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

closely behind. Australia is the leading exemplar of and guinea pig for the aggressive use of market mechanisms to underwrite higher education. Australia laid the pathway showing how the U.S. national style could be altered and adapted, encouraging other countries in Europe and Asia to follow suit.

Preserving academic tradition is now much less important to governments around the world than building economic capacity. It needs to be acknowledged, however, that the higher education policy community was complicit in this process by establishing the American system as the preferred global model. The single most influential theoretical advance in comparative higher education policy is Burton Clark's work The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective (1983). It laid down the principles of state-university relations, arguing that higher education systems existed within a trilateral set of forces: among the market, the state, and the academic or professional oligarchy.

Clark argued that higher education represented a tension among social, market, and political influences and, therefore, the centralisation of power needs to be avoided in favour of a division of power that is best achieved in a federal system (Clark 1983, 265). The thinking was that a centralisation of power draws a system out of balance and into disequilibrium. Balance is achieved by having the necessary expertise and administrative capability in government that corresponds with specialist knowledge and skill within the academy, which means that the state would always possess some policy-making capability. Ideally, a stable system would be diverse in structure and pluralistic in decision making. Within this scheme of things, the United States would be considered as having the optimal higher education system because it is the most diverse and most market oriented. Paradoxically, it is also one in which federal higher education policy is relatively weak because it has no central ministry responsible for academic matters. At most, the federal government is concerned with accountability for funding and coordinating state-based accreditation (Dill 2001, 81–95).

Clark's framework made it possible to chart the changes occurring in the more centralised or unitary systems, compared to the more