Don't do what Australia has done

The paper describes and analyses the environment in Australian universities since the changes initiated under the Labor government in 1988 by John Dawkins. It looks at the role and interplay of ideas in the changing intellectual culture in universities, in particular the common effect of the ideas of both liberal economics and postmodernism, and the tensions between corporate values and open enquiry. It raises the issues of the extent to which universities should have a distinct set of values from wider society, and the basis upon which universities should exist as distinctive institutions.