“… the control freakery that besets Australia’s universities (along with some other public institutions) is a natural but unacceptable consequence of two decades of an encroaching managerialism and under-funding…”

That’s why I walked out of Deakin “University” 16 years ago and have never gone near a “university” since. The biographer Hazel Rowley also left (1996). She left the country as well as the institution. Google up her excellent good-bye article.

Circa 1990, my colleagues thought my gloomy prognostications about managerialism were alarmist. They don’t now.

There are no universities in Australia. Just incompetent, greedy manufacturers of qualifications.

And while we’re at it, it’s the same managerial class which took control of the economy and screwed it to death. Citizens, shareholders, checks and balances were trashed. The keywords of this catastrophic managerial revolution (mission statements, commercial-in-confidence, “security”, bonuses, etc.) all point to a slow coup de etat based on secrecy, lack of accountability, contempt for ideas, obscene greed and, naturally, incompetence.

Ironically, the universities have been starved because the managerial class will never trust them, no matter how assiduously they mimic the corporate model.