PREAMBLE

At a time when Australia is undergoing massive changes in the globalizing context, the public has the right to expect teaching, research and public comment from university specialists that can help them shape and control their lives.

We believe it is our responsibility to warn that in many different fields it is becoming increasingly difficult – even in some cases impossible – for this duty to be adequately performed.

The role of the university is being undermined by government policies on the one hand, and by corporatist administrative practices on the other.  These policies and practices threaten the future of the university as a centre of intellectual discovery and creativity, and of teaching and research.In recent times both Labor and Coalition governments have implemented policies that effectively reduce universities to mere business enterprises.  As a result Australian universities have moved towards administrative structures and ideologies based on the business corporation – structures entirely inappropriate for carrying out the proper role of a university.

Some senior administrators have taken advantage of these policies to expand their own power and to treat universities as effectively their private property.  Vice-chancellors generally no longer consider themselves, or behave, as academic colleagues, but as Chief Executive Officers.  The thrust of this bureaucratic restructuring is to turn Australian arts and sciences into an auxiliary for immediate commercial needs, to stifle free enquiry and critical debate, and to debase the public university so that it becomes, at best, a limited form of vocational training and, at worst, a sales counter for titles.

This adulteration of Australia’s universities occurs at a time when media ownership is becoming further concentrated in private hands, the ABC emasculated, and the arts trivialized and commercialized. Australia faces the prospect of a rigid, monolithic, market-fundamentalist culture, which can no longer question itself, the society of which it is a part, or its governments.  This threat to higher education further endangers our public culture.  Democracy is in danger of losing the vital public sphere without which it can only be a hollow shell.

We call on the government to make a commitment to quality public tertiary education by fully funding all of Australia’s currently operating public universities.

We call for public support to defend universities against the damaging growth of coercive administrative control that is reducing their function to servicing short-term needs of the economy.

We seek to enlist everyone supporting these aims, as outlined in the constitution, especially university staff (including managers) and students, to mount public education campaigns in support of the idea of universities as public institutions responsible for the generation and dissemination of the widest possible forms of knowledge.

We assert the right – indeed the responsibility -  of  public intellectuals to speak out about corrupting practices and financial waste in universities, and to mount teaching and research programmes to remedy deficiencies in existing university curricula.  We shall later propose a national conference to highlight and further these aims and to recruit members and public support.

AIMS

•	To advocate a world-class public university system for Australia

•	To this end, to promote a collegial administrative culture in Australia’s universities

•	To monitor governance in Australia’s universities

•	To defend and extend academic freedom and intellectual responsibility in Australia’s universities

•	To organise meetings, seminars and conferences to further these Aims

•	To publish web pages, newsletters, papers, pamphlets, magazines, journals and books to further these Aims

•	To nurture significant academic programmes that have been removed from existing  university courses

•	To lobby university authorities, politicians, the general public, and the media to further these Aims