Jan Currie

This chapter analyses some of these strategies used to improve Australia’s research excellence and its international collaboration. It also looks at two universities that have altered their undergraduate teaching towards liberal arts degrees in a bid to create the ‘Harvards’ of the South. Some of these strategies have generated positive structural changes and others have had unintended consequences. As universities have become more integrated into the global knowledge economy, the working conditions of academics have altered substantially with greater competition and pressures to be more corporate, more accountable and more international. The chapter builds upon the benchmark Carnegie International Survey of the academic profession across 14 countries that Altbach (The international academic profession: portraits of fourteen countries. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, 1996) described and notes the changes that have occurred in Australia since the mid-1990s to reshape the higher education landscape and the impact it has had on academics’ working conditions.

Academic work is increasingly located within the complex interplay between global, national and local contexts, pushing and pulling in different directions. Universities, whose "core business" is knowledge production, have become more important for nations in today's global economy, where knowledge is often treated as a commodity that moves quickly around the world. This sharper focus on universities in a nation's economic fortunes has resulted in significant policy changes that are rapidly transforming the working conditions of academics and their professional identities. This chapter discusses the changing nature of academic work, with a particular focus on the last decade, which has seen universities and academics altering their mission statements and strategic plans to integrate themselves into the global knowledge economy. It draws on empirical studies, including our own, that highlight the impact of corporate managerialism and new accountability mechanisms on academic work. Building upon the benchmark carnegie international survey of the academic profession across 14 countries in the early 1990s (Altbach, 1996), this chapter provides a follow-up based on the preliminary results of academics surveyed in two of the 20 countries during 2007-the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia-about the consequences of funding constraints, expansion of higher education, greater competition and pressures to be more business-like and become more international (Universities UK, 2007; Coates et al., 2008).

Education has often served a role in social movements and in collective efforts to remove injustices. Evidence of this role is illustrated by such examples as Labor Colleges in the United States, ANC education camps in South Africa, feminist consciousness-raising groups in many western countries and literacy-raising groups with political orientations in Cuba and Brazil. Often the intention embedded in the educational role is not simply to change for the sake of progress but to revitalize and defend values different from the dominant ones. In some societies, there is a greater emphasis on the continuation of the culture and a desire for very little change; whereas in others there is a greater emphasis on transforming the culture and improving it. In most western industrial societies there has tended to be an emphasis on change, on questioning the status quo. Yet, within these societies, there are particular groups that would prefer to see little change to the status quo. This chapter examines the different orientations that communities have to social and technological change and the values they would like to keep and how they have attempted to do that in a world that is nevertheless changing at such a rapid pace.

The fundamental force underpinning neoliberal globalisation is the privatisation of the economy. It is commonly understood that this movement to shift substantial resources from the public sector to the private sector began simultaneously in the United States with the Reagan government and in the United Kingdom with the Thatcher government. From these two countries, privatisation, sometimes referred to as economic rationalism or applying market forces to public sector agencies, spread to other Anglo-derived countries, such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and then to many other countries around the world. However, it is noteworthy that many European countries have resisted this trend towards privatisation, especially in regard to universities. An important distinction can be made between the privatisation and the commercialisation of higher education; nevertheless, the fact that there is an interaction between privatisation and commercialisation makes it difficult to untangle the impetus for these practices in universities. Both of these globalising forces are affecting Australia's higher education sector as public universities become more like private institutions and the locus of funding shifts from the taxpayer to students and their families. This privatisation process has been accompanied by commercial behaviour that may put Australia's research base at risk. This article addresses the impact of these two globalising forces on the quality of education and academic freedom in Australian universities. It argues that there is a greater chance that research will be curiosity-driven and critical education will thrive if profit is not the major determinant of university research and teaching agendas. To protect the independence of research and the enviable reputation that Australian universities currently have in providing high quality education, the Commonwealth government may need to reduce its drive to privatise universities and commercialise research.

This study was funded by grants from the Australian Research Council and Murdoch University. I thank them and the 253 respondents who were interviewed and gave me insights into their lives as academics. The research was a team effort that included Lesley Vidovich, Anthony Welch, and Harriett Pears in Australia; and Edward Berman in the United States. I want to thank Paul Snider for research and editorial assistance.

It is a commonly held view that the unique characteristics of new Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) have the potential to facilitate student-centered and independent learning. In this chapter we examine this assumption with specific reference to Australia's offshore programs in South East Asia. Many offshore programs are developed for onshore students only, and little explicit attention is given to the cross-cultural issues arise when the same material is taught in another country. There is concern that if cultural issues are not considered in offshore programs, any potential benefit of such programs may not be fully realized. In addition, a lack of understanding of cultural issues may have a negative effect on the diversity of information, languages, and cultures. Using Australian offshore education in Malaysia as a case study, we elaborate on Zigura's (2001) concept of "cultural responsiveness" and explore the issues that arise when new technologies are utilized in offshore/transnational education. We consider the experiences of three lecturers at two private colleges in Malaysia, and question the effectiveness of technology enhancements for their students.

The media and American politicians portrayed the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of September 11, 2001 as the act of mindless terrorists and principally masterminded by Osama bin Laden. In the same breath, analysts of the attack suggested that the terrorists involved might be located in 40 to 50 nations and in several US states. This indicates a global network. From the geographically 'remote' country of Afghanistan, the alleged terrorists were able to use sophisticated technology to direct an attack on the most powerful and most technologically advanced nation in the twenty-first century. This global network of terrorists could not have existed fifty years ago. When President George W. Bush declared that this is a 'new war', he identified a phenomenon that is linked with globalization. This is not a war against a nation state. Osama bin Laden does not belong to any particular nation state. His organization is global. The fight against terrorists is going to be a global struggle.

This concluding chapter reflects on globalization's effects on local education policy, with particular reference to the question: To what extent has educational development in Hong Kong been shaped by the global trends of decentralization and marketization? There are a lot of changes in common between Hong Kong's education system and those elsewhere, which suggest that Hong Kong's education system has been affected by similar trends. Before we jump to this conclusuion, we should bear in mind an alternative hypothesis that local factors are crucial and determining change. The core of this chapter examines the ways and the strategies that the HKSAR government has adopted to reform its education systems in response to the changing local socio-economic-political context and regional-global environments.