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From scholars to entrepreneurs: Simon Cooper discusses academic Darwinism in the age of audit culture.

Article Excerpt
On 4 July The Australian reported that the salaries of vice-chancellors were edging closer to those of the corporate world, with some packages topping a million dollars a year. Some academics might ruefully recall when vice-chancellors were considered part of academic staff. Today it seems that to compare the remuneration of VCs with CEOs in the 'private sector' is largely unproblematic. In the Australian article, if any distinction was to be made between universities and private corporations, it was made ever so modestly, with one senior academic referring to the university as part of the 'non-profit sector'. That such comparisons can be made is indicative of the degree to which the idea of the university has been supplanted by business norms and how 'knowledge' has increasingly become another commodity.

Mark Olssen and Michael Peters write in a 2005 issue of the Journal of Education Policy that 'after the culture wars of the 1990s will be the education wars, a struggle ... over the meaning and value of knowledge'. Yet there seems little evidence so far that such a war will be fought with the vigour and tenacity of the culture wars. This is not to say that academics have been entirely passive over the corporatisation of the university. There have been pockets of resistance and isolated critique. So far, however, any kind of systematic resistance to what amounts to a wholesale reconstruction of the university has not occurred. This can be attributed partially to the climate of precariousness in which many academics face the possibility of redundancy. However, it is the enhanced status of 'knowledge' within the high-tech neo-liberal economy that has undermined the public and critical role of the university. While once the university stood apart from the society it framed and interpreted, it now stands in direct competition with a society made over in its image: a technologically enhanced knowledge-driven form of the social whose commitment to ceaseless innovation and commodity creation leaves it little ground on which to stand apart or to defend more traditional values.

The increased 'relevance' and expansion of the university sector has been based on the shift from manual to intellectual forms of labour. Knowledge, increasingly regarded as a set of skills for use in the high-tech society, was, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, welcomed by...

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