From progressive pedagogy to "capitalist fodder" : The new universities in Australia

[Extract] In the 1960s, ‘the cultured confidence of the ivory tower’ gave way to ‘the agony of introspection’, according to Peter Karmel, vice-chancellor of Adelaide’s brand-new Flinders University in 1969. Higher education in Australia was subject to a radical re-evaluation against, as Karmel labelled it, ‘the permissive society’. Peter Karmel, economist and chair of the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission, was respected across the political spectrum as a guru of Australian higher education policy. He wrote submissions for every Australian review of higher education from the first (the Murray Review of 1957) to the most recent (the Bradley Review of 2008), just prior to his death. Bridging establishment and progressive aims, in 1969, Karmel was optimistic about the effect of change on higher education. He hoped that including new ideas in new universities would prevent what some feared – or hoped – was a revolution in higher education. He believed that by welcoming some of the progressive pedagogies that the growing cohort of radical staff and students advocated, they would bolster a university focused on producing graduates for the labour market, that was at that time experiencing important shifts. This was at odds with the sentiments and politics underpinning the more radical reforms that advocates of progressive pedagogies hoped would turn the values of the capitalist university upside-down. Ironically, by embracing some of the changes radicals proposed, I argue, universities helped reinforce the role of Australian higher education in producing what post-war reconstruction planner H. C. (‘Nugget’) Coombs called ‘capitalist fodder’.