When Western Sydney University announced it would shed hundreds of staff, its vice-chancellor described the decision as part of a “necessary transformation".

Soon afterwards, leaked documents revealed that the university had been paying external consultants up to $2850 a day to design the restructure. One consultant invoiced $85,000 for five weeks’ work plus tolls and parking. The optics are damning, but familiar.

Across Australia, universities are turning to consultants for what used to be their own core responsibilities: strategic planning, workforce design, curriculum review and even internal communication. The same firms, KPMG, Nous, EY and PwC appear repeatedly in annual reports, helping to manage crises they helped to create.

What has quietly emerged is a new institutional species, the consultant university: governed by PowerPoint, managed by contracts and addicted to the rhetoric of transformation.

To understand how this happened, we need to look back. The transformation began in the late 1980s with the Dawkins Reforms, which unified Australia’s colleges of advanced education and universities into a single “higher education system". Those reforms introduced HECS, ending free tertiary education and treating students as consumers.

It was not merely an economic adjustment, but an abdication of purpose, the government’s decision to relinquish public investment in the nation’s intellectual future and surrender education to the marketplace. Universities were told to “earn their keep”, to compete for students, funding, and prestige. What began as a supposedly pragmatic financial reform became a cultural capitulation. Education, once upheld as a public right and a cornerstone of collective progress, was rebranded as a private investment in personal advancement. The new language told the story: vice-chancellors became “CEOs”, faculties became “portfolios”, and learning itself was repackaged as a “product".

Into this environment stepped the consultants, fluent in the language of performance indicators and strategic alignment. They brought with them the ideology of New Public Management, the belief that public institutions should emulate private firms. Efficiency replaced wisdom as the measure of success.

Behind every consultant’s report lies the same creed: you can only manage what you can measure. In this worldview, numbers are not just tools, they are truths. What cannot be quantified is treated as inefficiency, sentiment or risk.

Universities have absorbed this creed completely. Teaching quality is now a student-satisfaction score. Research quality is a citation count or grant total. Institutional worth is a global ranking. The moral purpose of education has been reduced to a dashboard of Key Performance Indicators. And once the metric exists, it begins to rule.

Measurement carries the illusion of science, it feels objective, neutral and safe. It converts uncertainty into calculation, turning complexity into numbers that appear to speak for themselves. But it also replaces judgment with data and imagination with compliance. It narrows the field of vision until institutions can see only what they already know how to count. Universities now measure almost everything except the things that matter most.

Even reformers, who see the problem, often reach for the same tool. If current measures are narrow, they say, let’s measure something else. Let’s measure happiness, well-being, or belonging.

New Zealand has led the way, embedding a Living Standards Framework and a national well-being index into its budget process. Finland reports national happiness alongside GDP. Britain’s Office for National Statistics now includes life satisfaction, purpose and anxiety in its annual surveys.

Universities are following suit. Across the UK and the US, “flourishing dashboards” and “well-being indices” have become fashionable. Australian institutions are experimenting with student-happiness surveys and staff “engagement” scores.

The intention is honourable. But the trap is the same. The question is not what we measure, but why we believe measurement is the only path to understanding.

When we reduce well-being to data, we domesticate it. We turn experience into an audit trail. The mystery of learning, the slow burn of curiosity, the exhilaration of discovery, the discomfort of growth cannot be captured by a score out of 10.

Once upon a time, management was the servant of purpose. Its role was to support teaching, scholarship and public good. Now purpose serves management.

Consultant logic inverts the moral order. It uses the language of care, well-being, resilience and transformation to advance the logic of control. Every policy arrives dressed in empathy, yet behind it sits the same algorithmic imperative: cut, centralise, measure, report.

Universities now speak in paradoxes. They promise empowerment through compliance, innovation through standardisation, creativity through policy. Staff are asked to “own” reforms they had no part in designing. Consultation becomes performance theatre, where the outcome is already decided. Management has become a moral performance art, rehearsed, data-driven and oddly soulless.

Universities are not factories for credentialing. They are society’s memory and conscience, institutions that hold the long conversation about what is true, just, and possible.

The philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt imagined the university as a community of scholars and students pursuing “Bildung”, the cultivation of the whole person through the unity of research and teaching. Knowledge was not to be manufactured, but discovered; education was not to be consumed, but lived.

That tradition is in retreat. The contemporary university speaks in managerial dialect: “strategic alignment”, “key deliverables”, “stakeholder engagement”. Its moral vocabulary has been replaced by business metaphors.

Yet the original purpose remains clear: A university should be the place where new questions are born, a sanctuary for curiosity, where discovery leads not merely to new answers, but to the things we never knew to ask. That is what justifies the university’s public funding and cultural standing. It exists not to mirror society, but to imagine it anew. And imagination, by definition, cannot be managed. When education becomes a numbers game, creativity becomes deviance.

Academics learn to think within the metric, not beyond it. Students learn to treat learning as performance, not exploration. Administrators celebrate “innovation”, but reward conformity. The consequences are visible everywhere: departments cut and re-opened under new names, colleagues replaced by “positions”, once-vital disciplines dissolved because their benefits cannot be expressed in dollars or rankings. The churn is constant restructures, “renamings”, rebrands, each promising renewal, but delivering exhaustion.

Metrics also distort behaviour. When research is rewarded for quantity, scholars slice ideas into multiple papers – publish or perish. When teaching is rewarded through satisfaction surveys, intellectual challenge becomes a risk. When institutions are ranked by graduate earnings, courses in philosophy, languages and the arts quietly shrink.

The result is an elegant absurdity: universities optimising themselves into irrelevance. They produce more data, more reports, more strategies, everything except deeper understanding. Measurement promises accountability but delivers amnesia. It erases memory, purpose and trust. Over time, institutions lose the capacity even to recognise excellence unless it arrives pre-formatted as a metric.

This is not a plea against evidence or evaluation. Universities should be accountable to their students and to the public. But accountability must begin with an understanding of what cannot be counted: curiosity, wonder, doubt and the moral courage to question one’s own assumptions.

If we are serious about rebuilding the university, we must begin by asking different kinds of questions, questions about meaning, not metrics:

• Are we helping students to think independently?
• Are we cultivating the courage to speak truth to power?
• Are we keeping faith with the idea that knowledge, freely pursued, serves the common good?

To answer such questions requires humility, not consultants; conversation, not compliance. It requires rediscovering the slow, patient work of education: the dialogue between teacher and student, between past and future, between what is known and what is yet to be imagined.

The university’s worth was never in its data points. It was in its imagination, its willingness to look past the measurable and into the unknown. It is where a society stores its long memory and tests its new ideas. It is the one place designed to resist the tyranny of immediacy, where ideas can be nurtured before they are useful.

Cuts and restructures may balance spreadsheets, but they erode something far more precious: the capacity of a democracy to think beyond what it can count.

When universities become instruments of managerial reason, a society loses its most vital mirror. It forgets how to ask questions that have no predetermined answers, the very questions on which its future depends.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.