He is quite correct to separate RDM from the Melbourne Model. What needs to be added, though, is that administrative staff-numbers within individual faculties at the University of Melbourne (and within individual faculties in other Australian universities, notably Queensland, Sydney and Monash) have increased tenfold since the Dawkins White Paper of 1989. (These are the universities’ own figures: look at the University Calendars of any of the institutions I have named). It is a curious fact that the quest for “efficiency” has led to an explosion of administrative staff-numbers.

Nor, I think, do comparisons with the United States of America withstand scrutiny. Academics at the elite U.S. institutions are not a hired labour-force serving the interests of an army of educational apparatchiks. Higher education in the U.S.A. developed in a unique fashion, without a capstone institution (although the first six U.S. Presidents attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish one). In sharp contrast to Australia, federal intervention in the higher educational sector is minimal in the U.S.A., principally because of Chief Justice Marshall’s 1819 judgement in the case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Marshall ruled that the charter originally granted to the college was a contract and that state legislatures were forbidden by the Constitution to pass any law “impairing the obligation of contracts”. It will be seen that the Australian experience, where the federal government has sought to engineer the market orientation of a publicly-funded sector by means of a largely punitive re-distribution of funds, is rather different.

The Melbourne Model, as a concept, represented an imaginative attempt by Glyn Davis to escape the post-Dawkins revenue-squeeze that has devastated the Australian higher education sector. In practice, however, it is proving to be more of the tedious managerialism that is killing our economy virtually everywhere one looks.

“Growing Esteem strategy…sharply focused and well-resourced and all mutually supportive.” Which of the following does this describe?

(a) The Richmond Football club
(b) A group of unemployed MBAs
(c) The Fairfax board

I wonder if Don Watson has an armed wing? Has he declared independence? Can I seek asylum in Watsonia?

In its background to the project the university says ‘The University of Melbourne’s Growing Esteem strategy is conceived as a triple helix - three strands of core activities in teaching and learning, research and knowledge transfer - each sharply focused and well-resourced, and all mutually supportive’.

The so-called triple helix is of academic activities. The university makes clear that ‘Ensuring that the University is equipped with cost efficient enabling support services which deliver quality services within the available resources’ is (correctly) only a supportive activity.

“Universities” are not universities any more. (I walked out in 1993).

Even then corporates had started drowning the academic kittens. I’d rather be a feral cat.

The humanities and pure sciences have been choked one by one. Corporatism is the real culture war. It’s colonised politics, academe and everything else. The brawls between Windspittle, Manne et al are mere tribal spats. The suits don’t give them a glance..

The ‘Melbourne model’ isn’t ‘widely criticised’ as Crook claims. It may be criticised by some within the University of Melbourne and by some conservatives in the Melbourne establishment, but that is a rather narrow group despite Crook’s heavy reliance on it. The Melbourne model is widely admired within Australian higher education, emulated by some, and of course absolutely standard in elite US universities.