Quality policy in Australian higher education of the 1990s: university perspectives

In the last decade 'quality' has assumed the status of one of the meta-disc ourses across many domains of public policy, including education. This pape r focuses on the specific example of quality policy in Australian higher ed ucation of the 1990s, and in particular, on the micro level of quality poli cy practice as experienced by academic practitioners in 6 universities. As such, it forms a follow-up to an article published earlier in the Journal o f Education Policy (Vidovich and Porter 1997) which examined macro (nationa l) and intermediate (the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Educatio n) levels of a quality policy cycle consisting of contexts of influence, po licy text production and practice, as articulated by Ball and colleagues (B owe, Ball and Gold 1992, Ball 1994). The findings of in-depth interviews wi th key university personnel provide evidence of the 'messy' realities of th e policy process and considerable variation in quality policy practices at local sites, particularly in terms of the different historical contexts of universities which were categorized as 'traditional', 'alternative' and 'fo rmer college' types. However, despite such variation, the 'bigger picture' effect of the quality policy under investigation was to enhance Australian national Government control of higher education, albeit at a 'distance', ch aracteristic of the culture of performativity increasingly pervading higher education across many OECD countries. A further effect was to increase ine qualities. both between and within universities.