Aspiring to 'World Class' Universities in Australia: A Global Trend with Intended and Unintended Consequences

This chapter analyses some of these strategies used to improve Australia’s research excellence and its international collaboration. It also looks at two universities that have altered their undergraduate teaching towards liberal arts degrees in a bid to create the ‘Harvards’ of the South. Some of these strategies have generated positive structural changes and others have had unintended consequences. As universities have become more integrated into the global knowledge economy, the working conditions of academics have altered substantially with greater competition and pressures to be more corporate, more accountable and more international. The chapter builds upon the benchmark Carnegie International Survey of the academic profession across 14 countries that Altbach (The international academic profession: portraits of fourteen countries. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, 1996) described and notes the changes that have occurred in Australia since the mid-1990s to reshape the higher education landscape and the impact it has had on academics’ working conditions.