BY VIV MILEY
"Australia has definitely put a lot of time and effort into making education, whether it be vocational or higher or schools, be empathetic to the needs of business and the needs of what will make somebody employable", Rafik Mankarious, head of McDonald's Hamburger University.
Welcome to the future of higher education.
Business is taking over the university. For more than a decade, the sources of university funding have shifted, from public to private. First, the imposition of fees for overseas students and then the introduction of the HECS graduate tax ended free higher education, forcing students to pay more and more from their own pockets.
Then, federal government funding cuts left universities short-changed and desperate. They again turned to their students as funding sources, bringing in full up-front fee-paying places for postgraduates and, in the last three years, undergraduates.
Now, ever more rapidly, universities have turned to embrace business as a funding source — and are selling their souls in exchange.
One way this has been done is through corporate sponsorship of departments or research chairs. Mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP, which both have appalling environmental and labour rights records, sponsor the University of Queensland's engineering degree, for example, while computer manufacturer IBM sponsors the Chair in Information Technology at Ballarat University.
Another way has been through direct partnerships between universities and the private sector. The Hawthorn Consulting Group, a private wing of the University of Melbourne, is involved in a joint venture with the oil explorer Shell-Premier, an arm of the Shell petroleum empire — their joint project is to search for oil and gas in a Pakistani national park.
A larger version of this direct partnership is Universitas 21, a collaboration between the US-based Thompson Learning and 18 universities worldwide, including the University of Queensland, the University of New South Wales and the University of Melbourne, to set up an international online university.
Describing the benefits of the collaboration the consortium's web site states "As an incorporated entity, Universitas 21 is in a position to leverage the reputation, resources and experience of its members on behalf of corporate partners".
A briefing paper on the project, released in December by the National Tertiary Education Union, translates: "In other words the company is a vehicle through which the member universities collectively market their 'brands' in the delivery of for-profit, online, fee-paying higher education."
The universities involved don't design the course, develop the content or test and assess students; Thompson Learning does that. All the universities contribute is the selling power of their "brands" — and vice-chancellors hope that alone will be a nice little earner.
Scratch the surface, though, and fundamental problems appear, including about the very nature of this kind of corporate-driven "education". For example:
* If Thompson Learning is providing the content online, how will the universities ensure the courses have any educational value, how will they perform "quality assurance"?;
* Who will "own" the "intellectual property", the course content, and how will that sit with universities' supposed commitment to intellectual freedom?;
* Will students get any say in how the university is run or will they just be consumers, like at a supermarket?;
* Similarly, what will be the rights of staff, will they become just employees like in any big corporation or will they have representation on the university's governing bodies, as in public universities?;
* How much will public universities have to invest in what is basically a commercial venture, and how many libraries, lecture theatres or departments have had to be closed to do so?;
* If it fails, who accepts legal liability, will creditors be able to seize university property against their debts?; and
* How does the public find out the answers to these questions when universities hide behind the rules of corporate secrecy, telling inquirers that the negotiations and contracts are "commercial in confidence" and can't be released?
Letting the rules of the market take over is like drinking acid — and Universitas 21 is a perfect example of just how corrosive corporate involvement in education is.
The tough lesson to be learnt from all of this is that, as Karl Marx wrote in The German Ideology in 1845, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force".
And the ideas which rule are those which specify that nothing matters except filling the company coffers.
By this logic, publicly-funded education is an expensive burden — the government should cut capital gains tax instead. Free education is a lost opportunity — the government should allow companies to charge for it, and make money. And a rounded education which teaches people about society and life is inefficient and wasteful — better the government ensures that education is "empathetic to the needs of business".
Both Labor and Liberal have made noises about expanding higher education, and are keen to pose on the issue during an election year — but they're both committed to the transformation of universities into marketplaces.
A similar transformation is occurring around the world, with the aid of international institutions such as the World Trade Organisation.
The United States' position is that it wants to incorporate free trade in education and health services in the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services; it is backed by nearly all the rich country governments, responding to overt signals from their business sectors.
These governments, which run the WTO, want rules forcing the deregulation and privatisation of all countries' education sectors so that the corporations can conquer them — just as they're doing in every other area of social, economic and cultural life.
Business' motivations and aims are clear, as is the stance of governments and university administrations; their minds are made up and they're not going to give up willingly.
But it's not all one-way traffic: there are countless examples of resistance. If you want to stop the corrosion of education by corporate values, you'll need to be a part of them.
Environmentalists, for example, are campaigning for Hawthorn Consulting Group to withdraw from its involvement in the Pakistani exploration venture. University staff are fighting attempts to turn them into an easily exploitable, low-paid and casualised work force. Students are occupying vice-chancellors' offices in efforts to stop closures of departments and courses. Activist groups are springing up to take action against corporate encroachment into education.
Many of these efforts will come together in a national day of student action on April 5.
Called by the National Union of Students, the day will involve rallies across the countries demanding free education, the abolition of fees, the reversal of funding cuts, an end to attacks on staff wages, conditions and rights and an end to corporate control of universities. These protests will be an important sign that students and staff are not going along quietly, but are prepared to fight back.
A month later comes something even grander: the May 1 global strike against capitalism, which will feature simultaneous, coordinated blockades of stock exchanges and financial districts across Australia in protest at all the many, many instances of corporate misrule.
M1 will be the latest in a long line of massive confrontations between corporations and the people, a successor to those which have happened in Seattle, Washington, DC, Melbourne, Prague, Davos and in a growing list of other cities across the globe.
Corporations are on a general offensive; they seek to conquer everything. Our resistance, therefore, must also be general and global and resolute.