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Who is accountable to whom? Attempts to graft the governance structures of for-profit organisations onto universities threaten the very form of the university.

Article Excerpt
Building University Diversity, the issues paper recently released by Dr Brendan Nelson, canvasses the opening up of the higher education sector to a range of for-profit providers, both national and international. The concern that shareholders in their single-minded pursuit of profits might impede academic freedom and jettison research and critical inquiry is well-founded.

I nevertheless feel that the exclusive focus on for-profit institutions deflects attention away from the increasingly problematic question of governance in not-for-profit universities, that is, our present so-called public universities. I say 'so-called' because they have all moved into privatising and profit-making activities on such a scale that the very term 'public' has become questionable. Indeed, Professor Di Yerbury, President of the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, recently referred to them as 'nominally public institutions' [my italics] (Higher Education, the Australian, 9 March 2005). Her suggestive descriptor is supported by the statistics, which reveal that Commonwealth support now accounts for only about 40 per cent of university income, a spectacular decrease since the federal government embarked on its project of transforming higher education fifteen years ago.

The regulatory regime being devised for the new for-profit institutions will enable at least a modicum of scrutiny, whereas the marketising moves of existing not-for-profit institutions has induced less scrutiny under the rubric of 'commercial-in-confidence'. The ethic of the market and competition is causing them to become more like for-profit universities, or what we imagine them to be, since we have little experience of them; to date, Melbourne University Private is our only example. (Both Bond and Notre Dame are characterised as not-for-profit...

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