The Government's white paper on tertiary education promises to forge a Brave New World for post-secondary school education in this country.

The proposed changes will transform what is taught in those institutions, how it is taught, what gets researched and who gets to research it. In short, the proposed changes demand an alarming cultural shift for our universities and polytechnics.

For a start, there will be a whole new language of the academy. Universities will start talking more about "corporate brands" and "market niches" than about academic excellence.

In this environment there will be "modules" rather than courses, "points" rather than papers, "assessments" rather than examinations, "semesters" rather than terms and "teaching" rather than lecturing.

On the teaching side, there will be a noticeable shift to courses with a "strong applied focus." This will provide the opportunity to introduce innovative, multidisciplinary courses, across departments, across sites and even across continents.

Correspondence courses, distance learning, gaps in the pre-entry market, refresher courses, short courses, long courses, certificates and diplomas will all become the rage.

For truly innovative institutions, stadiums will replace lecture theatres; open-air rallies will replace lectures; and charismatic self-improvement sessions will replace tutorials. The environment will feel much more Amway than Academy.

About the only good thing that can be said about this emphasis on teaching is that it will detract attention from the lack of research funding coming into universities. Competition for research funding will increase simply because no sane person would want to be hamstrung with all that teaching.

Unfortunately, this means that research money will inevitably become harder to secure. Research foundations will start to act like banks, supplying money only to those people who don't really need it.* But unfortunately, you will.

Organisations will proliferate in an attempt to resolve the conflict between teaching and research commitments. Where departments have a history of unsuccessful research bids, smart staff will simply dissociate themselves from it.

On their grant applications they will change the name of their department, faculty or school. The really smart staff will simply establish their own independent centres for the study of this and that.

Staff will become output-focused. There will be a rush to join committees as people jockey to get themselves on as many as possible. Where there are time conflicts, the race will be to join those committees with the coolest name.

Committees with "council" or "senior management" will be inundated. Meanwhile, those with "interim" or "working" in the title will be studiously avoided by the switched-on Brave New Academic.

Once in those committees, people will simply bluff their way through by mixing up verbs and nouns a lot; sentences like "we need to benchmark our marketing spend …" are what committees will come to thrive on.

The output focus will extend outside of the campus to conferences. Academics will start giving out as many personal business cards as they can. Alternatively, at those institutions where performance is measured according to inputs instead of outputs, the performance indicator will become how many business cards people collect.

Either way, business card printers will be one unexpected beneficiary of the white paper.

This is a taste of the white paper's Brave New World. Yet it is surprising that only Act New Zealand has recognised the opportunities truly possible once we start down this road: if we allow our students to spend their funding subsidies overseas, then we obviate the need to spend any money on our tertiary institutions at all.

If only there were the political will, the white paper suggests, New Zealand could turn its whole tertiary education sector into an export industry.

• Carl Davidson is a sociology lecturer and Neil Lunt a lecturer in social policy at Massey University's Albany campus.

NOTE
* Mark Twain said: "A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain."