indicate the stages of differentiation and the social forces that bring them on.

Moreover, change is often viewed from the analytical perspective of social order: change impinges on or destabilises an inherently regulated "system" and the social process consists in more or less continual small-scale, incremental order- restoring adjustments to the established patterns. The degrees of resistance are focal to the analysis.

These three notions - of the regulative, classifactory and adaptive nature of organizations - are not themselves empirical in character. Though experience is said to confirm them, it as well might be that experience is constituted by their assumption, that what seems to permeate the natural (and by extension, the social) world is templated onto it. The result is self-fulfilling prophesy. To the extent that analysts and leaders share understandings about the workings of the social order, a mutually satisfying and reinforcing congruity of action and interpretation results.

The business of metaphysics, according to Collingwood 0940: 58-77), is the discovery of the absolute presuppositions in the scientific thought of a period. Whether they are the mainsprings of action or of its interIm~tation, regulativeness, classif'mbility and adaptiveness are, after all, metaphysical concepts. They are not the givens of experience, nor are they transparently applicable to it. Yet as we hope to show, government and university views about higher education were organized around such presuppositions.

Our aim, pace Collingwood, is to consider generative concepts permeating government and university thinking about Australian higher education. This is not a search for hidden motives, such as for a government scheme to even further centralise decision-making, as some have held to be the intention of recent policies. (Though taking the policies at face value is not the same as accepting their explicit affirmations.) What exactly is the foundation of the case for change and why are the particular changes advocated?

Change in Australian Higher Education 3

The O l d O r d e r

From 1965 to 1988 Australia had what was called a binary system of higher education. The rudiments of the scheme were as follows. A tripartite division of that sector of experience called formal education gave us primary, secondary and tertiary, or post-secondary education. This field was divided into three again, yielding colleges of advanced education (CAEs), technical and further education (TAFE) colleges, and universities. Recombined, the first and the third give us the binary system under what (from 1981) was a higher education rifle.

There always was some messiness of nomenclature associated with the classification; numerous definitional attempts were made and the field was elaborated and extended. Though some advanced education colleges were mint fresh, most had formerly been technical institutions linked to state departments of education and state teachers' colleges (which were admitted to the CAE system in 1972). That left a host of post-secondary residuals and CAE cast-offs (many concerned with apprenticeship and adult education). The 1977 emergence of TAFE as a system or sector was a classificatory formalization and intended by government as a vehicle for improved co-ordination and financial assistance.

The sectoral classification relied on statements about distinctive educational aims, purposes and institutional functions. The advanced education college part of it was the brain-child of a Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education, which was headed by Sir Leslie Martin, Chairman of the Australian Universities Commission. The committee's 1964/1965 report differentiated colleges from universities by their function: vocational and teaching oriented colleges on the one hand, and academic and research oriented universities on the other. The core of what later came to be called the binary system, following an English precedent, lay in this doctrine. Though the committee's report was issued a few weeks before Crosland's April 1965 Woolwich Polytechnic ~ h , his "equal but different" approach fitted the Martin proposals; and what happened in Australia went very much along the lines of what occurrexl in Great Britain with regard to universities and polytechnics (Pratt and Burgess 1974).

The source of the binary system can be traced to two primary factors: government's budgetary concerns and Martin's elitist view of the intrinsic qualities of the university (Davies 1989). The Prime Minister of the day (Sir Robert Menzies) resisted any expansion of the universities, primarily on the grounds of cost. He concluded that if the demand for higher education was to be met, large numbers of students would have to be educated outside the universities and he made this clear to Martin (Davies 1989:31). Even more importantly, Martin was convinced that any rapid expansion of the universities would endanger their primary mission: commitment to pure research. He also believed in a fundamental distinction between two types of tertiary student: pass and honours. "Implicit in this distinction according to intellectual capabilities", he is repotl~ to have said in a 1961 speech, "was the creation of two types of institution" (Davies 1989: 55).

4 Meek & O'Neill

Everyone concentrates on what official docmnents say or imply, but not on the style of them, or the approach. There are conventions, such as the calculated fictions of a joint hand, of anonymity, reinforcing the idea of impersonal scrutiny; phenomena have been subjected to a cool regard and patterns, tendencies and directions for rational action have been detected in the entrails. There are rare moments when a main actor shows the mainsprings of his thought in public, but even so, the message is there in the texts: for the artificers and the later defenders of binarism, education was academic or voc~onal in kind, or emphasis, and the inclination of minds was similarly divergent. Institutions were to be arranged according to this dual typification, of purposes of education and types of minds, because it was inherent in the nature of things, not imposed on them.

This looks now to have been more like a rationalization than a successful rationale for a particular educational ordering, but the durability and strength of such ideas should not be underestimated. A changed classification does not n e c ~ l y depend on altered suppositions. Further, it should be noted that despite the most strenuous avoidance efforts, a hierarchy was built into this sectoral arrangement. A social classification was given embodiment in the divisions of organized education. As Durkheim and Mauss (1969: 82-83) contend, and as the Australian case demonstrates, preconceptions about social relations were anterior to, and constitutive of the supposedly logical categories into which higher educational institutions were placed. It may be that any revision or reformulation also exhibits the ascension of types that is so characteristic of classificatory regimes.

Though there have been changes in the political complexions of governments since the binary system was conceived, no upheavals have unsettled the social divisions in Australian society. Nor are the tactics of government and institutional players remarkably different from those adopted by predecessors. It is more likely, we suggest, that what is announce~ as a new policy relies on scarcely altered social conceptions. The resultant ordering of higher educational institutions might then obey the same discriminatory principles, even though they are cast in a different language.

The Martin Report was commissioned at a time of rising engagement in higher education; the government was p ~ u p i e d with problems in the economy, leading to an instrumental concern for relevant education. The policies of the present government are being advanced in a similar environment. Then and now, policy on higher education reflects two popular assumptions: "the belief that higher education contributes to economic growth, and the belief that the provision of higher education places promotes equity" (Mildred 1986: 3).

Change in Higher Education

Continuity is the order of the day in the universities. Much writing in the field represents the remarkable normative and social stability of the university


organization, despite the attempts of governments and others to change it. The university is seen as a steady sort of place, more notable for its enduring forms than for embracing change with any indecent alacrity.

Burton Clark (1983: 186), for example, concludes that because academic systems are inherently multifaceted, diffuse and bottom-heavy, change "will remain uncommonly disjointed, incremental, even invisible, despite the imposition by modern governments of vast super-structures of control". Uncounted writers have quoted Burton Clark's statement that in the field of higher e d i t i o n we need a theory of non-change.

The popular (and self-justifying) idea is that universities do not oppose change, but their decision-making procedures put a brake on it. They respond to exogenous change proposals in measured fashion. Being geared to the conservation of inherent scholarly values, the university opposes haste as a matter of form, and as a matter of principle it advocates gradualism.

On the received understanding, when significant changes to the structure and funding of higher education institutions are proposed, the universities are bound to see a threat to their core values and to resist. Government plans to alter higher education usually do evoke this response, suggesting that government understanding of the university idea is antithetical to that held in the universities. So it was poruayed by many university teachers and leaders when the Australian government introduced major alterations to its previous arrangements for f'mancing higher education. But, despite the huffing, the institutions have not only gone along with key policy elements but have actively pursued their implementation.

The Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and Training (Mr John Dawkins) announced proposals for "a unified national system of higher education" at the end of 1987. His media release said:

Proposed is the demise of the existing ~oinary' system under which universities and CAEs [Colleges of Advanced Education] receive different funding treatment. In its place would be a system of higher education where institutions define their teaching and research strengths in agreement with the Commonwealth, and are funded accordingly.

Unlike the institutional amalgamations imposed by a previous Australian government in 1982 (see Meek 1989), entry to the new System was optional:

Institutions that choose to join the new System would have less government interference and share in the growth of the system. In return, they would neexl to look at improvements that could be made to their management and staff'mg arrangements.

The Government would ensure the incentives are there for them to do so.

6 Meek & O'Neill

Some institutions may wish to stay outside the new system. They could do so but, over time, they would lose resources to more effective institutions that have joined up (Dawkins, 1987).

Harman (1989) provides a useful summary of the main items on the government's reform agenda. In addition to the demise of the binary system, these w e r e -

(a)

Co)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

01)

Major consolidation of institutions through amalgamation to form larger units. Substantial increases in the provision of student places and various efforts to improve student progress rates in order to increase the output of gradual. Increased emphasis on fields such as applied science, technologies, computer science and business studies, perceived to be of crucial importance to economic reca3very and economic growth. A more selective approach to research funding, with increased emphasis on r e ~ h on topics of national priority, and substantial increases in research funding. Changes to the composition of governing bodies to make them more like boards of companies, and strengthening of management of universities and colleges, particularly to give much greater power and authority to chief executive officers. Major changes in staffing, particularly aimed to increase the flexibility of institutions, improve staff performance, and enable institutions to more successfully compete in staff recruitment in prkrity areas. Changes to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness of the higher education system, including reduce~ unit costs in teaching, improved credit transfers and rationalization of extexnal studies. Moving of some of the financial burden for higher education to individuals and the private sector, and encouraging institutions to generate some of their own income.

As the Minister noted in his media release, "Change imposeA by Government has rarely been effective in the higher education area". He looked instead for a partnership between the government, the community and the higher education system itself. The seductiveness of growth within and the certainty of decline without the new system made the partnership offer look more like a command. As the summary attached to the Minister's press statement said, over time the levels of Commonwealth funding available to non-participants would decline "as resources are shifted within the system", and "future growth would be allocated by a competitive process among those institutions in the unified national system".

The accompanying Green Paper (Higher Education: a policy discussion paper) spelt out the details. A decade of substantial enrolment growth was projected.


Government was unable to bear the whole additional cost, but it might be able to find more "to the extent that other parties to the higher education system agree to implement the structtwal changes and other reforms now required". The price for the higher education party included another round of institutional consolidations which would, the Green Paper said, widen educational offerings, enhance staff contacts and promotional opportunities, and (not least) "offer substantial efficiencies of scale".

The proposals were informed by competitive international economic conditions: "In Australia we find ourselves in a world in which the times have turned sharply against us" (Green Paper 1987: 2). Thus the Green Paper said Australia had a f'me reputation for conducting basic research which the government wished to maintain, but it considered that "a greater proportion of such research should be in fields that have the potential to improve the nation's competitive position".

Both in the Green Paper and in the (23 years earlier) Martin Report the economic point is driven home by drawing linear associations between the number and type of tertiary enmlments and the Gross National Product of selected OECD countries. Martin (1964-65: 3) stated that:

Education should be regarded as an investment which yields direct and significant economic benefits through increasing the skill of the population and through accelerating technological progress ... Economic growth in Australia is dependent upon a high and advancing level of edtr.ation.

The Green Paper (t987: 8-9) put it this way:

The compelling argument is ~ on any plausible projection of our economic future, there will be an increasing need for a more highly skilled and better educated workforce with the ability to deal with rapid change and irgae, asing complexity...

A guide to the desired level of increase may be found by comparing Australia's performance with other OECD countries.

While there is no equivalent of the Richter Scale to measure the magnitude of educational upheavals, there can be little argument that implementation of the proposals will significantly affect the management, r e ~ h function and funding base of universities and advanced edtr.ation colleges. As well, the structure and direction of the higher education system itself will be transformed. But the government was preaching linear expansion, not revolution. A new approach, giving close attention to efficiencies of resource use and institutional anangements, was required to "Im3mote further growth" (Green Paper 1987: 1).

Many of the commentators thought the changes were destined to send higher education down, not up. Others feawA a new version of the old binarism, the

8 Meek & O'Neill

perl~uation of inequitable distinctions within institutions, rather than between (Scott 1988). Everybody wanted the growth but there was scarcely a public

supporter of the reconstruction. Nevenl~less, the government's subsequent White Paper (Higher Education: a po//cy statement) introduced a policy which was, in all imporlant respects, identical to that spelt out earlier.

The responses to it were sometimes measuwxl, but mostly strident. Michael Osborne's paper (1988: 153) decrying the threat goveaaunent policies and practices posed to research excellence, conveys a typical reaction:

The White Paper tends to treat the universities as if they were industrial companies - it might be profitable for its adherents to enquire of successful companies whether they invest quite so much of their time and resources in such regulatory activity.

The vociferous opposition suggests that many university beneficiaries of the current order saw no advantages in a new order in which funding was settled by economic priorities and shared with new chums from the (by now incorporated) advanced edtw.afion colleges.

Numerous reasons have been given for standing against the Dawkins programme but most turn on the the sense of loss - of autonomy, of excellence, of basic research capacity, of the opportunity to study for its own sake - and of dismay that the old university values will be overtaken by instrumentalist, politically driven rationales. What went before might have been far from perfect, so the argument goes, but the new order will dilute or swamp outright all that universities stand for.

When order and gradualism are centre stage as explanatory devices and as desiderata, extensive, fundamental shifts are difficult to understand. Nor is it easy to explain what new order of things may emerge. If orderliness and continuity are thought synonymous, then change is antithetical. Therefore change does not emerge within an orderly system, it is imposed. In the case of higher education this usually means the imposition of government policy. Change is explained on an "us" and "them" basis, where "them" (the government) is doing something to "us" (academics and their institutions) despite "our" opposition. Thus, really all that is involved is the naked exercise of power. Just such explanations have been repeatedly applied to the changes now taking place in Australian higher education. Take, for example, the following in an article in The Australian (1989) entitled "Why academics must empower themselves":

The critics have won the intellectual debate, such as it is, but the Dawkinising of higher education continues apace. The academic critics have been diverted by a questionable assumption: that there is some sensible educational rationale behind the process.

The best explanation of the Dawkins initiatives is the direct exercise of power.


Government is the most significant actor in centrally funded, national systems of higher education, like that in Australia. But government is itself part of a system, and its policies are constrained or furthered by the values and interests of other parties to it. Higher educational institutions are in the system and supposing otherwise, while it makes for convenience in identifying the government enemy, also makes for the smug and static conviction that successful resistance now will somehow strengthen fuuae prospects.

Governmental explanations involve simplifications of another sort; the changes it is promoting are not revolutionary but adaptive, incremental, and signals of an early return to stability. The new policy is presented as an extension of an already evident trend. The Green Paper's chapter on "Structure and Organisation" begins: "Changes in the size and nature of higher education since the 1960s have blurred the boundaries between universities and advanced education institutions ". Similarly, TAFE institutions are reported to now be offering accredited diploma courses fitting the higher education classification. The impression conveyed is that the sands have been shifting under the feet of government, and now the time has come, as the Green Paper says, to " ~ g n i s e and capitalise" on the developments that now have been identified.

This "trend" interpretation of change smooths over the incessant clangour made by the participants, the disharmonies that order-based system conceptions have to attribute to intrusive external forces. Institutions did not lie comfortably in the embrace of their assigned places. They competed with each other and collectively pursued the maintenance and betterment of their sectors.

Adaptation

Since the fundamental tenet of order-centred conceptions is that change is antithetical, the imperative is to adjust or adapt so as to restore order. The Green and White P ~ are concerned to suggest that the policy proposals are modest evolutionary developments, leading quickly to a revised order. Reforms can fail when a sufficient number of influential people disagree and band together in opposition to undermine it. So far this seems unlikely, for whatever their public complaints the leaders are more concerned with competition than solidarism. Besides, they are in favour of many of the proposals: in a survey of institutional leaders, a substantial majority indicated support for key propositions aligned to the new policies. Taking amalgamations, for example, nearly two thirds of them agreed or strongly agreed that "larger organizations result ingreater o p ~ n i t y for student access to a broader range of courses" , ,and even more of them agreed that larger organizations are better able to shift resources around, strengthen some areas and protect others, provide staff with more resources and opportunities to strengthen teaching and research (Meek and Goedegebuure 1989: 74). The government can find solace with support like this from people who have been loud in their criticisms. In practice, they have been quick to pursue

10 Meek & O'Neill

amalgamations of every variety, but for reasons that are not necessarily in concert with government intentions.

To asse~ unflinching devotion to the enduring but now threatened principles of the university was easy enough; considerable legerdemain was required to convince staff at the same time that colleges should be incorporated. Like minnows in a puddle, university policy-makers flitted m~mnd the ~ w s cast by Dawkins, by staff naXvet~ and by their own ~ c . University purposes had to be reconstrued, not only to accommodale the mergers but also to sanctify them.

A paper prepared for, and endorsed by the Deans of La Trobe University ("La Trobe University: a New Academic Profile" 1989) demonstrates the resultant circumlocutions. The argument was that without massive fund injections it would be impossible to "elevate" college progrmnmes to university standards: "In short, the binary divide between Universities and CAE's has not been as much abolished as transferred to a binary divide between sectors within any given institution".

Strident calls to resist the Dawkins plan might be laudable, the authors said, but they "ignore the reality that it is not in the self-interest of all tertiary institutions, including some Universities, to resist"; ~ was not the unanimity of purpose to rebel successfully. Institutions had to set out a blueprint for restructuring and redevelopment in the fight of the objectives of the White Paper:. "The price of failing to do so is not some undefined sanction, on the part of government, but a reduced capacity to compete with other institutions in the ~ h stakes".

Realpolitik demanded flexibility :

The notion of a University as an autonomous community of scholars charged with an internal mission of 'conservation, transmission and extension of knowledge', safe from external intervention, is rapidly becoming untenable;

and a rigid adherence to principle:

We must continue, even in a changing world, to adhere to the ideal that the rifle 'University' is only deserved if respect is ac~corded to a vital core of attributes ... The fundamental mission of the university remains the conservation, transmission and extension of knowledge CLa Trobe University: a New Academic Profile", 1989).

Five mission statements for the university were set down. They might not be thought necessary in the ordinary course, the paper suggested, but were mandatory "in the context of any plan to affiliate or amalgamate with any other institution".

The mission statements, and the conclusions drawn from them, made room for amalgamations and set the terms. The standing and activities of existing university disciplines were not to be touched; resources formerly available to the


colleges could not be supplemented by the virement of university funds; a

unitary, not a fexie~ structure was required. The university occupied the high ground by virtue of its adherence to a

criterion of distinctiveness. The conditions, which the La Trobc Academic Board and Council subscquendy endorsed, shored up the incumbents against college incursions and the possibility that university negotiators might concede too much in order to secure amalgamation prizes. A reconciliation with principle was effectcd by preserving the essential university character in an institutional component. Higher education activities were classified by degree and kind: as conceived in a heliocentric diagram appended to the paper, the post-amalgamation La Trobe had a research core. Outside that was a ring of "Teaching and Training", then one of "Continuing and Access Education". In a wedge running through the rings and into the core there were: community-related activities, a technology precinct, a research estate, a polycentre and so on.

The situation facing La Trobe was by no means unique. In one way or another, amalgamations touched every university and college in the country. The Charles Sturt University in New South Wales had been ere.areA, post-Dawkins, out of three rural college campuses; with a name change other colleges became universities, but the more usual arrangement was that colleges were absorbed into, or associated with universities in various ways. One college had merged with La Trobe immediately before the release of the White Paper and subsequently there were negotiations between the university and four other colleges, two of them in rural areas at some distance from La Trobe.

In many universities there were moves to trim the philosophical sails. But did these amount to order-restoring adaptations? Hardly: the La Trobe Deans' paper, and similar university documents elsewhere, were attempts to strike terms which dampened internal conflict and often at the price of further antagonising staff in the colleges involved in merger negotiations with them. In attempting to bring divergent university interests into alliance (a) certain accommodations, particularly mergers, were presented as being brought on by external imperatives (government policy, the need to keep the university's end up in a situation of intense competition, the threat of losing funds by non-compliance); (b) assurances of minimal disturbance and resources preservation were given to constituent parts; and (c) mergers notwithstanding, the idea of the university as a distinctive and unchanging entity, and the principles it stood for, were reaffirmed.

Dawkins and his bureaucrats could be blamed for nearly everything; it suited the purposes of a good many university and college leaders to do so. The amalgamations pursued by them, along with the alterations to management anm~gements and employment conditions which they endorsed, were not so much triggered as licensed by the White Paper. In this sense, far from leading to adjustive, and order-restoring modifications, higher education institutions embarked on policies that had the reverse effect. The sc~e of intramural conflict increased, there was turbulent rivalry between universities for their enlargement, and intense coUege-university dispute over merger conditions. If one wished to

12 Meek & O'Neill

resort to an archetype, the analytical perspective of incessant flux in an inherently unstable system might be thought to suit the events set in train at least as early as the institution of the binary policy and giving every sign of continuing at least as long after its demise.

C l a s s i f i c a t i o n

Beings, institutions, objects may be grouped in an infinitude of ways, either because the world itself is unimaginably replete with possible forms or bexause our minds envisage them. It makes a world of difference to limit the possibilities in order to make sense out of material and social experience. This experience is a paradox - both unitary and chaotic, made and given, conceivable and beyond grasp in its ubiquitous totality; it has to be framed, but the very act is a blunt shaping of the elusive.

Classifying activities (and this itself is one) are functional or analytic in intent. In the former case, a purpose is served: the schema either guides actions that fall in with the lie of the land it ordains, or legitimates the resultant conditions as a natural state of affairs. The danger, as Douglas (1966: 67) argues, is that what is artificial and transitory is made objective and enduring:

As time goes on and experiences pile up, we make a greater and greater investment in our system of labels. So a conservative bias is built in. It gives us confidence. At any time we may have to modify our structure of assumptions to accommodate new experience, but the more consistent expe~ence is with the past, the more confidence we can have in our assumptions. Uncomfortable facts which refuse to be fitted in, we find ourselves ignoring or distorting so that they do not disturb these established assumptions. By and large anything we take note of is pre-selected and organize~ in the very act of perceiving.

Analytic classifications, those of science for example, are conceptual devices, artifices, abstract forms. The messiness of things is put aside; as Becker (1932: 139) says of the theoretical physicist:

Nobody expects him to formulate a law' (or shorthand state.anent of his observations) relating to the behaviour of a particular knotty, unplaned, kiln-dried, yellow pine two-by-four when struck with a dull axe in the sweaty hands of an Italian labourer who receives only thirty cents an hour for his work: ideal-typical and empirical are never confused, either by the public or the physicist himself.


This distinction between the functional and the analytic is hard to keep up, given the instnunental uses to which analytic statements can be put and the teleological artificiality of functional interpretations. Classifications do not emerge from thin abstractive air or from the detailed inspection of pre-ordained systems. While much that is said about higher education (by government and by the commentators) is presented as disinterested analysis, its political functionality cannot be ignored.

On the other hand, an analysis of higher edtr.afion that depends on the location of cases on a continuum between ideal types, as Becker proposexl, has difficulty in establishing its empirical anchorage. Scholastic endeavour gave the world a most excellent ideal-typical angelic continuum, from Gabriel and Michael to Satan and Beliar, whose self-evidence, coherency and completeness have yet to be m a t c h . TI~ makers and supporters of higher education classifications often seem bent on emulation and equally unconcerned about empirical suplmrt.

Far from being a classificatory novelty, the Unified National System (UNS) is a classificatory variant of the binary scheme. If there is a class of institutional non-joiners and ineligibles, then Australia will still have a binary higher education system. The conceptual basis for the UNS involves a shift from what the Green Paper calls an approach "fixed on structural prescriptions" (1987: 27) to one which legitimates some overlap Caetween TAFE and higher education, for example), and encourages institutional diversity. Diversity is juxtaposed to the former "artificial equalisation of institutional roles" (1987: 28). The process of institutional diversification is to emerge from the preparation of institutional statements of mission, or educational profiles as they are also called, followed by the negotiation of government-institution conwaets.

This policy of diversity amongst institutions, such a feature of the UNS, sits uneasily with the idea that they will be fewer and larger. There may be more diversity within institutions, but they will be very much alike in managerial span, structure and direction. An even more important issue is the effect of the new classificatory dispensation on the ranking of institutions.

Classifications methodically identify the like and distinguish them from the unlike. Even in a simple binary arrangement the idea of hierarchy is implied, for the relevant qualities or attributes are paired and, implicitly at least, graded by quality and complexity. The result is a stratified class-series. Trow (1984: 132) finds that higher education is itself "a stratified system of institutions, graded formally or informally in status and prestige, in wealth, power, and influence of various kinds". Moreover, there is not only a remarkable degree of stability to the various types of stratified structures across time and in different places, but also a great deal of similarity in their basic elements, involving "(1) the stratification of sectors of higher education, (2) the stratification of institutions within sectors: (3) the stratification of units and departments within institutions" (Trow 1984: 137).

Stratification suggests continuity, but higher education is far from static. Parkin (1979:112) notes that the relation between social classes:

14 Meek & O'Neill

is neither one of harmony and mutual benefit, nor of irresolvable and fatal contradiction. Rather, the relationship is understood as one of mutual antagonism and permanent tension; that is, a condition of unrelieved distributive struggle that is not necessarily impossible to 'contain'.

And so it has been with relations between the three sectors of post-secondary education. As invariably happens with classificatory artefacts, boundary conditions are the focus for discord and confusion. The advanced education sector itself was an intermediate zone and the leaders of its colleges often gave con uadic tory messages to government. In a 1982 paper prepaw, d by the Australian Conference of Directors and Principals (ACDP) of colleges of advance~ education, college heads said: "We believe it is fundamental to see universities and colleges as essentially one sector, that of higher education, with a range of differences deriving from institutional characteristics and specialisms". In the same paper, they asked the Advanced Education Council (the federal government body then responsible for the colleges) to amend a discussion paper it had issued (Advanced Education Council 1982) so that it made "a positive statement on the value, achievement and potential of advanced edtr, afion as a strongly established sector of higher education". The covering letter to this submission asserted: "We see Advanced Education as an orientation and approach to higher education which distinguishes it from that form of higher education traditionally associate~ with the universities" (see O~eill, 1984).

Parkin (1979:113) commends the analysis of social classes by reference to their modes of collective action rather than to their place in the productive process or the division of labour. Taking collective action as the defining feature of class, his closure model draws attention to characteristic group strategies, either of exclusion or usurpation, or both at once (in the case of intermediate classes). Colleges of advanced education have practiced dual closure, seeking to usurp university symbols and perquisites and to oppose any extension of their advantages to TAFE colleges. The matter of access to course awards provides instructive example.

In its 1982 Discussion Paper, the Advanced Education Council rather blurred the line (but also endeavoured to hold it) by a qualified sanction for the offer of associate diploma courses by TAFE colleges. These courses led to what was called an UG3 level award, meaning the lowest in a three level undergraduate classification, obtained after two years of study in a nationally accredited programme. A limited number of two year courses of this sort had previously been run by universities, but had totally disappeared when advanced education colleges got under way. In turn, the colleges progressively upgraded most of their UG3 awards to the UG2 level (three year diploma); many such courses were also upgraded to the UG1 (three or four year degree) level. By 1982, only a limited number of UG3 courses remained in the advanced education colleges and attempts were being made to elevate many of them. TAFE colleges offered certificate


courses, but there had been some diffusion of UG3 courses across the sectoral divide. The Advanced Education Council was addressing these shifting sands in the familiar way: should the door be kept fast, as the pure ideology required, or could the already evident tendency be permitted without bruising the sectoral arrangement of institutions? Nothing could better illustrate the social class foundations of the classificatory scheme than the Council's thinking on the subject; nor could anything more aptly demonstrate exclusionary strategies in operation than the advanced education college response to it.

"The technologists that Martin saw as being Izained through diploma courses have long since been subsumed within degree programs in company with some of what were earlier defined as technicians ", the Council said. But "the craftsmen - now more commonly known as tradesmen - are still trained through TAFE ". The Council believed the fact that the contemporary style of technician was now trained by both TAFE and advanced education was significant for the interface between the sectors. While the entry points and styles of course might be differene

both TAFE and advanced education are producing graduates who, at the exit point, are destined initially for middle-level occupations equipped with immediately relevant job skills. However, the long term objectives are different: a certificate level course is more concerneA with immediate job competency than an UG3 level course which includes a more substantial body of theory. It is this theoretical element which forms a base for further study at the higher education level and/or increases the chances of progression within the workforce.

Since they both led to middle-level positions in the labour force, the Council continued, "it could be argued that both t ~ of courses should be provided in the one sector". But the rationale for placing associate diplomas in advance~ education was "the relationship between associate diplomas and the degree and postgraduate courses in advanced education ". Having established that no more than one (suitably qualified) angel could dance on the head of the sectoral pin, the Council went on to allow that the TAFE sector did have a role in providing middle-level courses, and a contorted arrangement was outlined which, rather gracelessly, opened the door by a crack.

So far as the colleges were concerned the gap was altogether too wide. The submission of college heads (ACDP 1982) said: Hit would be to the detriment of TAFE and higher education if TAFE institutions were to be encouraged to enter the field of higher education". Higher education awards in TAFE should be phasext out and the TAFE system of accreditation and nomenclature should be quite separate from the advance~ education college system. UG3 awards (even though the colleges had been dropping them as fast as they could) "should be retained in the portfolio of higher education awards ". In the same document the college

16 Meek & O'Neill

leaders advocate the extension of masters level courses in ~ institutions and the introduction of docural Im3grmnmes in selected

For the Council, the sectoral mrangement follows and is justified by the social division of work. The universities do not even have to be mentkmed for it to be clear that they have been anointed for the task of preparing the upper echelons. For the advanced education heads, the dividing line between their colleges and TAFE institutions (nowhere in the submission is the word "college" mentioned in association with TAFE) should be even more deeply engraven in stone. But the same does not apply at the "upper" end of the system; as the college submission (ACDP 1982) says:

The realistic view of the future is that while there are differences in emphasis colleges and universities share common ground; that as a result of changes which have occurred in both universities and colleges the boundaries between them are already blurred and are likely to become more so; that attempts to create sharp distinctions based on the level of courses offered will become increasingly artificial.

Is the new manner of classifying institutions likely to replace the former "artificial equalisation" (as the Green Paper called it, referring to the presumption of intra- sectoral sameness, rather than the college/university likeness mentioned above) with something more natural? The reverse seems more likely. As universities vigorously compete to ~come larger, a standard leadership argument in favour of amalgamations is that growth is necessary to retain current status or to enhance it. In order to achieve parity with already large, older (and still growing) competitors the universities on the geographical and social outskirts have to join the growth

While it is difficult to get a handle on the new order from the Green and White Papers, subsequent implementation schemes demonstrate their classificatory foundations. The Report of the Task Force on Amalgamations in Higher Education (1989) shows how the policy on institutional consolidations is worked out.

The Task Force holds fast to an attributional theory of universities and (implicitly) puts unamalgamated colleges into a residual category without characteristic features. Its report says that most but not all institutions in the Unified National System will be called universities. All institutions, irrespective of rifle, will provide a wider range of functions than were typical of either colleges or universities in the binary system. But "notwithstanding this diversity of institutional functions the Task Force believes that the term university is not, and should not become, a meaningless rifle" (1989: 14).

The report maintains that the university role should be much broader than previously; even so, what are variously referred to as characteristic features, underlying principles, traditional functions or demonstrated capacities are


fundamental to such institutions. As the title of the chapter on this subject indicates ("The Nature of Universities in the Unified National System"), these essentials are built into the idea of a university - it is supposed that universities have a nature. In addition, the "international connotations" the university title has acquired "must be recognised in Australia and interIm~ted in the context of our particular higher education neea:ls". To preserve the connotations, only institutions with the requisite features can be called universities. The Task Force (1989:16) says it has:

examined possible criteria which could be used to determine whether a particular institution should be recognised as a University. It believes that the following characteristics should be used as a general guide ... These criteria should be applied rigorously to ensure that Australia's universities will remain at the forefront of acceptable international expectations of institutions using that term.

The Task Force shifts back and forth between the abstract (a University) and the particular (an institution), between the criteria for designating particular institutions and the general characteristics of universities. Even if it is held to be in the nature of an abstract thing that it is such and such (devoted to the pursuit of truth, committed to r e ~ h and postgraduate education, etc.), can one extract this suchness and use it as a standard for admission to a class comprised of particulars (institutions A, B, and C)? The minimum conditions for the conversion would seem to be that: (i) the abstract name - in this case "university " - denotes a ~ i f i a b l e and univocal feature or set of features; (ii) the feature or features are ascertainable in individual empirical instances; (iii) a class is constituted by individuals possessing the feature(s); (iv) only some in the possible world of instances possess the feature(s) i.e., a principle of exclusion as well as of inclusion is established; (v) there is more than one class.

Put this way, the whole project is in jeopardy for the conditions chase their own tails: the features in question both constitute a class and define the class membership of individuals. Besides, if a number of features are said to be characteristic of the members of a class then a range of intermediate cases is conceivable, a hierarchy established by the quantitative possession of these features. Whether one starts by talking about the nature of the higher education system, the world of employment or the Indian caste system, or any other social construct carrying the notion of prestige grading, then inevitably one is drawn into a circular business of rating.

The concept of professionalization (can one talk of an equivalent Universitalization, as one can talk of Sanskritization when referring to the adoption of Brahmanic~ features by "lesser" castes?) shows up the problem. If there are defining professional marks then they may be converted for use as signposts along an occupational route to full professional status. As Wilensky (1964: 137) asked, what is to stop all occupations becoming professions by the

18 Meek & O'Neill

progressive acquisition of these marks? He answered himself by falling back on • o ~ ' the essential attributes idea. In the nature of their work and the condiuons in

which it is undertaken, many occupations simply fail to fit the professional model:

If the marks of a profession are a successful claim to exclusive technical comwaence and adherence to the service ideal, the idea that all occupations move toward professional au0mrity - this notion of the professionalization of everyone - is a bit of sociological romance (Wilensky, 1964).

As Roth (1974) vigorously notes, there is no agreement about what counts as a professional attribute and most listings are self-serving. For example, the claim is that lengthy preparatory education is a feature of the professions, being needed to acquire another professional feature, a systematic body of knowledge and theory (leading to the achievement of that exclusive technical competence Wilensky talks about). But who is to say it is not the other way around7 Occupations on the make extend their courses ~ u s e lengthy education is requisite for a profession. Roth quotes Freidson (1970: 79-80): "If there is no systematic body of theory, it is created for the purpose of being able to say there is". We are back to the calculated pursuit of professional marks, but without the certitude of their existence outside inspirational and aspirafional uttexances about them.

Those who write about the professions are participant members either of those occupations that are generally held to have made the grade, or those engaged in the pursuit. Disinterested commentators might be thought to form a third category, but they cannot be distinguished on that account since every statement is presented as non-partisan contribution. As Roth (1974: 20) says: "Sociologists who focus on fists of attributes do not study this process, but participate in it".

So it is with exponents of the university idea. A telling recent example is the attempt of the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (1989) to define the nature of a true university. If anything comes out of the self-fulfilling calculations made by the committee, it is that the selected items confirm an entrenched view. In an article about plans for a new university covering the western suburbs of Melbourne, John McLaren (The Age, July 1989) highlights the ~ deficiencies of the AVCC paper:, the arithmetical measures of qualifications and publications assume quality guarantees excellence; the emphasis on referred journals and research grants "restricts the definition of academic production to their own fields, ignoring alternative forms of production in such fields as the fine arts, music, and even engineering".

Disaffected with the attempted definitions of professions, Becket (1970: 92) suggested that=

We can, instead, take a radically sociological view, regarding professions simply as those occupations which have been fortunate


enough in the politics of today's work world to gain and maintain possession of that honorific title. On this view, there is no 'true' profession and no set of characteristics necessarily associated with the rifle. There are only those work groups commonly regarded as professions and those which are not.

It is no accident that the comment should be so apposite to universities. Both they and the professions are social institutions of great prestige, and keeping or obtaining their benefits, by fair definitional means or foul, is as important for the occupants and aspirants as it is for the government gatekeepers to lay down rules for the game.

Summary and Conclusion

In this article we have considered recent alterations to government policies for Australian higher education, and the (largely negative) public reactions of university leaders. Our main interest, which this case served to elucidate, is the foundation for certain conceptions of social order and related assumptions about change as an impingement that leads to adjustive restorations of order. We suggest that there are principles of division in use that establish the categories of a certain order and sustain the response to change proposals.

A large number of university people had shared convictions about the nature of their institutions. Their attacks on the Green and White Papers were predicated on these collective representations. The fear seems to have been that the flexibility and diversity advocated in the Papers would lead to an indistinction of institutional kinds and purposes. The policies offended category assumptions about the place of universities in the organization of the higher education universe.

These assumptions were integrally connected to the institutional situations of the commentators, which is to say much more than that those most likely to be materially affected had most to say. Their criticisms indicate the relatextness of category formulations and concepts of order in this universe. The fimess of things was put at risk, so they held, by political and bureaucratic interlopers who, because they were unqualified to appraise and did not comprehend the nature of universities, were applying the wrong categories (such as those appropriate to the advanced education colleges, or those fa'om industry) to them.

How higher education institutions are classified is but an instance of how those who make use of classifications come to create, to modify, and eventually to sustain a particular taxonomy. Many university inhabitants do so, it seems, by asserting that the invariant occurrence of certain properties and qualities is in the nature of things, including social things. These provide both the cause for a thing to be called what it is, a university for example, and the effect of it being so named, that is, the rights and prerogatives attendant on its distinctiveness. The boundary disputes between partisans of the three higher education sectors, as well

20 Meek & O'Neill

as much of the denunciation of the Green and White Papers, arose from the attempted maintenance of fight, univocal concel~ of the university in a sectoral positioning, something government agencies had long advocated, even as they struggled to control an unruly universe that did not conform to these circumscriptions.

Apprel~nding these widely held classificatory femurea is a preliminary to the task of analysing the concepts embodied in the classification. When the name "University" was invoked by many critics of the Green and White Papers, the material instances were vested with attributes by virtue of the name. A relationship of logical identity held betwee~ the name of the thing - "University" - and the knowledge of it: to be worthy of the name, as the incumbents said, a university had to sustain its essential characteristics.

Wittgenstein (1958: 15) remarks: "It will often be useful in philosophy to say to ourselves: naming something is like attaching a label to a thing". Following this approach amounts to putting the status of a verbal concept, such as that of the university, entirely the other way around. Rather than always segregating cases by their common possession of inherent properties (the classificatory principle at work in denunciations of the Green and White Papers) the labelling will vary according to the classificatory aim. In which case, the word "university" does not signify a natural but a devisable category. What we call material instances, the institutions worthy of the name "University", are the artefacts of a convention reinforced by sanctions.

Though universities may be represented as a birthright of nature, the place accorded to them in articulations of the higher education system (in governmental as well as academic expositions) was closely allied to conceptions of social organization. It would be going too far to say that higher educational classifications were no more than an expression of social class figurations (which is the governing contention of Durkheim and Mauss about the generation of conceptions of resemblance). But, as the attempted matching of employment gradings and institutional types evidences, conceptions of social structure exercised a strong influence on the arrangement of higher education.

In the Australian case, governmental reform proposals did not touch social structures or the attendant denomination of employment types. Nor was the gradation of courses by their preparatory functions called into question. The policy statements, and compliant institutional responses to them, re-jigged the system by importing unchanged classificatory precepts to the organization of the "new" universities. Those who held out against university/college amalgamations did so by affirming that these same precepts should continue to be represented by parallel institutional segmentations. Either way, neither social nor academic structures were likely to undergo the revolutionary transformation which a reformation of categories signals.

Nee~am (1975: 367) suggests that in the analysis of collective representations (verbal concepts framed by cultural traditions in the classification of the world):


it was found that certain deep miscomprehensions were ultimately the result of the traditional assumption that classificatory concepts were n e c e ~ y composed around common def'mitive features, i.e., that they were monothetic. In each case, however, it was shown that the words in question actually denoted classes composed by family or slxradic resemblances, i.e., that they were polythetic.

He draws on Wittgenstein's demonstration that verbal concepts are not constituted by common properties (instantiated in all things so-called), but by sporadic family resemblances over a range of phenomena. A polythetic classificatory principle, N ~ a m maintains, elucidates many of the analytical problems in comparative social anthropology by replacing "insufficiently discriminative" taxonomic concepts with formal criteria representing logical possibilities.

In a masterly essay Borges (1981: 242) has touched the problems attendant on conferring an objective status on verbal concepts. "It is venturesome to think", he says, "that a co-ordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much". NeeAham precedes his article with this quotation (in a variant translation, in which "hazardous" replaces "venturesome", and without the parenthesis). However, Borges goes on:

It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious co- ordinations, one of them - at least in an infinitesimal way - does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.

The one in which he finds some trait of the universe is Schopenhauer's doctrine that the world is a fabrication of the will. The binary system was presented as conforming to natural features of the intellectual and vocational landscapes, an outgrowth of them as it were. But the system was devised; older category assumptions about the nature of the institutions called universities were reinforced by the place assigned to them in the higher education classifications.

The universities were willed upon us; many of the legatees were fearful that the White Paper was a codicil out of keeping with the spirit of the bequest. Humpty Dumpty says: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less". But there was no possibility of ordaining the concept of university in that fashion.

Acknowledgement This paper was prepared, in part, while Dr M e ~ was a Visiting Research Fellow, Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente, the Netherlands. The Research Fellowship was made possible by a grant from the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research.

22 Meek & O'Neill

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