The corporate regimentation of arts, science and education in Australia has been proceeding apace for more than two decades. In higher education, the process was initiated in the 1980’s with the ALP’s Dawkins reforms, which saw mass amalgamations of universities and vocational colleges and the introduction of HECS. Under Howard’s Liberals universities, arts organisations and scientific agencies were increasingly compelled to seek funding from private sources as Federal patronage entered a prolonged period of decline – with predictable results for all areas of intellectual and aesthetic life unsuited to operating in a mass market or unable to gear operations to the development of new products and technologies. The story continues under the present Labor government. Its latest instalment is the underwhelming response by governments to calls on behalf of the VCA as it struggles to avoid annexation by a rapidly corporatising Melbourne University.
Gilded Cage is a loose association of university students and staff, writers, artists, scientists and activists who see corporate culture, bureaucratic regimentation and top-down managerial practices as threats to institutions of many kinds. The group aims to raise awareness of the noxious effects of current institutional practices on Australian cultural life and combat them.
Gilded Cage calls for:
1. university students, university staff and the wider arts and science community to support suspension of the application of the “Melbourne Model” to the VCA;
2. immediate revision of the Federal funding arrangements that led to the VCA-Melbourne University merger;
3. university music students and staff to oppose the merger of VCA Music and the Conservatorium;
4. university students and staff to resist corporate regimentation by:
(a) disposing thoughtfully of university advertising material or undertaking spontaneous creative improvements to it
(b) publicising cost-cutting and re-structuring measures being undertaken by university faculties that are likely to affect teaching, learning or research;
(c) circulating flagrant examples of managerial language deployed in pursuit of inappropriate business models for academic life;
(d) discussing the impact of cost-cutting, re-structuring and managerial foul language with sympathetic parties beyond the university system;
5. artists, art teachers, arts workers and the members of arts funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of consciousness-raising and resistance involving: (a) culture-jamming, (b) whistle-blowing, (c) circulation of examples of toxic managerial newspeak, (d) public discussion;
6. scientists (social and natural), science teachers, government researchers and members of scientific funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of (a) to (d); and
7. all interested parties to join Gilded Cage in a show of support – with the aim of bringing together and informing all those with direct experience of systemic problems in the arts, science and higher education.
Gilded Cage believes that:
1. looking to the arts, sciences and education system exclusively as the source of export revenue has seriously impaired Australian public culture;
2. the introduction of inappropriate models of market competition has led to wasteful expenditure on advertising and consultancy and an institutional culture whose relation to students and to the general public is blinkered and manipulative;
3. new forms of managerial control demoralise all who seek to sustain and benefit from arts, science and higher education
4. university life is increasingly anonymous and educational experiences increasingly impoverished; and
5. current modes of operating arts organisations and scientific agencies have led to similarly impoverished aesthetic experiences for artists and their audiences and to the socially questionable dissemination and use of science.
Neither the arts, the sciences nor the education system at large should be forced to run as businesses or managed as mere adjuncts to economic life. In the absence of philanthropic patronage, governments should sustain a level of funding for the arts, sciences and higher education systems which acknowledges their non-economic importance to the nation. The arts, sciences and higher education belong together as touchstones of an informed self-critical intellectually and aesthetically dynamic community of citizens. All those who support these and the above propositions are encouraged to join via:
the gilded cage facebook enclosure
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