Foundational principles for the academic profession in the context of greater systemic accountability

The impact of global systemic changes over 40 years in higher education (HE) have typically focussed on efficiency, cost-reduction and the needs of the economy. This has usually involved ‘command and control’ change processes and corporate accountability practices aimed at reducing university autonomy and bringing academics under greater institutional control. We draw on systems research to consider factors related to the effectiveness of a HE system, as opposed to its efficiency, and propose a reform process based on learning as the basis of effectiveness. This requires greater differentiation between the important roles played by key stakeholders such as government, university corporate leaders and academics. A lack of definition of the academic role in the managerial university makes it difficult for the profession to present a counter-narrative to the neo-liberal reform agenda that has led to an ‘unbundling’ of academic work. We propose four universal foundational principles to underpin the academic professional in a context of greater accountability and argue these should be universally applicable to HE systems around the globe. We introduce an action research project to test these ideas using the Australian HE context as a case study which may provide a model for colleagues in other HE contexts.