A Memory of Elephants on the Modern Campus

This paper explores the key public policy assumptions underlying three of the four sequential and overlapping phases of higher education and university research in Australia:

• The academic-elite phase (1945 – 1985)
• The state-mass phase (1985 – 2005)
• The market-universal phase (post-2005).

The pre-1945 phase, which largely pre-dated Australian government involvement in higher education, is not explored in this paper, except to the extent of its academic-elite and market legacies. More...