AUR 62 01

vol. 62, no. 1, 2020 Published by NTEU

ISSN 0818–8068

AUR

Australian Universities’Review

AUR Editor Dr Ian R. Dobson, Monash University

AUR Editorial Board Dr Alison Barnes, NTEU National President Professor Timo Aarrevaara, University of Lapland Professor Jamie Doughney, Victoria University Professor Leo Goedegebuure, University of Melbourne Professor Jeff Goldsworthy, Monash University Dr Mary Leahy, University of Melbourne Professor Kristen Lyons, University of Queensland Professor Dr Simon Marginson, University of Oxford Matthew McGowan, NTEU General Secretary Dr Alex Millmow, Federation University Australia Dr Neil Mudford, University of Queensland Jeannie Rea, Victoria University Professor Paul Rodan, Swinburne University of Technology

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vol. 62, no. 1, 2020 Published by NTEU

ISSN 0818–8068

Australian Universities’ Review 2

Letter from the editor Ian R Dobson

ARTICLES 3

Losing faith in the classification and evaluation of research: A meta-metrics approach to research on religion in Australia Adam Possamai & Gary Long

Compares and contrasts results from data produced by the ARC’s Field of Research classification and global ranking data.

Also noted are contrasts in outcomes between ‘peer review’ disciplines and ‘citation’ disciplines.

10 Disciplines in their organisational context: Mapping Australian faculty structures to the ASCED and ANZSRC fields of education and research

OPINION 51 Watch out! The great university implosion is on its way Richard Hil

China is supposedly undermining our national security and way of life and causing ructions on university campuses. Time to take stock of the threat before us! Where is Dad’s Army when you need it?

54 Academic clickbait: The arcane art of research article titling Tim Moore

How to come up with a killer journal article title. Don’t forget the colon.

57 What ongoing staff can do to support precariously employed colleagues

Philip Hider & Mary Coe

The Academic Precariat

This study investigates the extent to which the national classifications of disciplines reflect the organisational structures of Australia’s universities.

Precarious employment is on the rise. What can be done to help the Academic Precariat survive?

18 What will follow the international student boom?

Future directions for Australian higher education Angel Calderon

Considers university futures, especially in light of the reliance on international students, coupled with international political and educational developments, and Australian demographic trends.

26 Organisational narratives vs the lived neoliberal reality: Tales from a regional university Marg Rogers, Margaret Sims, Jo Bird & Sue Elliott

This paper considers the gap (or even chasm) between what universities say about themselves, and the reality for staff.

41 ‘Amplifier’ platforms and impact: Australian scholars’ use of The Conversation Kim Osman & Stuart Cunningham

Digital and social media have changed the world of scholarly communication. The Conversation is a highly-regarded and widely-read medium, but do universities support or assist their staff in these communication endeavours?

63 It’s all about building a narrative Arthur O’Neill

The universities said it! Arthur provides a (thinkable) scenario, via the University of Central Tasmania.

REVIEWS 66 Brain, brain, go away; come again another day Why the Brain Matters. A teacher explores neuroscience by John Tibke Reviewed by Andrys Onsman

68 Resistance is not futile Resisting Neoliberalism in Education – Local, National and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Lyn Tett & Mary Hamilton Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

71 All bull, no point Bullshit Jobs – The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It by David Graeber

75 Responsible academics The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years by Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight & Neil Smith Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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Letter from the editor Ian R Dobson Another year is upon us! Time for more scholarship and opinion to be aired in the Australian Universities’ Review. Not to mention a few book reviews.

This issue, we have started with a pair of ‘quantoid’ papers, research and commentary that are built around how we ‘measure’ aspects of Australian higher education. First, Adam Possamai and Gary Long examined research into the Field of Research Code for ‘Religion and Religious Studies’. They found that there has been an apparent drop in quality of research in this field and decided that this could be due to the way this code has been constructed. Will you lose faith as well?

Meanwhile, Philip Hider and Mary Coe compared the national classification of disciplines with the organisational structures of Australian universities. Their analysis showed ‘…a fair degree of alignment…’ between classification schemes and faculty structures in the sample of universities they examined. Similarly, there had been little change of alignment between the current and previous research classifications.

Next, Angel Calderon, the numbers whiz from RMIT, has examined Australian higher education since the so-called Dawkins reforms in the late 1980s, and considers the challenges that our sector might face in coming years. He looks at two major drivers: dependence on the revenue stream from international students, and the changing demographic pattern of the Australian population.

Marg Rogers and her colleagues from the University of New England have examined what universities say about themselves in their mission statements and self-promotional glossies and consider the similarities and differences between such published materials with the ‘lived reality’ of the workers.

What universities say about themselves ought to be ‘true to the narratives… [and] …an accurate representation of what happens’. How is it at your university?

In the last issue, we published a paper by Kim Osman and Stuart Cunningham about ‘amplifier platforms’. This expression was a new one for me, but after reading the paper I felt that I knew quite a bit about the topic. This issue, they have followed up, with a piece on how Australian scholars use one such platform, The Conversation. Every morning, my e-day starts with The Conversation, and I’m sure I’m not alone there. Do universities support their scholars in their societal engagement activities via The Conversation (and others)? Unfortunately, such institutional support ‘… is uneven and underdeveloped’.

And so, to opinion pieces! Although publication of peerreviewed scholarly papers in journals is what results in brownie

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Letter from the editor Ian R Dobson

points for academics and universities, this is not the only way to get a message out on the street. Amplifier platforms are one way to send a message, and opinion published in AUR is another way. This issue, we have four sets of opinion, starting with Richard Hil, author of those must-reads Whackademia, and Selling Students Short. Richard points to ‘the great university implosion’, just down the track. Perhaps following Angel Calderon’s commentary on overseas students, he says ‘…it has become glaringly obvious that Australian universities are massively over-reliant on overseas students for their income and face an epic implosion when this revenue stream… dries up.’ And of course, universities would never pressure academics to increase the marks they give to some students!

Tim Moore reports on an analysis of journal article titles.

As he puts it ‘The research is complete, the article written, there’s just one last job – think of a great title, one that not only elegantly summarises your research, but that is also going to grab the attention of a fickle and perpetually time-poor readership’.

Read this paper to learn about ‘the ubiquitous colon’, the dos and don’ts of article titles, and marvel at the 48-word title of a DNA-related paper from about 30 years ago.

Writing about precarious employment in universities, TheAcademicPrecariat (‘a collective that writes about precarious academic employment from the perspective of those who have and continue to experience it’), ‘…offer suggestions to ongoing academics on how to improve the working lives and conditions of precarious colleagues’. Enough said!

Final word this issue (apart from the book reviews) goes to Arthur O’Neill, who daubs an interesting canvas by picking up on what (mostly) universities have said about themselves. If you hadn’t heard of the University of Central Tasmania before, well, you will have now! Move over, Hitchhiker’s Guide.

On to the book reviews. You will notice the ever-presence of serial reviewer Thomas Klikauer. When does this man sleep?

Thomas has provided three reviews this issue. Of course, Andrys Onsman is no slouch either. Read on, and then visit a book shop or library near you.

Finally, I should like to thank the authors and peer reviewers for their work, and many thanks are also due to the production and editorial team that work so hard to put AUR together. We’ll be back in September with more scintillating material for your edification and amusement.

Ian R Dobson is Editor of AUR, and an Adjunct member of the Professional Staff at Monash University, Australia. vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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Losing faith in the classification and evaluation of research A meta-metrics approach to research on religion in Australia Adam Possamai & Gary Long Western Sydney University

This article uses a meta-metrics approach to research the research in Religion and Religious Studies (Field of Research (FoR) Code 2204) in Australia. Comparing and contrasting various results from the data provided by the Australian Research Council (ARC) on its Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) process, as well as global rankings data, the findings point to a reported drop of quality of research in this field. In this article we argue that this loss of quality could be due to the way this FoR Code is constructed and we call for its revision. This research also points to a considerable disparity between peer review disciplines such as FoR Code 2204 and citation disciplines.

Keywords: ERA, religion, metrics, citations, FoR Codes

Introduction This article is a response to the call from Wilsdon et al.

(2015) recommending more research on research. To enact this, it re-appropriates the metrics system in a meta-metric approach to shed light on the work that academics are undertaking in Australia in the field of religion and religious studies. As such, it is not aimed at comparing and measuring individuals and/or organisations, but at allowing academics in this field to understand the impact on their work of metrics, peer assessment, and processes, and, hopefully, give them an understanding of their alienation from the products of their labour. The aim of this research is to provide tangible evidence, for the first time, concerning the academic success of the broad field of religion and religious studies as categorised and assessed by official government channels in Australia.

The field of study under research here is categorised as 2204 vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

Religion and Religious Studies and is one of the 157 FoR codes used to classify research activities in Australia and New Zealand. It is a code that includes a topic of research (religion as researched by, for example, anthropologists and historians) and a specific discipline (religious studies including, in this classification, theology).

The use of metrics for research is not a new process. Rennet al. (2016) trace it back to 350 years ago when bibliometrics were used to statistically analyse publications. The first citation analysis was used in 1927 to produce a ranking of chemistry journals, and when the impact factor of journals was created as an indicator in the 1960s by the Institute for Scientific Information, it was meant to provide librarians with information to help them decide which journals to subscribe to. It was only later that this metric led to the ranking of journals to evaluate the performance of researchers and institutions. However, this article is not a discussion on the validity and social use of the research metrics currently

Losing faith in the classification and evaluation of research Adam Possamai & Gary Long

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available. This has been done quite extensively elsewhere. the practice of various private and governmental agencies Findings can be supportive of the status quo such as the work collecting statistics over the Internet as ‘soft biopower’ and of Terämäet al. (2016) on the metrics used by the Research ‘soft biopolitics’. These data help to categorise Internet users’ Excellence Framework (REF) system in the UK. They found activities at both local and global levels. In today’s world, the that measurement of research quality and research impact population is managed not only in the offline realm but in from institutions are aligned, and that there is little evidence the online one as well. Although the conceptual image of the that the current pursuit of impact detracts from the quality of panopticon would be useful in this case, it needs to be updated research. Other more critical research can vary from proposing with the concerns of the time. New expressions such as ‘panthe notion of responsible metrics to deal with the unintended optic surveillance’, ‘panspectric veillance’, ‘synoptic veillance’ consequences of this system (Wilsdonet al., 2015), to a and ‘überveillance’ are used to describe these changes in policy critic (Woelert, 2015), to a Marxist observation that security and control processes (Lupton, 2015, pp 36-37). academics are losing control of their surplus time (Hall, Brivot and Gendron (2011) have demonstrated that new 2018). There are other types of critiques of the way quality is technologies have increased the capacity for surveillance. It is measured; these are on how citations and journal ranking can now possible to keep track of everyone’s data, not just those lead to ‘journal list fetishism’ (Gruber, 2014), on how citation of deviant populations as in the eighteenth and nineteenth behaviours can be linked to external pressures and personal centuries. Everyone is now being monitored and providing motives (Aksnes et al., 2019), on how citations affect ranking data. According to Brivot and Gendron (2011), Reigeluth in problematic ways, or on how (2014), and Stiegler (2015), they lead to perverse effects this leads to a predictive, ... research metrics are tools of social such as those of ‘gaming’ algorithmic governmentality: construction aligned with a neoliberal with quantitative indicators ‘a form of power-knowledge paradigm and are thus more related to (Wilsdon, 2015). These predicated on profiling biopolitics than to (supposedly neutral) metrics are not just simply practices and concerns with the demanded by universities to prevention of certain types of statistics. build their prestige and gain behaviour’ (Brivot & Gendron, resources, and as the 2015 2011, p.139). When someone Wilsdon report stated for the UK system, there are also surfs the net, buys commodities online, downloads files, ‘likes’, demands from the government and policymakers to be able to ‘tags’ or ‘tweets’, this information is stored and used to analyse access ‘big data’ on research at a fast pace. and anticipate trends for similar users. These trends are The method of using metrics to analyse metrics for this calculated by algorithms used as a form of governmentality. article requires some justification. Statistically speaking, This form of governmentality is no longer based on the it is not methodologically grounded enough to justify the statistics or demographic assessments developed by social comparison between data on ERA results, and global rankings scientists, but on data collected, through people’s use of the outcome. But metrics are not always scientifically valid Internet, by web analytics firms trying to fine-tune computer statistical instruments. Wilsdonet al. (2015) make reference to algorithms to provide the best possible (market) knowledge. the 2013 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment This practice is mainly aimed not at finding abnormalities with more than 570 organisations and 12,000 individuals who in the present (as it is in classical governmentality), but at have signed expressing their scepticism regarding the practice predicting future (consumer) behaviour. This same practice of using metrics in research management. For example, they is now adopted in the higher education sector with these argue that measuring the quality of one’s work according to research metrics to track the performance of institutions and citations or the impact factor of a journal has many deficiencies staff and measure the return for research investment from as a tool for research assessment. government. In these types of methods, any measurement The perspective of this article is that research metrics are that allows a form of control is thus a good measurement. tools of social construction aligned with a neoliberal paradigm Paradoxically, one goal of this article is to use these metric and are thus more related to biopolitics than to (supposedly systems against each other to shed light, not necessarily on the neutral) statistics. Indeed, in a classical Foucauldian approach, performance of a specific field of research, but on how this governments use statistics and other types of demographic field is evaluated and impacted. assessment to measure and forecast populations. This allows This research is aligned with other types of work which a government to predict population change and unrest and have used ERA results to assess the strength of a discipline if it is not possible to modify undesirable trends, at least at the international level such as the research paper from to compensate for their effects. Cheney-Lippold (2011) McKenna et al. (2017) on nursing, and Crowe and Watt has adapted these theories to digital capitalism, discussing (2016) on psychology. This article also adds another source

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Losing faith in the classification and evaluation of research Adam Possamai & Gary Long

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of knowledge, or of metrics, for this analysis by exploring relevant global rankings (see below).

Peer review vs citation discipline comparison The first round of ERA happened in 2010 to evaluate the quality of universities’ output for the six-year period from 2003 to 2008. The second one took place in 2012 (for 2005 to 2010), the third in 2015 (for 2008 to 2013) and the fourth one in 2018 (for 2011 to 2016).

Overall, there were 7,117 Units of evaluation (UoE) at the 4-digit Field of Research (FoR) level for the combined ERA 2010, ERA 2012, ERA 2015 and ERA 2018. One UoE makes reference to one university being assessed for one FoR code.

This excludes FoRs that were not rated. Of these, 5,879 UoEs (i.e. 83 per cent) were rated at world standard or better (3, 4 or 5). A score of 3 signifies a research quality on par with world standard, with 4 and 5 above and leading. Any score below 3 represents an outcome below world standard.

These UoEs can be broadly categorised into those that were assessed primarily on the citations of publications, and those that were based on peer review. In fields of research dominated by the output of journal articles, the process involves the calculation of citations per article as provided by world databases such as Web of Science or Scopus. In the fields of research that still contribute to the publication of journal articles, but also book chapters and monographs, the quality of these publications is judged by a panel of assessors (peer review) rather than by the number of citations. Thirty per cent of all publications in these disciplines is selected by each university and then distributed to these peer reviewers for assessment. Between these two categories, the spread of disciplines is fairly equal: 46.5 per cent were based on peer review, with 53.4 per cent based on citation analysis.

However, the ratings produced by these two methods differs significantly.

Ninety-two per cent of the citation disciplines were rated at world standard or better (3, 4 or 5) while only 71 per cent of the peer review disciplines were rated at world standard or better (3, 4 or 5). This begs the questions of whether science discipline ratings are inflated, whether peer review scores are suppressed, or whether the assessment is correct. FoR Code 2204 Religion and Religious Studies is one of the peer review disciplines. We are guessing that the pool of academics used to assess its performance comes from religious studies and cultural studies academics, theologians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, etc., and mainly from Australia. These would come from a broad mix of Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines.

We come now to the question of assessing peer disciplines broadly. Some disciplines have a small number of UoEs. We vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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have used a threshold of 30 UoEs across these periods, to generate more robust results. This has narrowed down the number of peer reviewed disciplines to 38. Of these, 26 peer reviewed disciplines have less than the 83 per cent national average that are rated 3, 4 or 5. See Table 1.

On the other hand, there are 54 citation disciplines that have at least 30 UoEs. Of these, only five citation-based disciplines, as listed in Table 2, have less than the 83% national average that are rated at 3, 4 or 5.

To further this comparison, and this time with a focus on ERA 2018 only as found in Figure 1, the average rating for all peer review UoEs was 3.1 while the average rating for citation Table 1: Peer Review FoR Code below average performers FoR Code

No. of UoEs*

% 3, 4, 5

2001 – Communication & Media Studies

73

82%

2002 – Cultural Studies

94

79%

1201 – Architecture

60

78%

1901 – Art Theory and Criticism

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109

78%

0803 – Computer Software

35

77%

1401 – Economic Theory

34

76%

1602 – Criminology

54

76%

1608 – Sociology

118

74%

1801 – Law

127

72%

0806 – Information Systems

80

71%

2204 – Religion and Religious Studies

51

69%

1607 – Social Work

62

68%

1502 – Banking, Finance and Investment

76

67%

1904 – Performing Arts & Creative Writing

1606 – Political Science

93

65%

140

63%

1905 – Visual Arts and Crafts

68

63%

1506 – Tourism

69

62%

1202 – Building

41

61%

1505 – Marketing

99

61%

1605 – Policy and Administration

78

56%

1302 – Curriculum and Pedagogy

131

53%

1402 – Applied Economics

123

53%

88

53%

1301 – Education Systems

103

49%

1503 – Business and Management

143

45%

1303 – Specialist Studies In Education

1501 – Accounting, Auditing & Accountability

* One UoE in this analysis refers to one university being assessed in one FoR code as part of one of the ERA assessments.

Losing faith in the classification and evaluation of research Adam Possamai & Gary Long

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No. of UoEs*

% 3,4,5

80%

1114 – Paediatrics and Reproductive Medicine

51

82%

40%

0202 – Atomic, Molecular, Nuclear, Particle and Plasma Physics

35

80%

1702 – Cognitive Sciences

32

78%

1701 – Psychology

121

71%

1117 – Public Health and Health Services

127

67%

* One UoE in this analysis refers to one university being assessed in one FoR code as part of one of the ERA assessments.

UoEs was 4.0. While citation disciplines make up 58 per cent of all disciplines assessed, they make up 85 per cent of the UoEs rated 5 and only 16 per cent of the UoEs rated 2.

Citation-based disciplines are assessed using metrics based on world benchmarks. Peer review disciplines, on the other hand, are based on more subjective analysis. This difference of outcome seems disproportionate to say the least, and puts in question either the process of peer review disciplines, or the quality of the work performed by academics in these disciplines, compared with their peers who are judged mainly on their citations. That said, the report by Wilsdonet al.

(2015) on the research metric system as used in the UK and recommends quite explicitly to continue supporting the peer review process, as metrics, even if imperfect, should help rather than replace the judgement of experts. This also raises the issue of whether peer review disciplines are ranked at the correct level, while the citations ones are inflated due to the metric system.

Nevertheless, either the ERA process disadvantages peer review disciplines which includes FoR Code 2204 Religion and Religious Studies or reflects the weaker performance of these disciplines.

ERA, religion and Australian universities This section comes back to the focus of this article on 2204 Religion and Religious Studies, examining the Australian universities that participated in any of the three ERA processes for FoR code 2204. Table 3 shows only the universities that scored a result for 2204. The others did not reach a volume of publication high enough to be assessed.

Indeed, if a university’s output is below a specific publication threshold, it is not assessed as part of the ERA process. Eleven universities participated in this process for this FoR code. The leading institution (with an average of 3.75) across these four assessments was the Australian Catholic University. Monash University and the University of Queensland followed with an average of 3.5. As expected, universities from the Group

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Table 2: Citation below average performers FoR Code

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20% 0%

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Citation

Figure 1: 2018 ERA Rating Distribution by percentage of Eight tended to score higher (average of 3.4) followed by the Unaligned Universities (2.8) and the Innovative Research Universities (2.4). Perhaps unsurprising, none of the universities from the Australian Technology Network published enough work in religion for its FoR code to be assessed.

Also in Table 3, a comparison has been attempted with global rankings. For this assessment, we followed the results of Vernon et al. (2018) in their systematic review of university rankings, which recommends using global rankings in tandem rather than one at a time. Unfortunately, the only global ranking system close to the ARC’s FoR Code 2204 is the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World Rankings for the discipline ‘Theology, Divinity & Religious Studies’.

The Times Higher Education’s closest subject is ‘History, Philosophy & Theology’ and would involve three different Australian FoR Codes whereas the former ranking only deals with one. Out of the 11 universities having a result for ERA 2018, only 4 make the top 100 in the world that are listed. Of these four universities, apart from one which did not reach the threshold for ERA 2018, the ERA 2018 average result is 3.

None of the Australian universities with a score of 2 in 2018 were among the top 100.

We note that there has been a drop from 6 (in 2018) to 4 (in 2019) of Australian universities in the top 100 in QS ranking, and a drop in average ERA from 3.4 in 2015 to 2.6 in 2018. This seems to indicate an overall drop in the quality in Australian universities in the field of religion studies, as assessed by two metrics; or a move away from publishing in this category (e.g. moving historical pieces on religion from religious studies publications to historical publications).

To test how FoR Code 2204 would rate as a citation discipline, we used the information provided by SciVal and InCites (see Table 4). We checked the articles published in religious studies during the period covered by ERA 2018 for each of the universities ranked for the last ERA, even though only 44 per cent of the publications were journal articles.

These should be regarded as affiliated articles whereas ERA includes staff back catalogue based on who is recognised as a contributor on an ARC defined census date. Potentially

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Table 3: Institutional Network Network

Universities+

ERA Scores

2010

Group of Eight (Go8)

2012

2015

2018

Average ERA Score per Round

University of Melbourne

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3

3

N.A.

3.3

University of Sydney

3

3

4

3

University of Queensland

4

3

4

3

Monash University

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4

4

3.5

3.25

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Average ERA Score per Round: Go8 Innovative Research Universities (IRU)

QS Theology, Divinity, and Religious Studies (World Ranking from 1 to 100)

Murdoch University Flinders University La Trobe University Western Sydney University

Average ERA Score per Round: IRU

2018

2019

51-100

51-100

3.25

37

51-100

3.5

51-100

N.A.

3

3.5

34

43

3.75

3

3.4

4

2

2.75

N.A.

N.A.

3

2

3

N.A.

2.6

N.A.

N.A.

N.A.

2

N.A.

N.A.

2

N.A.

N.A.

2

3

3

2

2.5

N.A.

N.A.

2.3

2.5

3.3

2

2.4

2

N.A.

N.A.

N.A.

2

N.A.

N.A.

N.A.

Australian N.A. Technology Network (ATN) Regional Universities Network (RUN)

University of New England

Average ERA Score per Round: RUN Unaligned

2 Australian Catholic University

4

Charles Sturt University

2

Deakin University

2

Edith Cowan University

2

Macquarie University

3

University of Divinity University of Newcastle

2 3

4

4

3.75

51-100

2

3

2

2.25

N.A.

N.A.

N.A.

N.A.

3

2.5

45

51-100

N.A.

N.A

N.A.

2

N.A.

N.A.

N.A.

N.A.

N.A.

3

N.A.

N.A.

3

3

3

3

3

N.A.

N.A.

4

3

4

2

3.25

N.A

N.A.

N.A.

1

2

2

1.6

N.A.

N.A.

Average ERA Score per Round: Unaligned

2.8

2.25

3

2.6

2.8

Total Average Score per Round

2.6

2.7

3.4

2.6

3.0

University of Notre Dame

+ Only those universities with a result for FoR code 2204 have been included in this table.

these articles do not reflect the 30 per cent nominated for the ERA peer review. On top of this, while 1,019.2 articles were included in ERA 2018, only 462 were reported in SciVal, and 303 in InCites. These publications refer only to articles vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

published in journals in religious studies and theology (as listed in these databases), and not for example, in psychology or anthropology journals that have included an article on religion. They do not represent all the articles submitted for

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Table 4: Testing 2204 as a Citation Discipline* Institution

SciVal

InCites

ERA 2018 Rating

Scholarly Output

Field-Weighted Citation Impact

Web of Science Documents

Category Normalised Citation Impact

Australian Catholic University

4

112

1.58

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1.02

Deakin University

3

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0.77

32

0.54

Monash University

3

70

0.92

47

0.88

University of Queensland

3

30

1.17

20

0.82

University of Sydney

3

86

1.29

42

1.22

Charles Sturt University

2

36

0.82

16

0.26

Murdoch University

2

15

0.98

14

0.63

University of Newcastle

2

35

0.48

24

0.54

University of Notre Dame Australia

2

6

1.49

5

0.28

Western Sydney University

2

30

1.24

13

1.63

Average

2.6

Total Articles University of Divinity

462 3

ERA. Were this not the case, few universities would meet the ERA threshold. Although the numbers are smaller, we expect the articles categorised in these two global systems to have been published in the major journals in religious studies and theology and thus have a higher probability of attracting citations. The data are thus not directly comparable but should be a reasonable indication. However, the data provided in Table 4 are those used for the various global ranking metrics.

As an exercise, without speculating on the possible higher or lower score of Australian universities, we allocated a score for citation impact: • 5 to any citation impact above 1.8, • 4 to any above 1.4, • 3 to any above 0.9, • 2 to any that was lower than 0.89, and • 1 for lower than 0.49.

We added all results from our reading of a Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and a Category Normalised Citation Impact (CNCI) of the 20 results and averaged them.

Note that an FWCI of 1.00 indicates that the publications have been cited at world average for similar publications (Curtin University, nd a), whereas the CNCI of a document is calculated by dividing the actual count of citing items by the expected citation rate for documents with the same document type, year of publication and subject area (Curtin University, nd b).

The result is an overall estimated ERA score of 2.5.

Contrary to our primary assessment, the peer review process for FoR Code2204 gives a marginally higher average score

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Not found (2.6 for ERA 2018). It must be noted that even if this latter figure also reflects the fact that peer reviewers assess books and book chapters, not all of which are included in SciVal or InCites, and taking into account the high uncertainty in these measures, the peer review process could positively affect FoR Code 2204.

Discussion and Conclusions The findings in this article do not question world rankings of Australian universities in this field as they are evidence of an alignment with the ERA process. Indeed, we have seen a drop in ERA results in 2018 which might reflect a trend in QS rankings. We thus noted a drop in the quality of the work in religious studies assessed in Australia as measured by these various processes. This could also signal a move away from this code by various researchers and Australian universities.

We also question the peer review process compared to the citation one, and after a test, assumed that although lower in outcome than citation disciplines, the peer review process could be appropriate if compared with other peer reviewed FoR codes.

This begs the question as to what could have caused this decline in quality in the recent ERA performance assessment.

It might be because the overall performance of academics in religious studies has indeed gone down. It might be because FoR Code 2204 is exclusively housed in the Humanities and Creative Arts panel, and that the social scientific study

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of religion (e.g. anthropology, human geography, political science and sociology) is not necessarily evaluated as part of the Education and Human Society Committee panel. Also, peer review assessors might not be able to judge the quality of each other’s work, e.g. a theologian assessing a sociological piece, and vice versa. This could be a call to include a FoR code in the 16 on Religion and Society (e.g. 169906) and change the existing code 220405 from Religion and Society, to Religion and Culture. It might help to distinguish the social scientific approach to religion from the humanities approach. It is also possible that FoR Code 2204 assessors are especially hard on each other. As the FoR code includes experts in religious studies, theology, the social sciences, and the humanities, we would indeed expect a high divergence of criteria used by experts to assess work from other disciplines.

These findings will certainly encourage researchers who specialise in another FoR code such as anthropology, sociology or history to abandon the use of this 2204 FoR code in the way they categorise their output. This will certainly weaken the visibility of the research on religion in Australia, and its future overall in ERA and global rankings assessments.

The likely outcome of the way FoR Code 2204 is assessed at the moment will certainly have an impact on the way research in religious studies, as represented in this Code, is portrayed in domestic and international rankings.

Woelert (2015) refers to the logic of escalation when it comes to ERA. When a system establishes a way to quantify its performance it must use an idiosyncratic and often inflexible way to reach that outcome. These measurements can become technically complex and even expensive to run. They can become abstraction of abstraction. Indeed, when we refer to the quality of journal articles, we often use citations as a form of abstraction, which is then used to provide another abstract concept, that is, the Relative Citation Index (RCI), which in turns provides the source for another abstract rating for ERA (e.g. a score of 3). In this article we have thus attempted to dig into this logic of escalation with regards to FoR Code 2204 Religion and Religious Studies and its success. A ‘stigmatisation’ of this Field as a low-performing discipline and field of research is likely to increase and will push away academics and universities from investing their resources in this FoR code. The most likely outcome will be for academics to lose faith in FoR Code 2204, because of the way religion is categorised in Australia, and because of this, the way it is assessed by peers.

Professor Adam Possamai is a sociologist of religion and Deputy Dean (Research and International) at the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University, Australia.

Contact: A.Possamai@westernsydney.edu.au

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Mr Gary Long is the Research Systems and Data Manager in the Research Engagement, Development and Innovation Division at Western Sydney University, Australia.

References Aksnes, D., Langfeldt, L. & Wouters, P. (2019). Citations, Citation Indicators, and Research Quality: An Overview of Basic Concepts and Theories. SAGE Open. DOI: 10.1177/2158244019829575 Brivot, M., & Gendron, Y. (2011). Beyond Panopticism: On the Ramifications of Surveillance in a Contemporary Professional Setting.

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 36, 135–55.

Cheney-Lippold, J. (2011). A New Algorithmic Identity. Soft Biopolitics and the Modulation of Control. Theory, Culture and Society, 28(6), 164–81.

Crowe, S. & Watt, S. (2016). Excellence in Research in Australia 2010, 2012, and 2015: The Rising of the Curate’s Soufflé? Australian Psychologist, 52, 503-513.

Curtin University. (nd a). Field Weighted Citation Impact (Scopus). Retrieved from https://libguides.library.curtin.edu.au/c. php?g=889921&p=6401377#s-lg-box-20759112 Curtin University. (nd b). Category Normalised Citation Impact (InCites). Retrieved from https://libguides.library.curtin.edu.au/c. php?g=889921&p=6401377 Gruber, T. (2014). Academic sell-out: how an obsession with metrics and rankings is damaging academia. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, 24 (2), 165-177.

Hall, R. (2018). On the Alienation of Academic Labour and the Possibilities for Mass Intellectuality. Triple C, 16 (1), 97-113.

Lupton, D. (2015). Digital Sociology. London: Routledge.

McKenna, L., Cooper, S., Cant, R. & Bogossian, F. (2017). Research publication performance of Australian Professors of Nursing & Midwifery. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 74, 495-497.

Reigeluth, T. (2014). Why Data Is Not Enough: Digital Traces as Control of Self and Self-control. Surveillance and Society, 12(2), 243–354.

Renn, O., Dolenc, J. & Schabl, J. (2016). A brief visual history of research metrics. Infozine, 1, 3-8. DOI:10.3929/ethz-a-010786351.

Stiegler, B. (2015). La société automatique. L’Avenir du travail. Paris: Fayard.

Terämä, E., Smallman, M., Lock, S., Johnson, C. & Austwick, M. (2016). Beyond Academia – Interrogating Research Impact in the Research Excellence Framework. PLoS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal. pone.0168533.

Vernon, M., Balas, E., & Momani, S. (2018). Are university rankings useful to improve research? A systematic review. PLoS ONE, 13 (3), e0193762. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193762 Wilsdon, J., Allen, L., Belfiore, E., Campbell, P., Curry, S., Hill, S., Jones, R., Kain, R., Kerridge, S., Thelwall, M., Tinkler, J., Viney, I., Wouters, P., Hill, J., & Johnson, B. (2015) The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363 Woelert, P. (2015). The ‘logic of escalation’ in performance measurement: An analysis of the dynamics of a research evaluation system. Policy and Society, 34 (1), 75-85.

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Disciplines in their organisational context Mapping Australian faculty structures to the ASCED and ANZSRC fields of education and research Philip Hider & Mary Coe Charles Sturt University

In this study, we investigated the extent to which the national classifications of disciplines reflect the organisational structures of Australia’s universities. The names of faculty units of ten universities were mapped onto the fields of education set out in the Australian Standard Classification of Education (ASCED) as well as the fields of research in the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC). The results show a fair degree of alignment between the faculty structures and both classification schemes, but also reveal much variation in the degree of alignment amongst the universities sampled. Schools and other second-level units are slightly more aligned to ASCED than to ANZSRC. Several units covering more specific fields are not represented in the current ASCED and ANZSRC classifications, though most non-alignment is due to divergent ways of dividing and compounding broader disciplinary areas. The degree of alignment to the research classification has changed little, overall, since the time of ANZSRC’s predecessor, the Australian Standard Research Classification.

Keywords: disciplines, classification, ASCED, ANZSRC, organisational structures

Introduction The idea of the academic discipline is multifaceted. As Sugimoto and Weingart (2015) observe, conceptualisations of discipline encompass both ‘cognitive’ views, in which disciplines are defined as particular bodies of content, with certain associated epistemologies, and ‘social’ or ‘institutional’ views, in which disciplines are considered to be the product of particular social structures, most notably the faculty structures of universities, developed over the past one and a half centuries. On the one hand, the similarity of faculty structures amongst universities, even across countries, points to intrinsic factors contributing to the development of disciplines; on the other, many academics would probably agree that university departments are not always established solely to reflect a nascent theoretical position or the growing popularity of a particular methodology and the way university faculty are departmentalised organisationally is bound to

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influence, to some extent, academic practices and, ultimately, how disciplines are conceptualised.

The institutional influence on the way academic disciplines are defined, even outside of particular institutions, is exemplified by the two standards covering academic disciplines developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics: the Australian Standard Classification of Education (ASCED) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001) and the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008). Both include a disciplinary classification scheme that is used to report on the teaching (in the case of ASCED) and research (in the case of ANZSRC) carried out in Australian universities, and both schemes have been developed with considerable input from the universities themselves, as well as from individuals and groups employed in these universities.

With the various intrinsic and extrinsic factors at play, it can be assumed that disciplines are not static and that disciplinary

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classifications will continue to change over time. It can also Literature review be assumed that there will continue to be a fair amount of alignment, but by no means perfect alignment, between It has been argued that academic disciplines, in the faculty structures and external disciplinary classifications modern sense, were established as a response by university such as ASCED and ANZSRC. What cannot be assumed, administrators to a burgeoning academic workforce in however, is that the amount of alignment between faculty the latter part of the nineteenth century (Whitley, 2006). structures and external classifications will remain constant.

As scholars professionalised and gained status, university It could be argued, perhaps, that institutional structures departments increasingly operated autonomously and might not keep pace with changes in academic practices ultimately as ‘cartels’, with the pathway to departmental and subject matter, though universities tend to change their employment controlled by the department itself (Turner, organisational structures more frequently than government 2000). As semi-autonomous units, or ‘tribes’, they developed agencies change their disciplinary classifications. Perhaps power bases that vied for university resources through the more importantly, the practice of basing institutional winning of academic ‘territory’, according to the oft-used structures on notions of discipline, even in an ‘institutional’ metaphor (Adams, 1976; Becher, 1989). sense, may be declining. Increasingly, interdisciplinary and On the other hand, university departments justified transdisciplinary configurations may be aligning better with themselves with reference to external concepts of particular university interests, depending disciplines, and it was no on how those interests are coincidence that different ...the practice of basing institutional defined.

The increasing universities established structures on notions of discipline, even in emphasis on interdisciplinary departments based on the same an ‘institutional’ sense, may be declining. research, with governments discipline (Turner, 2000). as well as industry prioritising Particular methodologies Increasingly, interdisciplinary and funding for the solving of and theoretical outlooks transdisciplinary configurations may be ‘real world’ problems, may were advanced by scholarly aligning better with university interests, be an argument for a move societies and accrediting depending on how those interests are away from discipline-based bodies, which provided a defined structures, as may new types of check on departments but degree program that emphasise at the same time reinforced student choice and curricular their autonomy. Disciplines agility. have both an institutional and epistemological basis This study examines the hypothesis that a decline, (Whitley, 2006). This is why ‘academic disciplines’ have been as identified by the literature, in the centrality of the conceptualised in a range of ways, or as what Trowler et al. concept of discipline in the academy over the past several (2012) describe as a continuum of approaches: at one end, decades has resulted in a decline in the alignment between there is the relativist position, from which disciplines are faculty structures and disciplinary classifications, at least seen purely as products of particular social environments, in the Australian context. It also compares the degree of primarily in the context of universities; at the other end, there alignment of Australian faculty structures with the two is the ‘essentialist’ position, from which disciplines are seen to different classifications, ASCED and ANZSRC, against have core bodies of knowledge requiring particular methods the hypothesis that ASCED, despite being the older of knowledge discovery (research) and dissemination standard, is more aligned to the organisational structures (publication, teaching, etc.). Trowler et al. (2012) recommend of universities given that these structures tend to be based a middle path, recognising the importance of social context as on teaching more than on research. The ANZSRC scheme well as differences in the objects of knowledge (i.e. subjects) is currently being reviewed, and thus it is timely to report that may give rise to intrinsically different epistemologies. on the extent and nature of the alignment between the It would appear that the history of the concept of schemes, as well as the extent of the alignment amongst the ‘discipline’ has likewise been affected both by politicofaculty structures themselves, across a sample of Australian economic and ‘scientific’ circumstances. The growth of the universities. The study also considers the range of alignment academic workforce in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across universities and across different disciplinary areas, reflected the increasing demand for science, as well as demand identifying organisational units whose names might be for various components of the service sector (law, medicine, candidates for inclusion in revisions to the current schemes, teaching, etc.) that were undergoing professionalisation if they are indeed ‘fields’. For the purposes of this paper, in the same way as the academy. Through the course of the ‘fields’ and ‘disciplines’ are treated as being synonymous. twentieth century, the natural sciences in particular attracted vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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large amounts of government and industry funding for research; however, increasing amounts of this funding were, and still are, for applied interdisciplinary research, which has to some extent run counter to the concept of disciplines and challenged the priority of disciplinary organisation. Trowler et al. (2012) thus contend that disciplinarity is not as strong a force in academe as it once was and the tribes metaphor not so appropriate nor applicable; on the other hand, disciplinarity clearly remains an important concept. It still has a large bearing on university structures and practices; there are still numerous scholarly societies representing the gamut of disciplines and fields; curricula are often still based on discipline, as are many research groupings and research assessment exercises, including ‘Excellence in Research for Australia’ (Australian Research Council, 2019a). The concept’s relationship with interdisciplinarity, however, is increasingly complex and fluid, with more and more environmental factors coming into play (government policy, global economics, higher education trends, and so forth).

The complexity of the relationship between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity includes the way in which the latter can work for as well as against the former: interdisciplinarity may encroach upon disciplinarity, but it may also be an incubator of new disciplines (Turner, 2000). The ways in which disciplines emerge, evolve and decline are themselves complex, although the literature has often treated them as a given and focused instead on the differences between them and the effects of these differences. Becher (1989), for example, distinguishes between hard and soft, pure and applied, urban and rural disciplines, and reports on how these differences correlate with various cultural characteristics. A more recent instance would be the analysis of research ‘engagement’ in terms of similar disciplinary dimensions conducted by Doberneck and Schweitzer (2017). However, Whitley (1984) had already pointed out the impact of historical trends on disciplines and the way in which environments shape disciplines.

Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’ were not completely autonomous, nor impervious (Kuhn, 1962). Academic fields were located in particular structures, which were the product of broad trends of government policy, the leadership of particular individuals, or technological and economic change, and so on. Whitley (1984) discusses the way in which biotechnology, for instance, has emerged as a new discipline in more recent times, out of the old ‘biology’ paradigm.

While many disciplinary changes may simply constitute greater specialisation and represent a finer calibration of disciplines into sub-disciplines, it is widely accepted that disciplinary (and sub-disciplinary) boundaries are often contested, and that ‘knowledge maps’ are subjective and dynamic, as implied by Becher’s tribes and territory metaphor.

These ‘battles’ may result in reconfigurations and different ways of looking at particular subject matter. New fields may

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also emerge, of course, through the discovery of new areas.

As Areekkuzhiyil (2017) discusses, new disciplines tend to be a product of new theoretical or methodological interests on the part of protagonists in one or more existing disciplines, which inevitably modifies the disciplinary landscape in some way or other. Baron (2005) points out, however, that not all new theoretical and methodological areas are promoted to the status of ‘discipline’, and this is not simply a matter of critical mass or the degree to which disciplines are ‘elastic’ or not (Marcovich & Shinn, 2011): politics also play a role, given the academic ‘real estate’ that disciplines are more likely to enjoy. Disciplines are ontological in as much as they focus on a subject matter, as Shepherd (1993) argues, but they are also epistemological in as much as they represent specific methods for studying that subject matter, and social in as much as they are only constructed due to certain socioeconomic conditions.

As such, disciplines are subjects, methods and groups. Given the multifaceted nature of the concept of discipline it is perhaps not surprising that it has often been defined as a list of various things. Kelley (1997, p. 1), for example, describes a discipline as a characteristic method, specialised terminology, a community of practitioners, a canon of authorities, an agenda of problems to be addressed, and perhaps more formal signs of a professional condition, such as journals, textbooks, courses of study, libraries, rituals, and social gatherings.

One could make a number of additions to this list. For instance, Foucault (1972, p. 224) views the discipline as ‘a system of control in the production of discourse’. However, the aim of the study reported in this article is to compare the ways academic disciplines have been viewed that have resulted in the ASCED and ANZSRC classifications with the ways they have been viewed that have resulted in the faculty structures of a sample of Australian universities.

The Australian context Universities in Australia make much use of standard classifications when reporting on their teaching and research activities to Federal government in order to facilitate comparison and sector-wide analysis. Higher education courses have been described in terms of the ASCED since its introduction in 2001. The standard comprises a classification of the levels of education as well as of the fields of education.

It was designed to be consistent, as much as possible, with the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), maintained by UNESCO (1997; 2012). Other equivalent classifications exist in other parts of the world, such as the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) in North America (National Center for Education Statistics, 2010).

As well as for the university and vocational education and

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training (VET) sectors, the standard is employed in other government data collection exercises, including the Census of Population and Housing (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016).

Meanwhile, universities report on their research activities and outputs in terms of the ANZSRC. It is also used by the Australian Research Council to help administer grant applications. It consists of a classification of fields of research, as well as of ‘socio-economic objectives’. There is also a brief taxonomy of type of (research) activity. Published in 2008 by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Statistics NZ, it replaced (in Australia) the Australian Standard Research Classification (ASRC; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1993; 1998). The research standard in particular is the product of extensive consultation exercises involving the Australian research and university community, as can be seen in the present review of ANZSRC (Australian Research Council, 2019b).

The data gathered using these standards have been subjected to various secondary analyses, including studies that have investigated the alignment between the content of published research and its authors’ departmental affiliations. Haddow (2015) found a significant amount of non-alignment between the two, echoing a previous analysis by Bourke and Butler (1998). However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has been no study examining the alignment (or otherwise) between the classifications themselves and departmental structures.

It should be noted that while a push towards interdisciplinary research can be seen in some of the discourse in which the Australian research community has engaged over recent decades, reflecting the global trend, there appears to be no sign of the discipline classifications playing a less important role in the reporting of university business in the immediate future at least: hence the ANZSRC review. Similarly, the recent emergence of ‘discipline’ as a way of directly organising academics in Australian universities (Harkin & Healy, 2013), as an alternative or supplement to schools and faculties, and as a replacement for departments perhaps, would suggest that its influence on universities and their structures is hardly obsolete.

Methodology The websites of the thirty-nine Australian universities (Universities Australia, 2019) were examined in order to discern those discipline-based components of their organisational structures where most of their continuing academic staff were primarily located. Where found, formally presented organisational charts were preferred for this purpose, but the webpages covering the relevant units and sub-units were also perused to examine and assess their vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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applicability. Typically, the first-level unit was named a faculty or college, and the second-level unit a school.

Usually, units and sub-units had their own websites, with pages that listed staff members and so on. Units were deemed discipline-based, or partially so, if part of their formally presented name represented, or could be considered to represent, one or more fields of study. Universities generally had two levels of discipline-based unit, according to their websites, but few had a clearly identifiable third level and even fewer one that consistently applied. Third-level units rarely appeared on organisational charts and rarely had their own websites with lists of staff. Sometimes, however, a staff page of a second-level site would divide staff by ‘discipline group’ or ‘department’. In such cases a sub-unit was inferred and noted, but far more commonly, teaching ‘areas’ or ‘research areas’ were presented without an obvious organisational role.

For the most part, these were more likely to represent areas of the curriculum or research foci, rather than groups of employees with a reporting line, and as such were discounted, as were ‘centres’ and the like that were part of the structure but whose members were mostly primarily located elsewhere (e.g. in a school). It should be noted that the primary purpose of the university websites consulted for this study appears to be marketing, i.e., to attract new students to the university.

Gathering information about organisational units from these websites was still possible, but they should not be considered completely reliable sources.

For practical reasons, it was decided to draw on a sample of ten universities, consisting of those whose websites, at the time of inspection in September 2019, were deemed to indicate their university’s faculty structures most clearly. As they included representatives from all the major groupings (Australian Technology Network, Group of Eight, Innovative Research Universities Australia, Regional Universities Network) and from most of the states and territories, the sample was considered reasonably representative of the population. The ten universities were: Australian Catholic University (ACU), Charles Sturt University (CSU), Griffith University, La Trobe University, RMIT University (RMIT), University of Newcastle, University of New South Wales (UNSW), University of Tasmania, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), and University of Western Australia (UWA).

The field of study elements of the names of the units and subunits for each of the ten universities were extracted and listed as a taxonomy (one for each university) on Excel spreadsheets.

In a few cases, universities included multiple units with the same field of study in their names, distinguished in some other way, e.g. by location or educational level. These duplicates were merged in the taxonomy. In all cases encountered by the authors a unit’s name included a disciplinary element.

The fields of study in the taxonomies were then coded twice, first using the ASCED fields of education codes and

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2009 versions of the websites of the universities in the sample were examined by means of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web). These years were chosen as they were the years before and after the existing ANZSRC classification was introduced; 2007 thus mirrored 2019 in that they both mark the end of an iteration of the national research classification, with a revision of the ANZSRC standard scheduled for publication in 2020. As a 2007 version of the Griffith University website was not found, the units for this university across all three years were excluded from the analysis.

Mapped (n)

Did not map (n)

Alignment (%)

University of Technology Sydney

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8

75.0

University of Western Australia

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5

75.0

University of New South Wales

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72.2

Australian Catholic University

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3

66.7

Findings

RMIT University

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5

66.7

Griffith University

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10

56.5

University of Newcastle

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7

56.3

University of Tasmania

7

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50.0

Charles Sturt University

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14

39.1

La Trobe University

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9

30.8

123

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61.2

The number of second-level units identified for analysis ranged from 9 (ACU) to 36 (UNSW). The degree to which they aligned with the ASCED field codes is set out in Table 1. Most organisational units of most universities in the sample mapped to an ASCED code, but those universities (UTS and UWA) with greatest alignment (i.e. with the highest proportion of units that mapped) only reached the threequarter level, while CSU and La Trobe’s structures coincided with the ASCED scheme in only 39.1 per cent and 30.8 per cent of cases respectively. Thus, while there is clearly a considerable degree of alignment between the disciplinary basis of schools and other second-level units and the ASCED disciplinary classification, there is also a significant degree of non-alignment. The range of alignment, from 75 per

Total

then ANZSRC fields of research codes. Both standards comprise three levels of field codes: the best matching code was used, regardless of level. If the element in the taxonomy was considered to semantically cover more than half of the concept represented by a code, as indicated by its component sub-codes (in the case of first and second level codes), but not significantly more than the code, then this code was recorded as the appropriate choice. On the other hand, if the element represented the meaning of more than one code at the same level, but not more than half of a code at a higher level, then a code for ‘no match’ was recorded. Similarly, if more than one first-level code or less than half of a third-level code was applicable, or no code at all was applicable, a ‘no match’ was recorded. Interpretation of the name elements was based on corresponding descriptions or indications found on the unit’s webpages, where applicable. Interpretation of the codes was based on the scheme’s other codes, sub-codes and references, where applicable. The coding was initially carried out by the two authors in parallel, so that inter-coder reliability could be measured; agreement was achieved in over 85 per cent of cases.

The percentage of elements in each university’s taxonomy that matched a code was then calculated. Those elements that did not match were analysed, as were the codes applied, using a broad, independent classification, namely Wikipedia’s ‘List of academic fields’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ academic_fields). For a longitudinal comparison, 2007 and

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Table 2. Alignment of organisational units and ANZSRC codes Mapped (n)

Did not map (n)

Alignment (%)

University of Technology Sydney

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10

68.8

Australian Catholic University

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3

66.7

RMIT University

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5

66.7

University of Western Australia

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60.0

University of New South Wales

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58.3

University of Newcastle

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43.8

Charles Sturt University

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10

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6

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Griffith University University of Tasmania La Trobe University Total

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Table 3. Fields of units not mapped to ASCED codes

alignment to the two classifications. In the case of the ANZSRC scheme, UTS, ACU Compound fields N Broader unitary N Narrower fields N and RMIT were most closely aligned with fields two-thirds of units mapped to a code, and Humanities 6 Humanities 3 Applied systems 1 La Trobe again was the least aligned at 38.5 biology per cent. Only half of the ten universities Social sciences 4 Social sciences 3 Aviation 1 had a majority of their units aligned with Natural sciences 4 Natural sciences 6 Cancer medicine 1 the research classification, while the range Formal sciences 4 Formal sciences 0 Genetic counselling 1 of overlap was also smaller than with the ASCED scheme. It is hypothesised that the Professional and 28 Professional and 12 Health policy 1 weaker alignment is due to the tendency of applied sciences applied sciences faculty structures in Australia to be based Indigenous 1 more on teaching than on research.

Australian studies The disciplinary elements of the names Islamic studies & 1 of the second-level units that did not civilisation map to the two schemes were analysed, Orthoptics 1 as set out in Tables 3 and 4. Compound Rural health 2 fields (e.g. Computing and Mathematics) Total 46 22 10 and the broader unitary fields (e.g. Allied Health) were categorised according to the six disciplinary groupings in Wikipedia’s cent down to 30.8 per cent is quite surprising. No obvious ‘List of academic fields’. The narrower fields, featuring more at explanation has been devised for this large range. The number the third-level of the ASCED and ANZSRC classifications, if of units does not appear to be a significant factor, nor the age at all, are listed verbatim. A few terms occurred multiple times of the university, nor its grouping. The number and nature of in the compounds, and a few broader unitary terms likewise the faculty restructures at the various universities might be a occurred two or three times, but there was, in summary, a major factor, but confirmation or rejection of this supposition wide range of terms representing a wide range of fields and requires further investigation. It should be emphasised that disciplines not aligned to ASCED and ANZSRC. Given alignment with ASCED (or with ANSRC for that matter) their preponderance, compounding was likely a major factor tells us nothing about the quality or value of the teaching in this non-alignment, probably in some cases the product of (or research) of a university’s units, only about a university’s organisational mergers. Some of the narrower fields may be organisation. candidates for new or revised entries in the schemes, although The degree to which the sample university units aligned none of them featured in more than one university structure with the ANZSRC codes is set out in Table 2. As the ASCED (at least not at the second level). It should be noted that the and ANZSRC schemes are quite similar, it is not surprising full population of universities might well yield four times as that there is a strong degree of correlation (Spearman’s rank many of these narrower fields, which would represent a quite correlation coefficient = 0.85) between the universities’ relative significant number.

The distribution of the fields of units Table 4. Fields of units not mapped to ANZSRC codes that were not mapped to ASCED codes was then compared with that of the fields Compound fields N Broader fields N Narrower fields N of units that were mapped. Using the Humanities 7 Humanities 6 Applied systems 1 basic Wikipedia taxonomy, it was found biology that the non-mapped fields are reasonably Social sciences 3 Social sciences 3 Aviation 1 representative of the disciplinary spectrum, Natural sciences 6 Natural sciences 6 Indigenous 1 though the professional and applied fields Australian studies fit relatively better into the scheme than did the four ‘basic’ disciplinary groupings. This Formal sciences 1 Formal sciences 1 Orthoptics 1 may reflect pressures applied by professional Professional and 38 Professional and 14 Rural health 2 accrediting bodies and the increasing applied sciences applied sciences demand for universities to focus on jobSpeech pathology 1 ready education. In any case, the figures in Total 55 30 7 Table 5 demonstrate the preponderance of vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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Table 5. Fields of units mapped and not mapped to ASCED codes Mapped fields (n)

Mapped fields (%)

Nonmapped fields (n)

Humanities

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Social sciences

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Formal sciences

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Professional and applied sciences

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100.0

78

Total

professional fields in modern academe, with those related to health especially prevalent.

It was interesting to note that certain fields varied considerably across the universities in terms of their superordinate unit’s named disciplinary area. Thus, although the field itself may have been aligned to the national codes, their disciplinary location was often not aligned. Notable cases include Psychology (located organisationally under Health, Medicine, Social Sciences, etc.); Criminology (located under Social Sciences, Law and Justice, etc.); specific allied health fields that were sometimes located under Medicine, other times Health Sciences; and likewise various discipline areas that were sometimes under Social Sciences and other times under the Humanities, Arts, and so on.

Finally, the second-level units from 2007 and 2009 were mapped to the ASRC and ANZSRC classifications respectively. Excluding the mapping for Griffith University (due to a lack of access to its 2007 website), the overall degrees of alignment in all three years – 2007, 2009 and 2019 – are shown in Table 6. Although most of the universities’ structures changed over the period, resulting in a shrinking total number of second-level units, the overall degree of alignment with the corresponding national research classification remained about the same (i.e. a little over half ).

Table 6. Fields of units mapped and not mapped across time Year

Mapped (n)

Did not map (n)

Total

Alignment (%)

2007

115

88

203

56.7

2009

107

95

202

53.0

2019

99

79

178

55.6

Discussion University structures change slowly and they don’t necessarily change to keep up with changes in disciplines generally; they

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usually change for various reasons pertaining to their university’s individual circumstances. These might Nonreflect broader disciplinary trends, but they might mapped reflect counter-trends, or simply a realignment to fields (%) another configuration of established disciplinary 14.1 classifications. Likewise, disciplines change slowly.

9.0 Many fields and disciplines reflected in university 12.8 structures today were established many decades ago.

5.1 New fields do emerge, due to new subject matter, new methodologies, or for socioeconomic reasons, 59.0 but typically take decades to establish themselves to the extent that they commonly constitute university 100.0 departments. Individual universities have many options when it comes to organisational structure: even the largest universities can only split their academic workforce into a relatively small number of units. As each university’s academic workforce and socioeconomic circumstances is different, their choice of units will likewise vary. Only after a long period of time could an emerging field hope to have become institutionalised across many universities.

Our findings suggest that second-level academic units in Australian universities take on a wide range of disciplinary guises, about half of which coincide with the standard classifications. One of the reasons for the shortfall is that any single classification of disciplines, standard or otherwise, will omit many alternatives, one or more of which may suit the circumstances of individual universities better, at a given time.

There are many different ways that the disciplinary landscape can be divided. For instance, Accounting might be combined with Banking and Finance in one classification but stand on its own in another.

However, the large variance amongst the ten sampled universities in degree of alignment with the standard classifications is noteworthy and merits further investigation.

It does not appear to be simply a question of size, with smaller universities having more need to group academics into units combining multiple fields. Other circumstances that might lead to a workforce with less orthodox disciplinary aspects may be at play, or perhaps a greater willingness to ‘break the mould’ organisationally, which might mean different disciplines or less of an emphasis on discipline.

Finally, the organisational choices made by Australian universities as a whole does not appear to have resulted in less alignment with the standard research classification over the past decade. As the classification is partly the product of these choices, this might be considered unsurprising. However, it does suggest that this association, between university structure and discipline, is still strong, at least in Australia. It might be that the power of disciplinarity is diminishing more broadly, but as an organising principle for universities, it remains very much alive.

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Philip Hider is Head of the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University, Australia.

Contact: phider@csu.edu.au Mary Coe is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University, Australia.

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Haddow, G. (2015). Research classification and the social sciences and humanities in Australia: (mis)matching organizational unit contribution and the impact of collaboration. Research Evaluation 24(3), 325-399.

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What will follow the international student boom?

Future directions for Australian higher education Angel Calderon RMIT University

This paper highlights some of the challenges being faced by Australian higher education which are likely to have an impact over the next ten years and beyond and opportunities to deal with them. In doing so, the policy settings from the Dawkins reforms in the late 1980s to the present which have shaped the higher education landscape are described, bringing into perspective the operating context for Australian universities. Two key themes are discussed: universities’ reliance on international students, and demographic shifts.

The discussion that follows is how these drivers are likely to shape demand for higher education and what impact these will have on universities over the next ten years.

Keywords: higher education, public policy, Australia, students, demographic shifts, international education, planning and foresight.

Introduction Over the past 30 years, Australia has trialled a series of educational reforms, courting fee deregulation, marketisation and liberalisation. These policy changes have been key drivers in the success of Australia’s higher education sector, enabling many of its institutions to ‘punch above their weight’ globally as measured by various global ranking schemas.

But it has also created economic dependencies that makes Australian institutions vulnerable more than ever to political international fluctuations.

Higher education reforms: a potted history The success of Australia’s higher education, as measured by the income generated from international students in fees and charges, has rested on policy reforms which started in the late 1980s under the leadership of the then federal education minister John Dawkins. Following the release of a discussion

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paper in December 1987 (Dawkins, 1987), the government’s perspective on the future direction of higher remained unchanged when the White Paper was released in July 1988 (Meek, 1991). The implementation of these policies resulted in the amalgamation of institutions (from 19 universities and 73 other higher education institutions in 1987 to 38 institutions in 1991) and brought in a unified national system; an increase in the number of publicly-funded places available for study, and a new funding model on discipline and level of study, among many other changes.

The main argument for undertaking successive public policy reforms was that Australia needed to be more competitive internationally. As Meek (1991) observes, Australia’s massive overseas deficit is mentioned as a motivating factor for many of the Hawke Labor Government’s policies. These reforms, which went through during the 1990s and 2000s, delivered unprecedented economic stability and growth. They were influenced by the neoliberal forces that prevailed at that time. Many governments around

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Table 1: Australian higher education reforms from 1988 to 2014 Review

Purpose

Key outcomes

Higher Education: a policy statement. Dawkins [White Paper] (1988)

Expand capacity and effectiveness of the sector.

Amalgamations, end of binary system, increase in public funding, increased capacity to offer places to international students.

Learning for Life: review of higher education financing and policy.

[The West Review]. (DETYA, 1998)

Identify options for the financing of higher education teaching and research over the next 20 years.

Move towards a ‘student-centred’ approach; quality agency established; set groundwork for subsequent reviews to address issues of access, competition, levels of funding.

Review of Higher Education in Australia. [The Nelson Review].

(Nelson, 2003)

Determine appropriate Block grant replaced by per-student student funding, mechanisms and levels for funding increase in maximum student contribution, universities higher education. permitted to set their own student contribution, regional loading for universities, additional funding for equity and quality programs, access to income contingent loans for full fee-paying courses.

Review of Australian Higher Education. [Bradley Review] (Bradley et al., 2008)

Examine state of the Australian system against international best practice, explore future directions and consider options available.

Student demand-driven funding system introduced; continued ability to offer full-fee courses for domestic undergraduate students; setting participation and equity targets; a revised qualifications framework and established a new regulator.

Higher Education Base Funding Review [Lomax-Smith Review] (Lomax-Smith et al., 2011)

Identify principles to support public investment in higher education

Government accepted recommendations but no significant changes to existing arrangements were required. It recommended average level of base funding per place be increased, areas of underfunding were identified, maximum student contribution should remain capped.

Report of the National Commission of Audit (2014)

Review the performance, functions and roles of the government and recommend efficiencies, savings and productivity improvements

Review found Government investment in higher education contributes to a more agile and productive workforce. National priorities for research were updated and reviews of research funding policy and research training were commissioned.

Review of the Demand Driven System . Kemp-Norton Review (Kemp & Norton, 2014)

Examine impact of the demand driven funding system

All higher education providers should be eligible for government supported places, further open system for competition between public and private providers.

the world turned to economic rationalist approaches to solving problems they confronted (such as trade deficits and reduced ability to fund programs). This resulted in the adoption of market-driven approaches to solving these problems (Meek, 2003; Broucker & de Wit, 2015; Cantwell 2016).

With each wave of reform, the Australian government has further advanced liberalisation, heightened institutional competition and increased deregulation and marketisation of the higher education sector. Table 1 provides a summary of policy reforms between 1998 and 2014.

Additionally, two further reviews were completed in 2019.

First, the review into the Higher Education Provider Category Standards was undertaken by Professor Peter Coaldrake and the government announced in December 2019 that it vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

accepted the review’s ten recommendations (Department of Education, 2019a). These included: • Retaining research as ‘a defining feature of what it means to be a university’.

• Adding more formal requirements and benchmarks for both the quantity and quality of university research.

• Requiring universities to offer doctorates by research and undertake ‘world standard’ research in at least three broad fields of education, or at least 30 per cent of the broad fields of education in which they teach, whichever is greater.

Second, the Review of the Australian Qualifications Framework, led by Professor Peter Noonan was also completed in 2019 and in December 2019 the federal government accepted all its recommendations in relation to higher education and accepted the aims of the

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recommendations of the review in relation to vocational expenditure of universities and other institutions totalled education, contingent on further discussions with state and $2.53 billion (DEET, 1988). Further, 6.9 per cent of the territory governments (Department of Education, 2019b). civilian population aged 15 and over had been awarded a The review recommended: higher education degree (ABS, 1988).

• Senior secondary students should be able to study As a result of amalgamations, universities increased in size subjects at school that count towards a vocational training and complexity. In 1993, the first year for which data were qualification or university degree. reported as a unified national system, across Australia there • Recognition of micro-credentials to allow providers to were 575,617 students and 76,618 full-time and fractional offer short, highly targeted courses. full-time staff, with an overall expenditure of $6.0 billion.

• Vocational education and training and higher education Over 80 per cent of enrolments were at the bachelor’s level; should have clear and flexible entry and exit points, as well 15 per cent in postgraduate by coursework programs, and as pathways within and between the two sectors, to allow enrolments in higher degree by research increased to 3.6 per students to mix and match the subjects they study to meet cent (DEET 1994). their education requirements.

By 2018, there were 169 providers of higher education Over the next few years, programs in Australia, which we will see the extent to included 37 public universities The key message for university leaders is which the recommendations (Norton & Cherastidtham, the need to consider the value proposition from the Coaldrake and 2018). Total enrolments in of their universities’ locations and the Noonan reviews are enacted Australia were 1.6 million, and whether these deliver of which 1.4 million were communities in which they operate and the projected outcomes. To in the 37 public universities serve to set them apart from one another. sum up, what we have seen (Department of Education, over the past 30 years is that 2019c). Total revenue from policy makers in Australia have been unable to implement an Australian universities was $32.0 billion in 2017, with $31.8 integrated tertiary education system and have not addressed billion generated by the 37 public universities. Fifty-four per the imbalance in funding provision across higher education cent of revenue came from government sources or the Higher and vocational education. In fact, we witnessed a significant Education Loan Program and 23 per cent from international decline in participation in vocational education and a student fees and charges (DET, 2018a). The full-time and weakening in the standing of public vocational educational fractional full-time staff increased to nearly 130,000 in 2017 institutions. Further, it should be noted that although Australia (DET, 2018b). has harmonised the mutual recognition of qualifications and occupations, there is no agreement for credit transfer and Features of Australia’s higher education recognition of prior learning across Australian institutions.

One thing that remains obvious is that, for Australia to Three decades on from its inception, Australia’s unified remain competitive considering the emergence of Asia as national system is defined by several distinguishable features an education and knowledge powerhouse, it needs to have which attest to the transformative nature of the successive a cohesive long-term tertiary education policy inclusive of waves of policy reforms of the intervening years. A key feature both the higher education and vocational education sectors of Australia’s enviable position as a global leader in exporting and supported by the appropriate level of funding, regulation, educational services is that it has built a robust quality quality assurance and legislative framework. assurance (QA) framework. The basis of this framework goes back to 1999 when the then minister of education announced Higher education in context: Facts & the establishment of a new quality assurance framework for figures the higher education sector (Shah, Nair & Wilson, 2011).

This resulted in the establishment of the Australian University Back in 1987, Australia’s population reached 16.5 million Quality Agency (AUQA) in 1999 as an independent body and the average full-time adult average weekly ordinary time to audit institutions and issue public reports. In 2011, the earnings was $429.90 compared to $1,633 as at May 2019 Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) (Australian Bureau of Statistics – ABS, 1988; ABS, 2019a). was established as an agency with the task of applying and There were 73 colleges of advanced education as well as 19 enforcing the TEQSA legislation and additional legislative universities, with 393,734 student enrolments, an average of frameworks. AUQA operated until 2011 when its functions 4,280 enrolments per institution (Commonwealth Tertiary were transferred to TEQSA, which become operational in Education Commission (CTEC), 1987). The combined 2012 (TEQSA, nd).

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1,200,000 1,000,000 800,000 600,000 400,000 200,000 0

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 Domestic

Dawkins white paper

West review

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International

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Report of the national commission of audit

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Figure 1: Domestic and international student enrolments in Australian higher education, 1989–2018 Source: Compiled by the author, using aenrolments customised datasetinfrom the Department of Education Figure 1: Domestic and international student Australia higher education, 1989 - 2018 Source: Compiled by the author, using a customised dataset from the Department of Education

Australia’s unified university system has several other significant features. In Australia, universities are homogenous (i.e. offer similar programs) and as a massified system, there is no significant diversity in discipline offerings and student cohorts. Partly a function of population size and distribution, there are fewer institutions (37 public and five private universities) compared to other national systems (e.g. 164 in the United Kingdom (UK) and 2,828 four-year degree-granting institutions in the United States of America (USA)). In addition, universities are large: the average size of Australian institutions is 34,325 enrolments, compared to 13,740 in the UK and 4,500 in the USA. Another feature is that all Australian universities are expected to be research intensive.

Finally, all universities are comprehensive and offer doctoral programs. Thirty-one out of the 37 public universities teach across ten broad fields of education and the median number of doctoral program completions in universities in 2018 was just over 190.

As Davis has pointed out, Australian universities have adopted a single idea of a university. That idea was spelled out in the Dawkins’ White Paper (1988): A national framework will be developed on the basis that there should be ‘consistency in the types and length of similar courses in higher education’ (Davis, 2017, p. 33).

Whilst these features can be viewed as Australia’s strengths and key to the success in global university rankings, they are also Australia’s threats. Consider that there is no differentiation in what universities are deemed to be distinctively strong or specialised in. There is also vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

no differentiation in what courses are on offer in locations across Australia. While this lack of differentiation has not driven student demand away from the 37 public universities over the past 30 years, the increased relevance of the private universities and non-university providers in educating Australia’s domestic population as well as those overseas students who choose to study onshore, it cannot be underestimated. The impact of technological transformation on the provision of educational services and the continued growth of online learning and other forms of delivery also cannot be underestimated.

The key message for university leaders is the need to consider the value proposition of their universities’ locations and the communities in which they operate and serve to set them apart from one another.

Over-reliance on international students The number of student enrolments in Australian higher education has increased from 441,074 in 1989 to 1.56 million in 2018. Over this period, domestic student enrolments have seen an annual average growth of 3.4 per cent compared to 11.9 per cent for international students (Department of Education, 2019c) – see Figure 1. In recent years Australia has benefited from instability in the UK and the USA in recruiting international students, however Australia lags those countries in attracting top quality students. The other factor which has made Australian universities increase their international student numbers is that domestic demand for education is flat.

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In recent years, international student enrolments have underwritten the growth seen in Australian universities.

Since 2000, the 37 public universities and all other higher education providers have earned more than A$90 billion from international students via tuition fees and charges. In 2000, the fee income derived from international students for higher education totalled $978 million, increasing to $11,270 million by 2018 (ABS, 2019b). Whilst the Australian government contributions to universities continue to rise, revenue from international students has increased five times faster than the Australian government contributions since 1995. In 1995, Commonwealth government grants totalled $4.3 billion increasing to $17.2 billion by 2017; by comparison, the income generated from international students increased from $441.2 million in 1995 to $7.5 billion in 2017 (DETYA, 1996; DET, 2018). Over this period, we have seen that Australia’s educational services exports across all sectors have become the third-largest export industry.

This strong growth has led universities to depend on income from international students to supplement governmentsourced income. In 1995, 5.9 per cent of Australian universities’ revenue came from international students, compared to 23.3 per cent in 2017 (DETYA, 1996; DET, 2018a). In fact, the University of Melbourne received A$879.3 million in income from international students (or 33 per cent of total revenue) in 2018, compared to A$23.6 million (or 4.5 per cent of total revenue) in 1995 (University of Melbourne, 2019; DETYA, 1996). This means that Australian universities would suffer significant financial loss if international student numbers were to steeply decline. In 2018, 33 per cent of international students were from mainland China, compared to 4.6 per cent in 2000 (Department of Education, 2019c; DETYA, 2001). As Birrell and Betts (2018) point out, there is the danger that the Chinese government in pursuit of its own geopolitical agenda could deter or even ban Chinese students from enrolling in programs at Australian universities, and they conclude that such an occurrence could have serious financial consequences, particularly for the Group of Eight universities.

The number of enrolments in higher education globally (including those who seek to study abroad) is expected to rise further, with East Asia and the Pacific being the region with the largest number of enrolments. However, there is no guarantee that Australia and the traditional host countries of international students will continue to be the main beneficiaries. In recent years China has emerged as a source but also a host country for transnational education. As China continues to build its capacity (and quality) to educate its own people, perhaps the Chinese appetite for offshore study could diminish in the coming years.

Australian universities are urged to have a sound risk management strategy, realising that the loss of a market the size of China’s could not be replaced by one single market.

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Australian universities need to diversify their international student recruitment away from traditional markets, instead focusing on middle income economies and countries with which Australia has forged strategic trading partnerships, including harmonisation and recognition of qualifications.

A case in point is the closer links Australia has forged with Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico over the past 20 years. Like Australia, these countries have embraced trade liberalisation and have also increased two-way trade with Australia.

Demographic challenges ahead As we live in an era surrounded by uncertainty and witnessing many economic, social and geopolitical shifts, there is no guarantee that Australia’s ongoing educational success is assured. There are several challenges, many of which have a demographic as well as a geopolitical connotation. The way the state, civil society and market forces respond to these challenges will determine the path for Australia over the next 10 to 20 years.

As noted in the Dawkins White Paper (1988), the national demand for higher education had exceeded supply in the previous four years with an estimated unmet demand of 20,000 qualified applicants, half of which were school leavers.

The White Paper also noted that the demand for education would continue to rise strongly until the early 1990s, when the 17-19-year-old cohort would begin to decline in size. The last statistical report issued by CTEC, before it was disbanded by minister Dawkins, observed that the number of students enrolled in higher education had an annual average growth of 2.7 per cent between 1980 and 1987 (CTEC, 1987).

However, this growth pattern no longer exists. By 2020, we have observed that the domestic demand for higher education has been flat for some years. The analysis of the projected domestic enrolments for higher education that follows suggests that the expected growth to 2030 will be less than half the annual growth average observed during the 1980s and throughout the first twelve years of the 21st century (Calderon, 2019).

Although the number of young people completing Year 12 is increasing across Australia (from 64 per cent in 2009 to 79 per cent in 2018) (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority – ACARA, 2019), it has been estimated that the additional number of youths seeking to enter university between 2018 and 2030 will be 48,000 and this would equate to having the equivalent of one additional university. There is indeed a limited pool of school leavers to boost domestic commencing enrolments and universities across Australia face increased competition to attract school leavers.

These estimates are built from state and territory level to national level, using the ABS population projections

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for Australia (ABS, 2018a) in parallel with an analysis on the number of full-time and part-time students by age and grade over the period from 2006 to 2018 (ABS, 2019c).

This analysis suggests that the Australian 18-64-year-old population is expected to rise minimally over the period from 2017 to 2030, with an average annual population growth of 1.2 per cent. In 2017, there were 15.3 million people in the 18-64 age bracket, this is expected to rise to 16.6 million in 2023 and reach 17.9 million in 2030. Therefore life-long learners (or seekers of second and post initial qualification) are more likely to be driving domestic student demand.

Further, the analysis suggests that: • The 16-24 domestic commencing student cohort is expected to rise by between 42,000 to 49,000 by 2030, that is 1.2 per cent per year from 263,300 enrolments in 2017 to between 303,300 to 310,600 in 2030.

• The 25-39 domestic commencing student cohort is expected to rise by between 18,000 to 23,800 by 2030, that is 1.4 per cent per year from 104,700 enrolments in 2017 to between 113,300 to 114,100 in 2030.

• The 40-64 domestic commencing student cohort is expected to rise by between 6,700 to 7,800 by 2030, that is 1.1 per cent per year from 46,376 in 2017 to between 53,400 to 54,500 in 2030 (Calderon, 2019).

The implications for universities of this reduced population growth are significant. While the domestic school leaver population represents the main student cohort, domestic undergraduates are increasingly moving towards online and multi modal studies. This shift is likely to shape the kind of student experience university leaders would have to offer to the younger cohorts in years to come. In 2002, 82 per cent of domestic undergraduate students were on campus; 12 per cent were online and 6 per cent were multi modal. By 2018, 67 per cent were on campus, 16 per cent were online and 17 per cent were multi-modal (Department of Education, 2019c). Should current trends persist, over the next 10 years about 55 per cent of domestic undergraduate students will be on campus; 20 per cent online and 25 per cent multi modal.

We also see that domestic postgraduate students are significantly moving towards the off-campus mode of study.

In 2002, 71 per cent of Australian domestic postgraduate students studied on campus, this number decreased to 54 per cent in 2018. In turn we see that the online mode increased from 26 per cent in 2002 to 37 per cent in 2018 (Department of Education, 2019c). By 2030, it can be expected that roughly 40 per cent of the domestic postgraduate student population will be exclusively studying on campus.

What these shifts in study mode mean for the student cohort on campus is that these will largely be international students, because due to visa restrictions, international students are limited in the extent to which they can undertake studies online or multi-modally. However, for domestic vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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students, these shifts in mode of study and interaction could mean that managing student wellbeing will come to be of paramount importance. This will represent a rethink for university decision makers in how best to support an increasingly culturally and ethnically diverse student (and academic staff ) population.

Educational inequality Although domestic demand for higher education is flat, there is a disparity in the levels of educational attainment in the 20-64-year-old Australian population. Over the period from 2004 to 2018 there was a strong increase in the proportion of persons holding a bachelor’s degree or higher qualification from 21.1 per cent to 31.4 per cent (ABS, 2018a). We observe that the Australian Capital Territory (49.3 per cent), New South Wales (34.4 per cent) and Victoria (34.1 per cent) are by far the best performers compared to the weakest performers, i.e. Queensland (24.4 per cent) and Tasmania (23.3 per cent).

We also observe that persons living in remote and very remote (15.7 per cent) and outer regional (16.8 per cent) areas are at half the rate of educational attainment (i.e. bachelor’s or higher) of those living in major cities (36.0 per cent). There is also a disparity in educational attainment between male and female students. In 2004, 19.8 per cent of the male population held a qualification increasing steadily to 27.9 per cent in 2018. In turn females showed a stronger increase rising from 22.4 per cent in 2004 to 34.9 per cent in 2018. Overall, a larger percentage of females holding a qualification compared to males, and females also showed stronger growth in the period 2004-2018 (ABS, 2018b).

As a matter of public policy, both commonwealth and state and territory governments need to mitigate the increased inequalities which result from uneven indices of educational attainment. One way to do so is by providing the financial and other forms of incentives to those most disadvantaged to not only enrol at university but also to complete a degree.

Doing so may somehow boost domestic demand for higher education.

What lies ahead An analysis (by the author) of universities’ financial statements over the 2014 to 2018 period (published in the institutions’ annual report and finance statistics by the Department of Education (nd.)) suggests that over time, Australian universities’ revenue growth is weaker relative to expenditure. Therefore, over the next few years we are likely to see reduced operating results, and in some instances ongoing deficits. As argued earlier, domestic demand for university education is flat (growth estimated at 1.2 per cent per year),

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while geopolitical factors will influence the size and shape of international education.

In a higher education system largely funded by taxpayers, there are limited revenue opportunities in a competitive market environment: The Australian domestic fee-paying market is capped (if not non-existent); industry contributions to support universities’ ability to educate and train the labour force is atypical (yet we often read media reports that industry demands ‘job-ready’ graduates), and philanthropy is relatively a foreign concept. Over the next few years, Australian universities might have to reduce overheads, in part due to the influence of higher cost but also due to automation and technological transformation. It also means that universities will shut down programs in which student demand and discipline relevance have subsided. As the shift to online delivery for subjects continue to scale up (including emergence of newer online learning platforms), the academic workforce will continue to be challenged by those shifts.

At the system level, over the next ten years Australian universities are likely to confront: • Tightened government financial support; in turn increased student financial contribution.

• Increased emphasis on outcomes-based and performancebased funding (something which has been in the making for more than 20 years).

• Targeted policies on access and participation – focusing on disadvantaged groups and geographies with low educational attainment.

• A focus on students’ wellbeing (including mental health); student affordability and ability to repay through the taxation system.

• A focus on reconfiguration of what it means to be a university; rebalancing institutional mission (including communities and jurisdictions being served) and addressing national priorities.

There is no doubt that the road ahead for Australian universities is bumpy. While Birrell & Betts (2018) sounded alarmist when they described the situation of Australian universities as precarious because of reliance on international students, their assessment and fears for what lies ahead are valid.

Finally, the opinion of the auditor general of Victoria contained in the results of the 2018 audit of universities is that universities need to ‘monitor circumstances abroad, and actively manage its recruitment programs to increase the diversity of the source countries that make up the overseas student base’ (Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, 2019, p 30). The Auditor-General of New South Wales echoes the view of his Victorian counterpart and further adds that ‘sudden changes in demand can challenge the ability of those universities to adjust their cost structures’ (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2019, p. 19).

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Policy responses from government, civil society, market forces and university leaders need to consider the spectrum of possibilities arising from these demographic and geopolitical shifts. Timeliness and moderation are central to mapping a way forward.

Angel Calderon is the principal advisor Institutional Research and Planning at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Contact: Angel.Calderon@rmit.edu.au This paper is based on a keynote address presented at the annual forum of the Australasian Association for Institutional Research in Hobart, Tasmania on 12 November 2019.

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Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), (2019). Year 12 Certification Rates. Retrieved from https:// www.acara.edu.au/reporting/national-report-on-schooling-inaustralia/national-report-on-schooling-in-australia-data-portal/year12-certification-rates Birrell, B. & Betts, K. (2018). Australia’s higher education overseas student industry: in a precarious state. Middle Camberwell: The Australian Population Research Institute. Retrieved from https://tapri.org. au/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/final-report-overseas-studentindustryV2.pdf Bradley, D., Noonan, P., Nugent, H. & Scales, B. (2008). Review of Higher Education in Australia: Final Report. Canberra: Australian Government.

Broucker, B., & De Wit, K. (2015). New public management in higher education. In J. Huisman, H. de Boer, D. Dill, & M. Souto-Otero (Eds.), Palgrave handbook of higher education policy and governance.

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Calderon, A. (2019). What is after the boom? Future directions for Australian higher education, keynote presented at the Australasian Association for Institutional Research, Hobart, Tasmania, 2019.

Cantwell, B. (2016). The geopolitics of the education market. In Hazelkorn, E. (ed.). Global Rankings and the Geopolitics of Higher Education: Understanding the influence and impact of rankings on higher education, policy and society. New York: Routledge.

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Retrieved from https://docs.education.gov.au/documents/australiangovernment-response-review-higher-education-provider-categorystandards-review Department of Education. (2019b). A new future for VET and higher education [Media release]. Retrieved from https://docs.education. gov.au/documents/australian-government-response-review-highereducation-provider-category-standards-review

Kemp, D., & Norton, A. (2014). Review of the demand-driven funding system. Canberra: Australian Government.

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Meek V. L. (2003) Governance and Management of Australian Higher Education: Enemies Within and Without. In: Amaral A., Meek V.L., Larsen I.M. (eds) The Higher Education Managerial Revolution?. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht.

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Norton, A. & Cherastidtham, I. (2018). Mapping Australian higher education: 2018 version. Melbourne: Grattan Institute.

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Organisational narratives vs the lived neoliberal reality Tales from a regional university Marg Rogers, Margaret Sims, Jo Bird & Sue Elliott University of New England

Organisational narratives are foundational to inform the actions and directions of an organisation. Modern organisations often place great weight and invest significant time crafting their narratives that are communicated through mission statements, strategic plans, policies, directives and self-promotion. Sometimes these narratives align with the lived reality of the workers and those who deal with the organisation, but at other times there is a significant gap, or even chasm, between the portrayed ideal and the reality. This paper situates such narratives, and the lived experiences within critical organisational theory and a neoliberal framework. Utilising autoethnographic accounts of four academics within a higher education context, it highlights this gap and the need to voice concerns about this misalignment. The paper raises awareness of both organisations and workers to the importance of being true to narratives and ensuring they are an accurate representation of what happens. It offers ideas for resisting the disjunction between narrative and reality and a way of challenging neoliberalism within higher education.

Keywords: narrative, auto-ethnography, higher education, critical organisational theory, neoliberalism, organisational restructure, ethics

Humans are innately attracted to narratives and have used them to explain their lives, histories, cultures, beliefs and organisations throughout time (Gottschall, 2012).

Organisations create narratives to direct their efforts, justify their positions and actions, situate their policies, motivate their workers and align themselves with desirable values (Pekar, 2011) or groups of people. Such narratives are important and are often held up by managers as the ideal for how their organisation should be perceived by others and how it should be operated; in effect, organisations become ‘PR driven marketing institutions’ (Klikauer & Tabassum, 2019, p. 88). The narratives carry weight because conformity with them can be used as a criterion for the acceptance or rejection of projects, resources and people. Additionally, workers use them to self-govern their work and development using strategies such as performance reviews and applications

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for promotion, as part of neoliberal governmentality of workers (Pyysiäinen et al., 2017). Due to their inherent power, it is beholden on managers, workers and society to critically question organisational narratives. Sometimes there are profound differences between the lived reality of those that work and deal with the organisation. Here we discuss autoethnographical accounts from workers in one regional Australian university. Autoethnography situates such accounts within the context of the individuals (Benoot & Bilsen, 2016), the context in this case, being the university.

The individuals involved hold standard academic roles which involve research, teaching and service activities. The accounts are analysed and explored to elucidate the differences between the autoethnographic accounts and the organisational narratives. To do this, we draw upon an organisational critical theory alongside a neoliberal framework.

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Organisational critical theory This research draws upon organisational critical theory, which requires critical exploration of organisational ideology, culture, structure, management and communication (van Manen, 1990). Here, we investigate one university as a context for the examination of the organisational narratives versus the lived reality. We are not claiming this organisation is inherently poorly organised or operated or that those in management intend to hinder and frustrate workers. Rather we use our direct experiences to engage in critical thinking within the parameters of our theoretical framework to illustrate the key message of this paper; the disjunction between organisational narratives and our lived experience. We argue our critical thinking supports the formation of ideas that might improve

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outcomes for the organisation, its professional and academic staff, students, the community in which it operates, similar organisations, and ultimately, society overall.

We make this claim based on the proposition that critical thinking offers an opportunity to use our experiences to enhance understandings. In the 17th Century, Frances Bacon said critical thinking was ‘a desire to seek, patience to doubt, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and hatred for any kind of imposture’ (Bacon, 1605 in Silver, 2011, p. 1).

In essence, critical theory necessitates moving on from a neutral, sympathetic position (Cooksey & McDonald, 2011) to one that offers opportunities for reflection and change.

Critical thinking can transport an organisation forward in a positive direction, and its promoters believe the alternative to thinking critically is financially detrimental in the longer term

Figure 1: The effect of neoliberal policies on the quality of the work and the workforce Source: Marg Rogers

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and damaging to the richness of life (Scriven & Paul, 2016).

Organisational critical theory can be positioned alongside the neoliberal theoretical framework purposefully chosen to guide this research.

Neoliberalism theoretical framework Neoliberalism is responsible for a narrative in which managerialism flourishes. It is important to be clear that this paper positions management as different from managerialism.

Management consists of the ‘necessary organising activities required in any large, complex organisation’ (Taylor, 2003, p. 5). In contrast, managerialism can be seen as ‘management for its own sake, of management as the central and privileged purpose of the university’ (p.5). Managerialism imposes demands on staff ‘for the purpose of rendering employees subordinate’ (Morrish, 2016, p. 1). Integral to managerialism is the tenet that workers cannot be trusted. Therefore, to ensure the organisation’s success workers must be closely supervised and controlled; a process that leaves those on the receiving end feeling micromanaged (Giroux, 2013, 2015). Further implications of the managerialist attitude are that there must be management structures that ensure an appropriate level of supervision is available to oversee each and every worker and that the role of managers is to ensure conformity (Graber, 2012; Monbiot, 2016), rather than facilitate positive,

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encouraging work environments where innovation flourishes.

Shore and Wright (2019) state: This move reflects the way that many university managers now see their role – which is no longer to provide support for academics but, rather, to manage them as ‘human capital’ and a resource. From the perspective of many university managers and human resources (HR) departments, academics are increasingly portrayed as a reluctant, unruly and undisciplined workforce that needs to be incentivised or cajoled to meet management’s targeted outputs and performance indicators (p.8).

To justify this position, a narrative of improved efficiency to cope with competition is generally adopted, as demonstrated in Figure 1. This, in turn, leads to ‘bullshit’ words (Luks, 2017) that sound sophisticated, but have little or no meaning. Once a management-heavy structure is in place those occupying management positions must justify their positions by appearing to be extremely busy doing important work. In our experience, this is often demonstrated through sending emails and other communication that repeat information already sent to their workers and calling more meetings. More broadly, this has become so problematic, there is now a significant body of literature on what are termed, ‘bullshit jobs’ as described by Glaser (2014) and Graeber (2019) (See review of Graeber, 2019, in this issue). Having obtained a bullshit job leads managers to offload ‘more and

Figure 2: The effects of neoliberalism in higher education Source: Marg Rogers

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more of their responsibilities onto the lowest-ranking female subordinate to give the impression that they were too busy to do such things themselves, leading, of course, to their having even less to do than previously’ (Graeber, 2019, p.

33). Whilst the neoliberal narrative positions this as the best way forward for improving productivity, the experiences of workers are the exact opposite as depicted in Figures 1 and 2. This plays out somewhat differently in different contexts but is particularly problematic in the higher education sector (see Figure 2) where the conformity enforced by neoliberal managerialism is the opposite of what is needed for universities to fulfil their critical roles as a check and balance on society (Connell, 2015; Furedi, 2017; Jones, 2014; Orr & Orr, 2016). As a consequence, Shore and Wright (2019) argue that mismanagement is rife, stating ‘higher education is now being modelled on the same types of financial speculation that produced the … global financial crisis’ (p. 8).

Thus, in this paper, we share auto-ethnographic examples, illustrating counter-productivities in the higher education context within one university. Boughton (2013) argues that the way forward from the problems created by neoliberalism is to use the power of the collective and collective resistance, but there is an important role for leaders in this context to articulate the vision and facilitate collective action. This paper is situated as an awareness raising paper, a necessary first step to voice these dilemmas as experienced in the higher education workforce and suggest a way forward to resist such difficulties within a neoliberal regime.

Methodology

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Individuals who do not accept the boundaries and strictures of the figured world may challenge it and this challenge is the purpose of this paper.

Using an auto-ethnographic approach, the authors accounts were created by drawing on their reflections, peer discussions and journal entries. These auto-ethnographic accounts are not isolated events, but rather, are representative of the efforts of academic staff who live in the valley between an organisation’s ideals and the reality of neoliberal management. The examples were chosen because they represented a range of experiences within research, service and teaching which are the three main activities of academics at the university. All accounts were collected in a time period covered by the organisation’s strategic plan, that is 2016-2020, which is important for the findings, because what is written in the plan, and the reality of workers’ lives were very different.

Ethics approval for auto-ethnographical research studies are not needed (Stahlke Wall, 2016), however, it is important to act ethically. The authors have made every effort to ensure that individuals in management have not been named, unless it is in a media report or in documents in the public domain.

Additionally, because of the timeframes in which many of the events occurred, a period in which an organisational restructure was undertaken, multiple people held management positions in acting, interim and/or substantive roles. For example, in the last five years we have had at least five deans, and ten heads of school. This degree of management movement, we claim, makes it difficult to identify any individual within the accounts.

Organisational narratives

In this study we employed an auto-ethnographical approach, which integrates what we learn from political and intellectual positions about practice and theory (Holman Jones, 2016).

This approach situates the ethnographic narrative within the individual’s cultural context (Benoot & Bilsen, 2016). Autoethnographic accounts are more powerful when they contain personal reflections, emotional reactions and embodied acts (Benoot & Bilsen, 2016). Through these narratives, we have constructed our own understandings of our lives, the lives of others, our culture and its constructs through figured worlds (Pennington & Prater, 2016) that have been created socially and built culturally.

Figured worlds as defined by Pennington and Prater (2016) and Cleland and Durning (2019) are social/cultural constructs in which roles for participants are defined based on power, status and rank. Participants in a figured world interpret their experiences based on the narratives available to them in that world, and act accordingly. Figured worlds are co-constructed by participants, so are not static. Individuals who wish to be successful within their figured world must act in ways that advantage themselves within its framework. vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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Using one Australian university as our case, we started with the institutional strategic plan for the period 2016-2020 (UNE, 2015) which states that the university aims to deliver ‘excellent research with high impact’ (para. 3). It gives special reference to ‘international distinction’ in staff members’ chosen fields and that the research will ‘positively impact and strengthen our communities’ (para. 8). The strategic plan also outlines the university’s aim for ‘digital dominance,’ which encompasses being ‘a global leader in the delivery of high quality and innovative teaching and learning, with digital and online education accessible 24/7 throughout the world’ (UNE, 2015, para. 6). Staff working at the university are purported to be experiencing ‘a bold and innovative culture’ that is engaging and constructive ‘where creative ideas and innovation thrive and where staff flourish’ (UNE, 2015, para.

8). The university aims to ‘improve operational resilience’ by ‘improving flexibility, responsiveness, efficiency and reliability and through adopting best practice in all things we do’ (UNE, 2015, para. 7). Specifically, in challenging times in the higher education sector, the university claims it will ‘diversify and

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Figure 3: Summary of the three autoethnographic accounts Source of organisational narratives: UNE, 2015

grow income’ to ‘guarantee excellence in teaching, learning, research and innovation’ (UNE, 2015, para. 5). At the conclusion of the strategic plan, a list of values is offered, including (UNE, 2015, para. 10): • Creative, innovative, willing to change and take calculated risks; • Respectful, approachable and helpful; • Sustainable, robust and dependable; and, • Ethical, honest, accountable and authentic.

In contrast to this document is the lived reality of staff and the tension-filled clashes between management and staff, in which management’s rhetoric is far from the lived reality of staff. For example, a recent restructure involving the creation of faculties was justified by the then vice chancellor in terms of improving management: staff also objected to Professor Duncan’s decision to restructure and consolidate 10 schools into three faculties, reversing a predecessor’s decision. The old structure didn’t really work, she thought, while the restructure brought more coherent management to the university. “It helped us make changes to introduce different and better ways of teaching, and respond to students,” she said (Fuller, 2019, para. 42-43).

This is based on a position claiming that change is essential for survival, and that the best change to ensure this survival is an increase in management positions at the cost of on-theground staff positions, with management reasoning that ‘the status quo in times of disruptive change is not a winning strategy’ (Matchett, (2018)).

However, this restructure, which resulted in the creation of multiple new senior management positions (deans, deputy deans, associate deans) and their supposedly essential accompanying support staff, was deeply unpopular with many professional and academic staff. ‘Last winter a staff meeting

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expressed no confidence in (the) VC … over an academic restructure’ (Matchett (2018)). The drivers of this high level of unpopularity are illustrated in the following sections of this paper which explores the findings, discussions and suggestions of a positive way forward.

Findings: The lived reality In the following paragraphs we share the lived reality recounted by four academic staff members within the university during the period the strategic plan was in place. The first example explores the area of research, the second examines service and the last reflects upon teaching within the academic’s workload as depicted in Figure 3.

Example 1: The creation of a research-based digital app (research) After the successful publication of two research-based story books to support young children from Australian Defence Force (ADF) families (Rogers, 2018a; 2018b)(see ‘Waiting for Daddy: Rose’s Story’ and ‘Now that I am big: Anthony’s story’) the eBook author joined with another early childhood education academic (both co-authors of this paper), along with university technological learning designers and media designers to transform one of the eBooks into a research-based digital app (Rogers et al., 2018a) as shown in the first column of Figure 3 (see ‘Rose’s Story: Waiting for Daddy’).

This also aligned with other early childhood technology research in which both academics were engaged at the time.

Additionally, the project addressed a research gap identified earlier by the team that this cohort of children did not have adequate age and culturally-appropriate resources and parents of the children had requested digital apps.

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Figure 4: The imbalance of managerial and administrative webs encountered by the research output team The project effectively aligned with our teaching around early childhood literacy, multi-literacies, communication development, technology and ways of supporting families and the university’s promotion of its’ role in innovative research with impact and dominance in the field of digital technology (as identified in UNE, 2015).

Several organisational barriers to creating a research-based digital app presented themselves, much to the surprise of our team. Even though digital apps had been in use for at least eight years, there were many times within the process when we felt like we were proposing to do something that had never been done before. That is, we had to push organisational and bureaucratic boundaries to invent the rules as we moved forward with the project. We saw this refusal to accept a digital app as a valid research output as a management ‘resistance stance’, privileging print literacy practices (Leander, 2009, p. 147) because a different research-based printed children’s storybook had been published previously from the same data set which was applauded by university management (see Baber et al., 2015). The barriers we encountered included ethical dilemmas, a lack of understanding of non-traditional research outputs (NTRO), a lack of leadership courage to permit the project to move forward, and complex administrative webs to navigate as outlined in the second column of Figure 4 as we now explain.

The University’s ethics committee was very hesitant to approve the publication of the app from research data gathered during the first author’s PhD (Rogers, 2017) because the app was considered to be an NTRO. We were advised an NTRO was not a publication and one co-author had not listed an app as a potential PhD research output. This seemed absurd, because the lack of resources and request for eBooks, vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

apps and programs was one of the findings of the project.

How the researcher was supposed to predict such a finding and put it in an ethics application before beginning data collection is puzzling. Because of this lack of psychic vision, we were required to draft a new ethics application, rather than amend the previously approved one. This extra application was a very time-consuming process and seemed unnecessary given a children’s hard copy picture book and eBooks from the same PhD data set had been published without issue and we saw the app as simply an alternative form of publication. The ethics committee believed an app available on the internet was a major concern, despite the published eBooks being freely available online. Therefore, we were asked to obtain new permissions from all participants as well as the Australian Defence Force ethics committee who were adamant that no special permission was needed since the research had already obtained permission from the non-ADF parents and their children.

There was an overall lack of understanding on the part of the ethics committee about what we were trying to achieve with the data; that is, create a useful and educational narrative for children, parents and educators in a modern, accessible format. This was especially frustrating given the university strategic plan’s emphasis on ‘digital dominance’ (UNE, 2015) aligned with an online university-wide teaching and learning focus and a recent push for high impact research from the Australian Research Council (2015). After addressing over fifty ethics committee conditions on various forms to progress the app, we were then sent on a bureaucratic paper chase. This involved seeking permission from the University copyright officer, the information technology department, the legal department, university insurance, the head of school,

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the dean of the faculty, and the professor and a very senior manager (who ironically said we didn’t need this approval).

At times, many of these personnel were baffled as to why we had been asked to seek their approval. This all occurred during a major restructure of the university, so asking for head of school and dean approval involved seeking permission from different interim and acting managers during the overly long and tedious process (and each required us to explain the project in detail). All these delays impacted the research team’s workloads as we were strongly advised we could not proceed until all permissions had been gained. This meant that team members continued with other duties and could not move forward with the project until permissions were gained after a six-month delay.

There were times during the project we regretted trying to be innovative, and we lamented the number of traditional journal articles we could have produced instead. We learnt several lessons during the journey that we share here in the hope of improvements. We recognised there were significant gaps between the management narrative of innovation and the knowledge about innovation approaches possessed by people in management and ethics positions. Thus, valuable teaching and research time was wasted explaining and justifying the chosen app output, multiple times to multiple people. This time could have been better spent facilitating traditional research outputs with which management and ethics committees appeared more comfortable and therefore, have the relevant supportive processes in place. We also needed to be sure that what we were innovatively creating was worth moving the ‘organisational elephant’ and therefore, worth diligently pursuing and arguing our case.

Also, we came to understand that for every blocker, there was someone cheering us on. However, these encouraging people didn’t necessarily have any power. Lastly, we came to realise that by pushing against the ‘organisational elephant’ we may have made it easier for those to come. Unfortunately, we also realised we were becoming known as annoying to management and the ethics committee, which of course may have future personal ramifications. During this period we were asked to attend multiple forums at which senior management spoke of digital dominance and the need for innovative research and practices. These were difficult to listen to, knowing how far from our workplace reality were the notions expressed in them. We felt frustrated, disillusioned and disappointed that despite management having high ideals, they were not able to implement systems and practices that supported them.

Example 2: Invited lectures and workshops (service) This example highlights how management narratives and Australian Research Council (2015) priorities around

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‘demonstrating engagement and impact’ in professional fields are often thwarted by neoliberally inclined university managements. Academic roles are typically defined around teaching, research and service, the latter including service to one’s university and professional field. However, my experience is that service to one’s professional field is somewhat narrowly defined by universities and actively monitored by a set of forms and policies that bear limited relevance to the task at hand. The overall impact is to inhibit rather than support such professional endeavours.

My lived reality and commitment to professional service as an author (Elliott, 2008, 2014) and consultant over several decades in the early childhood education field has been to regularly engage with practitioners in professional learning. There is no one right approach to professional learning, particularly in the early childhood education field, where diversity of service type, qualifications and geographic dispersal of practitioners prevails. Further, under the Australian Quality Framework (AQF)(Council of Australian Governments (COAG), 2008) and the current National Quality Standard (NQS) (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2018) there are imperatives for practitioners to engage in critically reflective and ongoing professional learning. Added to these drivers, practitioners are time poor and funding for professional learning is often ad hoc and somewhat limited. However, being accustomed to navigating these complexities did not fully prepare me for continuing this professional learning work in my current university context.

Initially, I obliged by completing the relevant forms to travel locally and interstate to conduct professional learning.

Permission was sought and given to charge fees commensurate with funds available in the early childhood education field, rather than the university corporate charge out fees proposed for external work. I well recognised there would be no invitations to deliver professional learning if I chose to align rigidly with university prescribed fees. Over time with the restructuring from schools back to faculties and new management system accountability priorities, the number of forms and various levels of signing authorities increased, while efficiencies declined. For example, to conduct professional learning, such as a two-hour workshop for a local government in a capital city, the following were required: • a four-page Project Approval Form; • a one-page Request for Legal Approval; • a budget; • an online travel system entry detailing itinerary, flights, organisational cost codes and costings; and • a request to the Head of School for approval to travel and work off campus citing details of all staff covering my on-campus duties and teaching roles, even in non-teaching periods.

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The volume of paperwork required for a one-off service event, the evidence required to show I was engaging in work (rather than having a holiday), and evidence demonstrating that I would not be neglecting my duties was alarming. It should be noted that the budget proforma and expectations of those signing off on the budget were not relevant for the oneoff smaller scale professional learning events I was proposing.

In addition, in this instance, invoicing arrangements were required between the council and university. Despite repeated requests to the university, this was a seven-month process from an initial request to the Finance Department to complete a one page requesting council form, to the actual post-workshop payment into my Academic Professional Funds (an account which is available for me to expend on ongoing research costs).

Ongoing management of the process was time consuming and frustrating and I wondered why 40 per cent of the invoiced amount was deducted as a standard university management fee given the level of university service afforded to both myself and the council involved. Also, I reflected on the ramifications for my professional standing in the field and questioned would this council ever seek a university academic again for professional learning. A further ongoing frustration when regularly conducting professional learning was to know when and how much was deposited into my Academic Professional Funds. I considered this essential for forward planning around how best to utilise professional funds for research projects and conferences. Despite several requests for transparency around fund transactions, only a balance has ever been available on request to the relevant administrative officers. Due to this lack of transparency there is ongoing staff speculation about such funds being ‘black holes’.

Another option I considered to circumvent this onerous process was to complete a Private Paid Outside Work Application. The nine clauses in the Declaration cover every option from not presenting oneself as a representative of the university to conflict of interest, not using university resources and providing evidence of personal professional indemnity insurance. The declaration was clearly framed from a management, not worker, perspective with no room for negotiation.

Overall, in my experience, the current neoliberal management and accountability systems we are required to work within inhibit the conduct of professional learning in the field. The university publicly applauds high profile engaging projects with the field yet ignores the highly impactful smaller scale endeavours and actively creates barriers for engaging.

The challenge becomes to find ways around the inefficiencies of form filling management systems and seek other ways to maximise one’s professional engagement and impact. These experiences prompted my reflection about university ideals of staff with distinction in their fields of study and ability to foster positive community engagement and how this was vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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Figure 5: The interplay of neoliberal governmentality, policies and procedures and micromanagement in the examples Source: Marg Rogers

impeded in my realities. Unfortunately, the experiences were so time-consuming and inane that my frustration and stress levels rose to such an extent that I resolved to reduce my workload to part-time university work. This has offered the flexibility to continue to engage in what I consider highly impactful and rewarding professional learning work, without the burden of navigating increasingly complex management systems.

Example 3: Disrespect of scholarship (teaching) I have supervised to successful completion many higher degree (masters and doctorate level) students across a wide variety of topics over my decades as an academic. In addition, I have examined many theses. Recently, when one of my students was ready to submit their thesis for examination, I worked through the multiple forms required with the student including: • Thesis Submission Form • Statement of Authorship Form • Right of Access to Thesis Form • Request to Restrict Access to Thesis • Copyright Compliance Table • 100 Word Abstract for Graduation • Research Data management plan The existence of so many forms for thesis submission adds pressure for the academic and student at the end of the student’s candidature at a time when they are already under

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time pressure. In this case, the thesis submission form must be co-signed by the head of school. In the past this has been a simple formality: many times previously, I sent an email to the relevant delegate who signed the form and returned it within 24 hours. However, this time I was told the school co-ordinator of higher degrees by research was required to send the thesis and the form to a faculty manager, who would need to read the thesis before signing the form. I was told the thesis should have been submitted several weeks prior to the deadline for this to occur. I felt offended by this new procedure (which had not been communicated to the school) as it suggested to me that my expertise in determining that a thesis was ready for examination was being called in to question, despite being a professor with many years’ experience. In addition, the process for checking my expertise was calling on the experience of an academic who did not have expertise in the area of the student’s research, suggesting that the checking process did not recognise the specific knowledge required to evaluate the work.

Given that the student was submitting the thesis at the end of the legal candidature, I chose to submit without having this form signed so that the student was on record as having submitted in time. After waiting for two weeks I contacted the school higher degree by research co-ordinator who had not received the signed version of the form. This person then contacted the faculty senior manager who had not yet read the thesis. I complained that such a delay was unfair on the student and the form was returned later that day. While I understand that there may have been reasons behind the changes, these were not communicated clearly, nor was adequate warning given for my student’s thesis deadlines. This seemed at odds with the management claims of having a respectful and helpful culture. I was left feeling very frustrated, hurt and disrespected, given my seniority, level of expertise and experience in academia.

Discussion In this section we have used organisational critical theory and apply a neoliberal framework to the findings. The three examples provided above illustrate the extremely complex and unnecessary requirements of management that restrict the productive work of academics, as depicted in Figure 5.

The narrative of the university management is that we are digitally dominant, produce high impact research, service our communities well, are innovative in our teaching, work in an environment that is efficient, respectful and helpful and where creativity and innovation flourish (UNE, 2015), yet the reality for the academics in these examples is quite different. We felt our work was constantly interrupted, distrusted, disrespected and frustrated to fit with neoliberal management; experiences that were far from the ideals

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portrayed in the strategic plan. In turn, this meant that enjoyable and fulfilling work became onerous, tedious and seemingly pointless. It became more difficult to justify engaging in some of these activities, given the extra time they now required when we were juggling multiple projects and increasing work demands. So much extra time had to be dedicated to the projects than was necessary in order to comply with neoliberal management demands, accountability, compliance and proving the legitimacy of our efforts and skills. Creating ‘hyperactive busyness’ (Hil, 2012, p. 85) for academics means they are less able to stop and question poor policies, procedures and managerialism according to Smyth (2017). During the period of these events, management shifted the goal posts, continually adding additional layers of supervision, administration and processes that consume academics’ time, so the real and important work could not be completed. This creates a gap between the two parties, with management moving further and further away from the reality that academics experience every day. This growing gap between university managers and the reality of workers ‘is now a key feature of the university scene’ (Connell, 2019a, p. 130). This has the consequence of shifting the emphasis of ‘academic activity to commercial goals, the shift from exchange to competition, the movement from equality to inequality and the turning of academics into human capital’ (Taberner, 2018, p. 130).

In effect, what results is ‘a kind of parallax – people in the same organisation begin to live in completely different worlds’ (Spicer, 2018, p. 40). The consequences of this gap between management and workers can be significant, as discussed by Spicer (2018) in his analysis of the failure of Nokia. In relation to the higher education sector (Connell, 2019b) argues such a lack of synergy between academics and management poses risks to educational quality, and ultimately to the university’s reputation as educational quality declines.

In moving towards increased managerialism (or what Blackmore, 2019a, calls proceduralism), which in our experience is demonstrated by the enforcement of policies and procedures that restrict individual academics from engaging in productive work, the role of universities is called into question. While the strategic plan under which we work promotes high quality outputs, the management of these plans has been heavily influenced by neoliberal values as shown in cumbersome requirements that did not enhance the quality of the work. In our accounts, it actively discouraged engagement in innovation and impact in research, meaningful service to the community and excellence in teaching. The existence of so many forms and procedures to prove the validity and worthiness of academic’s work and the number of checks and approvals needed in all examples highlights neoliberal micromanagement, as explained by Giroux (2013; 2015).

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Workers will feel mistrusted, undervalued and disillusioned by the university staff, but they stifle academics and distract when their work is scrutinised to such an extent, as was the from their key research, teaching and service responsibilities. case in the three accounts in this paper.

As Morrish (2016) argues, they appear to be developed If you listen to the management speak, the university is for the sake of having processes, not for their utility. Spicer presented as an organisation that creates research of high (2018, p. 55) concurs, arguing such processes are ‘cooked up quality, is dominant in the digital domain and innovative in far from the day-to-day realities of a workplace. When they teaching and efficient and respectful of our practices; yet what are implemented, there is a profound mismatch between academics experience is teaching impacted by processes that do working practices and grand ideas. New concepts, which are not fit with teaching pedagogies and research time and energy supposed to make things better, often make them worse’. Such are squeezed. This results in declining quality across all areas of managerial demands appear to have no demonstrable positive academic work: teaching, research and service. These changes impact on quality but do serve to provide a paper trail for are underpinned by a rhetoric that positions higher education accountability purposes (Smyth, 2017). Ultimately, many as a business; a business competing in an education market academics avoid certain tasks because of the cumbersome selling a product to students (Watts, 2017). Whilst there is forms or bureaucracy that cannot be separated from the task debate as to the nature of the product being sold (Watts argues at hand, or choose to engage in fake compliance (Connell, that education itself cannot be sold, so what students are 2019a), thus further widening the gap between the reality purchasing is a qualification), of working academics and the positioning of higher management.

For academics in universities, coping education as a business means For academics in with their neoliberalised workplace is that the original mission of universities, coping with their problematic. Many feel overwhelmed, higher education, [that of neoliberalised workplace enhancing the capacity of is problematic. Many feel overpowered, fearful and powerless to resist students to engage effectively overwhelmed, overpowered, or change their workplace. High levels of as democratic citizens, and to fearful and powerless to resist stress, use of workplace counselling services, enhance social justice more or change their workplace. anxiety, depression, anger, sick leave, broadly (Christensen et al., High levels of stress, use of alcoholism, attrition and other signs of an 2019)], is compromised. In workplace counselling services, order to address this, Bell et anxiety, depression, anger, sick unhappy workplaces abound al., (2019, p. 11) argue we: leave, alcoholism, attrition ‘must not just be teachers and and other signs of an unhappy scholars, we must be dissenters and transgressors in pursuit workplaces abound (Hil, 2012; Smyth, 2017). Even though of racial justice, equity and transformative social change that they resist the neoliberal governmentality, they also tend to allows for liberation and radical love to surface’. internalise the managerial rhetoric and start judging their One of the issues with micromanagement is that academics performance in the light of the neoliberal mantra (Smyth, feel they are not trusted to do their job (Connell, 2019a).

2017) because they are immersed in it daily. According Drawing particularly on the first and third narratives, seeking to Macías (2015), one of the important outcomes of permission from several departments, along with attaining a neoliberalism in institutions is its role in ‘producing subjects new ethics clearance, and having work checked by a manager that, while suffering the detrimental effects of neoliberal offers the covert message that academics cannot be trusted deregulation, nevertheless internalise neoliberal discourses (a phenomenon widely discussed in the literature; Connell, and use them to understand themselves and others as rational, 2019a; Kirkby & Reiger, 2015; Smyth, 2017). Specifically, calculative, enterprising, and individually responsibilised from our examples we seem to be perceived by management subjects’ (p. 254). As Macías (2015, p. 267) explains, as potentially doing something to jeopardise the university neoliberalism ‘constitutes the university not only as a product and the families our app was designed to support, engage in of neoliberalism, but also as an instrumental site in which professional development as a way of escaping our work duties, the biopolitical and ontological project of neoliberalism is or willing to approve the submission of student work that accomplished’. Other causes for unhappiness of academics was sub-standard. Our shared experience leads us to believe are the intensification of work and high-level changes such as academics are perceived by management as incompetent restructuring (Macías, 2015). While these are often argued by troublemakers, who need to be kept on a tight leash, management as necessary, and ‘the result of crises, discourses micromanaged through forms and processes that do not make of efficiency, streamlining and efficacy attach themselves to any sense to those working outside the management group. crisis discourses’ they are often used by management to ‘shape These processes are meant to support the work undertaken the neoliberal university’ (Macías, 2015, p. 264). vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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Neoliberalism positions management as synonymous with efficiency (Watts, 2017); thus, better management is expected to ‘prove an effective solvent for a wide range of economic and social ills’ (Taberner, 2018, p. 132). Management or the leading of people is seen as a skill that can be taught (Taylor, 2003). As a neutral discipline, management is thought to be more efficient when managers have little knowledge of the sector, ensuring they operate independently, and without bias (Blackmore, 2019b). Unfortunately, research has so far failed to support this proposition (Spicer, 2018). Instead the neoliberal managerial context in which managers operate is likely to encourage the emergence of what Oplatka (2016) calls ‘dark leadership traits’. As it is unusual for managers to be assessed for their skills or made accountable for the damage they potentially cause for the workers they supposedly lead or for the organisation, these dark traits tend to be overlooked.

There are few avenues to address damage caused, but in our context, they include a cumbersome and time-consuming complaints system which the staff union may assist with and Public Interest Disclosure (PID) processes through an auditor. The difficulty of complaining in a workplace and the processes involved mean most instances go unreported.

Instead, managers are often promoted on the basis of their dark leadership traits and continue to bully from a higher position with a commensurate salary, where their autocratic leadership style continues to impact negatively on employee performance (Basit et al., 2017) and employee wellbeing (Beattie, 2019). Indeed Graeber (2019) suggests that the further a manager climbs the hierarchy, the less accountability is required so that by the time the level of vice chancellor is reached, Gschwandtner and McManus (2018) argue salary levels are not based on performance, but rather on a keepingup-with-others approach.

Managers at lower levels operate as gatekeepers between workers and those further up the hierarchy. Often these managers are promoted from the ranks of workers. Because of their previous relationships, workers often expect these managers to advocate for them; as well as understand the realities of their daily work and support them. There is a greater sense of betrayal when these managers fail to do so (Barcan, 2019). Managers in this position experience tension between the expectations of workers and the expectations of their managers. Generally, those who demonstrate loyalty to the regime tend to be rewarded (West, 2016) so that for these managers there is significant motivation to clearly signal they belong to the leadership group (Davis, 2017; Spicer, 2018).

In our examples, we see this in the verbal support offered that made absolutely no difference to the imposts placed on us by management outside of the school. In further examples, we have seen this in requirements imposed for study leave, annual leave and promotion to which the managers in question were not subject when they were working as academics.

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Resistance to neoliberal managerialism in higher education comes with a cost. As West (2016, p. 6) explains: Dissenters are casually dismissed as poor team-players, trouble-makers or malcontents … those academics who show their loyalty to the new paradigm can expect favourable treatment in the allocation of teaching responsibilities, travel grants, even office space and furnishings. Above all, they can be safely promoted to positions of managerial authority themselves – although they will then be more closely monitored for their conformity to accepted doctrine.

Policies, procedures and initiatives developed in isolation without an understanding of the reality of day-to-day work generally tend to be ineffective and time consuming but their failure to achieve desired outcomes tend to be blamed on workers themselves rather than on the managers who developed them (Spicer, 2018). As Brennan and Zipin (2019, p. 275) explain: ‘slippages, missteps and unintended consequences blamed on “workplace culture that needs to change”, rather than on managerial culture that needs to change’. The emotional impact of this on academics goes unnoticed or is seen as a weakness. Here, the ‘pathologisation of those who complain is never far from the surface. Healthy individuals conform, oppositional individuals are maladjusted. A case of bullying or harassment is more conveniently conceived as the result of an “adjustment disorder”’ (West, 2016, p. 8).

The culture of individualism that is an inherent part of neoliberalism (Beilharz, 2015) means that the solution to staff resistance is positioned as being in the hands of the staff themselves. Those who are concerned about overwork are directed to courses that will teach them how to prioritise their time; those who are targeted for bullying are sent to stress management courses and counselling, and anybody who is feeling the effects of the restructure is sent to a course on managing change. Management and inherently poor systems are never cited as the reason for entrenched issues. In our organisation, when staff feedback indicated poor communication channels between academics and management, the number of unidirectional management missives with a lack of real collaboration or feedback, the solution instigated was fourfold. Firstly, a Facebook at work page was introduced, secondly, multiple emails (up to four each time) were sent with the same content from different people, thirdly senior management sent out an email ‘news’ every week, and lastly, a restructure offering yet more management levels and additional new management positions was imposed. No strategies were developed to improve communication from workers to management. Instead, all the strategies focused on creating channels from management to workers.

In concluding this discussion, we identify a need for further research in these perilous neoliberal times for universities.

As academics, we are generally good at looking outwards

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for research topics, but in this challenging higher education climate, we need to look inwards more often. Specifically, we have identified three areas of potential research: 1. Examining critically reflective management approaches, drawn from arguments that management must be equally accountable, if not more so, than workers; 2. Investigating embedded inequities between management and staff created by increasingly hierarchical and burgeoning management structures; and, 3. Interrogating change frequency and ‘the change is good’ mantra, plus seeking robust rationales and frameworks for structural change.

which then leads to behavioural change, thus its import should not be overlooked.

Taylor (2003) argues we should refuse to participate in needless managerial activities while Kenway, Boden, and Fahey (2015) introduce the idea of symbolic acts of defiance such as academics avoiding school meetings or choosing to work from home more often. Often academic unions include such small acts in their industrial action, so workers are protected when they take these measures, which is important for many personnel. Certainly, we need to think critically about our work and the way we daily engage in the workplace (Thornton & Shannon, 2015). Language might be reframed (Hil, 2012) so that meaningless management-speak (what Where to from here many authors now call bullshit: Ball, 2017; Frankfurt, 2005; Luks, 2017; Spicer, 2018) is challenged.

In this paper we have used three examples from our recent Informal strategies may include simply being available experiences to reflect on the ways in which neoliberal to talk with colleagues (Graeber, 2019) and demonstrating managerialism has shaped our world and the ways in which we appreciation of their work (Morrish, 2019). We have a operate in that world. We believe that simply accepting that responsibility to reclaim time (Watts, 2017), a movement this is the way things are in higher education is not acceptable. captured in the idea of the slow academic (Klein & Wall, As Davis, (2017, p. 40) claims: 2019). Humour provides an ‘To allow wild propositions opportunity to speak back Resistance makes an individual vulnerable to stand unchallenged is to to power (Manathunga & so it is important that we work within the acquiesce to the transformation Bottrell, 2019). Foucault collective. This means being clear about a by which untruth becomes suggested speaking back conventional wisdom’. By to power helps shape our common purpose underpinned by common locating ourselves, as the subjectivity in ways other than values around cultural democracy and ‘sociological observer as part imposed upon us by managers social justice. of the events being researched’ (Raaper, 2019).

(Fox & Alldred, 2017, p. 21), More overt resistance we open opportunities to think strategies might include what about things differently. We must no longer be complicit in Spicer (2018, p. 168) calls administrative sabotage: ‘using our downfall, but actively resist in order to create change. bullshit as a way of purposefully clogging up an administrative Essentially, ‘we need to stop deluding ourselves into believing system … as a purposeful and planned way of overloading that we need to continue endorsing stupid ideas’ (Smyth, the administration of large organisations.’ He also suggests 2017, p. 214). advocating for strategies that ‘tether people more closely to Our reflections lead us to identify the importance of the longer-term results of their decisions’ (p. 185) which may engaging in some form of resistance as advocated in the involve developing performance accountability measures for literature. Hil (2012, p. 202) reflects on the function of managers (Christensen et al., 2019; Smyth, 2017). resistance that is ‘to destabilise the existing order by engaging Resistance makes an individual vulnerable (Hil, 2012; in various acts of dissidence and subversion’. These acts might Spicer, 2018) so it is important that we work within the be at the micro-level such as that defined by Taberner (2018) collective (Kenway et al., 2015). This means being clear as covert resistance and by Bosanquet (2017) as STARS about a common purpose (Graeber, 2019) underpinned by – slow, tiny acts of resistance. Such acts of resistance might common values around cultural democracy and social justice involve forgetting to perform certain tasks, leaving tasks (Manathunga & Bottrell, 2019). Through the collective incomplete, and taking of sick leave when stress escalates. we are exposed to different views from those with different Whilst small acts of resistance might be perceived as a childish backgrounds (Ferrando, 2012), and those holding different avoidance of the bigger problem, they have a positive purpose theoretical perspectives (Manathunga & Bottrell, 2019), all of in serving to raise awareness of the absurdities and tensions which are necessary to strengthen the collective. These provide experienced by those subjected to neoliberal managerialism. us with ammunition to build spaces of hope (Kenway et al., Raising awareness is a preliminary step that contributes to 2015); and alternative narratives that speak to our own truths the creation of a communal culture (a shared understanding) and values. Together we can develop the radical imagination vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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claimed by Bourassa (2019) as essential for the development of alternatives to neoliberal managerialism. We hope this paper takes the first step in sharing our understandings, and in reaching out to others who may contribute to a collective building of alternative narratives. Organisational change is challenging, and open to opposition and setbacks and is hard work. Indeed, Martin Luther King (1963) stated ‘We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through … tireless efforts and persistent work’ (para. 21).

Overall, organisational narratives are important documents to critique, because it is from these that many of the directions and actions of an organisation are founded. This study highlighted that when the reality of the workplace and these organisational narratives are so incompatible it becomes comical, workers can experience high levels of frustration, disappointment, disillusionment and have their time wasted, which further hinders their work. Whilst neoliberal governmentality of managers reasons that it is the worker’s job to take responsibility for problems (Macías, 2015; Moisander et al., 2018; Pyysiäinen et al., 2017) such as these, responsibility for the chasm between workers experiences and organisational ideals needs to be addressed.

Macías (2015) argues that the governmentality framework of neoliberalism is ‘an onto-epistemological project that consistently shapes social environments, social policies, state institutions, and the subject that is captured and lives within these environments, policies and institutions’ (p. 253). The effects of this framework on the work and lives of staff within our organisations is profound and needs to be questioned.

We believe that critiquing these narratives and the neoliberal practices of management within the organisation could raise awareness and open opportunities to improve the quality and quantity of the work and the quality of experiences of workers. As such, workers would be more likely to enjoy their work, engage in innovative research, service and teaching and meet the needs of the organisation and the academy to better fulfil their role within society. Morrish (2019) reinforces this by stating: Staff who feel valued and whose demonstrable competence is recognised by security of employment will experience less stress and are more likely to exhibit greater loyalty to their employers. A corollary of this transformation would be an improvement in relationships between managers and academics, a state which would favour enhanced learning for students’ (pp. 10-11).

Dr Marg Rogers is a lecturer in early childhood education at the University of New England with research interests in families, narratives, professionalism and technology in early childhood.

Contact: mbaber@une.edu.au

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Professor Margaret Sims is a lecturer in early childhood at the University of New England with research interests in early childhood and higher education professionalism.

Dr Jo Bird is a lecturer and course coordinator in early childhood education, with research interests in children’s technology supported learning, play and early childhood leadership Dr Sue Elliott is a Senior Lecturer and Course Co-ordinator in early childhood education at the University of New England with research interests in outdoor play, forest preschool, education for sustainability and action research.

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Rogers, M., Bird, J., Roberts, R., & Donald, T. (2018). Rose’s story: Waiting for Daddy. Apple Incorporated(1.1). Retrieved from https:// itunes.apple.com/us/app/roses-story/id1439753804?ls=1&mt=8 Scriven, M., & Paul, R. (2016). Defining Critical Thinking. Retrieved from http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-criticalthinking/766 Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2019). Privatizing the public university. Key trends, countertrends and alternatives. In S. Wright & C. Shore (Eds.), Death of the public university? Uncertain futures for higher education in the knowledge economy. (pp. 1 – 27). New York: Berghahn.

Silver, C. (2011). The importance and logic of critical thinking. Wired.

(3 Oct). Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2011/03/theimportance-of-logic-critical-thinking/ Smyth, J. (2017). The toxic university. Zombie leadership, academic rock stars and neoliberal ideology. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Spicer, A. (2018). Business bullshit. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Stahlke Wall, S. (2016). Toward a Moderate Autoethnography.

International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 15(1), 1609406916674966. doi:10.1177/1609406916674966 Taberner, A. M. (2018). The marketisation of the English higher education sector and its impact on academic staff and the nature of their work. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 26(1), 129152. doi:10.1108/IJOA-07-2017-1198 Taylor, P. (2003). Waiting for the Barbarians and the Naked Emperor’s Chicken. Higher Education Review, 35(2), 5 – 24.

Thornton, M., & Shannon, L. (2015). ‘Selling the dream’: Law School branding and the illusion of choice. In M. Thornton (Ed.), Through a glass darkly: the social sciences look at the neoliberal university (pp. 157 – 176). Acton, Australia: ANU Press.

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Watts, R. (2017). Public universities, managerialism and the value of higher education. London, England: Palgrave Critical University Studies.

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Organisational narratives vs the lived neoliberal reality Marg Rogers, Margaret Sims, Jo Bird & Sue Elliott

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‘Amplifier’ platforms and impact Australian scholars’ use of The Conversation Kim Osman & Stuart Cunningham Queensland University of Technology

Digital and social media have grown exponentially to become highly influential spheres of public communication – increasingly crowded, contested, and corrupted, and increasingly in need of scholarly engagement. Alternative metrics (‘altmetrics’) that are generated from social and digital media platforms have become more important as indicators of impact and engagement for scholars.

In AUR 61/2, we reviewed the growth of amplifier platforms and the academic and contextual reasons for their growth. In this article, we investigate how scholars frame their practices of engagement and impact, how they use ‘amplifier platforms’, in particular The Conversation, and to what extent institutions are supporting their staff in these activities. We find that scholars frame engagement and impact as an ethical imperative and place importance on evidence-based messaging; that they are not only interested in seeing their own research amplified, but in amplifying other quality research; that this benefits their other academic activities; that open access models promote republication and increase reach and engagement; and that institutional support for engaging on amplifier platforms is uneven and underdeveloped.

Keywords: public scholarship, amplifier platforms, digital media, online scholarly communication, The Conversation, engagement and impact

Introduction Amplifier platforms are used by scholars to engage with wider publics and stakeholders than academia alone. The most prominent amplifier platform in Australia is The Conversation, a digital media platform that publishes articles written by academics and is aimed at a general readership.

The Conversation is an open platform that facilitates the republication of its articles and is an effective channel for scholars to communicate their research to diverse audiences.

This article is the second in a two-part investigation. Our article in Australian Universities’ Review 61/2 (Osman & Cunningham, 2019) focused on the academic and contextual reasons for the growth of amplifier platforms. This article draws on qualitative findings based on data collected through surveys and interviews with scholars across career stages, disciplines and institutions. We find that scholars frame engagement and impact as an ethical imperative and place importance on evidence-based messaging; that they are not vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

only interested in seeing their own research amplified, but in amplifying other quality research; that this benefits their other academic activities; that open access models promote republication and increase reach and engagement; and that institutional support for engaging on amplifier platforms is uneven and underdeveloped.

Methods First, we collected data through a series of questions added to The Conversation’s annual survey of their readers and authors (who are also readers). Our questions targeted authors and focused on motivations for publishing in The Conversation, whether it was useful in their careers, and the extent to which their institutions were supportive of such publishing activities.

The survey was delivered to all readers and authors who visited the site during a two-week period in July 2017, and had 6,084 respondents. Of these, 196 respondents were

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Figure 1: Outcomes of writing for The Conversation authors published by The Conversation who answered our questions and exactly half agreed to be interviewed by us.

Of the 196 authors who answered our questions, most (78 per cent) rated publishing in The Conversation at least somewhat useful to their career, while 73 per cent indicated some level of institutional encouragement for such activities (keeping in mind encouragement does not necessarily equal support). Survey respondents noted a range of reactions to publishing in The Conversation as indicated in Figure 1, along with invitations to submit book proposals, contact from community groups and unsolicited contact from trade lobby groups.

After analysing survey responses, we collected data from The Conversation’s metrics about all 98 authors who agreed to be interviewed including the number of articles they had each published (Figure 2), the number of cumulative reads (Figure 3) and re-publications (Figure 4) they had on The Conversation site, how many times their articles were shared on social media, their field of study and career stage.

Using these data we narrowed the field to 16 authors who were contacted for an interview based on either high numbers of reads (how many times people accessed their article on The Conversation or associated websites), republications (how many different media outlets the article was republished in), or social media shares (on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) of their articles. It was a purposive sample as we explored how contributing to amplifier platforms like The Conversation played out subject to a number of variables such as career stage, gender and age.

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Nine scholars were interviewed in the pilot round. The group included five women and four men who were from sciences (five participants), education (two), writing and management. Our interviewees were a range of everyday academics, from part-time early career lecturers to senior scholars with public profiles. All had had some degree of success writing for The Conversation, based on available metrics such as those shown in Figures 3 and 4. That is, their articles had a high readership – in some cases millions of readers – on The Conversation and other sites (The Conversation publishes content under a Creative Commons license and its articles are regularly republished on other sites, and readership is also tracked on these sites by The Conversation), they were widely republished in other prominent outlets such as the ABC or CNN and/or their articles had a high number of shares on social media sites such as Facebook.

It is important to note that the metrics that are currently underpinning our understanding of the interview data do not distinguish between academic and non-academic impact.

However, from survey responses indicating contact from a variety of stakeholders, we can assume the available metrics do demonstrate a significant degree of public engagement.

Underpinning this assumption is The Conversation’s selfreporting that 82 per cent of its readership is non-academic (The Conversation, 2018).

The interviews focused on scholars’ public communication activities as distinct from traditional academic publishing.

We wanted to know how scholars understood engagement and impact, and what drove them to engage with the

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Figure 2: Number of articles written by authors of The Conversation who responded to our survey questions (n=98) by the top ten represented ARC/ABS Fields of Research (FoRs) and career stage.

Please note the numbers in the plot area refer to career stages.

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Figure 3: Cumulative number of reads across articles published by The Conversation by author. Authors we interviewed from this dataset are indicated in black, and are relatively high performing authors based on the available metrics from The Conversation. public on issues related to their research. We asked scholars about their motivations for using amplifier platforms to disseminate their research, how long they had been doing so and if they planned to continue contributing to sites like The Conversation. We also asked them about their broader communication strategies, if they used social media and what they thought the effects of such activities have been on their career. We were also interested in gauging the support they felt they had from their institution, and whether or not there was any form of recognition, formal or otherwise, for such activities.

In addition to the pilot round, we also conducted another two rounds of interviews, each with a purposive sample of scholars. In the second round, we interviewed researchers from Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs – in addition to The Conversation, the Cooperative Research Centres Association is the other of our Linkage project partners) and communication professionals from CRCs who were tasked with publicising the centre’s research. In the third round, we interviewed early-career researchers to understand why they contribute to amplifier platforms given the need to establish a record of traditional academic publication. In this third round, we sought to elicit career narratives from early career researchers who are engaged in substantial teaching, service

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and research work building a profile for themselves in their field and institution.

In total, over the three rounds, we conducted interviews with 20 scholars.

Findings The ethical imperative to disseminate evidence-based research In light of the limitations of traditional quantitative measures of impact and to augment the alternative metrics generated by amplifier platforms, we sought to elicit narrative accounts about how scholars had achieved impact with their work and how they tried to contribute in a highly contested and compromised public sphere. One of the most prominent themes to emerge from the interviews was the emphasis academics put on the importance of evidence-based research being used in public debate: ‘But it’s really important to be communicating to the public evidence-based messages … there’s a lot of people out there blogging stuff on social media and it’s a bit of a mess sometimes. But there are some good voices out there in the world of social media that are sharing some good stuff.’

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Figure 4: Cumulative number of republications in media outlets ( for example SBS, ABC, IFL Science, Wall Street Journal) for responding scholars’ The Conversation articles, by authors’ career stage. Note the outlying author has 108 publications republished a total of 453 times. The next most highly republished author has 49 articles that have been republished a total of 303 times.

‘If we’re not there giving the information, then someone else will.’

‘Evidence-based information in this day and age, it’s a crowded space. And there’s lots of voices out there that are telling their own stories and sharing their own opinions. It’s really hard for the public.’

‘But I basically think that we need to make sure that good information gets out to people’ For the select cohort of academics we interviewed, The Conversation was central to the communication of their research. It gave them the freedom to report their own research in a way that engages and connects with a general audience.

‘I think when you do the sort of work I do you can kind of get a bit lost in academic concepts and constructs and thinking about deeper issues. And I think The Conversation helps you pull yourself back to explain what you’re doing in a really pithy manner to a lay audience’ Writing for an amplifier platform like The Conversation fits well between their normal writing as an academic and other engagements with mainstream media.

‘Often stuff in The Conversation gets picked up by other mainstream media. So, it’s a good vehicle, often, for amplifying …’

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‘So in terms of engagement probably for convenience, I think The Conversation has kind of worked nicely and so I probably prioritised that as the most, as the easiest kind of thing to integrate into work and research life. As an academic it sits well.’

The scholars we interviewed did not generally regard the mainstream media channels and platforms as first choice, but rather they are looking for where debates are happening. They are looking at engagement on a smaller scale where they can have real impact.

‘I don’t have that zealous approach to going out and propagandising for my field, that’s not motivation for me. But more often I’ll say, “Oh, this whole debate is really interesting isn’t it”? So I find it interesting more than having an ulterior motive.’

‘It’s about sharing information and making sure people know that it’s out there and where they can find it.’

‘So letting people know and letting them know in a way that matters is important’ ‘Rural and regional publications. You know, they’re probably far more important than getting a run on Channel 9 or in the Australian newspaper. So we want to get to those communities. So it’s again, what does the audience read?’

‘I just use those platforms because they’re useful to get the

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message out. But it’s actually trying to get out a message that’s important in terms of society as opposed to well, will this help me with my academic career and will I be on the telly and be a celebrity? It’s genuinely about “this is appalling”, if you read the report it’s genuinely appalling .... And it’s a good way of getting good academic work out into the light.’

The scholars we interviewed often emphasised the ethical aspect of engagement and impact. As researchers and scientists, these scholars see themselves as having a moral obligation to raise awareness of what the latest evidence actually says. This is especially important for issues like diet, nutrition and climate science which are highly contested on social and digital media. As Morin (2018, pp 3-4) notes: By politicalising these issues and tying them to religious and political dogma, the ability of science educators to change attitudes, and perhaps behaviours, fades. In response, some scientists have entered the public sphere to refute misinformation and spin by relying on the gateway belief model to change attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.

While some of our interviewees expressed a concern that certain types of engagement on amplifier platforms might be seen as advocacy, most agreed that it is these highly contested areas – the environment, climate and health issues like vaccinations, diet and cancer prevention – that are most in need of scholarly contributions. And this type of engagement, via amplifier platforms or social media sites like Twitter, is important for impacting public opinion (Kotcher et al., 2017).

Interviewees understood that there is no ‘general public’ or one mass audience for scholarly information. Instead, there are ‘issue publics’ and controversies (Papacharissi, 2015). There are many publics that benefit in different ways from engaging with evidence-based information and scholars have to make choices and target these different and sometimes overlapping publics.

‘I see it as a kind of an ethical or political imperative to engage.’ ‘…here was data that was really important to understand.’

‘But we also are a lot noisier on those platforms you referred to. The amplifier platforms like Twitter and Facebook and so forth. As well as very much involved in websites like The Conversation. I personally have written oh, I think about 35 pieces for them. But I was a very early adopter because I thought it was an excellent idea to get stuff beyond the classroom but still with credibility. And I like the freedom that offers.’

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Amplifying other quality research as an ethical imperative and to improve their own knowledge Interviewees were not only interested in sharing their own research, but in writing about and amplifying other quality research. For some, it didn’t matter so much where the quality research originates from, getting accurate, evidence-based information into the public domain took precedence.

‘I thought well I suppose I could write it up, it’s not my work but I’m in a good position, I’ve followed this whole field for a long time although it’s not my expertise. So, I wrote [The Conversation article] over a weekend. And I absolutely couldn’t believe the take-up. Of course I had no idea whether it would get a 100 reads or a 1000 reads or what, but [my colleague] kept on emailing me and saying, “Wow this is going crazy, it’s going viral”’.

‘But you tend to specialise in certain things. Whereas you do actually have a huge bank of expertise that you don’t necessarily use for peer-reviewed research or for big projects and things like that. But being able to put things out there in that way, it’s a different outlet but I also think it’s valuable.’

Benefits other academic activities As Charlotte Frost argues in The Digital Academic, using and producing digital media content gives scholars additional skills and potentially “an alternative route to career success” (Frost, 2017, p. 37). The scholars we interviewed were clear that writing for a general audience on an amplifier platform also benefits the other work they do as an academic. Our interviewees often spoke about how the writing skills they gain translate to writing in other forums. Journal articles are clearer and grant writing more compelling, as they are able to tell better stories about their research.

‘And although success rates in NHMRC are very poor, I’ve had a record better than most people. And I kind of knew this one was going to get up, I thought this is just such a good story, it’s so simple, everything ties in and this is simple.’

‘Probably more so for writing grants I guess. So I’ll tell the story and I’ll compel the panel why they should be giving me money for my project.’

‘The narrative is front and centre rather than the numbers.’

‘It’s only after having had the experience writing these articles I think my own scientific writing has benefitted a little bit from it. Like telling the story, writing something that you know can grab someone’s attention quickly… I think it’s improved my writing.’

‘I mean I knew it would be controversial, and I knew it would upset people.’

Open models promote republication and increase reach and engagement

‘I don’t know if people who don’t have clinician backgrounds, whether they feel differently. But it’s really important to be communicating to the public evidence-based messages.’

Amplifier platforms improve the dissemination of scholarship because their open models mean greater reach and republication rates. Stories that the scholars we interviewed

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have written in the Australian edition of The Conversation have been picked up by international outlets like CNN and the BBC, along with mainstream Australian outlets like the ABC, SBS, Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian. In addition, an increasing number of popular media sites are republishing content from The Conversation.

‘I mean who would have thought Mamamia would publish a long essay by an academic …? But they do. And those sorts of audiences are really important, I think, for academics.’

‘Yeah looking at the matrix of The Conversation to see where it was going as well really interested to see how many reads it was getting and it was amazing.’

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‘So sometimes you do get quite a wide much wider reach than you think.’

‘I was at a barbecue and a friend of a friend said “Oh I was reading something on my phone and oh, you wrote it” and it was on Mamamia. I was like, “Oh yeah, yeah I know the article but I didn’t realise it had been republished through that outlet”.’

Amplifier platforms are good pathways to other media, including international media. But they can also connect a scholar with a specialised niche community which can benefit from their expertise.

‘I had a film contract with an Australian outfit, and the BBC

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‘Because to me [as a senior scholar] you know, it takes me a couple of hours to write a Conversation article and I get hundreds of thousands of reads and lots of comments. It takes me six months to a year to write a [journal article] and approximately 200 people will cite it. So there’s…if I want my opinion to go further there’s no question where I should put my effort.’

‘I was on an enquiry in NSW, a parliamentary enquiry into [this topic] because of the piece in The Conversation, and I wasn’t very well published. And to be honest it’s very hard to get publications on [this topic] into journals. So peer-reviewed journals, they don’t really want to know about [it] because again, it’s beyond non-normative.’

them. So where a public scholar in the past may have worked hard to establish a working relationship with a journalist, or journalists would contact university media departments, now media can contact the scholars directly through social media and amplifier platforms

‘I don’t mind the republishing aspect of it, I guess what troubles me is it’s become a bit like an echo chamber, you’re getting exactly the same views across a range of platforms, it’s very hard to get another view in there. And look I know what’s driving it, it’s basically journalists are pretty tight these days. It’s a way of saving money and sharing so you know on the one hand it’s fine to republish in different mastheads but I would just like to see a wider variety of views to be honest.’

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– currently having negotiations with them at the moment…

I mean The Conversation certainly got it out there there’s no two ways about it, no one’s going to read the peer review publication. The Conversation was really what blew it up.’

‘I’ve had contact from the Wall Street Journal, The New Scientist saying they saw the stuff in The Conversation. Interview on such and such, you get a lot of contacts like that. A lot of contacts from other researchers who have seen it and repubWe found mainstream media are using lished it, and a lot of contacts The Conversation to contact academics not always favourable, from the general public.’ [Laughs] directly and establish relationships with ‘A Creative Commons publishing system, such as The Conversation provides, is just a brilliant outlet. I think that the republications are really interesting, and also the kind of spin off media that you get.’

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‘Because of The Conversation, I did this interview and then I wound up on this committee, and now I can help…’

One of the key aspects of amplifier platforms is the ability for journalists to directly contact scholars. This can either be through their online profiles associated with their articles, or through the ‘Find an expert’ functions on the platform. We found mainstream media are using The Conversation to contact academics directly and establish relationships with them. So where a public scholar in the past may have worked hard to establish a working relationship with a journalist, or journalists would contact university media departments, now media can contact the scholars directly through social media and amplifier platforms.

‘To be honest I mean if I was to make a point about it, if I was a marketing person at [my university] I would be concerned about what it means for my long-term job security. Because they don’t go to the [university] marketing people very often. They come straight to me. So Channel 9 emailed me straight, directly. I think The Project, no The Project went through [the university] media [department], but have in the past [come directly to me].

It’s the third time I’ve done The Project. They have come straight to me.’ ‘…the AFR piece, I hadn’t expected that invitation to come, and I was quite thrilled to be offered the gig because that is a new audience…I got a tremendous reaction from that article.

Which I wrote in a couple of hours, it was written from the

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heart and that’s what they wanted and it cost me very little time and I got a big reward from it.’

‘Our focus is very much on stakeholder communications and student communications.’

The Creative Commons licensing enables content to be republished widely, and can obviate the need for a scholar to engage with mainstream media outlets themselves:

‘But we do use a bit of social media, but it’s not at this point in time a priority for us, because it just does not align with what we’re trying to do.’

‘A Creative Commons publishing system, such as The Conversation provides, is just a brilliant outlet. I think that the republications are really interesting, and also the kind of spin off media that you get.’

‘Well it really depends when things become patented and licensed and things like that as to when we can actually start really talking about it.’

‘So I don’t really pitch to newspapers, I’ve never really bothered. Because if you write a decent thing in The Conversation, it gets sucked into other outlets very effectively anyway.’

Institutional support for engaging on amplifier platforms In addition to engaging with amplifier platforms and integrating impact activities into their workload, engaged scholars also need to negotiate their relationships with university and faculty media departments. As some university blogs are becoming media hubs that seek to emulate The Conversation or Scimex, scholars must decide whether to go through their own established media channels using connections with journalists or editors at The Conversation or funnelling their research through university departments with professional communications staff.

‘At the university level we have a media department. Nice people and very helpful, but generally a bit off the pace. Normally the horse has bolted before they actually get onto it.’

Not all the scholars we contacted as part of this study were familiar with it.

‘It would help if you defined what “The Conversation” is. I have never heard of “The Conversation”.’

For those based in outward-facing, industry-focused research centres, impact and engagement with different publics is often embedded in research from design to completion. (This is now an emerging expectation throughout the university sector.) Among the cohort, which was a purposive sample of Cooperative Research Centres (the Cooperative Research Centres Association – CRCA – is also a research partner) representatives, their main focus was on targeted publics and targeted stakeholder communications strategies. (Most of these interviewees were communications officers employed by CRCs.) This diminished the priority they placed on maximising general public communication using general amplifier platforms like The Conversation.

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This is not to say that CRC-based communications staffers didn’t acknowledge the importance of a variety of media channels for communicating with their stakeholders. While not used extensively, amplifier platforms are still an important part of the landscape.

‘So general social media has its just blah that’s come out.

Whereas you get to The Conversation and there is a degree of confidence that it is reasonably close even though it may be a strong opinion one way or another it’s not defamatory it’s based around some form of evidence and it is somewhat robust.’

In the general interviewee cohort, we found some junior scholars are planning careers outside of the academy.

Therefore, engaging with the public on amplifier platforms and providing links to their scholarly work is particularly important as a way to profile themselves with potential employers. The commitment to amplifiers and public communication was as much about giving them options beyond academia as it was an attempt to consolidate their academic prospects. This speaks directly to the countervailing pressures on ECRs. ‘I don’t believe in all honesty that academia in terms of the current model has any influence on practice at all. Because I don’t think the people really bother reading our papers and when they do it’s great but you know we produce a massive piece of work and put it into a couple of articles and then publish them academically. You know you’re really missing reality--for want of a better term. So I automatically go to The Conversation as an outlet for publishing or at least alerting people outside of the academy.’

The rising expectations around engagement and impact can often pile another task onto an often already overloaded junior scholar’s workload. Junior scholars and early career researchers (ECRs) have been hard to reach for this project due to sheer busyness. Many were too busy during semester, and then were away on field research, or too busy engaging in research activities during the break. Of the six early career researchers (four from the dedicated round and two from the pilot round) we interviewed, only one has an ongoing fulltime faculty position. The others are part-time, in researchonly roles in dedicated centres, or working outside academia.

We found some strong evidence of highly-focused strategic support in research-intensive institutes and centres.

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At the other end of the career spectrum, many engaged researchers are established scholars who approach engagement as a social imperative, and who have the relative luxury of being more able to decide how to allocate their time in favour of such activities. For many junior scholars, however, their time is often viewed, by the senior scholars they are working with, as being better spent on traditional academic publications.

‘Unless you’ve got 20 publications in with your PhD you’ve got no chance of getting a Fellowship. It’s just nonsense, so I think it’s kind of reaching breaking point now.’

‘Although you know to say there’s no formal recognition for it, it is brought to the attention of Heads of School and proVice Chancellors and people up the line, so that’s useful. For me the main value I see in it for them is just the ability to talk to normal people. To get out of the science-y mindset. And as I say, I always say, “I think this is going to help your writing”.’ ‘…yeah I think a lot of my colleagues are a lot more senior in terms of age as well as experience as academics. And a lot of different opinions about the value of doing this sort of thing.’

Discussion The Engagement and Impact agenda is evolving in the UK and Australia as an adjunct to research quality assessment exercises (the REF or Research Excellence Framework, and Engagement and Impact (EI) as part of Excellence in Research Australia, or ERA). Of course, as Mats Benner (2018) points out, there are few university systems worldwide that are not engaged in debates about, or deeply embedded in, engagement and impact – although it is the ‘gift’ of the Anglosphere, and particularly the UK and Australia, to wish to seek to measure it in countrywide assessment exercises conducted independently of university jurisdiction.

Accompanying these exercises are urgings to build engagement and impact into the conceptualisation of research rather than to add their consideration ex post facto, and the re-drafting of research grant applications to draw attention to such urgings and give it a weighted value.

We identified several key characteristics of engaged scholars that support the research literature canvassed in our previous article (Osman & Cunningham, 2019). They align the value of amplifying research on sites like The Conversation with more than one outcome; they recognise being able to tell a good story has impact; and they are prepared to wade into controversial topics. Engaged scholars use amplifier platforms to communicate current research on topical issues, including work that is not their own. This type of proactive engagement needs to be supported at an institutional level, so that a full range of academics (not just senior and established scholars) can contribute to public debates on issues that matter. The academics we interviewed noted a mostly informal and uneven vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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level of recognition for activities in amplifier platforms, but they were divided on whether or not this recognition had any effect on long-term career prospects in academia. Recognition and focus were higher for interviewees in dedicated research institutes.

The scholars we interviewed expressed strong moral sentiment that evidence-based information should be in public debates, especially regarding controversial issues like climate change. They recognise the limitations of traditional academic publishing and this heightens the potential of amplifier platforms. Benefits also include improvements in grant writing and subsequent outcomes. But there is a marked difference in our sample between established senior scholars whose governing ethos might be characterised as ‘giving back’, and ECRs (who were purposively sampled because of the difficulty of reaching them), for whom such engagement was much more challenging and institutionallyinfluenced.

Given global concern about the spread of misinformation and a lack of effective expert voice on crowded and contested digital media platforms, scholarly contributions in these spaces are becoming increasingly valuable – both for scholars themselves and the quality of public debate. And given that the result of the first Australian engagement and impact assessment exercise led Minister for Education Dan Tehan to remark that the results show that ‘university research is improving the lives of every Australian’ (Ministers for the Department of Education and Training, 2019), it is important that institutional support is provided for these kinds of activities. Support in the form of service or workload allocation for engagement and impact using amplifier platforms, that can be measured using metrics like republication and readership, offers a new way for recognition and reward for scholars’ public communication.

Kim Osman is a Research Associate at the Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Stuart Cunningham is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

Contact: s.cunningham@qut.edu.au

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the generous contributions of the scholars we interviewed for this project in informing the direction of our research. Thanks also go to the wider research team, Prof Axel Bruns, Prof Jean Burgess, Prof Nic Suzor and Prof Patrik Wikström. This research is funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project “Amplifying

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Public Value: Scholarly Contributions’ Impact on Public Debate” Grant ID: LP160100205

References Benner, M. (2018). The New Global Politics of Science: Knowledge, Markets and the State. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Frost, C. (2017). Going from PhD to Platform in Lupton, D., Mewburn, I., & Thomson, P. (Eds.). The digital academic: Critical perspectives on digital technologies in higher education (pp. 36-46).

Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com Kotcher, J. E., Myers, T. A., Vraga, E. K., Stenhouse, N., & Maibach, E. W. (2017). Does Engagement in Advocacy Hurt the Credibility of Scientists? Results from a Randomized National Survey Experiment.

Environmental Communication, 11(3), 415–429. https://doi.org/10.10 80/17524032.2016.1275736

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Ministers for the Department of Education and Training. (2019). Uni research delivering real benefits for Australians [Press release]. Retrieved from https:// ministers.education.gov.au/tehan/uni-researchdelivering-real-benefits-australians.

Morin, D. (2018). To debate or not debate? Examining the effects of scientists engaging in debates addressing contentious issues.

Journal of Science Communication, 17(04), 1–18. https://doi. org/10.22323/2.17040202 Osman, K., & Cunningham, S. (2019). Engagement and impact through ‘amplifier platforms’. Australian Universities’ Review, 61(2), 42-48.

The Conversation. (2018). The Conversation Stakeholder Report 2018. Retrieved from https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/ files/395/TCSR_2018singlepagesupdated.pdf

‘Amplifier’ platforms and impact Kim Osman & Stuart Cunningham

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OPINION

Watch out! The great university implosion is on its way Richard Hil Griffith University

With China supposedly undermining our national security and way of life, and causing ructions on university campuses, it’s time to take stock of the threat before us. So serious has the situation become that some have called for the equivalent of a dad’s army capable of protecting our shores from possible Chinese incursions. (Border security, you see, are still flat out trying to turn back the boats).

It’s a worrying situation. Forget John Pilger’s documentary, The Coming War with China: international relations and intelligence experts are suggesting that the war has already started. Yes indeed, it’s time for our brave Captain Mainwarings to step up and defend our beloved homeland. Happily, though, Field Marshal Scott (‘good bloke’) Morrison is addressing the threat – I mean, just look at how he’s responding to the bush fires - by making sure that the Pacific Islanders are on side (if only they’d stop whinging about climate change), and that the army, navy and air force are on full alert. Meanwhile, we have to contend with an enemy within: elements of the Chinese student cohort who have stirred up opposition against pro-Hong Kongers, even spying on them and occasionally beating them up (apparently). The Coalition Government, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police and conscripted university managers are onto this too, ensuring that freedom of speech prevails on our campuses. (Interestingly, such freedoms do not seem to extend to whistle-blowers who expose the bugging of foreign governments, but let’s not go there). vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

Predictably, mainstream reporting on the growth of ‘Chinese influence’ has been less than illuminating. Journalists – especially hacks at The Australian – have probed every conceivable dark corner to get at the facts. But they’re not the only ones interested in this ghastly scenario. It seems that the moral panic over China has reached hysterical proportions.

Chinese infiltration, or so it seems, is everywhere, from excessive housing investments and land buy-ups to dodgy dinner dates with ALP officials; and from Confucian Institutes (as fronts for espionage activities) to the take-over of student unions by Chinese students. Concern has even arisen over the spread of Chinese takeaways and the growing demand for Mandarin courses, both clearly promoting Chinese influence across the nation. And don’t forget the sinister 5G network – or the coronavirus.

Recently, three journalists from the Sydney Morning Herald/ The Age (Baker, Hunter & Bonyhady, 2019) took the brave step of striding into the murky world of Chinese students to expose the shadowy goings on in our hallowed halls. Following some general observations on ‘the Chinese issue’, their report morphs into a more general discussion of how our universities deal with international students – no trivial matter, given their contribution to university coffers. Apparently – surprise, surprise - not all of these student visitors are happy campers.

After all, our journos inform us, they have to fork out up to three times more for their education than domestic students, often live in dilapidated and over-crowded accommodation,

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our article relies too much on higher education ‘experts’ Y and senior university managers for its information, the latter have a vested interest in asserting that all is well in uni-land, don’t you think? Well, contrary to what they suggest, it isn’t all sweetness and light, I can assure you.

For example, V-C Michael Spence’s view that universities place no pressure on academics to pass students is utterly absurd and patently untrue. The institutional pressures to pass students (including those from overseas) are well known, as I point in my book Selling Students Short: Why you won’t get the university education you deserve. (Available at discount price from your local second-hand bookshop). If you talk to most academics, they would tell you (in no uncertain terms) that when it comes to the grading of student assignments, they are pressured – subtly and otherwise – to comply with the sacred bell curve (a nineteenth century European construct of questionable worth). They will also tell you that the bar for passing students has been significantly lowered over the years. When too many students fail their assignments, eyebrows are raised among heads of school, deans, and/or teaching and learning ‘experts’. In some universities, failing students are granted an automatic right to resubmit (sometimes they’re charged for the privilege). Academics will further tell you that one Watch out! The great university implosion is on its way Richard Hil

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t the risk of appearing pompous (which of course, I A am), here’s an idea for any future inquiry into Uni-land: Why not talk directly to mainstream academics about their experiences of university life? Forget the lumpen professoriate, just interrogate those poor sods who do the grunt work, many of them underpaid casuals, and you’ll get an entirely different picture of what transpires in our so-called higher education institutions.

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By virtue of being in a cut-throat global market, universities are prone to concealing their shortcomings and to peddling illusions of ‘academic rigour’, ‘excellence’ and all that guff. The chasm between claim and reality couldn’t be wider. (Read my book! You’ll love it. I’ve sold at least ten copies).

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e overseas student recruitment industry is riddled Th with corrupt practices, some of which you identify, but many which you don’t. Again, see my book. It has a very nice cover.

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e reasons for diminishing standards in our universities Th are complex and varied but are closely linked to the marketisation of the tertiary sector, and the opening up of universities to global competition. This has been accompanied by entirely new and oppressive – sometimes ruthless - systems of top-down management focussed on revenue raising and brand promotion. In short, the entire enterprise has been well and truly neoliberalised.

Please see Raewyn Connell’s excellent book, The Good University. It also has a nice cover.

Congratulations on your recent splendid article in the Sydney Morning Herald about Chinese students in Australian universities.

While I agree with a lot of what you have to say, there are a few points you may wish to consider as you consider your next contribution on this topic. I hope you don’t mind me doing this, but my long experience as an academic at several Australian universities gives me some limited insights into these sometimes-vexed places. At the end of the day, of course, these are only my views, so please feel free to ignore them.

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of the main challenges they face when assessing their students is how to lower the bar sufficiently to ensure that most pass, without totally compromising one’s academic integrity. Additionally, to obtain good student evaluations – key to acceptable performance reviews and therefore to increasing one’s chances of promotion – then you don’t want to cheese-off students by failing them or giving them grades they’re not happy with, do you? You see, few if any students complain when they get an HD, but hand them a pass or even credit, or God-forbid, a fail, all hell breaks loose: complaints to heads of school, terrible evaluation ratings, the spreading of malicious rumours, threats of violence etc. The ‘dumbing down’ tendency of which I speak isn’t always as crude as what I’ve suggested; practices vary from one academic/ institution to another, but rest assured, such practices are commonplace in today’s universities. (Managers will say otherwise, of course, before prattling on about ‘excellence’ and the like).

and feel estranged, lonely and depressed. Many of them struggle with the most basic English, which makes reading turgid academic texts and assignment completion tough going. All-in-all, it’s not what they expected from the muchvaunted Aussie ‘student experience’.

But as to the worrying proposition that some overseas students might be gifted passes for their courses – an allegation that’s been floating around for years - the ever-perky ViceChancellor of Sydney University, Michael (no-problemshere) Spence, rejects this scandalous assertion outright. Now; call me naive, but if you want to find out what’s really going on at the University of Sydney, or any other university for that matter, why would you rely on the skewed insights of an overpaid CEO (Hil & Lyons, 2018), who has a vested interest in protecting the USyD brand? Worried by such questionable investigative reportage, I decided to write directly to the said journos. This is a slightly amended version of the original: Dear eminent investigative reporters (I didn’t really say that)

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Overseas students are indeed a cash cow for universities, even though some VCs get tetchy at the suggestion. Their experiences in these places are often dismal and a far cry from the vapid promise of never-ending fun and high-quality learning.

I think I’ll stop there; I do go on a bit. Thanks anyway for taking the time to read this letter. I’m a great admirer of good vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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investigative journalism which, sadly, is rapidly disappearing in the mainstream media. (Sorry to be so contentious and opinionated). That said, I have every confidence that you will take on board my observations, and maybe even check them out. I am available for interviews day and night, but preferable not while the rugby or tennis is on.

Best wishes Adjunct Professor Richard Hil I am of course still waiting on a reply from the journalists in question. A friend of mine suggested that I should ‘get a life’ because a reply will not be forthcoming any time soon. I must say, I find it sad and bewildering that rather than attempting to talk with people at the coalface, as it were, journalists continually rely on senior university managers or luminaries from think tanks to try and make sense of university-land. It’s like asking Donald Trump to comment on ethical business practices – you’re going to get a skewed perspective. Right?

We shouldn’t be too shocked or surprised by any of this.

Universities have a strong interest in portraying themselves as bastions of propriety and high-quality education. And guess what? It worked, for now at least, and especially when it comes to international students.

Partly as a result of government cutbacks, the pressure to cross-subsidise research through inflated student fees has been enormous. And given all the rankings baloney that goes with global market competition, the desire to protect the reputation of universities has never been stronger. It’s why they employ armies of marketing and public relations personnel to produce and promote all those puerile slogans, tag-lines and ads. It’s also why they pay ‘consultants’ enormous amounts of money to tell them what they already know and why they recruit senior managers from other parts of the corporate world. It’s all about image – and sales. Again, there’s nothing all that unusual about this – it’s the corporate business model in action. It’s the same reason why fossil fuel companies seek to portray themselves as sustainability crusaders, why banks spend so much time concealing their dodgy deals, why prisons say they’re about rehabilitation, and why many aged care homes claim they care while leaving clients alone in dark corners. It often takes commissions of inquiry, whistle-blowers and shock-horror media reports to lift the lid on what’s going on.

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The problem with the university sector is that journalists are still in the realm of don’t-ask-don’t-tell; whistle blowers are hard to come by, and the findings and recommendations from inquiries, if and when they happen, appear to be, if not entirely ignored, then invariably fudged. The 2015 ICAC report into universities and the international student market, Learning the hard way: managing corruption risks associated with international students at universities in NSW, is a case in point (ICAC, 2015). Check it out for yourself.

‘Corruption risks’ notwithstanding, it has become glaringly obvious that Australian universities are massively over-reliant on overseas students for their income and face an epic implosion when this revenue stream dries up, which it will once China and India build up their own sectors. It’s happening right now.

Watch out!

Dr Richard Hil is Adjunct Professor in the School of Human Services and Social Work at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Adjunct Professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University, and Convenor of the Ngara Institute.

Contact: josephgora@hotmail.com

References Baker, J., Hunter, F. & Bonyhady, N. (2019). ‘Overseas students have delivered a cash bonanza to universities, but at what cost?’ Sydney Morning Herald, 24 August.

Hil, R. & Lyons, K. (2018) ‘Million-dollar vice-chancellor salaries highlight what’s wrong with our universities’, ABC News, 5th February.

Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-05/vc-salariesare-a-symptom-of-whats-wrong-with-our-universities/9396322 ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption). (2015).

Learning the hard way: Managing corruption risks associated with international students at universities in NSW. Retrieved from https:// www.icac.nsw.gov.au/prevention/corruption-prevention-publications

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Academic clickbait The arcane art of research article titling Tim Moore Swinburne University of Technology

The research is complete, the article written, there’s just one last job – think of a great title, one that not only elegantly summarises your research, but that is also going to grab the attention of a fickle and perpetually time-poor readership.

Article titling is a challenge for experienced researchers, and even more so for young academics seeking to get a toehold in the tough and unforgiving world of academic publishing. In my work as a writing and communications lecturer in the arts faculty of an Australian university, I spend some time in classes talking about research article titles, and which assemblages of words might help students get the right exposure for their work.

Some answers are to be found in advice provided by the journals. Springer, for example, recommends titles that convey the main topics of the study; that highlight the importance of the research; and importantly – attract readers. According to the APA Manual (2010), that all-powerful arbiter of academic standards, ‘a title should be fully explanatory when standing alone. It should summarise the main ideas of the manuscript, and if possible, with style’.

All this however, is guidance of a minimal kind. Alas, there are few insights here about which types of words should be chosen, and how this elusive sense of ‘style’ might be created.

In the spirit of good academic research, I thought it would be a useful endeavour to put together a corpus of article titles (about 1,000 from a range of social science and humanities journals) and see what patterns might emerge.

The ubiquitous colon Undoubtedly, the first feature to stand out in my collection was that minor item of punctuation – the colon. It is an intriguing thing that the colon has become so central nowadays in the way that titles are put together. In my corpus, a clear majority of titles (62%) were of the ‘colonic’ type, as in the following:

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Academic integrity: a review of the literature Critical thinking: seven definitions in search of a concept Perfectionism: A contributor to social anxiety and its cognitive processes The following research (Dillon, 1982), whose subject just happens to be the rise of the colon in article titles, is appropriately colonic in its construction: In pursuit of the colon: A century of scholarly progress.

Around this broad two-part structure, a range of patterns could be discerned. A common technique is to first indicate the general SUBJECT of the research, followed by reference to the TYPE OF RESEARCH CONDUCTED (e.g. a narrative approach, a case study, an empirical study etc.), as in the following: Redefining ‘early career’ in academia: a collective narrative approach Psychosocial influences on children’s identification with sports teams: A case study of Australian Rules football supporters Australian Muslims’ orientations to secular society: An empirical exploration of theoretical classifications An interesting variant on this theme is for the second component (to the right of the colon) to be used not to summarise the type of research, but rather to indicate the broad CONCLUSIONS drawn from it. In the corpus, sometimes these were presented in clear and bold terms, like the following: Public intellectuals vs. new public management: The defeat of public engagement in higher education

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Moral psychology and moral intuition: A pox on all your houses Other times, such conclusions were presented in a tentative – even teasing – way, using a question form: The pragmatic university: a feasible utopia?

Electronic contracts: A law unto themselves?

Question forms were also to be found in initial position in these two-part titles. Here they were used as an alternative – and perhaps more compelling – way of signalling the subject of the research, as in the following: Why do academics blog? An analysis of audiences, purposes and challenges Who cheats at university? A self-report study of dishonest academic behaviours in a sample of Australian university students Too much? Too young? The sexualisation of children debate in Australia In the latter title, one can’t help admiring the neat reference to lyrics in ‘Boys in Town’, that signature song of the late Chrissie Amphlett.

Finally, a tried and true method, used especially for interview and text-based research, is to begin with a SIGNIFICANT QUOTE from the research, followed by information about the SUBJECT/TYPE of research: “I’m not allowed wrestling stuff ”: Hegemonic masculinity and primary school boys “I am more Chinese than you”: Online narratives of locals and migrants in Singapore While the colonic style is clearly favoured by many, there are times when it can be overdone. In the following – which refers to undoubtedly important and needed research – it’s not quite clear how the information in part two of the title is much of an advance on what’s provided in part one: Bullying at university: students’ experiences of bullying

Titles, nominally speaking An additional part of my linguistic investigations was to consider the nature of noun phrases (or nominals), as the principle grammatical building blocks of titles – in both colonic and non-colonic structures. A range of patterns were noted here. One common form is what can be characterised as the VERB + ing (or gerund) + NOUN structure.

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It’s hard not to think that this style hasn’t been influenced by a similar titling trend in cinema. Films drawing on this pattern are innumerable, to the point now even of being cliché: Breaking the Waves; Saving Private Ryan; Leaving Las Vegas; Killing Eve. The appeal of this type of construction lies in the ambiguity the gerund is sometimes able to create – giving such titles a special arcane quality.

Driving cultures: Cars, young people and cultural research Another grammar-related category, one that is shown to the right of the colon in the last example, is what can be described as the THREE-BIG-NOUN genre. Other examples in my corpus – of the non-colonic type were: Individualisation, risk and the body Migrants, media and the cultural politics of China There are resonances here again with cinema, with examples in this category evoking memorable film titles like: Sex, Lies and Videotapes or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Alas though, some article titles in this category don’t always manage to achieve the same arresting quality as their film counterparts, as in the following less-than-sonorous constructions: Framing, motivated reasoning, and opinions about emergent technologies Neoliberalism, massification and teaching transformative politics and international relations A sub-category of this pattern, one that requires additional creative flair on the part of the title, is what might be called the ALLITERATIVE-THREE-BIG-NOUN genre, as in the following: Bourdieu, the boom and cashed-up Bogans Pussy Riot, Putin and the Politics of Embodiment And for the most thoroughly alliterative creation I could find in the corpus, the gong goes to (count the s’s): Sexting, selfies and self-harm: Young people, social media and the performance of self-development A final category that stood out were titles that went deliberately for some humorous effect, through the use of wordplay, parody, punning and the like. Thus: Vocation, vocation: A study of prisoner education for women

Conceptualising democracy (without colon)

Generation X-pendable: The social exclusion of rural and remote young people

Restructuring reproduction: International and national pressures (with colon)

Getting it on(line): Sociological perspectives on e-dating

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As further evidence of the cinema’s intertextual influences, many titles in the ‘for-humorous-effect’ genre make explicit reference to films or to other popular media.

Apocalypse probably: Agency and environmental risk in the Hunter region

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registering a proportionally lower number of hits than generic, non-country-specific equivalents.

Technological innovation of higher education in New Zealand: a wicked problem?

Perth cultural studies: A brief and partial history

Always look on the bright side of life: Cancer and positive thinking Home and away: Family matters in the lives of young transnational couples

Dos and don’ts of article titling: Lessons from research So, these are some of the linguistic possibilities. The question is which type of title should one opt for? Are there any structures that are more likely to attract the attention of readers, and thus act as a compelling lure to one’s work?

Research studies point to some broad principles. One of these is brevity. In a study of titles in the sciences (Paiva et al. 2012), articles with longer titles were found to be downloaded less often and were less cited. The explanation offered in the study is that longer titles – usually taking the form of hyper-extended noun phrases – are more difficult for readers to process. The suggestion is that if there is any momentary confusion about what a title means, an impatient reader will skip over it.

This tendency was noted in my corpus, with hit rates and citations for the following extended constructions being appreciably lower than for shorter titles.

Ambivalent globalisation, amorphous vulnerable nationalism: Considering debates about nation and national positioning within the global from the point of view of young Australians Professor age and research assistant ratings of passive-avoidant and proactive leadership: the role of age-related work concerns and age stereotypes While these are both long – coming in at 20 words plus – they do fall short of the following from a biomedical journal.

At a mind-stretching 48 words, this title is believed to be the longest to have made it into an academic journal: The nucleotide sequence of a 3.2 kb segment of mitochondrial maxicircle DNA from Crithidia fasciculata containing the gene for cytochrome oxidase subunit III, the N-terminal part of the apocytochrome b gene and a possible frameshift gene: Further evidence for the use of unusual initiator triplets in trypanosome mitochondria Another finding is that titles that refer to a specific country or location tend to attract fewer readers – aside from those who have a clear interest in the locale under discussion. This was confirmed in my collection, with the following articles

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Finally, an unexpected finding – and one that is also a little disappointing – is that quirky and amusing titles, of the type discussed above, tend to have less impact. Thus, in a study by Sagi and Yechiam (2008), a selection of articles with titles evaluated as ‘amusing’ attracted fewer citations than those whose titles were neutrally informative. Several explanations are offered by the study. One is that by going for humour, an author forgoes the opportunity to load their title up with discipline-relevant keywords, crucial nowadays in electronic search and retrieval processes. Another explanation is that attempts at humour can have the effect, sadly, of appearing to trivialise the research and its significance. The no-nonsense title of Sagi and Yechiam’s study – Amusing articles in scientific journals and article citation – commendably practices what it preaches.

The best advice?

So, drawing on the above, what is the best advice to pass on to students? Nothing earth-shattering, I’m afraid: keep it short, keep it simple, play it pretty straight … oh, and think about using a colon, or indeed, think about not using a colon.

All things considered though, we all shouldn’t get too carried away with the significance of an article’s title – and to be lured into putting more effort into the product’s branding than the product itself. In this regard, the best advice a responsible teacher of academic writing can give a young researcher is that irrespective of the title, if the research is sound and the writing good, the work will find its way regardless.

Tim Moore is an Associate Professor in Academic Literacy and Linguistics at Swinburne University. He is also Secretary, Swinburne Branch of NTEU.

References APA (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Dillon, J. T. (1982). In pursuit of the colon: A century of scholarly progress: 1880–1980. The Journal of Higher Education, 53(1), 93-99.

Paiva, C. E., Lima, J. P. D. S. N., & Paiva, B. S. R. (2012). Articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often. Clinics, 67(5), 509-513.

Sagi, I., & Yechiam, E. (2008). Amusing titles in scientific journals and article citation. Journal of Information Science, 34(5), 680-687.

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What ongoing staff can do to support precariously employed colleagues The Academic Precariat There is a growing divide between ongoing and precarious academics in Australia. Precarious academics are often exploited, underpaid, and have little hope of gaining permanency. In this article we offer suggestions to ongoing academics on how to improve the working lives and conditions of precarious colleagues. Our suggestions range from easy and straightforward to more challenging. We offer them to encourage discussion and action, and to inspire ongoing academics to consider how the circumstances of precarious academics today may differ from their own experiences as ‘early career’ academics.

Introduction: Our recommendations in the face of rising academic precarity There is a growing divide between ongoing and precarious academics in Australia (Brown, Goodman, & Yasukawa, 2010; Hugo, 2008), sometimes referred to as the ‘tenured core’ and the ‘tenuous periphery’ (Kimber, 2003). The number and proportion of precarious academics has expanded in recent decades, and recent data from the National Tertiary Education Union (2018) suggests that around two-thirds of all university staff are now on precarious contracts: 45 per cent casual and 23 per cent fixed-term. A recent analysis of Victoria’s eight largest universities’ annual reports shows a similarly high figure of 63 per cent of all staff, with women making up 57 per cent of this group (Heffernan, 2019).

Paid academic labour is distributed unevenly between these groups, teaching-only positions being dominated by casuals and research-only positions by fixed-term staff (NTEU, 2018). At the same time, there has been a series of government cuts to higher education and academics first hired during the post-war higher education boom are retiring en masse (Hugo, 2008). There is a dearth of new ongoing positions, vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

and the ratio of students to ongoing teaching-and-research staff has skyrocketed (Hugo, 2008; NTEU, 2018). Academic job opportunities for new PhD graduates are increasingly scarce both in Australia and overseas, and higher education research shows that people often remain ‘stuck’ in precarious roles for years or even decades (Hugo, 2008; May, 2012).

Under such circumstances, senior and ongoing academic staff are increasingly called to manage casual and fixed-term employees, who undertake research towards large projects and take care of overflow or ‘buy-out’ teaching. Unsurprisingly, the power relations and expectations that develop between such staff can be problematic.

We have developed this short paper for ongoing staff in Australian universities, for their consideration when working alongside, managing, or hiring precarious academics. While many of the challenges facing universities require substantial structural change, there are numerous things that ongoing academic staff – and those on longer-term, fixed-term contracts – can do to ameliorate the situation. This includes ensuring laws, rules, and agreements governing employment are followed; avoiding and calling out exploitation, unequal treatment, and bullying; and offering practical support and

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solidarity to precarious colleagues. Other groups have made related reflections or recommendations, writing from a variety of disciplinary positions and national contexts, and we acknowledge the valuable contributions that precede our own (see Anti-Precarity Cymru, 2018; Natalier et al., 2017; Thorkelson, 2019).

As a collective of writers concerned with academic precarity, we offer suggestions that range from easy and straightforward to more challenging. We do so to encourage discussion and action, and to inspire ongoing academics to consider how the circumstances of precarious academics today may differ from their own experiences as ‘early career’ academics. Yet we also find it important to acknowledge that, as the pool of ongoing academics shrinks, workload pressures are increasing. While some of our suggestions might be viewed as, or might pragmatically require, ‘more work’ for ongoing academics, we firmly believe that, when precarious staff are routinely expected to perform unpaid or underpaid academic work, the work of ongoing staff is also devalued and threatened. If the labour of ongoing staff continues to be shifted to precarious staff, then universities will no longer require ongoing staff.

A final note: We also feel it is important not to transfer too much institutional responsibility onto individual (ongoing) academics. As part of the writing process, for instance, we debated whether to include a suggestion that ongoing academics ‘gift’ their leftover personal funds to precarious academics’ personal research, career development, or conference attendance. As a collective, we acknowledge that such arrangements are sometimes subject to abuse: for instance, where ongoing staff members make claims of intellectual property on the basis of such ‘gifts’. But even where obligation-free support is offered, we wonder at the ethics of encouraging such arrangements. Although some routes for ongoing staff support of precarious staff raise their own ethical concerns, we nonetheless believe that the support and advocacy of ongoing staff is crucial in our shared fight against casualisation and the devaluation of Australian universities.

What ongoing staff can do: Hiring, pay, and contracts 1. F acilitate transparent hiring practices, which might include internally advertising casual and fixed-term roles, rather than selecting candidates you already like or know.

Research shows that recruiting staff in the latter way leads to inequitable hiring, and that the composition of the cohort of precarious academics, as well as their pay, is currently highly unequal (for instance, male casuals tend to be paid more) (May, 2012; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2014; Van den Brink, Fruytier & Thunnissen, 2013).

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nsure the recruitment process for roles is straightforward, equitable, and considers things like the research or topic expertise of prospective staff. For instance, ask for candidates’ CVs, hold short phone interviews, or discuss candidates needs to ensure, for example, neurodiverse options.

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Do not use student feedback for hiring purposes.

Research indicates that these surveys have a gender and cultural bias, which has an impact on precarious staff in both the short and long-term (Fan et al., 2019; Mitchell & Martin, 2018).

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For regular, periodic recruitment (such as sessional teaching), set up a shared email list that all hiring and potential staff can access for announcements about positions.

5. If you are responsible for employing teaching staff, provide information on the classes (hours, time, locations, and content), time and marking expectations, and payments ahead of time.

6. Work to ensure that teaching contracts are confirmed as early as possible and that pay commences promptly in the first pay cycle of teaching. This means being organised and highlighting this as a priority in ongoing staff meetings. Do not arrange for staff to be paid in lump sums, as this will result in higher rates of taxation – already a problem with sessional teaching – which will only be reimbursed at tax time. Consider: Will they be able to pay rent? Pay bills? Buy food? (Heffernan, 2019).

7. For research or administrative roles, make it clear what tasks, duties, and hours will be involved and whether they are likely to change over time. As with teaching staff (point 6 above), make sure that payments are spread evenly over the employment period.

8. Give staff an appropriate amount of time to ask questions and to consider whether they want to accept a role. Allow room for negotiation and discussion of duties.

9. Check that staff are being paid correctly. This is not always the case, as was seen in a recent dispute lodged on behalf of casuals at The University of Western Australia (Glynn, Smith & Pedden, 2019). Indeed, precarious academic work is commonly underpaid (Brown et al., 2010; May, 2012).

10. Ensure that job titles and duties match the tasks performed, and that academic work is paid at an academic rate. Using general/professional rates not only means that staff are paid far less, it also has an impact on their job titles and thus their future employment prospects.

11. If staff are teaching tutorials, they should be paid the tutorial rate that includes preparation time, not at an hourly rate (unless they are being required to take on additional preparation hours above the standard tutorial

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rate). It is also important to ensure that, where relevant, staff receive the higher rates of pay appropriate to their formal qualifications such as a PhD or an honours degree.

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What ongoing staff can do: Supporting teaching staff 1. B e aware of the experience of your teaching staff. In many cases, staff have years of experience. In other cases, they may have none. Where appropriate, offer support and access to teaching development activities, training in organisational IT and learning management systems, and other professional development opportunities that front-line staff might need (for instance, mental health first aid training, disability and accessibility training, and cultural safety training). Ensure staff are paid to attend training.

2. Avoid micromanaging staff, especially experienced teachers. It is important to provide advice to new teachers but also to trust experienced people to do their jobs.

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Set and communicate expectations for the number of hours spent on tasks, especially those that could potentially involve unexpected, unpredictable, or ‘never-ending’ hours, such as tutorial development, administration, and pastoral care. Ensure these expectations are in keeping with pay standards: if casual tutors are paid for three hours of tutorial preparation, ensure any work you require of them can be done in this time. Make the limits of staff ’s teaching responsibilities clear to them. Let them know when you expect them to pass work on to you: such as student enquiries, extra marking, and other work that is above their pay grade or beyond their pay allocation.

4. Make sure staff are paid for all teaching duties. If duties are not paid, they should be transferred to ongoing lecturers or convenors. This includes: (re)development of curriculum, course outlines, assessments, teaching materials, reading lists, tutorial plans, and engaging in online learning or social media spaces. Likewise, all marking – including cross marking, double marking, and any work related to reporting academic integrity issues or plagiarism – should be paid.

5. Ensure staff are paid to teach for the entire duration of units, that is, for all weeks during the teaching semester, including pre-semester preparation, online-only weeks where there is an expectation of reading and teaching, and end-of-semester marking.

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When writing assessments, keep marking and turnaround time in mind, as well as contract expiration dates and student numbers. It is possible to write assessments that are relevant, rigorous, and short on marking time, vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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including collaborative, in-class, and peer-reviewed assessments.

Formulate ways of dealing with additional requests

that are likely to come from students, such as requests for written references at the end of semesters. With precarious academics’ support and input, you may wish to raise the limitations of precarious teaching with students at the beginning of each unit. Do not allow students to ask teaching staff to work for free. Clearly establish the default time/s and place/s for contacting casual staff (such as the classroom) or ongoing staff (such as online forums, office hours, and email). Discourage students from hanging around after class for one-on-one meetings with precarious teaching staff or from overloading them via emails.

Support precarious teaching staff to support each other.

Set up meetings and enable them to share resources and workloads as appropriate.

Take responsibility for the courses that ‘no one wants to teach’ rather than outsourcing them to precarious staff.

Such courses may deserve a higher workload, a rewrite, or deletion.

Value your precarious teaching staff. If a precarious staff member is regularly teaching foundation courses, core courses, or other courses that are essential for your degree/s to function, agitate for their transferral to fulltime and ongoing employment.

What ongoing staff can do: Supporting and acknowledging research 1. F orward job opportunities and advertisements to precarious staff, including grants, calls for papers, conferences, and job openings.

2. Where possible, offer to read draft papers as well as grant and job applications.

3. Put precarious staff forward for roles or awards that will raise their research profiles.

4. Introduce precarious staff to senior scholars in their area, either in person or online. Insecure and low-paid work means that staff are often unable to attend conferences and events and help with ‘networking’ is always appreciated.

5.

Consider your capacity to use or leverage funds to pay precarious staff for their research and writing contributions. Given the current state of the academic job market, the promise of career progression alone is inadequate when offering ‘opportunities’ for collaboration (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013). If co-authoring papers or grants: do not let casual or fixed-term staff do all the work and avoid situations where funding ‘runs out’ before writing up begins. If funding does run out,

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ongoing staff should complete the project, ensuring that precarious academics are properly acknowledged as authors and collaborators.

6. Do not require or encourage unpaid or uncredited research and writing work. Be aware of your university’s ethics and intellectual property rules, which often include strict guidelines on authorship.

What ongoing staff can do: Questioning opportunities, inequalities, and flexibility

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cknowledge that times have changed, and precarious A academics have little hope of obtaining permanency based on unpaid or volunteer work (Hugo, 2008; NTEU, 2018). Before becoming an ongoing academic, you may have engaged in the kinds of unpaid, uncredited work still expected of your precarious colleagues as a ‘rite of passage’.

Yet it is widely acknowledged that in the contemporary workplace ‘hope labour’ – ‘un- or under-compensated work carried out in the present... in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow’ – is largely a means of ‘capturing’ workers and extracting free work from them (Kuehn & Corrigan, 2013, pp. 9–10).

2. Precarious staff are often asked to attend unpaid meetings, either for teaching, research, or departmental/school decision-making. While it is important that precarious staff have a voice in these areas, if their attendance is expected they should be paid. If not, make it clear that they should not attend, and consider alternative ways of including their input. For instance, pay a precarious staff representative to attend, or gather and raise concerns on their behalf.

3. Be sensitive to the fact that only certain staff will have the financial capacity to perform unpaid work. Consider if, by offering unpaid ‘opportunities’ to those who can afford to work for free, you may be inadvertently reproducing gendered, classed, and racialised inequalities within universities (Acker, 2006).

4. Assure part-time or casual staff that they do not need to be available for full-time hours. Casuals and fixedterm staff often need to hold multiple positions to earn a liveable salary (Brown et al., 2010). Unpredictable or irregular hours can cause undue stress. While flexibility is often sold as a ‘benefit’ of casual employment, in practice it disadvantages precarious employees, who are expected to be available at all times (Cantrell & Palmer, 2019).

What ongoing staff can do: Listening and speaking up 1. H ave honest conversations about the state of the higher education sector and academic employment. If you are

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someone’s first academic employer, inform them of the ways that the university and ongoing colleagues may try to exploit them. Provide a pay schedule, pay rates, your university’s enterprise bargaining agreement, and other relevant documents. Tell them about the NTEU and any other groups campaigning against casualisation on campus (for instance, Supercasuals), and encourage them to join.

Provide precarious academics with information on who they can contact when tasks exceed their allocated work time, or the responsibilities stipulated in their contracts.

Support staff in their contract negotiations, especially if they are new or belong to a group (for instance, women) where they are likely to be exploited or paid less than other precarious colleagues (May, 2012; Van den Brink & Benschop, 2014; Van den Brink et al., 2013).

Encourage precarious staff to come to you with any other issues relating to their employment.

When presented with new policies, workplace changes, and teaching modes (such as online, blended, or flipped classroom methods), ask how these will have an impact on precarious staff. Raise issues in departmental meetings, in committees, among colleagues, in public forums, and anywhere else you can think of. Ask precarious staff what they think – being careful not to encourage extra, unpaid work – and be prepared to raise matters on their behalf.

Argue for institutional and departmental support for and access to: a. Office space, with ergonomically suitable equipment (not just hand-me-downs); b. Printer, photocopier, IT (including university email access), the university library, during and outside semester; c. Internal research/travel grants and awards, including the possibility of being listed as the Chief Investigator, the removal of any rules requiring that recipients have long-term contracts, and the inclusion of rules enabling funds to be used to pay precarious applicants/CIs; d. Research office assistance and grant writing support; and e.

Professional development, such as mentoring, teaching, and supervision guidance; access to courses and conferences; and the possibility of giving paid guest lectures on topics of expertise.

In your institution, department, discipline society, and other forums, argue for schemes that provide access for low-paid and precarious academics to: a. Conference scholarships and fee reductions; b. Travel, writing, and research development funds; and c. Mentoring opportunities and career advice.

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8. Finally, if you see other academics treating precarious staff poorly – whether through bullying, discrimination, overwork, wage theft, or sexual harassment and assault – speak up! While academic precarity is clearly a systemic problem, some staff seek to benefit from the growing inequalities in university employment, and these people need to be held accountable. Precarious academics often do not feel they have the cultural or institutional capital to call out exploitation of themselves or others and may even have been told that this treatment is normal. Offer a sympathetic ear, advice, and help to stand up for them! #TheAcademicPrecariat is a collective that writes about precarious academic employment from the perspective of those who have and continue to experience it.

Jessica Ford is a lecturer and early career researcher in film, media and cultural studies at the University of Newcastle.

Jessica’s research examines women and feminism on screen.

She has been precariously employed for many years but is currently lucky enough to be enjoying the temporary relief of a fixed term contract.

Contact: fordjessica@gmail.com Jess Ison is a PhD candidate and casual academic at La Trobe University on Wurundjeri land. After six years she has her first three-day-a-week contract as a research assistant on a project looking at women’s safety on public transport.

Contact: j.ison@latrobe.edu.au Lara McKenzie is an honorary research fellow in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia. She undertakes research on precarious work in Australian universities as well as on romantic love and age.

She has been employed in precarious academic roles, during and after her PhD, for around 10 years.

Contact: lara.mckenzie@uwa.edu.au Fabian Cannizzo is an early career academic in sociology, currently working as a teaching associate and contract researcher at RMIT University, as well as holding a teaching role at Monash University. Fabian has research interests in exploring equity in the context of creative and intellectual career pursuits, and has published on academic labour, worklife balance, and the experiences of early-career academics in Australia.

Contact: mrfabiancannizzo@gmail.com Louise R Mayhew is an Australian feminist art historian and a lecturer in art history at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. She researches women’s collaboration, art in the age of the selfie, and the critical cross-overs between vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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feminist collectivism and relational aesthetics. After working casually at UNSW for nine years she moved to Brisbane for a one-year part-time contract. She is currently on a (soon to end) 18-month part-time contract.

Contact: l.mayhew@griffith.edu.au Natalie Osborne is a lecturer in the School of Environment and Science at Griffith University. Her research interests include socio-spatial justice in cities, radical spatial politics, emotional geographies, and public feelings. While not currently precariously employed, Natalie has assisted with writing and coordination.

Contact: n.osborne@griffith.edu.au Benjamin Cooke is a senior lecturer in Sustainability and Urban Planning at RMIT University. His research interests encompass a critical perspective on nature conservation.

While not currently precariously employed, Ben has assisted with writing and coordination.

Contact: ben.cooke@rmit.edu.au

References Acker, J. (2006). Inequality regimes: Gender, class, and race in organizations. Gender and Society 20, 441–464.

Anti-Precarity Cymru (2018). Solidarity: A very brief guide on how to support precariously employed academics. Retrieved from https://drive. google.com/open?id=1_22JNlrTmI3PkUCWFIxKf8-cvVZwC4eU. Brown, T., Goodman, J. & Yasukawa, K. (2010). Academic casualisation in Australia: Class divisions in the university. Journal of Industrial Relations 52, 169–182.

Cantrell, K. & Palmer, K. (2019, 6 May). The casualties of academia: a response to The Conversation. Overland. Retrieved from https:// overland.org.au/2019/05/the-casualties-of-academia-a-response-tothe-conversation/.

Fan, Y., Shepherd, L.J., Slavich, E., Waters, D., Stone, M., Abel, R. & Johnston, E.L. (2019). Gender and cultural bias in student evaluations: Why representation matters. PloS One 14, 2, 1–16.

Glynn, E., Smith, R. & Peden, S. (2019). Dispute at UWA: Halting wage degradation. Connect: The magazine for Australian casual and sessional university staff 12, 2, 6.

Heffernan, M. (2019, 1 May). ‘Starvation wages’: No job security for most Victorian university staff. The Age. Retrieved from https:// www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/starvation-wages-majority-ofvictorian-university-workers-in-casual-teaching-trap-20190501-p51j1y. html.

Hugo, G. (2008). The demographic outlook for Australian universities’ academic staff. Retrieved from http://www.chass.org.au/wp-content/ uploads/2015/02/PAP20081101GH2.pdf.

Kimber, M. (2003). The tenured ‘core’ and the tenuous ‘periphery’: The casualisation of academic work in Australian universities. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 25, 41–50.

Kuehn, K. & Corrigan, T.F. (2013). Hope labor: the role of employment prospects in online social production. The Political Economy of Communication 1, 1, 9–25.

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May, R. (2012). Casualisation; here to stay? The modern university and its divided workforce. Retrieved from http://issuu.com/nzteu/docs/ robyn_may_airaanz_casualisation_paper_2011.

Mitchell, K. & Martin, J. (2018). Gender bias in student evaluations.

PS: Political Science and Politics 51, 648–652.

Natalier, K., Altman, E., Bahnisch, M., Barnes, T., Egan, S., Malatzky, C., Mauri, C. & Woodman, D. (2017). TASA working document: Responses to contingent labour in academia. Retrieved from https://www. tasa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/TASA-Insecure-workforcefinal.docx.

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Thorkelson, E. (2019, 27 July). Twelve ways that stably employed academics in higher education can support precarious academics [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/unambivalence/ status/1154848003301236738.

Van den Brink, M. & Benschop, Y. (2014). Practicing gender in academic networking: The role of gatekeepers in professorial recruitment. Journal of Management Studies 51, 460–492.

Van den Brink, M., Fruytier, B. & Thunnissen, M. (2013). Talent management in academia: Performance systems and HRM policies, Human Resource Management Journal 23, 180–195.

National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) (2018). Overview of 2018 staffing statistics. Retrieved from http://www.nteu.org.au/library/view/ id/9369.

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It’s all about building a narrative Arthur O’Neill School of Hard Knocks, University of Life

The Universe Looks Down (Title on poster advertising an exhibition of works on paper by Kristen Headlam, 23 August 2018 – 17 February 2019, Noel Shaw Gallery, University of Melbourne) Trevor Prout (known behind his back as ‘Brussels’ to friend and foe alike) had to deliver on a promise. Asked what his priority would be if appointed to the position of ViceChancellor, University of Central Tasmania (UCT), he espoused a bold vision: to institute a root-and-branch makeover of the university’s image. Beleaguered by northern and southern competitors, the Selection Committee grasped at any straw that would rescue UCT from oblivion in the course of yet another widely-expected round of mergers.

Geography counted against continued existence – the usual resort was to put universities together that preyed together; so, Trevor’s scheme was to distinguish UCT in such a way as to avoid its capture by a neighbour.

Now installed, Trevor appointed a consultancy firm, ‘Brand News’ – a small operation that specialised in image-making – to advise on the makeover. Trevor asked its Managing Director, Nobby Benton, to come up with a revised mission statement. For Nobby, mission statements were old-hat.

Aspirational pieties, he called them. The task was to knock the organisation into shape; and doing that was all about re-shaping the university’s narrative. He said the discursive strategy was to evidence that the university’s accomplishment was written in the wind, as it were. Nobby had picked up ‘discursive strategy’ from an article in one of a pile of journals he kept beside the lavatory for occasional reading. The device consisted in positing a contrast then landing on one side of vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

it – by turning spatiality on its head in UCT’s case. By going so far as was possible in the opposite direction to its regional preoccupation.

Globalisation had been a widely adopted institutional target in days of yore; and even without outposts in foreign parts, some places continued to count it as a defining feature of institutional worth. Sure, an international presence, a global reach, was a good thing. But UCT was a boutique university with academic emphases on trees and snow. More than travel across Bass Strait to a university in the Apple Isle was required – a story about fulfilling a destiny, of being equipped by character to venture beyond ordinary limits, to encounter a new frontier.

Character is destiny, so the university’s narrative – its now-preferred story from creation to accomplishment, and beyond – depended on identifying new destinations.

Why not voyaging into Space? What better than to adopt another name, such as The University of the Milky Way (UMW)? True, another university ‘owned’ the Southern Cross but having that in its title was more to do with flagwaggling and hinting at a quasi-religious affiliation than with getting up there and getting something out of it. Again, a bunch of fancy-pants at two West Australian universities sought to engage local computer addicts, citizen scientists, in contributing to a surveying task – ring-fencing the boundaries of galaxies.

The endeavour indicated the correspondence of galactic goings-on and the fate of higher education amalgamations.

The leader of an underlying astronomical research project, Professor Simon Driver, explained: ‘So far we think that right after the Big Bang, gravity started to pull galaxies together, and then they went through a period when there was lots of merging, lots of collisions, and violent episodes leading to distorted looking galaxies.’

It’s all about building a narrative Arthur O’Neill

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Implementation

kind, or nearly resembling, so that their uses might easily be comprehended.’ Since encounters with other beings were very Educationally speaking, the culmination of the UMW many light years away, the easiest course was to put the matter narrative amounted to recruiting planetary punters. ‘Space’ aside for the moment. touched all the visionary buttons, not of a university with Nevertheless, UMW had to be re-jigged to fit the narrative. ‘a mission to change lives and change the world’ as another So various bits of it were put into a Bragg School of Astral Australian regional university had it but one of charting Dreaming. Here was a win-win name: though William Bragg courses to untold worlds and changing lives there, if any. occupied a Chair in Mathematics (and taught Physics) at the In a way, this scheme was an updated globalisation project: University of Adelaide from 1886 to the end of 1908, and his students from other planets rather from other countries were son, William Lawrence, had completed his first degree there, the resource to be mined. As Nobby reflected, in the good old they may well have known something about Tasmania, maybe days of that model of globalisation, the British Empire, we even have passed that way – it was a long shot but, having been sold the natives glass beads and other trinkets, and now we sell jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915, a putative them MBAs – plus ça change… association was sufficient to justify adding the prestige of their The Council bought the idea. So did state and federal surname to the new school; besides, including ‘Dreaming’ governments. It satisfied the innovation thing without going genuflected to cosmological understandings of the original into means; and it met the (but unfortunately wiped out) ideal of narrative: to bring inhabitants.

As Nobby reflected, in the good old days down the high and bring up You could, as ‘Brand News’ of that model of globalisation, the British the low, or vice versa. So, one did, invent a faux tradition.

Empire, we sold the natives glass beads and small place in Tasmania would To live up to it, in the name jump up and over all those big of Quality, the consultants other trinkets, and now we sell them MBAs joints on the Mainland; and introduced a template – plus ça change … like all good narratives this one approach: the standardisation established an aiming-point, a of product by way of a clutch of culmination, and was open-ended. Who knows? Maybe there course and subject pro formas, to be completed by biochemists was more than one universe out there … However, Trevor and the few remaining metaphysicians alike; and to be tested cautioned against going too far. As he told Brand News: ‘It’s with the full rigour of marketing and human resources not what we actually do, it’s the vibe, a dream. People will get expertise. The consultants said this was ‘protecting the Brand’. on board the idea, not the delivery. “Milky Way” is one small step; it’s a catchy title.

Brussels, beam me up!

Some dissenters wanted to tell Brussels he was dreamin’ and a bit had to be done in order the give the semblance of pursuit.

Better still for Trevor and his minions to protect the brand If there were inhabitants out there who could be persuaded to by attending to appearances, by turning the narrative into give UMW a go, then entry requirements had to be tailored a marketing scheme. Had they also turned the idea of to fit their circumstances. One plan was to require applicants narrative as a literary device into a formulary of institutional from outer space to be adept in the Austral tongue. A few conformity? Having already joined the ranks of in-words, made bold to question its presumed superiority. Trevor asked ‘narrative’ was a fortuitous appropriation. Building a narrative cunning linguists on the staff to come up with answers. Their was a means to an end. first proposal was to make a lingua franca out of a simplified Myth became the message – encouragement for outsiders version of English. As they said, the aim should be ‘to shorten to join and imperative for insiders to keep in line. The good discourse by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out news conveyed by the narrative was that troops were got to verbs and participles, because in reality, all things imaginable believe in (or at least to say) the same thing. All hands were are but nouns.’ Then there was a second project: ‘a scheme set to making UMW fit the vision that was embodied in the for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever’; and hence the narrative. The trick was to turn a wand into a truncheon: expedient ‘that since words are only names for things, it to marshal the ‘troops’ (as Nobby was wont to call them) would be more convenient for all men to carry about them in serried ranks behind their staff officers. What followed such things as were necessary to express a particular business from espousal of its unifying objective was reinforcement of they are to discourse on.’ ‘Another great advantage proposed a command structure. ‘One badge of honour, one collective’ by this invention,’ its advocates argued, ‘was that it would became the creed of compliant Milky Way-ites. But, as serve as a universal language to be understood in all civilised so often is the case, calls for togetherness demonstrate the nations, whose goods and utensils are generally of the same absence of it.

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It’s all about building a narrative Arthur O’Neill

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That was the problem with the ‘discursive’ part of a discursive strategy. A conjuring trick of Frog intellectuals, ‘discourse’ settles, via Anglophone literary criticism, in companionable rest amongst the linguistic sediment of management consultancy. A discursive strategy is a contradiction in terms: discourse is fluid, strategy is fixed; and an institutional narrative is a strategy, the rule, the law. No allowance is made for discourse, for difference. A makeover is the work of a cosmetician.

‘Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.’

21 August 2019 Arthur O’Neill is a Carlton Pensioner, maintained by the State to evidence its benign intention in clothing and feeding wastrels of a bygone age.

Contact: arthurjhj65@live.com.au

Notes and sources Nobby had picked up ‘discursive strategy’ from reading an article …: ‘Populism is typically understood as a discursive strategy opposing the people and the elite, with populists claiming to represent the first against the second. But the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, an advocate of left-wing populism, argued persuasively that it also implies a vertical form of power and requires a charismatic leader.’

Didier Fasssin, ‘Macron’s War,’ London Review of Books, 41 (13), 4 July 2019, p. 24. even without outposts in foreign parts, some places continued to count it [a global presence] as a defining feature …: Thus, in a full-page advertisement (headed ‘OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXCEPTIONAL ACADEMICS WHO WANT TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE’) Flinders University affirms: ‘Join us on our journey as we endeavour to become an Australian top 10 university, and amongst the top 1% in the world.’ The foot-line to this advertisement is:

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ring-fencing the boundaries of galaxies…: Curtin University and the University of Western Australia are sole partners in a joint venture supported by the West Australian Government, the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). The Centre invites ‘citizen scientists’ to contribute to its ‘Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA)’ research project: ‘Astro Quest are looking for volunteer astronomers to study crowded images of galaxies and work out which light is coming from which galaxy. All you need is a computer and the internet.

REGISTER FOR ASTROQUEST Astronomers have been looking deep into the universe and surveying millions of galaxies. But to help find discoveries in these surveys we need to carefully identify the boundary of every galaxy. Computers are pretty good at this, but they don’t always get it right. That’s where you come in! We need your help to inspect each galaxy and make sure we have the right result.’ https://www.icrar.org/outreach-education/outreach-initiatives/ citizen-science/ and ‘In our previous project, Galaxy Explorer, citizen scientists were asked to classify galaxies and to fit a ring around each one.’ https://astroquest.net.au/science/guide-to-astroquest/ ‘So far we think that right after the Big Bang …’: Astro Quest, under the heading ‘Galaxy evolution has changed through the history of the universe’ and quoting Professor Simon Driver, leader of the GAMA project. https://astroquest.net.au/science/the-science/ ‘a mission to change lives and change the world’ as another Australian regional university had it …: op.cit., Flinders University. The Weekend Australian, ‘World,’ July 13-14 2019, p. 14. ‘to shorten discourse, by cutting polysyllables into one, and leaving out verbs and participles…’: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1985 [1726]). Part 3, Ch. 5 (‘The author is permitted to see the grand Academy of Lagado. The Academy largely described. The arts wherein the professors employ themselves.’), p. 230. London: Penguin Classics. ‘a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever …’: ibid., p. 230.

‘SOUTH AUSTRALIA • NORTHERN TERRITORY • GLOBAL • ONLINE’

‘Another great advantage proposed by this invention …’: op. cit., Swift, p. 231.

The Weekend Australian, ‘World,’ July 13-14 2019, p. 14.

A conjuring trick of Frog intellectuals, ‘discourse’ …:

and it met the ideal of narrative: to bring down the high and bring up the low …:

See for example, Jacques Derrida (tr. Barbara Johnson) Plato’s Pharmacy (1981 [1968], London, The Althone Press, p.78:

As noted by a book reviewer (about popular tales included in Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the 18th- Century Imagination by Noelle Gallagher):

‘Logos – “discourse” – has the meaning here [in Plato’s Phaedrus] of argument, line of reasoning, guiding thread animating the spoken discussion (the Logos).’

‘These inversions – high brought low; low elevated (temporarily) high; the triumph of the lesser over the greater – are characteristic of the unsettling social narratives the pox or the clap could be used to tell’.

‘Looking up at the stars, I know quite well/ …’:

Claire Bucknell, ‘Colonel Cundum’s Domanin’ London Review of Books, 44(14) 18 July 2019, p. 29.

vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

W. H. Auden, first of four stanzas in ‘The More Loving One’ Selected Poems, London, Faber and Faber, 1979 [September 1957], p. 237.

It’s all about building a narrative Arthur O’Neill

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REVIEWS

Brain, brain, go away; come again another day Why the Brain Matters. A teacher explores neuroscience by John Tibke ISBN 978-1-4739-9291-7 (pbk), Corwin, 204 pp., 2019.

Reviewed by Andrys Onsman

I have no idea whether Jon Tibke has finished his doctoral studies yet but judging by the conceptual clarity of his writing in Why the Brain Matters I’d say he’s got it in the bag. He has produced a short, excellent and timely book, and although it is aimed at secondary school teachers, its readership should be far wider than that because in my opinion it is one of the best books on introductory neuro-cognition on the market. Its strength includes the author’s willingness to say what is known, what remains unknown and what our best guess is (so far) on the bits in between. Given that he is talking from his (often stated) perspective as a teacher, it is an excellent snap shot of where we are at in neuroscience now, and how both what we know and what we don’t know might be used to improve learning and teaching in secondary schools (and elsewhere).

There is a pleasing logic to the sequence of the chapters, based on answering four simple questions: Why should teachers be interested in neuroscience? What should we know and what can we ignore? How can we use it in our practice?

What does the future hold? His answers are clear, coherent and grounded in actual research, and are also kernels of ideas that serve as solid bases for further reading and consideration.

The first chapter outlines the reasons why teachers ought to keep an eye on developments in the field. His consideration of the term ‘brain-based learning’, based on asking ‘what learning does not involve the brain?’ won me over immediately.

His advice is to not accept the reductionist jargon without examination because a lot of it is wankery (my term, not his). I agree that the promulgation of vague, incomplete ideas tarted up with glib terminology that carelessly assume universality has done too much damage in the past. A reasonable understanding of what happens in the brain of a learner helps teachers realise that idiosyncracy is the norm and treating students equally isn’t the same as treating them equitably.

Foregoing a general description of the brain and its elemental functions, Tibke outlines what he believes teachers and students should know and points to a few sites

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and books for further detail. All the examples and references are secondary school-related but they also exemplify the broader context. There were a few sites that I was not familiar with, mainly the English ones, but they seemed to be helpful and well researched when I looked at them. I’m sure there are sites of the same quality in Australia, Europe and even the USA if you look judiciously enough. Both the first two chapters include a synthesis of the ideas presented: Tibke is very good at putting his analytical comments into a useful context. Unlike other books on the subject, his is a ‘big picture’ approach that doesn’t get bogged down in detail but also doesn’t skimp on evidence.

The chapter dispelling the neuromyths should be compulsory reading for every parent and teacher as a barricade against the host of pseudoscience charlatans scamming the gullible public. Smart drugs, AI interfaces, sleep, brain scans and more are discussed and placed in one of 3 baskets: true, not true or possible-but-we-need-to-know-more. Tibke picks a few of the more currently controversial ones to exemplify his strategy of assessing whether they are true, and it seems to me to be a relatively easy way to do your own fact-checking.

The chapter on schools being involved in research is the most problematic: not conceptually, the idea is fine but in practice. Tibke uses the BrainCanDo project at Queen Anne School in England as the basis for his argument that getting real research into schools is beneficial to students. I know a bit about the cited study on music and I’m not entirely convinced that the outcomes are as readily generally interpretable as Müllensiefen implies. Tibke does acknowledge that although there are correlational links between learning music and general learning, there is no causal relationship. The Queen Anne study is ongoing and results won’t be in for a few years, but my money is on more correlation and exactly the same causality. Nonetheless, Müllensiefen’s work is definitely worth reading if you are interested in music (but bear in mind his output is prodigious).

Brain, brain, go away; come again another day Reviewed by Andrys Onsman

vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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The chapter on Temple Grandin and Barbara Arrowsmith Young will be interesting for anyone who hasn’t come across them yet because both are remarkable and inspiring women.

Grandin is the reluctant superstar of Autism, an American academic whose life has been documented in an eponymous TV movie starring Clare Danes. There is also a lot of interest in Arrowsmith Young’s approach to helping learners develop conceptual structures even though there is also a great deal of contestation about it and not everyone links it to neuroplasticity in such a direct fashion. Even Norman Doidge himself doesn’t fully endorse her program. It is good to see that Tibke doesn’t shy away from the controversy. He even quotes Tim Hannan from Charles Sturt who points out that none of her claims have ever been subjected to clinical rigour. Tibke seems unperturbed by the anecdotal nature of her writing but as someone who has trod a reasonably similar path in early education, I am far from convinced about the universality of her claims. That’s not to say I would counsel against using her approach but rather to be careful about where, when and with whom.

The chapter on ‘Skills, Learning Needs and the Brain’ is for me the centrepiece of the book. But I acknowledge that I am interested in pretty much the same things that Tibke is, so in the interests of fairness I happily acknowledge a possible bias.

Overall, the chapter is a pretty decent summary of the state of play at the moment, at least from a teacher perspective. It doesn’t claim to be a compendium of everything in the field – imagine how big a tome that would be! It focusses on literacy and to a lesser degree on numeracy, then serves up a pretty good summary of creativity that morphs into the skills required to maximise learning. At 20 pages, it is the chapter I would distribute among teachers – having paid the appropriate amount of money therefore, of course – to start discussions and excite interest. Although a couple of small questions remain about the literacy part (Did Gardner really say that??) the section on creativity is the best thumb-nail overview I’ve ever read. The parts on habit formation, attention formation and retention are brief but accurate and easy to read.

I am less enamoured with the section on Autism. It is solid in terms of its accuracy, but I get concerned that in summarising the issue a deal of the nuance and individual variation gets lost and even the slightest whiff of uncertainty allows the profit and/or fame-seeking scammers in.

Regardless of the incontrovertibility of the evidence and data about Autism, ASC and ADHD, a disproportionate number of people (i.e. parents and teachers) prefer the balderdash and faux psychobabble of the tabloids. If Elle and Andrew say inoculation causes Autism, it must be true. It isn’t.

Macpherson’s claim to being a wellness advocate has lost all credibility, and Wakefield is a self-serving fraud. Ironically, neuroscience can explain why facts don’t change people’s minds. vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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In the last chapter Tibke flies a few kites trying to predict What Lies Ahead. He points out that bringing research into the classroom still has some ethical issues to resolve – who owns the data, what safeguards are in place, the unevenness of adoption and so on – but he argues that, for him, all that can be overcome, and the benefits far outweigh the risks.

His enthusiasm is infectious. There is a long list of trails that research and development in neuroscience might choose to follow, always qualified by the understanding that any one of them might lead nowhere while some others might turn into superhighways.

And to finish, Tibke re-iterates (after several earlier iterations) that this is his take on neuroscience in the school, based on the research and reading he has done, and his enthusiasm for particular aspects. I guess it’s meant as an apologia of sorts, but it has an air of apology about it. I don’t think it is necessary because the book stands up very well on its own merits and as everyone working on research in any science or art knows, every book like this is subjective. We all (should) know that no one these days is entirely objective and omniscient. What he puts forward as (propositional) knowledge is sound and his interpretations are valid. For that no apology is necessary.

The references are selective but excellent – every issue in the book can be followed by anyone whose interest is piqued.

Why the Brain Matters is an outstanding book from a skilled communicator and an experienced and enthusiastic educator.

I recommend it as an accessible entry point for everyone who has an interest in neuroscience, especially secondary school teachers. It isn’t condescending in its reductionism and it is illuminating in its synthesising of ideas into a context. And where it needs to be it is provocative. In short, it is exactly what a mainstream book on neuroscience ought to be.

And I hope he does well in his doctoral studies. Should he still be engaged in them.

Andrys Onsman is Adjunct Associate Professor at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University, Australia. He is author of Experimentation in improvised jazz – Chasing ideas. (Routledge, 2019) with Rob Burke.

Contact: onsman@hotmail.com

Brain, brain, go away; come again another day Reviewed by Andrys Onsman

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Resistance is not futile Resisting Neoliberalism in Education – Local, National and Transnational Perspectives, edited by Lyn Tett & Mary Hamilton ISBN 978-1447350057, hardback, Bristol: Policy Press and Bristol University Press, xx+270 pp. 2019.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer Divided into 16 chapters, the 35 authors of the edited volume Resisting Neoliberalism in Education discuss the colonisation of education by the ideology of neoliberalism. Lyn Tett and Mary Hamilton focus on adult education (part 1), school education (part 2), higher education (part 3) while also offering a national perspective (part 4) and a transnational perspective (p. 5). Their book has no conclusion discussing ‘what can we learn from all this?’. Nonetheless, Kathleen Lynch’s forward starts by emphasising that there is a ‘myth that there can be equality in opportunity without equality of conditions’ (p. xvii). Schools are stratification institutions that, overall, increase inequality. When the mere existence of books in a household can be linked to potential achievement at school, some students are clearly at an advantage even before entering our rigid school system. Many indicators show an overall decline in social mobility. This is more marked the more neoliberalism holds sway. Today, more than during the 1970s (before neoliberalism) for example, schools make sure that working class students remain in the working class (Wills, 1977).

The second point Kathleen Lynch makes is that our societies are governed by ‘three major institutions of ideology: the media, religion and education’ (p. xvii). The role of the media is to mass manufacture consent (Herman & Chomsky 1988). Just as Ford perfected the mass-manufacturing of motor cars, Rupert Murdoch has perfected the mass-manufacturing of public opinion and adjacent voting patterns. Murdoch is one of the world’s foremost Merchant(s) of Truth (Abramson 2019). Apart from the USA, Poland, Ireland and a few other places, religion is in terminal decline, at least in many OECD countries. One is inclined to argue that religion has been replaced by consumerism as the key institution capable of pacifying society (Marcuse 1964; Klikauer 2018). Finally, there is education as a transmitter of ideology. The book shows how this works.

Tett and Hamilton start the introduction to the book by emphasising that ‘the role of critical intellectuals is to re-problematise the social reality of the present and to foster critical awareness of alternatives’ (p. 1). This is the

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Resistance is not futile Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

exact opposite of what neoliberalism wants, namely TINA: there is no alternative to the present system of neoliberal capitalism. To achieve TINA, neoliberalism in schools and universities fosters ‘competition rather than collaboration among practitioners and among students. It creates a lowtrust environment where professionals (and students) have to be monitored and assessed by external yardsticks’ (p. 2). The same regime is applied by university managerialists to control academics. They too are in competition (grant applications, internal promotions, bidding to teach classes that are seen as good, etc.) with each other. Much of this creates a low-trust environment in which managerialists rule by playing off academics against each other.

One of the key external yardsticks for schools is PISA (OECD, 2019). At universities, managerialists use more elaborated instruments such as The impact factor fetishism (Fleck, 2013). At schools, such external yardsticks are spiced up with the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) ideology (Klikauer 2019) while in university it is the relentlessly enforced demand to publish in A-level journals. Such demands are often issued by ex-academics turned apparatchiks who never or rarely publish in A-level journals and hence have become apparatchiks and managerialists. Much of this reflects on one of the better definitions of management ever delivered. It came from none other than Corporal Klinger in the US TV series MASH. Klinger said, ‘management is when those you can’t manage those who can’ (Klikauer 2007, p. 138).

Next to the OECD’s PISA ranking that focuses on the three skills capitalism needs (mathematics, science and reading), ‘schooling is dominated by the requirement to produce good tests, exams and inspection results’ (p. 6). Key to the understanding what schools are about are the first three words in the above quote – schooling is dominated. Indeed, schools are institutions of domination (Illich, 1971; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). Still, neoliberalism (externally) and managerialism (internally) remain obsessed with tests and exams. These are not for students but are directed against students (Robinson 2010). Testing and ranking also mark a ‘shift from humanist vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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perspectives to a focus on neoliberal and value for money approaches’ (p. 13). The idea behind this is to ‘reduce the person…to human capital, not as a life to be lived, but as mere economic potential to be exploited’ (p. 41). For neoliberalism, it is human capital, for managerialism it is the balanced score card that seeks to assign a profit value to each employee – profitability narrowed down to the individual. Common to both is that a human being has no value in-itself – only value in the function it performs for capitalism.

Like any function in capitalism and in corporations, workers, like students are assessed, ranked and defined by someone above you. In schools, such ‘an outcomes-based curriculum and standardised assessments can limit [a] teacher’s professional discernment’ (p. 58). This idea is not that it ‘can’ but that it ‘will’. Under an outcomes-based curriculum, school teachers and university lecturers become mere instructors delivering the textbook contents set up by for-profit corporations that publish textbooks. Simultaneously, teachers and lecturers have been confined to a rigid top-down system managed like a Ford factory. Management (that knows better) tells teachers and lecturers what to do. Early management theorist Fayol (1916) called it the chain of command. These kinds of ideologies are camouflaged by managerialism’s buzzwords like engagement and empowerment (e.g. www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator).

It is the very idea of the ‘neoliberal discourses [to] deprofessionalise teachers’ (p. 70) at schools and lecturers at universities (Klikauer, 2017). This makes 85 per cent of schooling very boring and there is a reason for that. It prepares people for working life which is also 85 per cent boring.

Human beings need to be conditioned to accept the way of capitalism. They need to believe that it is normal –even natural– to sit at a desk and look at a computer eight hours a day, five days a week for up to 50 years of their lives. When you think of it, this is quite an achievement. To round up the entire system, capitalism fills us with cheap consumer goods in the belief that two plasma TVs makes you happier than one (deGraaf et al., 2005).

Meanwhile at schools, universities and workplaces, boredom and dullness reign. This is a ‘dullness that is situated in predictability and universality – the day after day of the same pedagogy regardless of what is to be learnt. Dullness is located in unadulterated textbooks – or PowerPoint presentation-based learning that fails to connect with students’ existing understandings and experiences’ (p. 75).

Dullness is set to continue as it pleases school and university managerialists, overseers and ‘inspectors’ (p. 76). The same dullness is found in standardised testing. Unfortunately, only ‘20 per cent of parents…refused to submit their children to [such] standardised tests’ (p. 90). In other words, the media apparatus that engineers mass compliance and acceptance of such tests seems to work rather well. Still, those who refuse such tests often organise ‘effective grass-roots [and] vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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social media-based social movements’ (p. 90). It is not at all surprising that ‘nationwide, 45 per cent of opt-out activists were teachers’ (p. 96). Perhaps it is a case of: the more you know about standard testing, the less you want it done to your children.

While this might be a mild form of institutional violence directed against children, in the USA ‘African-American, Indigenous, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, immigrants and Latino communities’ can experience worse (p. 104). In the USA, ‘institutional violence targets even young children’ (p. 105) ‘for the purpose of social control and deculturalisation’ (p. 107). Forms of institutional violence continue in higher education where ‘processes of neoliberalisation [damage] pedagogic possibilities’ (p.

121). ‘Rather than a feature of public life, the privatisation of university funding has encouraged tertiary education to become a private affair’ (p. 123). Under managerialism, there is a ‘rebranding of students into customers [and] librarians [into] information officers’ (p. 125).

Just like almost anything neoliberalism can reach, ‘higher education is now a global industry that is estimated to contribute around £73 billion’ to the UK’s GDP per year (p. 137). With that, the move from humanist education to a money-making entity has largely been completed. Like in many privatised and semi-privatised industries, ‘the intensification of the pace of work and job insecurity has increased [while] new forms of accountability and surveillance [have increased]’ (p. 137) – largely for those at the receiving end of the equation. For some academics this even means ‘being forced into smaller offices [and] shared offices’ (p. 139) or being placed into so-called open plan offices (Stillman, 2018) with only the dean and a few selected henchmen of her or his personal entourage occupying real offices. Consequently, many academics ‘do an awful lot of writing at home’ (p. 140).

The university – from Latin universitas means whole – is no longer the whole assembly of scholars. It ceases to exist.

Managerialism triumphs.

Meanwhile, key performance indicators (KPIs) enforce the managerial system onto academics engineering output and impact factors measured in citations, the h-index and the i10-index (scholar.google.com.au/citations). It enforces ‘useless writings [meaning] writing you do not want to do’ (p.

144). Others would call it bullshit writing (Graeber, 2018).

The impact of managerialism is a rather recent phenomena because ‘academics have not traditionally seen themselves as an exploited workforce’ (p. 146). To this there are two answers.

Marxists would tend to think that the moment profits come in, surplus value must be created, and exploitation exists. NonMarxists would tend to think that exposing academics to rigid control systems to increase work is exploitation. Common to both is alienation. Increasingly, academics feel alienated at universities.

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Much of this is ideologically disguised by presenting a university as an ‘entrepreneurial university’ (p. 157) which means ‘free education for everyone’ (p. 159) is eliminated just as ‘direct democracy is a way of making decisions’ (p. 159).

Instead of democracy, managerialists reign. Such universities are deliberately underfunded [which assists managerialists in establishing a climate in which] marketised terms (p. 161) have achieved definitional power. Consequently, people are now ‘human capital [an ideology that has] become the main driver of adult education’ (p. 188). This means that ‘personal development [has become a mere] by-product’ (p.

189). Much of this comes under the general idea of seeing a ‘labour force [purely as being able to deliver] ‘the highest rate of return’ (p. 190). This works in private universities as well as in so-called “as-if ” universities. These are state universities run by managerialists under managerialism.

Much of this indicates a move ‘from a progressive humanist educational practice to a narrowly defined practice of skills training’ (p. 205). It is a move from education to training. As they say you can train a dog, but you cannot educate a dog.

When educational managerialists move education to training, they convert human beings into dogs applying Pavlov and Skinner. What this means has been shown in one of the most exquisite documentaries ever made – Human Resource Social Engineering (HR, 2010). This thinking has even shaped education with ‘the objective of employability [no longer] dedicated to the objective of active citizenship’ (p. 235).

While the book highlights the pathologies of education under the regime of neoliberalism, it also contains a raft of ideas on the book’s main title Resisting. In the Afterword, Lyn Tett and Mary Hamilton say that they have ‘identified ten key ideas’ on resistance (p. 253). Resistance means an acute awareness that resistance takes place in an ‘hostile environment’ (p. 253; cf. Klikauer, 2017). The second issue for resistance is to ‘prioritise a learner’s perspective [while] harnessing communication technologies’ (p. 254). Resistance also means an ‘explicit sharing of core values [while] fostering creativity’ (p. 255). The authors also suggest ‘collaborating with new groups’ and encourage the creation of ‘a knowledge commons’ (p. 256). Finally, there should be the ‘promotion of education as a common good’ (p. 256) and the ‘use of education research itself as a resource for making changes’ (p. 257). In short, Mary Hamilton and Lyn Tett’s edition makes a most insightful contribution to our understanding of neoliberal education as well as how to resist it.

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References Abramson, J. (2019). Merchants of Truth, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, New York: Basic Books. deGraaf, J., Wann, D. & Naylor, T. H. (2005). Affluenza: the allconsuming epidemic, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Fayol, H. (1916). Managerialism Industrielle et Generale (Industrial and General Managerialism), London: Sir I. Pitman & Sons, ltd. (1930).

Fleck, C. (2013). The impact factor fetishism, European Journal of Sociology, 54(2), p. 327-356.

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit jobs, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York: Pantheon Books.

HR, (2010). Human Resource Social Engineering (1:59min video).

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rnJEdDNDsI .

Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society, New York: Harper & Row. Klikauer, T. (2007). Communication and Management at Work, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Klikauer, T. (2017). Management Education – Fragments of an Emancipatory Theory, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Klikauer, T. (2018). Marcuse@50!, Capital & Class, 19(1):161-188.

Klikauer, T. (2019). STEM education for the global economy: Review of Miseducating for the global economy: How corporate power damages education and subverts students’ futures, by Gerald Cole, Australian Universities’ Review, 61(2):93-96.

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies, Boston: Beacon Press.

OECD (2019). PISA Ranking 2018, Paris: OECD (https://www.oecd. org/pisa/).

Robinson, K. (2010). Bring on the Learning Revolution. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks.

Stillman, J. (2018). New Harvard Study: Your Open-Plan Office Is Making Your Team Less Collaborative. Retrieved from https://www. inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-open-plan-office-ismaking-your-team-less-collaborative.html.

Wills, P. (1977). Learning to Labor – how working-class kids get workingclass jobs, New York: Columbia University Press.

Thomas Klikauer is the author of Managerialism (Palgrave MacMillan. 2013) and 450 other publications. He teaches PhD and MBA students at the Sydney Graduate School of Management, Western Sydney University, NSW, Australia.

Contact: t.klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au

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All bull, no point Bullshit Jobs – The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It by David Graeber ISBN: 9780141983479, paperback London & New York, Penguin Books, 332 pp., 2019.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

In 2013, British-American anthropologist David Graeber published an article On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs in a little-known British magazine called Strike! (Graeber, 2013). Bullshit Jobs received worldwide attention. In February 2019, Penguin Book launched Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs – The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It. Graeber says that many bullshit jobs appear to be ‘HR [human resources] consultants, communications coordinators, PR [public relations] researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers’ and so on (preface, p. xiii).

Some might say these are useless jobs. Once there were productive jobs in manufacturing but many of these have been ‘automated away’ (p. xv) or relocated overseas. Still, there are plenty of jobs that will never be sent overseas. We do not fly to Bangladesh for a haircut and our cars will not be serviced in Zimbabwe just because it is cheaper. Similarly, we do not attend universities in Mongolia, India, Honduras and China just because it is cheaper. The very opposite is the case: too many Australian universities live off too many overseas students (Robinson 2019).

Many of the jobs that have been exported, because they can be, have created unemployment at home. While some sections of the working class are unemployed or confined to precarious employment (Wright, 2016; Standing, 2016) others are overworked, toiling away for 60+ hours per week. Overwork and the capitalism 24/7 culture (Cray 2013) have created a host of ancillary industries like ‘dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen’, etc. (p. xvi). These exist because others work for too long. This may also apply to what Graeber calls paper pushers. Their numbers seem to be on the increase. Overall, one is inclined to think that capitalism seems to generate a general rule that says that the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less it is likely to get paid for. In other words, a nurse earns less than a merchant banker.

It is not at all clear how our society would suffer if all ‘private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR experts, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, legal consultants and HR professionals would disappear overnight’ (p. xix). These jobs are ideologically legitimised by the corporate business press, US billionaires vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

masquerading as working-class heroes, right wing political parties and their lackeys and missionaries. For decades, these have been ‘highly successful in engineering resentment against train drivers, school teachers and car workers’ but, of course, not against CEOs and rafts of managerialists guarding train drivers, car workers and school teachers. More importantly, the former group has contributed to the pathologies of capitalism including unseen environmental vandalism (Wallace-Wells 2017) far beyond what train drivers, teachers, nurses and lecturers could do.

When some of those in bullshit jobs were asked ‘does your job make a meaningful contribution to society? [an amazing] thirty-seven per cent [said] it does not’ (p. xxii). In other words, there are jobs that are so completely pointless, unnecessary, and even insidious, that even those who do these jobs cannot justify what they do. They – in fact many of us – are forced to perform complex but ultimately worthless administrative rituals only to be told admin wants it and just do it for admin. A Wall Street banker even admits ‘I regard the moral environment as pathological’ (p. 13). My peers are ‘greedy and ruthless’ [they believe they have] ‘a God-given belief to make as much money as they can in any way that they can – legal or otherwise’ (p. 13).

Their jobs seem to be bullshit jobs as many listed in Graeber’s astute book admit themselves. But what defines a bullshit job? Graeber says that his ‘definition is mainly subjective [and that his book represents a] worker’s perspective [because] I think it is safe to assume the worker knows best’ (p. 10). In other words, bullshit jobs are a ‘form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence’ (p. 3). But bullshit jobs are not shitty jobs. Shitty jobs are bad jobs like those filled by slaughterhouse workers, cleaners, promotional mascots, traffic wardens, animal food tasters, port-a-loo toilet cleaners, road kill removers, sewer cleaners and the like. Bullshit jobs are different. Shitty jobs are mostly manual labour jobs. They are paid hourly. By contrast, bullshit jobs are mostly white-collar, salaried jobs.

These bullshit jobs are found in public administration as well as in corporations. Some work in outright bullshit jobs while All bull, no point Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

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others have experienced a slow but steady bullshitisation – filling their day with useless paper work, box ticking and form filling. One might distinguish between five types of bullshit jobs (p. 28). There are…

1. Flunkies needed to make a boss look good; ‘you cannot be magnificent without an entourage’ (p. 29); just as an anonymous British academic [says] every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean, and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them are only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs’ (p. 181).

2. Goons are put in place to oversee others, to bully and control others; ‘most universities…now have public relations offices with staffs several times larger than would be typical for, say, a bank or an auto manufacturer of roughly the same size’ (p. 36).

3. Duct-tapers are employed to deal with organisational glitches that really should not exist; then there are 4. Box tickers who are there to pretend that an organisation does something that in fact it does not do; and finally, there are 5. Task masters – there job is to assign work to others. They are also more likely to spend a substantial amount of time assessing and justifying what they do rather than actually doing something.

These five types are found as managerialism ingrains itself into not-for-profit organisations, companies and corporations (Klikauer, 2013). In some of its worst expressions, they dehumanise work while claiming to humanise the workplace.

This takes the form in elaborate propaganda games often linked to new-age-like ‘mindfulness’ (p. 58) – a current fad.

The mindful university offers mindfulness.

Meanwhile, the proportion of hours spent on research and teaching declines while the proportion dedicated to so-called administrative tasks increases constantly. Are these useless paper pusher tasks that many academics are forced to endure? Systems like these mark the managerialist takeover of universities. Crucially, the number of managerialists in private institutions has increased at more than twice the rate as it did in majority government-funded universities (Murray & Frijters 2017). Unsurprisingly, managerialism finds its expression in the fact that ‘the proportion of hours spent teaching in class or preparing lessons has declined, while the total number of hours dedicated to administrative tasks has increased dramatically’ (p. 79). Managerialism always means that academics are tormented through one of HR management’s preferred instruments: performance management (Klikauer, 2017). As a worker called Finn says, ‘performance reviews, Finn admits, are bullshit’ (p. 124).

Still, a senior lecturer based in Melbourne showed me her key performance indicators (KPIs) for 2013. They said that

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she had to bring in between $11,500 and $34,000 of external grants per year and publish between 1.05 and 2.1 journal articles per year. In fact, both goals are way beyond what most academics do. As for publications, it not only fosters quantity over quality (Nathan & Shawkataly, 2019) but managerialists also support what Fleck calls Impact Factor Fetishism (Fleck, 2013. We know that KPIs are bullshit, but it has had serious consequences for academics who are measured against unachievable goals so that university managerialists can deny promotions because academic X or Y is an underachiever.

The terror wrought by the managerialists is by no means accidental. Graeber writes ‘much of what happens in such offices is simply pointless, but there is an added dimension of guilt and terror’ (p. 133).

HR trickery, managerial bullshit and a terrorising office existence (Schrijvers, 2004) are every day occurrences under managerialism or what Graeber calls managerial feudalism. By this, he means that middle managers like to establish and run little fiefdoms (ABC, 2005). Still, one needs an explanation for why corporations, and private and public universities create rafts of wasteful jobs. Is there a gigantic conspiracy of politicians who have created Graeber’s Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs? Perhaps none other than the former US president Barak Obama hit the nail on the head in explaining how it works. Graeber writes: Does this mean that members of the political class might actually collude in the maintenance of useless employment? If that seems a daring claim, even conspiracy talk, consider the following quote, from an interview with then US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America: “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?” I would encourage the reader to reflect on this passage because it might be considered a smoking gun.

What is the president saying here? He acknowledges that millions of jobs in medical insurance companies like Kaiser or Blue Cross are unnecessary. He even acknowledges that a socialised health system would be more efficient than the current market-based system, since it would reduce unnecessary paperwork and reduplication of effort by dozens of competing private firms. But he’s also saying it would be undesirable for that very reason. One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do. So here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legisvol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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lative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs’ (p. 157).

Consequently, we have bullshit jobs, and these can even be measured in terms of economic wastefulness. Graeber emphasises, ‘the closest I know to such a study that does use such a broader sample was one carried out by the New Economic Foundation in the United Kingdom, whose authors applied a method called “Social Return on Investment Analysis” to examine six representative occupations, three high-income, three low. Here is a summary of the results: 1. City banker – annual salary c. £5 million – estimated £7 of social value destroyed for every £1 earned.

2. Advertising executive – annual salary c. £500,000, estimated £11.50 of social value destroyed per £1 paid.

3. Tax accountant – annual salary c. £125,000, estimated £11.20 of social value destroyed per £1 paid.

4. Hospital cleaner – annual income c. £13,000 (£6.26 per hour), estimated £10 of social value generated per £1 paid.

5. Recycling worker – annual income c. £12,500 (£6.10 per hour) – estimated £12 in social value generated per £1 paid.

6. Nursery worker – annual salary c. £11,500 – estimated £7 in social value generated per £1 paid.

In other words, ‘the more one’s work benefits others, the less one tends to be paid for it’ (p. 212). Since, a lecturer’s work tends to benefit others, such a lecturer is paid less than a university managerialist. Such a university managerialist, at a well-known American private university for example, does not have to sit in an open plan office. The manger has a corporate (read: university) car with chauffeur (in this case, a Maserati with personalised license plate) receiving a substantially higher salary than the lecturer.

Inside such Selling-Students-Short (Hil, 2015) and grant-driven universities, managerialists speak of research excellence, which means winning external grants: one of the worst excesses occurs in research. An external grant agency funds roughly ten per cent of all the applications it receives from researchers working at universities. This means the following: A whopping 90% of academic work that goes into writing such grant applications is for nothing in any given round of applications. This is astonishingly wasteful. Much time, money and human creative energy is drained away. All this is engineered by managerialists as they are the important decision-makers, not the researchers in the field. The scale of such wastefulness is mind-numbing. A ‘study determined that European universities spend roughly €1.4 billion a year on failed grant applications’ (p. 188). Thankfully, the €1,400,000,000 is not wasted on teaching and research! To put such stratospheric numbers into perspective, European academics are forced to waste the value of roughly 3.5 Boeing vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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747-800 aircraft (fully equipped) every year. One should not engage in the foolish belief that things are better in AngloSaxon countries; in fact, they are worse.

This marks the triumph of managerialism (Krakauer, 2019).

Managerialism works its way through business organisations just as through universities. It colonises workplaces. Above that towers neoliberalism – managerialism’s evil twin brother and the all-guiding global ideology for decades.

Neoliberalism’s political catechism means shaping politics in terms of anti-unionism, anti-government, taxation for the poor – not the rich and corporations – deregulation (read: re-regulation in the interest of business and corporations), relentless competition, the privatisation of everything, and a quasi-religious belief in the still rather illusive free market, etc. Undeterred, neoliberalism and its political henchmen follow a global script. Graeber writes ‘first unleash the chaos of the market to destabilise lives and all existing verities alike; then, offer yourself up as the last bastion of the authority… against the barbarians they have themselves unleashed’ (p.

255).

Finally, Graeber concludes ‘I look forward to a day sometime in the future when governments, corporations, and the rest will be looked at as historical curiosities in the same way as we now look at the Spanish Inquisition or nomadic invasions, but I prefer solutions to immediate problems that do not give more power to governments or corporations, but rather, give people the means to manage their own affairs’ (p. 270).

With this, Graeber ends his very readable, highly enjoyable, insightful and most exquisite book on the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.

Thomas Klikauer is the author of Managerialism (Palgrave MacMillan. 2013) and 450 other publications. He teaches PhD and MBA students at the Sydney Graduate School of Management, Western Sydney University, NSW, Australia.

Contact: t.klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au

References ABC, (2005). Corporate Psychopaths, ABC Catalyst (5th May 2005), (http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1360571.htm, accessed: 30th November 2019).

Cray, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso.

Fleck, C. (2013). The impact factor fetishism, European Journal of Sociology, 54(2), p. 327-356.

Graeber, D. (2013). On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. (http:// strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/, August 17, 2013, accessed: 30th November 2019).

Hil, R. (2015). Selling Students Short: Why you won’t get the university education you deserve, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Klikauer, T. (2013). Managerialism and Business Schools, Australian Universities’ Review, 55(2), 128-132.

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Klikauer, T. (2017). Eight fatal flaws of performance management, Management Learning, 48(4), 492-497.

Schrijvers, J. (2004). The Way of the Rat – A Survival Guide to Office Politics, London: Cyan Books.

Klikauer, T. (2019). A preliminary theory of managerialism as an ideology, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (forthcoming, https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12220).

Standing, G. (2016). The precariat, class and progressive politics: A response, Global Labour Journal, 7(2), p. 189-200.

Murray, C. & Frijters, P. (2017). Game of Mates: How Favours Bleed the Nation, Brisbane, Queensland: Cameron Murray.

Nathan, R. J. & Shawkataly, O. B. (2019). Publications, citations and impact factors: Myth and reality, Australian Universities’ Review, 61(1), 42.

Robinson, N. (2019). Australian universities risk catastrophe due to over-reliance on Chinese students, expert warns, ABC News, https:// www.abc.net.au/news/, 21st August 2019, accessed: 30th November 2019.

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Wallace-Wells, D. (2017). The Uninhabitable Earth. NY Magazine, retrieved from http://nymag.com/, 9 July 2017, accessed: 5th January 2019.

Wright, E. O. (2016). Is the Precariat a Class?, Global Labour Journal, 7(2), p.123-135.

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Responsible academics The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years by Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight & Neil Smith ISBN: 9781787355514, paperback, London: University College London Press (free PDF download from www.uclpress.co.uk), 144 pp., 2019.

Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

In 1967, the distinguished MIT linguist Noam Chomsky published an essay on The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the New York Review of Books (Chomsky, 1967). Nicholas Allott, Chris Knight and Neil Smith’s book presents eight chapters that reflect on Chomsky’s original essay. In the preface, the editors’ note that ‘by 2004, even the New York Times – not the greatest fan of Chomsky’s political writings – had to admit that if book sales are any standard to go by, he may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet today’ (preface, p. x). (Chomsky’s key work – Syntactic Structures (1957) – is on Martin SeymourSmith’s list of the 100 most influential books ever written (thegreatestbooks.org)).

Perhaps Chomsky’s vital thought in his 1967 essay is that ‘it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies’ (p. 1). At many universities, we find academics, but one also finds intellectuals. Some might like to distinguish between an academic – a teacher at a university or institute of higher education – and an intellectual – a person possessing a highly developed intellect. These are by no means synonymous. The latter are ‘people to whom [we] refer as intellectuals’ (p. 2). To illuminate the academicsvs.-intellectual distinction, one might think of an academic as someone who teaches a university class as demanded by the managerialists placed above her or him, as someone who publishes diligently in so-called A-star-top-ranked journals for reasons of ‘impact fetishism’ and promotion (Fleck, 2013). Perhaps one of the clearest expressions of the academic vs. intellectual difference is Henry Giroux’ (2017) graduation address at UWS Hamilton. Another dividing line between academic and intellectual might be detected in this (p. 3): In the face of the temptation not to make a fuss, not to rock the boat and not to endanger one’s livelihood, it is almost always easier to serve the interests of the powerful, or to say and do nothing, than it is to stand up for what is right by speaking out.

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A similar thought had been expressed by Upton Sinclair 30 years before Chomsky. Reflecting the gendered realities of the day, Sinclair said, ‘it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!’ (Sinclair, 1935). In almost any of the 15,000 business schools globally one can find examples of Sinclair’s thought. ‘Stand up for what is right’ has a long history. Conceivably, it all started with Socrates’ trial (Nails 2018). Much later, it was none other than Italian natural philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) who made a fuss.

Galilei did not give in to the Catholic Church even when shown the instruments of torture. Of course, it would have been by far easier to serve the interests of the powerful.

Instead, Galilei ‘stood up for what is right’ even when this meant not being able to publish any longer. His daughter Suor Maria Celeste carried on his work. Unaware of Galilei and Maria’s achievement, many of today’s academics say and do nothing while focusing on the next 7,500-word journal article boosting journal-science. They join the academic rat race never realising that even when they win the rat race, the winner is still a rat. From PhD to comfortable retirement, they achieve the rather dubious grandeur of A-Star publications – euphemistically known as having academic standing and having a track record – rewarded by lush titles on their doors and business cards, hefty perks and salaries. Slowly they have been wheeled into becoming what Baritz (1960) called the Servants of Power seven years prior to Chomsky’s seminal essay.

These academics are busy. They hardly ever have a moment for reflective thought – never mind self-reflection. They console themselves with hallucinations like ‘there’s no need for intellectuals in general to speak the truth and to expose lies, as mainstream journalists will do it anyway’ (p. 7). In times of fake news and ‘digital fascism’ (Fielitz & Marcks, 2019), the general public almost as much as academics has simply been Outfoxed (Greenwald, 2004). A gigantic and highly manipulative media apparatus ensures as much Responsible academics Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

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(Klikauer, 2019a). One might argue that those who engage with the public (‘intellectuals’) might be less naïve about the media and politics compared to ‘technocratic’ academics (p.

8). Swayed by positivism, systems theory, non-critical theories, easy-to-understand models and other trimmings of the nonintellectual smorgasbord, many diligent academics see the world from within unable to ascertain the pathologies of our current life from the outside. The towering achievement appears when business school professors advocate thinking outside the box and then deliver a paper at a conference or write a paper that does the exact opposite: they think inside the box in an almost Janis-like self-enslavement ( Janis, 1985) lacking what Baillargeon (2007) has described as Intellectual Self-Defense – Find your inner Chomsky. Many of these academics have been duped by common hallucinations such as making a contribution and contributing to society, however insignificant their contributions are.

Many might not even have recognised that ‘the scope of academic freedom has declined significantly in the last few decades’ (p. 9). Today, the neoliberal academic apparatus – running under the ideological hegemony of Managerialism – has fine-tuned its instruments of deception. Seamlessly, it engineers compliance and manufactures consent. There is no longer any need to persecute an outstanding intellectual mind of the standing of a Karl Marx. He escaped to England.

There is no longer a need to force Adorno into exile (Klikauer, 2015) and Walter Benjamin into suicide (Klikauer, 2016a).

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn no longer needs to be in the Gulag.

Today, corporate mass media have established their global dominance so thoroughly that fighting those few intellectuals, those who become a minor irritation to the system once in a while, is no longer needed. When they still put up a fight, the power of corporate mass media puts them in their place (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). Things have become worse from the days of Chomsky’s essay (1967). Chomsky’s essay ‘dealt almost exclusively with governments, but one needs now increasingly to look at companies and other non-state actors such as the public relations industry and the business community more generally’ (p. 11). With a diminishing state under neoliberalism’s ideological onslaught, corporate PR has taken over. Corporate media and PR have made it possible for many to believe Toxic Sludge is Good For You (Stauber & Rampton, 1995) just as Trump is good for you and so is Boris Johnson, Bolsonaro and many others.

According to Wallace-Wells (2017), ‘you should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will…only the latter, Chomsky writes, protects you from the despair’ (p. 13).

There is a critical need for this as Orwellian Newspeak holds sway at the ‘PR-university’ (Cronin, 2016) and elsewhere. The rise of managerial ‘bullshit talk’ (Klikauer, 2019b) is designed ‘to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order’ (p. 14). Trapped in

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the ideological echo chamber of positivist academia, hunting for the next research grant and submitting an application to the next impact and research competition your university runs, many academics are overworked and insulated from the realities of capitalism’s pathologies. In other words, ‘if you aren’t a member of the community being served the lies, you’re quite likely never to know that they are in circulation’ (p. 17). The neoliberal university makes sure that you do not realise the lies – and more importantly – the deceptions you are served by the managerialists at your own university.

Those hard-working academics hammering out one grant application after the other, those who win shiny awards handed out generously by university managerialists and professional associations will almost never realise that ‘activists are the people who have created the rights that we enjoy’ (p. 19). As a consequence of not understanding the history of struggles even at universities, there has been a decline in trade union membership among academics. Surprisingly, this comes at a time of escalating short-term contracts and the McDonaldisation of higher education (Ritzer, 2018; Bhattacharya 2019). Slowly, many intellectuals are replaced by faithful apparatchiks oiling the managerialist machine of higher education. The day of The Last Professor (Donoghue, 2008) and perhaps even the last intellectuals is upon us.

‘Intellectuals [are] those who have the ability to reflect, comment and propose solutions…to present alternative narratives and other perspectives’ (p. 27) Instead of this, we see ‘that many…promote, or turn a blind eye, to the oppressions of the establishment [including] the establishment’s control over university academics’ (p. 27).

Given the fact that ‘intellectuals…have the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest’ (p. 32), those who call themselves intellectuals should keep this fact in mind. While they have the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth, many do not. Still, there are those who enable intellectuals to have the leisure to engage in intellectual debates unveiling the distortions of the powerful: those non-intellectuals who work in factories and offices. They are the ones who are manipulated day-in-and-out by mass media (Coban, 2018). They are the ones who are deliberately depoliticised (cf. Neuman 2017, p. 624). Indeed, ‘most voters pay little attention to politics [which goes hand in hand with the fact that] human reasoning is prone to a wide variety of biases’ (p. 35) – a fact that has been well-known since the seminal work of Solomon Asch (1955).

Worse than being manipulated might be the fact that ‘one of the things we know from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they can’t listen’ (p. 41). This works well inside society as well as inside universities. Inside society, it is the other, the refugee and vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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the migrant that are presented as a threat. In the words of US President Trump ‘Mexicans are animals…these aren’t people…they’re rapists’ (usatoday.com 16 May 2018).

Inside universities, it is the managerialists armed with KPIs, casualisation, performance management (Klikauer, 2017), etc. who threaten intellectuals and academics, consciously or unconsciously (Gove, 2015).

This has been made part and parcel of today’s managerialist university. Indeed, ‘universities are now expected to function as corporations…the notion of a democratic self-governing community has vanished after an onslaught of macho corporate governance culture, including the ludicrously high levels of remuneration for executives’ (p. 72). The days can’t be far off when the first president or vice-chancellor of a university is dubbed ‘CEO’ with a multimillion dollar salary riding in a corporate car driven by a chauffeur or flying in a private jet while half of their (!) staff are on short-term contracts as their (!) university generates substantial revenues from staff while Selling Students Short as Richard Hil has called it in his exquisite book (Hil, 2015; cf. Klikauer, 2016b).

Inside as well as outside of universities, ‘our prime concern should be the crimes for which we share responsibility and that we can do something about, that we can mitigate or terminate’ (p. 79). This is the enduring task of those who call themselves intellectuals. Chomsky himself writes in this book dedicated to him, The press often helps by suppressing (or even deriding) the facts. For example, the Economist assures us that the ‘grim, mirthless’ Bernie Sanders with his ‘crotchety-great-uncle charisma’ is an ‘indulgence’ that Democrats can ‘ill afford’, and that fortunately, silly season ‘has probably passed’. After all, we are instructed, his main ideas ‘have little support within [the Democratic] party, let alone America’: only the support of 75 per cent of Democrats, 59 per cent of the general public (national health care, ‘Medicare-for-all’) and of 80 per cent of Clinton voters, 45 per cent of Trump voters (tuition-free college). Facts that readers are spared (p. 82).

This is How Propaganda Works (Stanley, 2015). The very same point is made by Chomsky in a chapter written by Noam Chomsky himself in the book being reviewed here.

Chomsky says that the ‘concentration of wealth leads to increased concentration of political power and increased marginalisation of the public’ (p. 83). Almost every social and economic indicator tells us that we are moving rather rapidly towards an ever-greater gap between the haves and the havenots which will lead to all the expected pathologies (Hanauer, 2014). Highlighting these is the task of intellectuals. On our responsibility, Chomsky says in his own chapter in the book the following: ‘so what’s the responsibility of everyone? Well, to try to avert this catastrophe’ (p. 105). Perhaps the most impending catastrophe is our collective movement towards vol. 62, no. 1, 2020

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an Uninhabitable Earth (Wallace-Wells, 2017) despite Greta Thunberg’s best efforts (Thunberg, 2018).

Far too few have understood the true magnitude of what we are facing. We carry on giving lectures, marking exam papers, supervising PhDs and publish articles in A-star journal that are rather inconsequential. At the same time, we face the 6th mass extinction on earth (Ceballos et al., 2015). Trust in the democratic process will not help. As Chomsky said, ‘political scientists have shown you can predict the outcome of an election with remarkable precision simply by looking at campaign spending’ (p. 109). Democracy has been turned into a well-financed election spectacle in which not the one with the best idea is the winner but the one with the biggest mouth – Trump & Co. This is nothing new. We have known this since 1835 (Tocqueville, 1835) and we still trust in democracy and elections. Finally, Chomsky notes, ‘in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, the right-wing alternative…I’m old enough to remember listening to Hitler’s speeches over the radio in the 1930s, not understanding the words as a child, but couldn’t miss the thrust and the massive popular support, and so on. That’s threatening’.

In Germany and elsewhere, right-wing populism is on the march, except that in Germany it is not just populism, but outright neo-Nazism that is on the rise (Klikauer, 2018).

While I am not ‘old enough to hear Hitler’s speeches in 1930s’ (as Chomsky did), unlike Chomsky, I do understand what Hitler meant when shouting, Die Vernichtung der jüdische Rasse in Europa – the eradication of the Jewish race in Europe (see youtube.com/watch?v=11fl8AykFqo).

Indeed, ‘that’s threatening’ (Chomsky). Very threatening, indeed. Even more so when one sees 8,000 neo-Nazis marching in the East German city of Chemnitz in 2018, displaying all the fascist trimmings one can imagine: the hunting of foreigners, Hitler salutes, thug violence and an attack on a Jewish restaurant (cnn.com, 29th Aug. 2018).

This is flanked by neo-Nazis inside German parliaments as well as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) leadership, and its adjacent apparatchiks. In English, some might say ‘ f***ing disgrace’. Not so long ago, these men were hard-core neo Nazis and now they are AfD apparatchiks generously paid for through federal taxes. Not surprisingly, anti-semitism is on the rise in Germany once again. Perhaps ‘the formative stages of fascism are with us once again’ (Rohde, 2019).

While the book does not have a conclusion telling readers what we can learn from all this it does close with Noam Chomsky saying ‘an intellectual presupposes a certain amount of privilege. Privilege confers obligations and responsibility, automatically’ (p. 119). Intellectuals and perhaps even academics should keep this in mind. These obligations and responsibilities should be directed toward ending suffering as defined by what the Latin-American ethics philosopher Responsible academics Reviewed by Thomas Klikauer

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Enrique Dussel calls the community of victims (Klikauer, 2014). Ending suffering is the ethical and intellectual duty of those who call themselves intellectuals.

Thomas Klikauer is the author of Managerialism (Palgrave MacMillan. 2013) and 450 other publications. He teaches PhD and MBA students at the Sydney Graduate School of Management, Western Sydney University, NSW, Australia.

Contact: t.klikauer@westernsydney.edu.au

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