Advanced neoliberal governance and Australian rural higher education

This paper adopts the concept of governmentality to understand a form of power at play within recent policymaking practices relating to rural higher education in Australia. While commonly constructed in terms of equity and the basic rights and opportunities of the Australian population, equity of access to higher education for regional, rural and remote (RRR) communities is one designed from its outset in relation to a broader set of national governance issues. In this work we argue that rural higher education is constructed as part of the solution to a broader problem – that of economic governance. We show how particular forms of reason built into modern approaches to governing work to obliterate difference, and we argue that RRR provision of higher education has become mired within the tensions and contradictions of competing problems of governance and economic interests. The final sections of the paper look to recent moments in Australian higher education policymaking whereby statistical indicators are gathered by consultants to identify ‘need’ and ‘readiness’, and we make the case that these sorts of processes, divorced as they are from local knowledges, can help to re-embed the ongoing creation of marginalisation in RRR communities. We close the paper arguing that a genuinely rural higher education requires different imaginations than those in train now, built instead through ethical recognition and inclusion of marginalised rural people within their own modes of governance, and with greater autonomy over the conditions by which rural higher education is constructed and enacted.