Corporate ideology has caused the meltdown of the financial markets, is accelerating planetary disaster and has hollowed out our society. It did this with massive taxpayer support, for example fossil fuel industries get more support than renewable energy.

Why we expect corporations to do anything apart from spin the truth to ensure profits for a minority is beyond me.

Well put lillian. The only interest our corporate 'leaders' have in academe is the generation, via research, of new and potentially profitable intellectual property - at public expense - which they then expropriate and convert into commercially saleable commodities ('wealth creation') by exploiting the 'cheap labor' of junior academics and manufacturing workers in foreign lands, 'killing' their opposition and accumulating yet more surplus value or 'private' profits for themselves and their pampered, self-indulgent families.

the only people who have benefited from the corporatisation of australian universities are hucksters and little hitlers. dilan imagines some fantasy corporatisation which actually would benefit the students and the community. but dilan's fantasy is so far from the current orwellian reality, i can't see the point of his article.

Hi every body The number of corporate universities has grown dramatically: More than 2,000 organizations operated such programs in 2001, compared to 800 in 1995. But, writes Mark Allen in The Corporate University Handbook, don't make the mistake of assuming this is a management fad. Corporate universities reflect a sound organizational development strategy, helping companies bring new skills into the workplace, develop corporate leaders, and attract and retain workers.

Just what are corporate universities? Allen, director of executive education at California's Pepper-dine University, describes them as ongoing programs, either operated by an employer or outsourced, that offer coursework geared toward teaching workers new skills or improving their current knowledge. Unlike traditional training programs, which react to skills gaps, corporate universities are strategic, reflecting company priorities.

The 14 essays in The Corporate University Handbook provide models for designing corporate universities and strategies for managing them. For example, in "Creating a Corporate University," Mike Morrison describes the launch of Toyota's University of Toyota in 1999. After a cross-departmental team identified corporate priorities, Toyota created centers of excellence to concentrate on specific areas of employee development.

Toyota University offers more than 1,000 courses, Morrison says. "Our strategic alliances with a number of providers of learning content continue to strengthen and broaden our capability."

Bushbasher, insults don't add much to the discussion. He raises some interesting points. But really universities are not designed to be corporations.

Quite often I get the feeling that, somehow, I have wandered into a parallel universe and papers like this one confirm that this is so. It is a funny sort of place and I can hardly think with the humming noise of Cardinal Newman spinning in his grave so loudly. Consider the function of the sections of the tertiary system before Dawkins "reforms": TAFE taught young people necessary skills for the workplace: CAE taught strictly vocational courses like nursing, primary teaching, Occupational Therapy etc – a few vocations snuck into University like Medicine and Dentistry. There were a small number of Universities whose primary function was to teach people how to think, how to critically evaluate new and old theories, to conduct "blue sky" research and to extend knowledge regardless of the needs of Toyota. To put it crudely there is not the brain power, or money. in a small population like ours to drive 38 "Universities". The technical term for what is happening is "Regression to the Mean".

david, my insults were not really for dilan, but for the thugs who have destroyed australian universities. but if dilan raised some interesting points i honestly missed them.

i don't think dilan is any happier than me with the current sham. but i don't see what he's offering as a solution, except a fantasy of *good* corporate governance. i don't see how his good governance would work. more importantly, i see no way to get there from here.

the first step is not a better corporate model. the first step is sanity. this would involve the acknowledgement that a university's production cannot even remotely be measured by crass production numbers, by the number of degrees awarded, the number of refereed articles published, or the number of companies pleased.

once there's an agreement on this, *then* we can discuss governance. but i don't see anyone powerful who is interested in anything but scam production measures. i repeat, the beneficiaries of the current barbarism are hucksters and little hitlers. and it's not just that they're winning: they've won.

I think you're just being harsh for the sake of it. At least he has the guts to say something. Dilan has cleverly pointed out the hypocrisy of the people who are now running universities like they are companies but who don't want to be subject to scrutiny that goes with running a company.

Considering that only a few generations ago the universities were elitist finishing schools producing a handful of productive citizens, and focusing on classical educational for the governing elite.

Now universities are being pushed to produce the most skilled graduates for the tax dollar often with lower quality inputs thanks to public education.

Lillian, Sowat, and bushbasher look back with myopic hindsight to system that produced so little for so few.

david, i explained myself. believe what you like.

shadow minister, the "elitist" universities i went to didn't charge fees.

The corporatisation of higher education was the death knell for quality education.

The profiteer corporate mentality has ruined the commonsense in education by removing the tiers or layers of education as Gorufus mentioned earlier. ie. Education tailored to the needs of various employment sectors as well as to higher learning. It is a bit like a one-stop shop for education - roll up, roll up get your degree here today only two for one, but there's more! - Education R' Us incorporated.

We spin the idea of a more educated society but in reality we have dumbed down our higher education institutions to allow access to those who have not earned a place on merit. Add to that the pressure on lecturers/tutors to pass paying students makes a mockery of the whole system.

What were we thinking?

Bushbasher,

As I was talking about several generations ago, either you are very old or misread my post.

Universities and TAFEs are now both geared towards tertiary vocational education at the undergraduate level, and the desire for standardised education is not only from the corporate side, but also from the prospective students.

Tertiary education is a requirement for almost all employment and HSC is seldom sufficient.

The higher level acedemia is generally left to post graduate studies where higher levels of innovation are encouraged.

shadow minister,

fair enough on the "few generations ago". i missed that. however, my point stands, that there was a time when unis were both (substantially) egalitarian AND had standards. neither is now true.

the reason tertiary education is required for employment is pretty much because it is required. that is, employers demand it because they can, students are then forced to go to uni/tafe, and lecturers are forced to dumb down subjects for the huge increase in students, and the huge decrease in the standards of those students. the upshot is that zillions of students learn bugger all, for bugger all reason, at humongous expense to both the students and the society as a whole.

perhaps tafe et al is different from the major unis, though i question the quality of the vocational training. i've tutored a few such students, and they always seemed to be struggling with useless junk. not only was it useless, it was awfully presented and it was infested with jargon and pseudo-theory, to disguise the junkiness. for vocational purposes, that made it ultra-junk.

whatever for tafes, the major universities have been destroyed. they have given up the role of true learning, either for the discipline itself or for more vocational ends. instead, they are offering pseudo-intellectualism, pseudo-vocation, and childminding. at this stage, australian universities are simply a scam.

my comment is as a sole parent, whom has studied externally at UNE 1992-4, (internally) at ANU 1996-7, at UCAN 1999-2001, and now in 2009 at QUT, in a range of subject areas including arts and science.

the problems that younger academics are describing are critical, and we will all know about it when the job market starts to suffer the consequences of too many badly tertiary educated folk, and not enough folk who've been encouraged to develop excellence in manual labouring skills

it is worth remembering that originally all universities were private, but that did not cause lower standards, and neither did free education, but perhaps the "clever country" ideology was too disconnected from the reality of how manual labour underpins the job market

corporatisation of our universities may wind up enabling more smaller private teaching institutions, run by folk who want to keep the standards high, and who attract students whom are either paying for it, or at the top rank exiting high school

its a big back step from the impetus of education for everybody, but, then again, perhaps not everybody wants the tertiary educations we've all become accustomed to believing in as necessary

perhaps the greater egalatarian notion, is that of paying academics no more than tradesmen

The rise of mass tertiary education has meant that academically weaker students are gaining university entrance. At the same time universities have scrimped on tuition costs by increasing tutorial size, decreasing contact hours, using sessional staff to cover tutorials. The sessional staff are third and fourth year students which compares poorly to 15 years ago when CAEs hired professionals with industry experience to teach, tutor and run labs. Arguably the more experienced tutor is more knowledgeable but objectively students get far less help from lecturers and tutors than they did previously because helping students isn't a measurable KPI.

We know that unemployment statistics are underquoted and we know there is a problem with youth unemployment. I think that many university graduates from the old CAEs are unemployable in their field of study.

The TAFE system has cut costs by employing an army of sessional teachers. I think that many qualified TAFE teachers refuse to work in the system because of the appalling working conditions so that VCAT has been introduced in schools. The VCAT Teachers while experts in classroom management often lack the workplace skills and experience they are expected to impart to their students.

The structure and administration of Governance in company environments is the first stage in our corporate university design school process. In each of our applications the outcome is different as the design school management process is driven by the dynamics of company strategy and organisational capacity and capability challenges. The Governance Board may or may not involve members from academic institutions depending upon current needs. However where that relationship is always addressed is in the blueprint strand of strategic alliances. Schola Vitae at www.corporateuniversity.org.uk