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

of this, the standard warning signals were missed, such as the difficulty in comparing the United States’ with other systems, due to fundamental differences in funding and administration. Consequently, the cases note the sharp rise in oversight in the United Kingdom, as with Australia, and the apparent anomalous absence of oversight in the United States. This is a little ironic because this is probably due to a failure to take into account the historical context in which the former were developed precisely in order to emulate the American model and to push their national systems closer to a market-based model (Smith et al. 2002; Marginson 2002), given the U.S. systems model status.

In turn, this leads to the alternative hypothesis being overlooked. That is, the U.K. and the Australian systems had a certain ability to move much more decisively and rapidly towards the U.S. model than those on the Continent, in response to external economic factors. This move often entailed high levels of intervention by way of regulation and financial stringency; the capacity to achieve this might relate to local and national conditions and what is broadly termed ‘state capacity’. This proposition raises a more curious anomaly, that these classic ‘weak states’ proved much more decisive and interventionist than the more directive ‘strong’ corporate states. Nonetheless, this proposition corresponds with findings by Levy that show, during this same period, that leading liberal states managed to ‘overhaul their political economies on the basis of what appears to be a latent authoritative capacity’ (2006a, 388).

Furthermore, the methodological approach adopted by Scott and Hood may be questioned. Higher education case examples were juxtaposed with case studies of the civil service and prisons in an apparent attempt to discover common principles; however, this presents category problems. Taken as a whole, these analytical groupings represent a poor set and a design flaw that points to a much larger epistemological issue, which is found at the boundaries of higher education policy and other areas of political analysis.

For example, it can be well argued that prisons operate at a more utilitarian end of the justice system whereas higher education systems are usually considered to operate at a higher level, similar to the courts and