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

and international. The university was also encouraged to pursue its ‘tactical plan’ to increase international enrolments, which were already 900 onshore and 500 offshore, by 100 percent over the coming years. Complaints and concerns raised by international students that reached the audit panel, including the lack of responsiveness at the international service desk, were mentioned in the report but did not substantially influence the findings. The audit panel merely spoke of ‘ensuring adequate resources’ were available to meet projections in demand (AUQA 2003, 7–9).

At one level, this episode points to a problem discussed in the literature about the way in which quality audits are framed and conducted in Australia—that is, the audits are conducted primarily to reassure overseas customers and, therefore, serve the demands of marketing (Vidovich 2002, 405)—rather than genuinely seeking to protect student interests. This hypothesis is supported by continued reports of isolation, loneliness, and despair among foreign students (Deumert et al. 2005; Sawir et. al. 2008), which were all made worse by their apparent victimisation. These problems culminated in the street protests of 2009 after a series of violent attacks on Indian students in the larger metropolitan centres.

This all points to anomalies between responses reported by audits and the actual experience of foreign students; this can be explained by the ‘rituals of verification’ thesis, whereby the audit process becomes more important than actuality (Power 1997). Indeed, this is a by-product of the rise in the ‘grey science’ of numbers and the use of ‘controlling technologies’ to enforce regulatory compliance (Rose 1999, 43–60), problems that are not confined to higher education. Ironically, the bureaucratisation of social science is having its most crippling impact on the university, eroding its moral core and enfeebling it as an ethical community. Herein lie some of the keys to unravelling the complex relationship between the academy and the state.

Deep chasms exist among academic notions of the value of knowledge and the drivers and principles of higher education policy, and bridging these gaps is one of the aims of this work. The proposition set forth demonstrates that these differences, in part, relate to flawed conceptions about the way in which higher learning is regarded in the realms of