The Idea of a University: Enterprise or Academy

by Axel Clark

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I’d like to welcome you all to this conference, whose subject is: The Idea of a University: Enterprise or Academy.

Manning Clark House and the Australia Institute have chosen this subject for the conference because of the importance of universities in Australia—it’s plain, I think, that their importance, and public interest in them, are greater than ever before in our history.

In sheer size they’re greater than ever before: undergraduates, postgraduates, academics, administrative staff and maintenance staff collectively make up a national university community of around three quarters of a million people. And politically our universities are more important than ever. They are now, and in the lead-up to the federal election will continue to be, the subject of a national debate more serious and politically fraught than ever before.

It’s a debate about the role and function of our universities—how they can best meet the demands and needs of the nation—demands and needs of course being significantly different things.

What is our idea of a university—the sort of university—or rather, the sorts of universities—that we really need? Do we as a nation have any coherent, intelligent and useful idea of a university?

The Idea of a University was of course a book by John Henry Newman. Cardinal. Newman was one of the great heroes of my father, Manning Clark—an intellectual, moral and spiritual hero. Newman’s idea of a university was that it should train the mind. This was its main business: that it should ‘cultivate the intellect’, and its object was ‘no more or less than intellectual excellence’. Newman stressed the usefulnessw of cultivating the intellect.

What relevance and usefulness, what value (if any), does Newman’s 150-year-old idea of a university have for our universities, in the radically different world we face today?

Newman’s idea applied today might be taken to mean that the main business of our universities should be to cultivate intellectual excellence and the critical intellect, in all the disciplines, all the fields of study they deal with, ranging from (for example) psychiatry to economics to civil engineering to computer studies to history and the black armband debate.

And if that idea is felt to have little relevance or value today—if its proponents are to be dismissed as mere ‘nostalgists’, as they have been—what idea (if any) is to be offered in its place?

In its place can be put the view—the representative view, I think—advanced in an editorial in the Australian on July Äthe 18th, which pooh-poohed the idea that, in universities, market forces should ‘take a back seat’: obviously, in the view of the Australian, market forces should (as it were) occupy the driver’s seat at our universities, which should be seen and governed as enterprises.

Commercialisation, enterprise and the market place are living realities, powerful influences in our universities now. Their effect on the pursuit of intellectual excellence, cultivation of the critical intellect, free enquiry, the way our universities are governed and the values implicit in that mode of government, are issues central to this conference, central also to the great national debate on higher education. I look forward to the contribution our speakers today will make to that debate.

Axel Clark