Evaluating change in the Australian higher education system: a critical theory perspective

The paper questions whether the Australian Higher Education System has been colonised away from the traditional ‘idea of a university’ as a social institution to a new identity as an economic institution. Adapting concepts based on Habermas’ critical theory to the level of an organisation, a framework for analysing organisational change is applied to higher education to examine the question of colonisation. While judgments of colonisation have been made on the bases of the magnitude of external pressures and the types of changes within the system, the type of change is less certain when internal power dependencies and the perspective of academics is taken into account.