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The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change
The higher education industry might seem like it's booming, with over 200 million students in universities and colleges worldwide and funds flowing in like never before. But the truth is that these institutions have never been unhappier places to work. Corporate-style management, cost-cutting governments, mobilisations by angry students and strikes by a disgruntled workforce have taken their toll - in almost every country around the world. It's no wonder that there is talk of 'universities in crisis.'
But what should a 'good university' look like? In this inspiring new work, Raewyn Connell asks us to consider just that, challenging us to rethink the fundamentals of what universities do. Drawing on the examples offered by pioneering universities and educational reformers around the world, Connell outlines a practical vision for how our universities can become both more engaging and more productive places, driven by social good rather than profit, helping to build fairer societies.
But what should a 'good university' look like? In this inspiring new work, Raewyn Connell asks us to consider just that, challenging us to rethink the fundamentals of what universities do. Drawing on the examples offered by pioneering universities and educational reformers around the world, Connell outlines a practical vision for how our universities can become both more engaging and more productive places, driven by social good rather than profit, helping to build fairer societies.
239 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 15, 2019
8 people are currently reading
339 people want to read
About the author
Raewyn Connell
12 books5 followersRaewyn Connell is a sociologist, now retired from an academic career.
She has written a variety of books, including Southern Theory, Masculinities and The Good University. Her work has been translated into twenty-four languages.
She has written a variety of books, including Southern Theory, Masculinities and The Good University. Her work has been translated into twenty-four languages.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 14, 2019
A dear friend of mine came into the office the other day with this book – but not really to show me this book so much as to get me to see this YouTube video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bg90...
You see, I wrote my PhD thesis pretty much on what Rahman is doing here, on the all too strange world of marketing images and how they are used in the selling of education – or whatever it is that is being sold by such brochures.
This book has a lot of work to do. The first thing is to give some indication of what universities do and how they have changed over the last 40 years or so. The division is often between the ‘research universities’ of the ‘global north’ – which, amusingly enough, includes Australia – and then teaching universities - seen as less impressive. And then the universities of the global south and the multiple challenges they face.
I really liked the start of this book – she explains the idea of universities adding to the sum total of human knowledge in an interesting way – comparing it to an archive and then research being about adding to that archive. She also discusses the problems associated with the shift caused by the corporate capture of universities, where ‘research’ is anything but ‘pure’ now. At one point she says that there would be no chance today that Einstein would get support to research his general theory of relativity. Research needs to show signs that it can make money – and this is increasingly true of all education. People studying a degree out of interest seems too much like a thing of the past. And that surprises me, since ‘learning to think’ would otherwise seem the most effective way to survive in an increasingly changing world.
Before I started working in a university, it hadn’t occurred to me just how precarious the life I was getting myself into would be. The lack of job security – particularly for early career academics – is beyond the pale. The worst is teaching and marking. You have limited control over what you teach, but you still have to construct the lesson, and what you get paid for doing this doesn't really cover the time spent doing it. I really love teaching and even (although I pretend not to) quite like marking assignments – well, as long as they aren’t all nearly identical to each other, which becomes tedious very quickly – but you have to not think about what you are being paid for any of this work - or your anger will get in the way At first the money looks quite good, but it quickly falls to near minimum wage rates. You soon realise that the hourly rate is based on a something that can’t actually be done. For instance, if you are marking essays, you have to read and correct (and enter into the marking system, and moderate, and give feedback, and god knows what else) 4,000 words an hour. That isn’t even funny. If you were to spend only one hour on 4,000 words of correction you could give no feedback at all, basically just a letter grade, certainly no considered feedback. And I would find that to be impossible - I didn't become an academic to not give feedback. I want people to learn - I want their work to be honoured by someone explaining what is good and what could have been done better. But it also means that when someone hands in a 3000 word essay when they have been asked to only write a 1500 word one, well, hell have no fury… It becomes almost impossible not to think, you've just halved my rate of pay. I've also found that twice the words generally also means half the content.
Teaching is devalued in the system – which is stupid, since that would otherwise seem to be the main reason for us being here in the first place. But research brings in money and governments don’t fund universities enough, so finding research dollars becomes an imperative. Local students have to pay and pay, often through student loans, and international students fill financial gaps as well. But that then raises questions about what the relationship is for the university – are these students buying a service and are they therefore customers – and the customer is always right and the customer gets differential service according to their ability to pay – or are they learners who need to reach a certain standard? Given that universities are huge credentialing machines that simultaneously rely on getting money from their customers, the dilemma is built into the situation and so isn’t going away anytime soon.
Research gets published in research journals. I’ve had a couple of articles published now – I think to read one of them will cost you about $50. As the writer, I didn’t actually get paid anything to write it and I certainly get no money for you reading it. I’ve also been asked a few times to peer review journal articles that other people have written. I spend quite a bit of time on this, because, well, some people have done that for me and really put effort into it, and I've gotten a lot out of that feedback – and other people have written incredibly useless feedback and even nasty stuff about some of my articles too and, well, I don’t want to be one of those people. Anyway, all of that work is unpaid as well. And it is real work. But four publishing houses have somehow been able to monopolise all of the best research journals, and they basically charge universities so as to be able to gain access to the research they funded and read about it in journal articles their employees wrote for free, and which some of their other employees reviewed for free too. You couldn’t make this shit up. As Lou Reed once said, “Somewhere a landlord’s laughing till he wets his pants”.
The book ends with a couple of chapters on what a good university would look like in an alternative future world. I know it is important to show that change is possible, but chapters like this always leave me a bit cold. In fact, I find it hard to even really focus on what they are saying. I really ought to try to do something about my pessimism.
This is a very good introduction to what universities are and the problems they face and why they face those problems. Given so many of us are now required to go to university and it costs us so much to go there, we really should pay more attention to how they work and how we might make them more just and more effective.
You see, I wrote my PhD thesis pretty much on what Rahman is doing here, on the all too strange world of marketing images and how they are used in the selling of education – or whatever it is that is being sold by such brochures.
This book has a lot of work to do. The first thing is to give some indication of what universities do and how they have changed over the last 40 years or so. The division is often between the ‘research universities’ of the ‘global north’ – which, amusingly enough, includes Australia – and then teaching universities - seen as less impressive. And then the universities of the global south and the multiple challenges they face.
I really liked the start of this book – she explains the idea of universities adding to the sum total of human knowledge in an interesting way – comparing it to an archive and then research being about adding to that archive. She also discusses the problems associated with the shift caused by the corporate capture of universities, where ‘research’ is anything but ‘pure’ now. At one point she says that there would be no chance today that Einstein would get support to research his general theory of relativity. Research needs to show signs that it can make money – and this is increasingly true of all education. People studying a degree out of interest seems too much like a thing of the past. And that surprises me, since ‘learning to think’ would otherwise seem the most effective way to survive in an increasingly changing world.
Before I started working in a university, it hadn’t occurred to me just how precarious the life I was getting myself into would be. The lack of job security – particularly for early career academics – is beyond the pale. The worst is teaching and marking. You have limited control over what you teach, but you still have to construct the lesson, and what you get paid for doing this doesn't really cover the time spent doing it. I really love teaching and even (although I pretend not to) quite like marking assignments – well, as long as they aren’t all nearly identical to each other, which becomes tedious very quickly – but you have to not think about what you are being paid for any of this work - or your anger will get in the way At first the money looks quite good, but it quickly falls to near minimum wage rates. You soon realise that the hourly rate is based on a something that can’t actually be done. For instance, if you are marking essays, you have to read and correct (and enter into the marking system, and moderate, and give feedback, and god knows what else) 4,000 words an hour. That isn’t even funny. If you were to spend only one hour on 4,000 words of correction you could give no feedback at all, basically just a letter grade, certainly no considered feedback. And I would find that to be impossible - I didn't become an academic to not give feedback. I want people to learn - I want their work to be honoured by someone explaining what is good and what could have been done better. But it also means that when someone hands in a 3000 word essay when they have been asked to only write a 1500 word one, well, hell have no fury… It becomes almost impossible not to think, you've just halved my rate of pay. I've also found that twice the words generally also means half the content.
Teaching is devalued in the system – which is stupid, since that would otherwise seem to be the main reason for us being here in the first place. But research brings in money and governments don’t fund universities enough, so finding research dollars becomes an imperative. Local students have to pay and pay, often through student loans, and international students fill financial gaps as well. But that then raises questions about what the relationship is for the university – are these students buying a service and are they therefore customers – and the customer is always right and the customer gets differential service according to their ability to pay – or are they learners who need to reach a certain standard? Given that universities are huge credentialing machines that simultaneously rely on getting money from their customers, the dilemma is built into the situation and so isn’t going away anytime soon.
Research gets published in research journals. I’ve had a couple of articles published now – I think to read one of them will cost you about $50. As the writer, I didn’t actually get paid anything to write it and I certainly get no money for you reading it. I’ve also been asked a few times to peer review journal articles that other people have written. I spend quite a bit of time on this, because, well, some people have done that for me and really put effort into it, and I've gotten a lot out of that feedback – and other people have written incredibly useless feedback and even nasty stuff about some of my articles too and, well, I don’t want to be one of those people. Anyway, all of that work is unpaid as well. And it is real work. But four publishing houses have somehow been able to monopolise all of the best research journals, and they basically charge universities so as to be able to gain access to the research they funded and read about it in journal articles their employees wrote for free, and which some of their other employees reviewed for free too. You couldn’t make this shit up. As Lou Reed once said, “Somewhere a landlord’s laughing till he wets his pants”.
The book ends with a couple of chapters on what a good university would look like in an alternative future world. I know it is important to show that change is possible, but chapters like this always leave me a bit cold. In fact, I find it hard to even really focus on what they are saying. I really ought to try to do something about my pessimism.
This is a very good introduction to what universities are and the problems they face and why they face those problems. Given so many of us are now required to go to university and it costs us so much to go there, we really should pay more attention to how they work and how we might make them more just and more effective.
August 27, 2019
Connell's depiction of today's university (and university system) is quite bleak: market- and profit-oriented research and teaching instead of focusing the needs of society and students, the hegemony of the Western way of knowledge generation, increasing inequality among universities both among and within countries, outsourced operational (and even teaching) staff who don't involve decision-making, isolated (and well-paid) top management, etc. Yet she is optimistic about change and believes that there are alternative and better futures for universities we can choose. The last sentence of Emma Taylor's review of the book summarizes what I think: "Let’s hope this book is the force for change and reform that it deserves to be."
May 29, 2021
Some years ago at a university committee meeting when we were receiving reports on research developments in various schools one of the professors in the Business School provided a rich and engaging report of the developing research culture among a group of young scholars in a teaching intensive context. At the end the Vice Chancellor’s only response after the perfunctory thanks was to observe that report contained no KPIs. To this the professor (remember, this is the Business School where they’re pretty good at this management stuff) gave a 3-4 minute eloquent outline of why key performance indicators were not a suitable way to identify the essence of the School’s research development strategy, based in developing dispositions and confidence: assorted other profs around the table nodded along and several smiled at the closing comment that inserting KPIs would be a meaningless act. The VC’s response was simply: “But you will put some in, won’t you”.
The saddest thing about that story is that nearly everyone who has worked in a university in the last 20 years can tell a version of it: that we are increasingly assessed by imposed and unreliable quantification of the intensely collective and creative acts of teaching and research. In research terms, most of these measures are invalid – in that they do not measure what they claim to assess. Critique of this predicament is not new: as far back as the mid-1970s we were seeing books published with titles like The Degree Factory or the BBC’s still remarkably current mid 1980s satirical A Very Peculiar Practice but the degree of corporatist control has intensified since the beginning of this century – and recent years have seen a surge in scholarly and activist oriented exploration of the state of higher education. There are few that grapple with these problems quite as compellingly and convincingly as Raewyn Connell’s intervention.
Connell is extremely well placed to do this work. She has nearly 50 year’s work in the sector, is one of the sharpest social analysts we have, has specialised in sociologies of education (among other things), has worked in both Australia and the USA with deep links into other national settings, and has a global perspective including impressive work exploring theorists and analysts from the Global South. What’s more, her scholarship has been accompanied by active involvement in political struggles around the issues considered. I went into this book with high hopes – they were met.
The book is structured around three key aspects: what universities do in terms of the labour of their workers, how they maintain privilege and their exclusionary practices, and struggles for alternatives. The question of what universities do should seem the most obvious – teach and research. While this is so, Connell is also at pains to accentuate the collective nature of these activities as they include academic and professional services staff as well as students, while she also highlights the transformative character of much of this work. So she argues strongly against the emerging and increasingly dominant instrumentalist training model (where higher education is about learning the skills to get a good job) to argue that the important stuff of learning is not the factoids one acquires (via the ‘banking’ model of education) but the work we do to make sense of this information and how that transforms our understanding and how we make sense of the world around us. This is a powerful argument of the collective intellectual and for higher education as a dynamic, changing, interactive process.
This integration of not just research and teaching (most of us do that in our critiques) but also of the labour process and relations of higher education practice contextualise that work not just as collective practice but as systemic. The same power can be seen in the discussion of privilege and exclusion, which all too often in much of our work at present focuses on the effects of rampant managerialism (of the kind exhibited in my opening anecdote). While this is important to the case and importantly linked to privilege, Connell also grounds the university system in a global political economy of knowledge and labour appropriation and exploitation, where wealth and power (social, intellectual, cultural and economic) is concentrated in the Global North silencing Southern voices while expropriating their labour and knowledge. This aspect of the case links well to and extends aspects of her case in Southern Theory challenging not just the coloniality of knowledge but of the system as a whole.
In those six chapters Connell builds a powerful critique of what universities ‘actually do’ (the first part of the subtitle) allowing her to move on to explore not so much why we need change (the second part of the subtitle) but what that change might look like. She explores a series of alternative approaches that have been adopted over the last century, those that seek to disrupt the individualising, exclusionary, exploitative models that have dominated and continue to dominate the global system – some of which I knew or knew of but several of which were new to me. This is an inspiring account reminding us of the power of innovation in struggle. This is followed by a discussion of the characteristics of the good university (it is democratic, engaged, truthful, creative and sustainable) as well as the good university system (the same aspects as well as public funding in cooperative relationships) – stressing that none of those five characteristics can be achieved in isolation.
Connell’s experience and authority in the field give this engaging, globally aware, radical (in the sense of getting to the roots of the issue, and proposing fundamental change) analysis and programme gravitas. With this authority comes inspiration where she builds a compellingly inclusive model of the university not just as a workplace, but as a way of working that encourages and serves wider needs and goods.
Very highly recommended.
The saddest thing about that story is that nearly everyone who has worked in a university in the last 20 years can tell a version of it: that we are increasingly assessed by imposed and unreliable quantification of the intensely collective and creative acts of teaching and research. In research terms, most of these measures are invalid – in that they do not measure what they claim to assess. Critique of this predicament is not new: as far back as the mid-1970s we were seeing books published with titles like The Degree Factory or the BBC’s still remarkably current mid 1980s satirical A Very Peculiar Practice but the degree of corporatist control has intensified since the beginning of this century – and recent years have seen a surge in scholarly and activist oriented exploration of the state of higher education. There are few that grapple with these problems quite as compellingly and convincingly as Raewyn Connell’s intervention.
Connell is extremely well placed to do this work. She has nearly 50 year’s work in the sector, is one of the sharpest social analysts we have, has specialised in sociologies of education (among other things), has worked in both Australia and the USA with deep links into other national settings, and has a global perspective including impressive work exploring theorists and analysts from the Global South. What’s more, her scholarship has been accompanied by active involvement in political struggles around the issues considered. I went into this book with high hopes – they were met.
The book is structured around three key aspects: what universities do in terms of the labour of their workers, how they maintain privilege and their exclusionary practices, and struggles for alternatives. The question of what universities do should seem the most obvious – teach and research. While this is so, Connell is also at pains to accentuate the collective nature of these activities as they include academic and professional services staff as well as students, while she also highlights the transformative character of much of this work. So she argues strongly against the emerging and increasingly dominant instrumentalist training model (where higher education is about learning the skills to get a good job) to argue that the important stuff of learning is not the factoids one acquires (via the ‘banking’ model of education) but the work we do to make sense of this information and how that transforms our understanding and how we make sense of the world around us. This is a powerful argument of the collective intellectual and for higher education as a dynamic, changing, interactive process.
This integration of not just research and teaching (most of us do that in our critiques) but also of the labour process and relations of higher education practice contextualise that work not just as collective practice but as systemic. The same power can be seen in the discussion of privilege and exclusion, which all too often in much of our work at present focuses on the effects of rampant managerialism (of the kind exhibited in my opening anecdote). While this is important to the case and importantly linked to privilege, Connell also grounds the university system in a global political economy of knowledge and labour appropriation and exploitation, where wealth and power (social, intellectual, cultural and economic) is concentrated in the Global North silencing Southern voices while expropriating their labour and knowledge. This aspect of the case links well to and extends aspects of her case in Southern Theory challenging not just the coloniality of knowledge but of the system as a whole.
In those six chapters Connell builds a powerful critique of what universities ‘actually do’ (the first part of the subtitle) allowing her to move on to explore not so much why we need change (the second part of the subtitle) but what that change might look like. She explores a series of alternative approaches that have been adopted over the last century, those that seek to disrupt the individualising, exclusionary, exploitative models that have dominated and continue to dominate the global system – some of which I knew or knew of but several of which were new to me. This is an inspiring account reminding us of the power of innovation in struggle. This is followed by a discussion of the characteristics of the good university (it is democratic, engaged, truthful, creative and sustainable) as well as the good university system (the same aspects as well as public funding in cooperative relationships) – stressing that none of those five characteristics can be achieved in isolation.
Connell’s experience and authority in the field give this engaging, globally aware, radical (in the sense of getting to the roots of the issue, and proposing fundamental change) analysis and programme gravitas. With this authority comes inspiration where she builds a compellingly inclusive model of the university not just as a workplace, but as a way of working that encourages and serves wider needs and goods.
Very highly recommended.
October 18, 2025
A clear assessment of the state of universities today, and a radical imagining of what universities could be in the future. All universities are different - higher education is meant for the benefit of society as a whole. “Privatising education is theft from the public”very readable :) and also gives me hope about continuing to work in universities despite having to deal with elite cultures and rich kids who only see it as a $100000 ai slop club where you can meet your spouse and business partner in the business faculty while everyone else gets scraps and classrooms with black mould…. Who benefits from being in the best university in the country? And if every university is the best in the country or the world in different areas where do we go now?
April 10, 2023
An easily readable and frank assessment of the neoliberal changes in university life, with helpful examples of how to turn the tide on some of them. The global perspective is a great addition to many other works in the space, which tend to focus on universities in the global north.
June 7, 2019
Yeah ok I am a convert. I have liked Connell's work before but I wasn't going to give this an "easy A" on that account, especially given all the hype (admittedly some people I respect were the ones telling me it was good).
To me it took a while to warm up, the first few chapters are setting the scene but much of what they said was stuff that has already been covered by other authors and while Connell's style is pretty witty I often felt frustrated and wanted more detail. I particularly wanted the gender stuff to be said not just hinted at (that did come out later).
By about chapter 5 Connell seemed to think we had the broad picture and started tightening. I loved the mix of research, gossip, anecdote and things like comedians...it's all information you can check though none of it is made up. Even though there is a bleak picture to be pained, Connell keeps reminding us of the human/academic capacity to resist, encourages all forms of resistance before trying to paint a more organised and wholistic view of how we might turn around and be progressive again. Consistently this "dream" is driven by real positives that have come out of various traditions, it's pretty grounded in what most university workers (and probably students) actually want.
I thought the ending was pretty strong, she took two chapters to build the vision of how it all might be better and I was happy when she turned away from idealistic visions that would mean free labour. Much as academic teaching and learning is what I love, I need to pay the bills as well...Connell argued powerfully that society should contribute to a rich system of universities which should be equitable, a global network of cooperation and thought. This is so similar to what sensible economists and ecologists are saying that I had to agree with it.
I want this to be part of the conversation, I want to find ways to put pressure on our leaders to represent us better and implement this sort of a future vision, otherwise there will not be a future at all.
To me it took a while to warm up, the first few chapters are setting the scene but much of what they said was stuff that has already been covered by other authors and while Connell's style is pretty witty I often felt frustrated and wanted more detail. I particularly wanted the gender stuff to be said not just hinted at (that did come out later).
By about chapter 5 Connell seemed to think we had the broad picture and started tightening. I loved the mix of research, gossip, anecdote and things like comedians...it's all information you can check though none of it is made up. Even though there is a bleak picture to be pained, Connell keeps reminding us of the human/academic capacity to resist, encourages all forms of resistance before trying to paint a more organised and wholistic view of how we might turn around and be progressive again. Consistently this "dream" is driven by real positives that have come out of various traditions, it's pretty grounded in what most university workers (and probably students) actually want.
I thought the ending was pretty strong, she took two chapters to build the vision of how it all might be better and I was happy when she turned away from idealistic visions that would mean free labour. Much as academic teaching and learning is what I love, I need to pay the bills as well...Connell argued powerfully that society should contribute to a rich system of universities which should be equitable, a global network of cooperation and thought. This is so similar to what sensible economists and ecologists are saying that I had to agree with it.
I want this to be part of the conversation, I want to find ways to put pressure on our leaders to represent us better and implement this sort of a future vision, otherwise there will not be a future at all.
June 2, 2025
As critiques of universities go, this one by Raewyn Connell is better than most. It is the product of wide reading, offering ideas and examples from around the world. It argues for the positive role of 'operations workers', the non-academic staff, the numbers of which are so often seen as a sign of how universities have lost their way. It offers alternatives as well as criticisms. The writing is clear.
But in common with other left-wing critiques of universities, laying the blame for what has gone wrong on 'neoliberalism' is a problem. It dodges the historical question of what the higher education reformers of the last 35 years - most of whom were social democrats, not 'neoliberals' - thought they were doing and why they chose the policy instruments that they did.
Connell, for example, acknowledges that the introduction of 'tuition fees' (HECS) in the late 1980s was 'in part an attempt to widen acccess', but not that it enjoyed a lot of success in that attempt. Partly by accident - nobody in the late 1980s or early 1990s though that creating markets in international education would be as successful as it turned out to be - that turned out to be a reform that financed a very significant expansion in higher education research.
So while I agree that higher edcucation policy is far from perfect, and indeed is getting more imperfect, the era that Connell describes as 'neoliberal' had some big successes as well as failures.
But in common with other left-wing critiques of universities, laying the blame for what has gone wrong on 'neoliberalism' is a problem. It dodges the historical question of what the higher education reformers of the last 35 years - most of whom were social democrats, not 'neoliberals' - thought they were doing and why they chose the policy instruments that they did.
Connell, for example, acknowledges that the introduction of 'tuition fees' (HECS) in the late 1980s was 'in part an attempt to widen acccess', but not that it enjoyed a lot of success in that attempt. Partly by accident - nobody in the late 1980s or early 1990s though that creating markets in international education would be as successful as it turned out to be - that turned out to be a reform that financed a very significant expansion in higher education research.
So while I agree that higher edcucation policy is far from perfect, and indeed is getting more imperfect, the era that Connell describes as 'neoliberal' had some big successes as well as failures.
April 23, 2024
I appreciate this author’s distinct voice; her love for what higher education can be came through. She also offered fresh and humorous takes on higher education’s woes. I was glad for the case studies of alternative models, but would have preferred more direction for the vast majority of us who work in mainstream universities.
December 26, 2023
Very much enjoyed the first six chapters, less so the last two ones. Excellent to understand research process and causes + consequences of current state of academia.
September 14, 2019
With the state of universities around the world constantly being questioned and subject to multiple ranking systems, I decided to read this book to ponder how the university system should be managed. Connell's book reads like a thesis, with chapters structured in a manner designed to enhance the argument being presented. Particularly in the early part of her work, Connell refers to ideas and works of others in describing the (largely) historical basis of the modern university sector. I found these chapters the most interesting as they referred to concepts which seem to have been lost in the modern commercial focus of many universities. Towards the end of the book, Connell attempts to focus her argument by describing how fragments of the university system can be brought together to form the 'ideal'. Conveyed in a largely conversational style, the reader is left to ponder Connell's proposal and form their own conclusion.
January 3, 2020
Everyone who works at a university should read this and work towards making its vision a reality.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews