Knowledge and its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning ...

their modes of knowledge production change, their organisational boundaries become blurred, and, as a consequence, their structures become more transitory. Henkel argued that these changes can enhance institutional power because they may represent an ‘exercise in re-integration’ in which the identity of the organisation is rooted in a strong academic culture working in collaboration with a new kind of institutional leadership. ‘At the same time, this process can create difficulties for others largely because the inequalities of what has always been a highly stratified system increase and more explicitly so’ (Henkel 2005, 159–160).

Essentially, as academics negotiate more broadly with external stakeholders, notions of autonomy and academic freedom become more contestable. Therefore, it is not hard to conceive that the stronger and better resourced the institution, the better placed it is to preserve that autonomy, and there is good evidence of this from the United States. Wider engagement with stakeholders ‘at the periphery’ of the academic enterprise comes at the expense of activities that support the core mission; however, at the more prestigious institutions, faculty plays a larger role in decision making, and academic programs are less reliant on the generation of external revenues (Toma 2007, 61–62). Similar evidence exists in Australia where, from the outset, the more prestigious bodies embraced with zeal proposals for the creation of a unified system in the 1980s. Indeed, the changeover was in part driven internally across the board by institutional leaders seeking greater financial autonomy to generate funding, though the rank-and-file academic community was much less enthusiastic (Meek 1994, 37).

Consequently, it was also the more prestigious institutions that best secured additional scope and flexibility for their operations and were also most successful in meeting the challenges of entrepreneurialism. This capability tends to decline, and the ability to preserve academic culture diminishes, further down the scale (Marginson and Considine 2000, 189–197, 237–238). In turn, this has begun to threaten the ability of those institutions to carry out the ‘necessary separation’ of their ‘commercial engagement from their mainstream research terrain governed by academic freedom’ (Marginson 2007a, 128–129).