Dr Colin Symes - Abstracts

Recent Papers and Current Research

Towards a ‘real world’ education: the vocationalisation of the university

Universities are at a pivotal point in their history and are undergoing dramatic changes. Like many areas of the public sphere, they have been subject to budget cuts and encouraged to privatise many of their activities. One measure of their changed direction, is the degree to which universities have forged alliances with business and industry to extend their revenue basis. This paper argues that the liberal university has been superseded by the vocationalised university, and that the primary justification for its existence now rests on servicing the needs of human capital. Although some have seen this as lamentable development transgressing all that is valued in the academy, it can be argued that universities in following a philosophy of education in which theory and application complement one another are in fact embarking upon a radical approach to learning.

We mean business: the university of applied studies
Submitted to the Australian Journal of Education December 1998.

The university, as its moves into the third millennium, is at a watershed point in its long history. As never before, it has been subject to an avalanche of reforms which have threatened its nature as a public institution pre-eminently concerned with inquiry and tuition. Such was generally of a specialised kind, centred around a narrow range of disciplines, derived from the understanding of a liberal education which meant they were, stereotypically, abstract and theoretical, and designed to confer a certain grace of mind upon their recipients but not much in the way of utility. This meant that universities were preserves of the elite, and were insulated from the pressures attendant upon other public institutions. They were not, for example, expected to be accountable or to demonstrate that they were contributing in some measurable way to the economy: other institutions were designed to do that. The university of the 1990s, whilst retaining some features of the cloistered academy, is a somewhat different ‘enterprise’—a word which has particular resonance in this context—than it was. The strong pecuniary impulse that is marked feature of the millennial university has coloured most of its operations: teaching, research, administration. Its aggregate impact has resulted in the displacement of the liberal discourses that underpinned the ethos of the traditional university; it has meant that the university is following a different pathway, one shaped by the ethos of the real world. This is particularly evident in the university’s “symbolic economy” (Symes, 1998), which continues to emphasise the degree to which study, presumably to offset the common view that it does not, has strong utilitarian components that are recognised by employers and which particular universities, namely the one being promoted, (but in reality, meaning all) are successful at nurturing..Another side to this development—that to be explored in this article—are the changes to the course profile of universities, which have been immense in the last decade or so. It is argued that this course profile has seen the contraction of disciplinary faculties and an expansion of faculties in which the study is primarily of an applied nature, high in instrumentality and use-value, “mode two knowledge” (Gibbons et alia, 1994). The liberal university, which valued learning for learning’s sake, is undergoing a process of vocationalisation. Yet this vocationalisation tends to operate only at the rhetorical level, in the symbolic economy of the university; for many of the courses involved are taught in a far from pragmatic manner and emphasise theoretical knowing. Communication Studies is a case in point.

Symes, Colin. ‘Chronicles of labour: a discourse analysis of diaries’, Time and Society, Vol. 8, No. 2, September 1999, pp.357-380