education
24 Nov 2009
Why Academia Is No Longer A Smart Choice
With up to half of all teaching now done by casually employed staff with little institutional support, Australian universities are facing an unprecedented crisis, writes Melissa Gregg
So often the perception of university life in Australia is a cosy existence involving luxurious philosophical debates, long holidays and international sabbaticals.The reality is far less glamorous.
The past 10 years has seen an escalation of requirements for entry-level jobs so great that starting positions aren't even advertised. The over-supply of PhD graduates has made competition so fierce for tenured positions that casual contracts have replaced ongoing junior positions. Our best graduates, fresh from the biggest challenge higher education can throw at them, face their most energetic years vying for the privilege of this state of insecurity.
As the system currently stands, junior scholars are asked to prove their worth to universities in ways that those hiring them never had to. The heads of search committees today didn't even need a PhD to start their career, yet devise intricate formulae for assessing the accomplishments of those seeking to follow their example.
A book, multiple journal articles and a history of grant funding is now usually necessary on top of a completed dissertation to make a shortlist after graduating. How is it possible to achieve any of these things, when handing in a thesis also means handing in any claim for library access, desk space or institutional support? The industry has divested the responsibility of training their smartest students to a level where they can gain access to sustainable long-term employment.
For those who do succeed in getting a foot in the door in academia, the news isn't much better.
A recent survey of academics at one Sydney university showed a 100 per cent response rate when asked if they worked on weekends. My own research in the past few years has shown how tenured life involves a never-ending series of online administrative tasks that consume work and home life. All too rarely are these duties punctuated with face-to-face contact with colleagues and students — often the principal motivation for scholars to aspire to the job in the first place.
Branding strategies, overseas campuses, international recruitment and research outputs are the operational priorities for Australian universities. This leaves the value of teaching ambiguous at best since prestige comes from winning grants that absolve senior scholars from teaching undergraduates.
There is barely enough infrastructure to cope with our current international student cohort. Classrooms are major exercises in generating inter-cultural dialogue among students and teachers alike and we are forever told that it is unrealistic to expect serious language, skills and extra-curricular support for international candidates. Should governments really be so surprised when these students literally protest in our streets?
As is the case in many industries, the budget bottom line is used to justify cost-cutting of all kinds but the global financial crisis rings particularly hollow as a rationale for ingrained problems, such as the fact that most tutors aren't paid to attend lectures or mark essays. Most don't have access to an office to meet with their students even though tutors perform the bulk of undergraduate teaching.
Between a third and a half of teaching is now performed by casual staff, which means universities actually save the significant costs of leave entitlements and full superannuation for these "sessional" employees.
Holidays and weekends are irrelevant anyway when one's time is spent juggling the bulimic requirements of multiple tiny contracts, often spread across industries and between different university employers.
Most universities also face the problem of having to force permanent staff to take annual leave because so many feel unable to afford the time away from the office (another problem not limited to university workers). The four-semester calendar and career-defining grant applications are perfectly timed to swallow Australian summers.
This week, a national conference will bring together senior academics, junior faculty and students to talk frankly about working conditions in universities. Sponsored by the Australian Research Council's Cultural Research Network, the State of the Industry conference takes as its focus the work cultures affecting those seeking to pursue teaching and research careers now and in the future.
The organisers (of which I am one) are scholars at some of the lowest rungs on the scale — not the suits, not the tenured profs and not the administrators who usually have the role of speaking about university life. What this means is that anyone coming along might actually hear what it's like to work in a university on the ground, in the classroom and at the hot-desks that young scholars are increasingly offered as the meagre deposit on a career.
Organising the conference I've heard a range of stories of PhD graduates now choosing any kind of work — even administrative work within universities — rather than face the conditions of academic performance today. Anyone wanting to have children is particularly likely to fall into this category.
With 40 speakers from over 20 universities, and an organising committee spread across three states, the conference has overcome a range of obstacles that actively prevent collaborative ventures across the university sector.
For instance, concerns from my own university about the number of participants from other institutions, combined with the size of the host university's logo, meant that I could expect little support or publicity. Although the conference was my idea, our marketing office refused to facilitate press coverage, instead asking for transcripts of speeches by University of Sydney scholars only.
This is just a taste of the corporate logic now infiltrating university life. Its mission is to celebrate innovation in dollar terms, proving the brand power of elite institutions while discouraging attempts to reflect on the wider purpose of higher education for the nation as a whole.
The contradiction at the heart of today's universities is the expectation that employees will uphold the ideals of scholarship in tandem with commercial values, and that they will do this in every area of their working life except pay. Is it any wonder that our peers are leaving for other professions?
The State of the Industry conference reflects on the fate of those of us who have grown up in the corporate university, who face immense expectations to qualify for jobs in a system that is hardly recognisable, and who remain passionate enough to fight for the career we were led to believe in.
As scholars, we are tired of seeing good people leave the industry broken by its demanding and ever-moving goal posts. When a government promises an education revolution, it needs to make sure it has a strong frontline.
For over a decade a generation of graduates have been told to wait for Baby Boomers to retire to begin our lives as professionals, as home-owners, as people with families, as people who might want to have weekends. So many of our smartest friends have already seen through this infinitely suspended promise.
A great wealth of talent will be lost if our energy, ideas and hopes are ignored any longer.
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great article Mel, and one that resonates with my choice to leave the academy.
Yes your analysis is all too true. What happens to a culture that has a narrowly focused set of organisational outcomes will be interesting to watch. The most troubling part of your analysis is the loss of the next generation of scholars not only those that have been developed but those who decided based on future income generational and unsavory organisational politics a better career was without a PhD or to work in a university.
Mel:
Below are some personal views, thanks for your article.
Thomas Frank covered similar territory about the US experience in the third part of his book One Market Under God (2000). Also see the work on tournament theory in economics on institutional processes of resource allocation.
For research academics, there are several strategies to deal with the working conditions you describe (which I have seen as a sessional teacher, researcher, administrator and member of a quality assurance team). Partly, this is a competitive process that is no different from other industries such as management consulting or project management; and also working out the ‘unwritten rules of the game’ in a ‘success to the successful’ archetype (which is what it takes to progress to Associate Professor and Professor levels).
Many positions are not openly advertised – rather, Faculties may attend conferences or look to ‘strategic hires’ to build up their reputation in specific fields. You can see this on university HR sites, in the change plans for Faculties and Schools, and in head-hunters who attend conferences to find out who is the emerging talent.
First, you need to develop a ‘programmatic’ approach to your research: a longer-term view with multiple projects, streams or collaborations. Two key questions to ask are: Where do you want to be in 3-5 years time? In your discipline, what do you want to be internationally known as a recognised expert for? Also look at a time management system like David Allen’s GTD, and to writing models like Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle, WriteOrDie software, or Sanford Kaye’s Quick Writing Process. Get those sources into Endnote or similar bibliographic management software.
Second, develop a publications track record out of the PhD, and preferably into A* and A-level ERA ranked journals. You may need to target B and C-level journals first, whilst building up the methodology and research skills. A* and A-level journals want a level of skills around qualitative research or quantitative analysis. What many universities are looking for: an academic with research potential who can be productive and develop the School or Faculty’s reputation, and which can also inform their teaching. Try and write every PhD chapter as a potential journal article. It can help to co-write with people that you might collaborate with later on a grant – the international trend is for research teams rather than solo researchers.
Third, do your ‘due diligence’ on a target journal: look at its articles, the editorial board who will be peer reviewers, and see if there are relevant articles or debates you can cite. In particular, look at the style and formatting of specific articles as a writing model.
Fourth, look for your university’s internal grant schemes – usually at Faculty and Research Office levels. Your Faculty may also have specific research funds available as an Early Career Researcher (first 5 years after your PhD) or new staff member. The internal grants are usually ‘stepping stones’ to external, competitive grant sources. Your Research Office will probably have a list of Category 1, 2 and 3 grants, and there are many more Category 1 agencies than ARC. It takes a collaborative and publications track record to submit a competitive ARC grant, either as an ECR or APDI (Postgraduate Fellow) on a research team, or as a mid-career researcher (Academic Level B or C). Read the grant agency criteria closely, look at what has been successful in the past, seek feedback on drafts from others, and expect to get several potential rejections before a grant success. If you are teaching, you can also pursue an internal Teaching & Learning grant, or an ALTC team. Finally, align yourself if possible with an existing team, professor or senior mentor, and talk with the grant-writers in your Faculty and Research Office.
Fifth, be strategic about how you signal your research interests – what you will be building your reputation in – such as putting up a bio/research interests on your office door (if you have one), and having a research bio on your School’s website. Select the Honours and PhD students that will mantain your ‘currency’ in the field, and that will extend or build on your program of research. Make sure your publication track record and academic CV is current. Map out the potential government and industry partners in your research area, and talk with your university’s tender and development people.
Sixth, understand your university’s workload model and how the mix of papers and grants above can affect your teaching hours and other commitments. Everyone has a stint at administration and committee tasks, to build up their ‘university service’, but make sure you do the other things as well. Also look at the MSALS level and promotion criteria - these will be similar if you want to move laterally to another university.
Klaas Woldring
When I retired from Southern Cross University nine years ago, as an Associate Professor in Management, I could see this coming, as could all of my colleagues. The rot had gradually set in during the mid-1990s. I visit Southern Cross every year and hear the kind of stories which Melissa Gregg has presented so well. The decline began to unfold. Clearly you are getting together in a big way and are organising to do something about that. Twenty years of commercialism, corporatisation, endless restructuring by Vice Chancellors, most of whom far too readily complied with the economic rationalist pressures from Government, have hurt the quality of universities beyond question. The education revolution promised by Rudd appears not to have reached the tertiary sector. It’ll be up the staff AND students to resurrect the mood of 1968 as soon as possible.
Resort to every weapon you can find, short of violence, to turn the tide. The generation of 1968 could do it. It was the students and junior staff who got that going. They said NO to what was dished out to them and took control. The unions joined them in France and Germany, but not in Berkeley perhaps. The time has come. The new revolution is here,
you need to remind Rudd and co. that universities are NOT business organisations. They are educational institutions. Everything that happens there needs to be geared to that overall objective. It no longer is. You have had enough.That is good news. We all have.
Klaas Woldring
Great article. Good luck.
Melissa, a good entry in these discussions and I think its good to now demarcate the point past crisis, and we are now seeing people of high quality intellect leave the academy.
I just want to respond quickly to Alex - whose work I have great respect for and who many years ago (unknowingly, I’m sure) inspired me to pursue research - with a few specific comments:
First, broadly - that the issues raised by Dr. Gregg are not necessarily alievated by more and better research outcomes, but are questions about the sustainability of the culture as it stands. The question for research institutions should be existential; is there the foundation of an ongoing and sustainable research environment. First, do productive people want to stay. Second, are unproductive people given opportunities to produce, or let go. Research outcome maximalisation is of course part and parcel of the situation. I respond here as someone who uses all of the methods listed - GTD, programmatic approaches, A* only journal strategies, grant record establishment, team and group publication outcomes - and publishes at what I think is a fair clip (4 peer reviewed objects a year + other outcomes). I am doing all of these things and feel they help me intellectually grow, which is what I care about - or what the university might call growth in the enjoyment metrics. I think these methods are good and I feel like they should be encouraged in new and emerging academics as much as possible - especially in the face of (as the article says) academics who do not self-measure in this way and do not publish with that speed. I work hard and I have no doubt there’s a future for me if I continue to do so - but I believe Dr. Gregg is alluding to the economic rationalist paradox. Sure, I’ve been made to think as mercenarily as possible; to capture all my interests and to drive outcomes, to embellish and circumnavigate the systems that measure me. So now I’m so economically rational, I’m not so sure that Australian universities provide me with the best research environments after all.
"this is a competitive process that is no different from other industries such as management consulting or project management." I think Dr. Gregg has been describing this as problem rather than symptom. I would share some sympathy with her position, if only because as our jobs take on more and more elements from management consulting and project management, we look upward to the system we’re working in and seeing inefficiencies.
I have come the other way; I had a weirdly rapid career in management consulting, but do not include that part of my life on my academic C.V.- nobody I work with knows this about me. Quite rightly, Alex, you pointed out that you need to focus on your research priorities in a strategic sense - and I don’t want to be identified as an effective administrator, which I once was.
I’m positive about the future because across many Universities, the numbers of students studying media, culture and technology is skyrocketing - and they are vociferous in wanting to be capable practitioners as well as deft thinkers, which is wedging the University into higher quality provision scenarios. In their response to syllabus (ie, widespread and total rejection of any difference between creative industries and cultural studies approaches), I feel like the wave has begun to break on economic cynicism and the Universities who wish to profit (properly, sustainably profit) will increasingly differentiate themselves by considering student outcomes and staff outcomes in the same formula.
Melissa, it seems to me you argue for solidarity and then quickly slip into the epitome of neo-liberal careerism that is strangling emerging academics thereby re-inscribing the very structure you self-proclaim to be leading the fight against. For example, "I could expect little support or publicity". Not getting enough attention? Solidarity for personal gain? Oh, the irony.
The narrow performance indicators of Australian Universities miss some major strategic opportunities. These include the requirement for grant funding that is not included as an indicator or the importance placed on this by other advanced economies. Secondly the lack of providing significant scope to community engagement.
While the performance process is well described by the above writer the readers would also like to know how this process is manipulated by University managers and other academics.
Other major opportunities are being lost in areas like new and innovative teaching practices and programs.
It is obvious that without autonomy, or, rather, with control of tertiary education in the hands of the pollies, we must remove the concept "Universal" from the name "University" and replace it with "Utility"
Imagine a successful footy team which is not permitted autonomy, which is forced to pay players civil service rates, which allows the Sports Minister to select football teams, which is forced to field players who have lost their athletic abilities, and which is not entitled to keep the proceeds of profitable sporting events.
We would not do these things to Australian Sport, why then do we do these things to Australian education?
Why do we deprive our Universities the same autonomy as our Sporting institutions?
What better institutionhs than our Universities to provide the human resource for that research which the private sector has come to commercially monopolise?
And has anybody asked why our ageing and retired academics, with decades of experience and with the most to contribute to these debates, are not invited to participate in our tertiary institutions?
An education (and the acquisition of one) has been gathered unto the bosom of Commodification - something practised by the better class of corporations, all around the world, in this Golden Age of Mediocrity. Going well, eh? Rob
Merlinau
What the general public fail to realise is that we don’t have "Universities" anymore. They have been replaced (thanks to the progressiion of underfunding started under Labour -Dawkins-) by corporations selling education.
It’s ALL about money-ALL about money!
If a course (or program) doesn’t make money, is too teaching labour or materials costly-drop it.
Melbourne has attempted to solve the problem by going to the extreme level of only offering a handful of undergraduate degrees; everything else is postgraduate (and proportionately expensive).
The senior management groups in these ‘corporatations’ aren’t managers; they are academics who try to manage-and often do so in defiance of all the wisdom that is taught in their business courses.
It can’t continue along this path much longer. And at the end of the day the only ones who suffer are the students who have never had to pay so much for their ‘education’.
Idealogues like Gillard want 40% of all 25-35 years olds with bachelor degrees by 2015, or some such nonesense.
Anyone in academe knows that a bachelors degree in 2009 is worth what a decent Matric was in 1999. ‘Entry level’ of meaningful degrees in business and industry is now at least Honours and rapidly becoming a Masters. It’s all a gigantic con.
Shame, Shame, Shame.
So the mentality of "Entitlement" is alive and well in the Public Sector.
Well Mel, welcome to the real world where hundreds with the same intellect compete for positions and promotions by working smarter and taking slow, often horizontal, steps to achieve their goals.
Remember it is the journey that really matters, not the destination.
Ah yes, the real world, that most heart-warming of bedtime stories. Where people compete and gain advantage by meritocracy. Where, precisely, is this true? In small business? In mineral trading? Perhaps in banking and finance?
Not everything runs better when run like a business. Least of all, it seems, businesses. But certainly not a University.
Disturbing article! Many respondents are down on Rudd and point out the Dawkins era, but do not mention that under 11 years of the Howard government, tertiary funding was REDUCED by 8%. During the same period OECD countries INCREASED spending on average by 47%.
Howard spent more public money on private schools than the entire university system! And people wonder why our universities prostitute themselves for the o.s. student dollar and can’t afford to offer better conditions for their teaching staff. Don’t even get me started on AWAs!
We are now paying for Howard’s massive funding cuts to tertiary education! And people crap on about what great economic managers the Coalition were!
I’ve just completed 5 years full-time study at UNSW and during that time I witnessed a sharp decline in standards - classes got bigger and the staff more overworked. The humanities library there is a joke!
Want more money spent on our universities? Then lets put an end to the funding of wealthy private secondary schools that was endemic under Howard and has sadly been continued by Rudd.
Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts and different views.
My point in the above post simply was: if you decide to play the institutional game, there are effective ways to do so.
A quick response to Christian (personal views again): thanks for your kind words. Your queries re: ‘sustainability of the culture’ and the existential dimensions of research institutions are relevant. Rather than generational shifts they may be understood by other frameworks: Spengler’s ‘decline of the west’ thesis, Mosca and Pareto’s ‘circulation of the elites’, PR Sarkar’s ‘vipra’ intellectuals versus ‘vaeshya’ merchants, or Mark Davis’s book Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism. I began to see these changes in 1993-94 as an undergraduate at La Trobe University.
In my response to Mary O’Kane’s CRC review in the Cutler Innovation Review, I mentioned an anecdote from Emanuel Derman’s autobiography My Life As A Quant. Derman tells of why he found Bell Labs to be a difficult research environment due to mismanagement, whereas he thrived at Goldman Sachs which had a flat and interdisciplinary team structure, appreciated the role of theory, and integrated the applied research with a commercial, deadline-driven team. Bloomberg Markets had a similar story on sell-side researchers who have left brokerage firms to form their own companies (http://is.gd/530DR). These are different institutional forms to many Australian universities and perhaps close to those that Christian experienced in his management consulting career.
Melissa’s article captures many issues that arise for ECR younger academics (and which I have also seen from several different viewpoints). A lot of her paper expresses, very eloquently, the disenchantment that ECR younger academics face, given the rising ‘hurdle’ requirements and competition, and their expectations given the ‘received’ mythos around the 1968-mid 1980s period. Are these expectations a prison? ECRs are also usually new and are starting to see how universities work as complex institutions (cf. Gareth Morgan’s metaphor approach to organisations, and Barry Oshry’s top-middle-bottom distinction). If you’re going to try and change things from the bottom-up, you need to take these institutional, political and worldview factors into account: many of the ‘existential’ ‘problems’ that Christian mentions are these, because they might suit competitive institutions rather than individuals (tournament theory). This is also why Lou Gerstner, Steve Jobs and Ricardo Semler are popular in change management circles.
What tends to happen – like the ‘up or out’ culture in management consulting – is that the productive researchers will form their own teams and networks via the institutional processes, and the unproductive researchers will burn out, concentrate solely on teaching, or pursue alternative opportunities. To get to Associate Professor or Professor is a ‘self-selecting’ career choice, where there are strategic leverage points.
The alternative I sometimes suggest are people like Andrew Lo and Robert Shiller in finance. They established a body of work, expertise, and an international reputation. They still teach undergraduate classes, and judging by Shiller’s course at AcademicEarth.org, get excellent guests. They parlayed this body of work and expertise into a ‘boundary-spanner’ role that translates this academic work into accessible ideas as public intellectuals. Finally, they have also distinguished between a basic/theory-building program of research in the academe, and an applied program of research that may occur in a commercial setting or university spin-out company/investment vehicle.
There are self-reinforcing and virtuous loops here across teaching, research, publishing, public dissemination, consulting and commercialisation activities. You will find a similar dynamic in the career histories of Trevor Barr, Axel Bruns, Clayton Christensen, Stuart Cunningham, Terry Flew, John Hartley, Michael Porter, CK Prahalad or any of the other ‘successful’ academics in strategy, cultural industries or cultural studies. Take a similar academic in the field of knowledge you want to develop expertise in, learn what they did (and did not do), and good luck with your chosen career path.
Has anyone else found the idea of corporatist sociopathy as an academic career strategem unattractive?
Melissa,
Right on the, er, money.
1. The goalposts keep changing for appointment and promotion;
2. The pay is crap;
3. Corporate identity and branding get in the way of doing good stuff.
One solution is to send all admin people (from PVC types to cleaners) home for a month, and if we need them we will call them in. If we don’t, they can consider themselives redundant.
Trust your conference goes well.
Opportunity wasted for your uni PR unit Melissa - they could / should’ve spun it that Sydney was ahead of the pack in exploring "academic futures", or some such thing.
Excellent article by Melissa Gregg.
I became happily semi-retired from a senior post in academia and 4 decades of scientific research at the end of 2003 after capping a dedicated career and over 100 research papers with publication of a huge pharmacological text in New York and London (to meet the publication deadline for the latter, in addition to my other responsibilities, I was working 7 days per week in the workplace for several years).
However each year since then I have been teaching on a casual basis in the tertiary sector. Thus in 2007 and 2009 I gave the equivalent of a full-time academic’s full-time undergraduate teaching load (theory and practical second year science courses) in about 10% of the time and for about 10% of the money at an excellent university.
Now I am happy with this (I love teaching, I don’t really need the money) as are my students (they do well under my tutelage), colleagues (I don’t compete for scarce intramural resources) and the institution (I greatly assist their bottom line).
However there are some downsides for students, notably (a) university teaching should be research-informed (while I now publish very widely and prolifically overseas in books and magazine articles at a science-society interface, I co-authored my last laboratory-based scientific research paper in a good journal in my discipline in 2006 - as we scientists say, "You are only as good as your last paper") and (b) I (and many other casual academics) are living proof that undergraduates are paying about 10 times too much for their undergraduate tuition - they (and especially the exploited overseas students and local students paying full fees for lateral entry to top universities) are being ripped off.
Education should and can be free e.g. see Accredited Remote Learning (ARL, "ARL for All and All for ARL", sounds great in Dixie-lingo:
http://accreditedremotelearning.blogspot.com/2007/01/education-should-be… ).
Nevertheless, a further upside for me is that I have a huge amount of time for researching and publishing world-wide at a crucially important, Big Picture, science-society interface (e.g. re the worsening Climate Emergency and horrendous excess deaths associated with US global hegemony and racist Zionist and US Alliance wars, occupations and genocidal devastation in a swathe of Muslim countries; e.g. see Countercurrents, Bellaciao, Media With Conscience News, MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/Gideon-Polya ) - whereas full-time academics are variously constrained by Codes of Conduct and by self-preserving self-censorship from public comment on such matters.
Things are bad in academia as a result of the disgusting policies of the anti-intellectual, anti-science, pro-coal, pro-war, pro-Zionist, genocide-complicit, genocide-denying, war criminal, climate criminal, traitororus, anti-Arab anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish anti-Semitic, racist, quisling Lib-Labs.
Things were actually better before the Australian Labor Party became the Indigenous human rights-violating Apartheid Labor Party and Lib-Nat look-alikes under Kevin Howard (aka Johnny Rudd, Religious Right Rudd, R3, KFC Rudd, or Kevin 07 because the annual death rate is 7% for under-5 year old infants in Australian-occupied Afghanistan as compared to 4% for Poles under the Nazis of and 5% for French Jews under the Nazis and Lib-Lab-like Vichy).
For what things were like a few years ago see the transcript of my 2001 nation-wide ABC broadcast entitled "Crisis in our universities" (see: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s347931.htm ) and "Current censorship and self-censorship in Australian universities" (see: http://www.publicuni.org/journal/volume/1/jpu_1_s_polya.pdf ).
Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
Ten years ago I was a mature age university student studying Anthroplogy and Archeaology and although I found a certain satisfaction with the quality of the lecturers, many of the tutors were underpaid, (some were even under-graduates) and some were inexperienced as teachers and obviously hired as cheap labour.
This is not good enough for any university, which should be aiming for only the best academically, and that is not necessarily always about garnering information only to be used for economically productive means or by just keeping costs down.
Academia is about the gaining of specialised knowledge and information, the working over of ideas, that might be too esoteric or complex to be easily understood by the bulk of the population and therefore all too easily undervalued by our society.
This gap in undervalueing and misunderstanding academia must be addressed so that higher education is seen as indispensible, more user friendly and acceptable.
University publicity departments that work hard towards the aim of raising public awareness, could relate some real anecdotes about the positive effects of academia to ensure the continued (and even raised) support of governments and industry. They should clearly outline government and corporate responsiblities and benefits for educating their citizens and employees respectively.
And finally one of the reasons I suspended my studies, was fear of appropriation and rightful attribution, as I had discovered (and wanted to write about) what I believed to be a new perspective on the ancient connections between Egypto-Greco-Semitic culture, in relation to phonetics and the written word.
Great article Mel, and lots of good comments too.
But isn’t the solution obvious—join the union, organise, and make your demands heard?
Kitvv - Mel’s been doing that for a while, and to her credit has raised the issue inside the NTEU quite effectively. Unfortunately the NTEU’s focus doesn’t really include sessional academics, and there’s a bit of institutional friction as to the best approach. Whether or not to support tenure, for example - many career academics want to protect it, understandably, but it also contributes to the poor conditions for early career researchers.
I’ve written a little bit about the perspective of career researchers who work outside the academy here (sorry to spam with a link to my own site).
Alex, thanks for your thoughtful response; I appreciate the inclusion of modelling outcomes on previously successful academics. As it turns out, I agree from a completely different incursion into the academic creative industries model. While I don’t think creative industries is compromised in the way that many people in cultural studies approaches have discussed, I think its important to categorise it as a field with its own history and needs. (and as an a method of cultural-academic organisation, as many have said.) Parlaying work into industry certainly works well for those interested in studying industries (of course). But the same model applies elsewhere; successful academics in fields less interpretable for industries have their own models which are worth examining. As for "unproductive researchers will burn out, concentrate solely on teaching, or pursue alternative opportunities.", I think this relates to how the push to industry connection, of which CI is but a small part, has changed not only the University but the types of people who become academics. I would like to know more from people who have twenty-thirty years experience - are there more people now coming into academic work who do so out of a partially commercial imperative - would be a very interesting question to me.
Labor has betrayed students, academics and universities, beginning with the Dawkinization of universities in about 1990, the retreat from the free tertiary education brought in by Whitlam in the 1970s and the continuing squeeze on university funding. The Libs are even worse.
It is high time the National Tertiary Education Union - and indeed other unions - bit the bullet and shifted its allegiance (and financial support) from the racist, extreme right-wing, pro-coal, pro-war, pro-Zionist, anti-Indigenous Rights, anti-intellectual, anti-Science Australian Labor Party (aka the Apartheid Labor Party or Apartheid Israel-supporting Labor Party) to the anti-racist, centrist, anti-coal, anti-war, anti-racism, pro-human rights, pre-peace, pro-environment, pro-intellectual, pro-science, pro-Humanity, pro-Planet Australian Greens.
Indeed NTEU members are probably ETHICALLY required to advocate this because the "line in the sand" for any teacher is false instruction of students and of children (and indeed of anyone in general) - yet we have a flood of egregiously FALSE statements from Apartheid Labor Party politicians who tell us that LNG (methane) is "clean energy" (REALITY: it generates CO2 on combustion), talk of "clean coal" (REALITY: it generates CO2 on combustion and CO2 sequestration has yet to be developed for, let alone applied on, a commercial, industrial scale) and that the Rudd Labor-Turnbull Liberal ETS is a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (REALITY: US Energy Information Administration data indicates that Labor’s "60% off 2000 GHG by 2050" means that Australia’s annual Domestic and Exported GHG pollution will INCREASE to 173% of the 2000 level by 2050 and the permanent exclusion of agriculture from a GHG cap means commitment to more than 50% of current GHG pollution FOREVER).
Peace is the only way but Silence kills and Silence is complicity.
I have a somewhat different view of the creative industries push. I see CI as a method to bring transgressive activity under the control of corporate values so as to extract profit for corporates. In my view CI represents a fundamentally conservative image of society where the only purpose of human life is to engage with and support the existing system of social inequalities as represented through corporate interests. CI often puts itself forward as having arisen though a unique set of conditions and representing a new sort of intellectual labour. Nothing could be further from the truth. It represents an old model of hierarchy, obediance and dehumanised labour.
The idea that academics can adopt the management philosophies of conservative corporatism as a strategic mechanism whilst maintaining broader academic value to the community is not supported unless one identifies utterly with the exisiting social structures of dominance and inequality. I would think that academics who make that identification are merely functionaries of the existing power base. Not surprisingly, during this era of corporatism, such an indentification leads to rewards within academia. Particularly within those disciplines that do not have a physically verifiable set of conditions limiting outcomes (eg science/engineering etc), but whose outcomes are primarily arrived at through social negotiation ie as struggles for power (eg cultural studies etc).
Great article. Your arguments pretty much cover the reasons I have decided to pursue a different career.
Complicating the whole matter is that the life of a low ranking academic is no great shakes anyway. There are assistant store managers making more money, and they don’t have to have a Phd.
Why knock yourself out as an academic when, for a minor reduction in salary and a dip ed, you can get a job as a high school teacher?
Or take those hard won research skills and countless hours of experience as a sessional tutor/ lecturer and make a killing in the corporate world in either training or research.
Sadly, academics are no longer just employees of the university. They are now also a resource that can be exploited.
This is a very good piece. Send it to the VC’s of all our universities, because they are a collective disgrace.
I’ve experienced the job selection process nightmares outlined in this piece - impossible selection criteria that the senior members of the Department in question certainly didn’t meet when they started out and many of whom didn’t even meet at the time of the job application.
Great article Mel. I think that a lot of things have been happening in academia in the last decade or so, and one that you haven’t mentioned is the enormous increase in the number of people gaining PhDs. Naturally, a lot of them want to work in academia - for many that is the only world they are really familiar with - and there simply aren’t enough jobs for them all. The competition thus engendered leads to some of the pressure you’re describing. I’m not saying it’s a good thing - far from it. But it is one of the issues in the mix. In some disciplines (especially in some professional faculties), ten years ago you mightn’t have had a single person with a completed PhD applying for an entry-level position; now, as you point out, it is not even the entry-level minimum.
But I have to wonder why you use the phrase "even administrative work within universities". More and more PhD grads are finding that admin work is satisfying, interesting, and even that it uses many of their skills. I am glad to see people with PhDs working in admin. Academics often complain that administrators don’t understand their problems, and it seems to me that appointing administrators with PhDs, or supporting administrators to get PhDs, is one way to help with this.
Finally, as a baby-boomer, I would gladly ‘move aside’ if I didn’t worry that I won’t have enough super if Iive more than ten years after retirement! I get very tired, working full-time and studying at 58, and I’d love to find a way to work part-time, but I can’t see that happening for at least another seven years.
Universities were supposed to be about research and teaching, and employing the best people with these talents in order to educate our brightest young minds. Somewhere over the last 30 years this whole concept has been lost. We now have corporations with CEOs (although still given the title of Vice Chancellor) who believe their role is to sell something they redefine as higher education but is really just a ticket to permanent residency, or the minimum level certificate to a particular profession. They feel a need to flaunt how good they are by building extremely expensive architectural landmarks, and giving them florid names (usually with someone’s name and the word ‘centre’ in it), while at the same time dumbing down educational content, extending degrees, reducing staff numbers, and generally making life miserable for the creative staff who try to work there. As exemplified by our most recent ‘australian’ nobel laureate, you need to leave Australia early in your career in order to have opportunities that would never be granted here. When you are well recognised overseas, you will get lucrative offers to come back, but unless there are compelling reasons to return, they don’t.
If we want to do more in Australia than mining, agriculture and tourism, then it needs to be realised that investing in universities is a critical element in producing new ideas, new talent, and graduates who can take up responsibilities at any level and in any place in the world. Yet we have to watch the continuing incompetence, such as the Glyn Davis soap opera at the University of Melbourne, as he wields the ‘Melbourne Model’ hammer of ignorance to decimate the once proud Victorian College of the Arts.