“Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System”: New Accountability Policies for a Global Era?

Abstract

In Australian higher education, the establishment of a powerful, new, and controversial national regulatory body—the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA)—emerged from the federal government’s radical policy shift outlined in Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System (2009). With TEQSA’s main brief to monitor the quality of Australian higher education, it became one of the government’s key “solutions” to the policy “problem” of enhancing Australia’s positioning in the competitive global knowledge economy. In addition to accrediting institutions, TEQSA’s role is to monitor teaching and learning standards as well as research standards, and therefore it represents a significant development in enhancing the accountability of universities to central government. In the period before TEQSA was fully operational, major concerns were voiced from the sector that TEQSA policies would create a stranglehold of “red tape” around universities, undermining their autonomy. This chapter analyses the tensions around TEQSA accountability policies, many of which are reflected and refracted through higher education policies in other countries. Examining global-national-local dynamics of accountability policies in relation to Australian higher education provides an opportunity for “policy learning” internationally. The discussion draws on the conceptual lens of trust to examine the implications of accountability policies that appear to undermine the very risk-taking and innovations which purportedly characterize a global knowledge era.