Reflecting on changing roles and conditions of 15 years’ tertiary teaching work: 2006-2021, part three
Suburban Corporate-isation, proletarianization, precarity: 2015-2021.
Very little in my eight years of full-time tutoring, and five years of lecturing and co-ordinating experience at Sandstone and Former Technical prepared me for Suburban Corporate. This is really worth noting: I had several years’ full-time experience co-ordinating, lecturing and tutoring, under heavy workloads. By iteratively reflecting and attuning my work, had got good results with cohorts at both – very different – campuses. Based on my work at Former Technical I had also worked with genuinely diverse cohorts, including people coming into university who had not yet had the opportunity to do VCE. I thought I was experienced and competent and had some consciousness of my own class privilege and the weird blue bubble at Sandstone, yet from the moment I started work at Suburban Corporate, none of my moves worked on the new ‘opponents’. My powers, my tricks, and my charms had deserted me. Structurally, I had made it out of precarity; yet in fact, I had arrived with nothing to prepare me for the work, and no guidance, support, or mentoring. I was out of my depth and almost completely alone, and as I soon discovered, not all the entities I faced on my own were benevolent or nice to deal with.
Suburban Corporate employees are expected to attend remote campuses only conveniently accessible by car. As I learned from my very first commute, when you eventually arrived, already exhausted from the drive, finding a park could take fifteen minutes – then the university would charge you. It was usually then a 10-15 minute walk to the classroom, office, or café. To me that sequence of actions and what it silently takes from everyone who works there says nearly everything. Every Suburban Corporate employee was and is gaslit on this substantial and onerous ecological-society and temporal-opportunity cost, yet most of those habituated to it thought nothing of it. Employees bore it as a personal cost that was shrugged at, a quirk. Suburban Corporate’s employees are mostly people who have come to think nothing of driving 10s of thousands of km a year at personal (though tax deductable) expense, with all the CO2 and loss of personal time this implies vis a Sandstone or Former Technical employee.
When you do finally arrive after the always draining and sometimes horrible (gridlock, flash storms, multiple fatality pile ups) commute, Suburban Corporate’s campuses also have zero vibe, and terrible, huge, overpriced coffees with hotburnt milk you’re also supposed to add sugar to so as to mask the shitty bitter beans that give you a headache and bad breath. The front of Suburban Corporate’s campuses these days are mid-rise skyscrapers built in the late 00s and peopled by strange bureaucrats; academic staff and students were denied entry. The redstone backlots, where I taught and most students had to walk (ten to fifteen minutes from where there cars were parked) had no whiteboard markers (you had to bring your own!) were damp smelling, chock full of chaotic school furniture, and hadn’t been renovated since the early 90s. By reputation, Suburban Corporate campuses of yore had been places where students – and professors – were on the cans by the early afternoon; by 2015, all of this had been shut down.
In 2015, my first year there, a few factors were notable. Firstly, student numbers were nearly double what I had been recently used to: in the second semester of 2014, I had co-ordinated a subject of roughly 240, with three tutors taking roughly four tutorials (or eighty students each). In the second semester in 2015 at Suburban Corporate, myself and one tutor were responsible for 384 students across ‘three’ campuses ( the third being ‘the cloud’), with two markers brought in to cover the marking load. I commuted to conduct a weekly lecture at two campuses, did all the nine or so tutorials at one campus, and still did a substantial number of assessing for each round of assessment. At least two of the tutors were marking over 100 assessments on each of the three rounds; also new to me was that many were marking strangers who they would never meet, whose faces they would never see, who they had no relationship with, who they would never get to know.
Another factor new to my experience in 2015 was that large numbers of the students had significant remedial needs, including learning difficulties, mental health struggles, life struggles, and behavioural issues. Where issues arose, these students would make contact via email to voice these issues and have needs addressed. Some of these correspondents followed the clarification-re-mark-complaint typology described above (emerging from roughly 2012); but alongside this type of request were two others, which were new.
The first was a style of email that was clearly sent from a phone or tablet, often in haste, typed by thumbs, often by a student reacting to and seeking remedy from a negative affective state, usually frustration, sometimes anxiety and panic, other times personal distress. None of these emails, more like instant messages, were necessarily complaints or urgent crises, but any could be, or escalate into one. Most required only minimal response, and due to the volume of queries, all of them had to be expedited. This required very close, careful scanning focus for any with signs of incendiary potential, as well as careful attention to pastoral care issues for students facing serious personal hardship or existential struggles. In many cases, this was compounded by the fact that people do not know what they want or how to ask, or even how to write a good enough email to convey the basic request. Many failed to express their all-too-real cries for help clearly enough for me to discern what was at issue. For all these reasons, this pattern of messaging often required high level inferential guesswork, alongside proactive detective work on administrative databases or informal messages to colleagues to infer enough context or ascertain the deeper purpose for making contact.
As a daily practice, staying on top of this work involved dealing with a huge batch of messages, up to 100 a day, treating each on its merits, handling one after another at speed, but very accurately – and expecting that many of them would induce further emails, many rounds of handling. This could be galling to one’s sense of amour propre as many did not have any appropriate greetings or salutations. At times there also appeared to be some unprocessed parental transference and projection, usually presented as an assertion seeking to discharge hostility or blame while also claiming some kind of further labour service. Strangers, vulnerable young people, were messaging me, as if I were a parent denying or depriving them of something they were entitled to or as if I could take their bad feeling away. One therefore also had to try and ignore the absence of tone, or try to look past what appeared to be deliberately snarky, reproachful, blaming messages – again, from a stranger, yet also a vulnerable young person requiring careful attention, as well as a student struggling to learn to whom I strongly felt a duty of care.
The second style of email was a new type: the Equitable Learning Access Plan. At Sandstone and Former Technical we had one or two such students per course, usually known to us. At Suburban Corporate there might be 6, 12, or even 18 in a large course. Nearly all of these students requested extensions or were automatically granted special consideration, but that they also emailed about. Some of these students had complex personal, mental health, and behavioural challenges and learning difficulties that we were not qualified, resourced, or supported to handle. Yet handle them we did, amidst all the other messages appearing in the inbox.
Alongside this, there were increasing numbers of students who reported to me that they were experiencing hardship and struggling with life and health. Mostly this manifested as anxiety-depression, sometimes confessed, but sometimes talked around, by way of requesting an extension. Often this would come without the documentation that was procedurally necessary: these students were asking us to exercise discretion and trust them, but again, they were strangers, sometimes who hadn’t expressed themselves clearly or fully, and the selfsame system was known-to-be-open to anyone claiming mental illness as a way to make such claims.
Occasionally, and much more difficultly, there would be a student or two in every cohort engaging in a pattern of email behaviour that was off base, antisocial, escalatory, and so had to be handled with extreme care. However, usually there was no warning of this student’s existence, and by the time I was aware of them it was too late. Situations which would embroil me as a co-ordinator for rounds of correspondence recurring over many weeks had been triggered by some seemingly small phrase written a tutor in correspondence or an assessor in assessment feedback.
By the end of 2015, after just two semesters’ work, I had whole-body stress responses to clicking on the Outlook button on my desktop every morning: cold sweat, heart palpitations, strong feelings of panic. Email took at least one and sometimes up to two hours per day, every day; weekends would create a pile up that would ensure two hours’ of work, first thing Monday. As a result, by the end of 2015, I found it hard to like and trust my students. I could not behave spontaneously with them, or speak my mind with an open heart in my own words. I was wary of them; I knew I had to be careful, hold back, watch my words. Moreover, many of these students no longer felt the need to do the reading, nor apologised for not having done so. Yet many still demanded ‘more’ from me: after appearing to not first having given of themselves the basic dotpoints still listed as the student responsibilities, after not having read the instructions or submitted good work on time, they still demanded significant time and thousands of words of careful attention. They didn’t seem to be accessing the readings or reading the instructions, announcements, or FAQs, but they surely knew my email address, what they felt entitled to, and contacted me to claim it. They did not seem to want to do the work, nor acknowledge the work; but they did want ‘some other thing’, and demanded it of me. But was this other thing; what did they want, really?
At Suburban Corporate in 2015 there were no suitable candidates available to me for tutoring and marking work. Structurally, this was a conspicuous effect of the near absence of PhD candidates there, let alone HDRs with appropriate experience in the fields – outside my field of expertise – I was instructed to co-ordinate. In the first semester, the two who were offered to me as good enough turned not to be capable of dealing well with students’ needs, nor exercising discernment in email, or good judgment when marking assessment. This created additional and substantial remedial workload issues for me, again over email, compounding those detailed in the previous paragraphs. These tutors were in every way less capable professionals, yet they were dealing with far more demanding and complex student needs than had been the case at Sandstone. For the second semester, I resolved to hustle through my Sandstone networks to find capable, available people; when I did, I will forever remember being called out of the blue and then yelled at over the phone – screaming yelling, to the point I had to hold the phone away from my ear – by a senior Suburban Corporate colleague, for not adhering to a system they insisted existed. I protested that this was a system notable for the absence of the things it might have been conceived to provide: both a system, and one that could provide tutors and markers. This was a senior colleague I had only met once in person, the most senior member of our team.
When I did find these tutors and markers through my networks, I then had to shepherd them through the new bureaucratic labyrinth: ‘onboarding’. Onboarding was a word I had never heard until 2015, and must be thought as the companion to the emergence of the sessional and the dominance of the school manager. We were now in an institution that was totally reliant on sessionals, yet onboarded them in an onerous and untimely way. This was because merely becoming the category of person called a sessional at Suburban Corporate required significant email correspondence between employees, professional staff, and co-ordinators; in practice, this took at least three weeks of rounds, which ate into semester. In one case this meant that the sessional I was just trying to hire to do tutoring and marking was not allowed to front their class in the first week: this was deemed ‘risky’ for the students, by the same administration who refused to onboard them in time, or pay them until the fifth week.
The existential status and administrative treatment of sessionals at Suburban Corporate in the middle years of the 2010s was very strange: they were integral to high volume teaching work, yet they were thought of as in every way external, suspect outsiders who required Working with Children checks, although they were not working with children. They were regarded as contractors routinely performing a dotpointed set of tasks, yet who were expected to be responsive to high-level student needs via email, out of hours and beyond the temporal limit of the contract. Without the active intervention of a co-ordinator who had recently experienced these kinds of working conditions, these workers were very vulnerable to a sectorally-specific style of negated exploitation. As the institution in a sense pretended they did not fully exist, so too their exploitation, which was also structurally necessary and very profitable, was not really happening. However, most ongoing staff at level B and especially level A (grunt level; A is associate lecturer, E is professor) were too pumped to exhaustion by their own workload, and so scared about their own precarity, that they did not have any capacity to advocate for sessionals. Moreover, as these junior ongoing staff members felt very precarious because they were on fixed terms, or probation, so few if any had the courage to feed anything back up the chain. I certainly felt scared I would not pass probation, or would end up being served punitive workload conditions if I dared to speak my mind. If I am honest, that feeling never left in my years I was at Suburban Corporate; it coloured everything about my time there and what I put up with. Putting up with it in silence and not speaking out was also a violation of my values, so it also wounded my sense of dignity and who I really was.
As a result of this constellation of labour conditions, the attrition on sessionals was really high; a degree of churn was inevitable, and good sessionals with prospects and networks went back to Sandstone, where working conditions – and the quality of student work being assessed – was higher. This meant that every semester brought the fresh search through colleague-networks for people competent enough, and willing and available for the work – especially the high volume marking work, for which there was the greatest demand and the most elusive supply. I tried to direct work to trusted friends and colleagues, who reported back to me how they were mucked around by the administration, would not get a clear, firm, timely promise of actual work (which would often be less than promised), then spend weeks tied up in onboarding, waiting even longer to finally be paid. Then the actual work, when it came, was of course tiring and repetitive, and so inherently unrewarding. How could it mean given the quality of student submissions, and the fact they were strangers? Low quality submissions, no relationship with students, high volumes of work with tight turnaround deadlines, each round a full, exhausting working weak alone on a laptop. For ongoing staff members, I saw how these routine conditions burned people out, but due to the fear just mentioned, and the fairly pervasive sense of resignation, no sooner would we be drinking one semester into oblivion than we would be gearing up for the next.
The driver of workload and destroyer of solidarity at Suburban Corporate was an Excel-based spreadsheet called an Administrative Work Allocation Model (AWAM, or often WAM, pronounced ‘wham’). I believe they had been implemented a year or two prior to my arrival. I was presented with my AWAM via a perfunctory email from a senior colleague, a person who had negative people skills and neither the aptitude nor the inclination for the work. I did not understand WAM at all, but nor did any of my queries at the time resolve the ambiguity I felt and work it asked for me, nor the disquiet I felt at its workload-driving purpose, which I intuited.
At Suburban Corporate, AWAM was used to beancount and squeeze as much teaching labour out of ongoing staff members as possible, to the limit of the Enterprise Agreement, while hiding a lot of the implied labour that arose – for example, in the administration of that teaching work under the full set of institutional conditions described so far, and, in circular form, via the model itself, with all its horse trading over email. The beancounting, squeezing, and gaslighting on the implications of the model and ensuing practical patterns of labour, also had the effect of pushing right into time and headspace: of course for drafting and revising scholarly work, but most of all for inquiry, open library-based research, reading, reflection, and any scholarly engagement that was not pegged to a concrete research output. Of the few dozen colleagues I loosely associated with, I was one of but a few who continued to read theory and philosophy, conduct basic inquiry-based research, and borrow books from the library (a few of my colleagues noticed and commented on this, as if I were wearing red stilettos and tracksuit pants in the halls: ‘books…?’). The majority of my colleagues kept up with journal articles and cited controversies, but many no longer read books. Some also did not express any shame or regret at not reading. Without really articulating what had happened, although they were still called lecturers, they had become some other thing, at an institution that was still calling itself a university, but was no longer engaging in what this work was and had meant only a decade earlier.
At a school level, the workload pressure was driven by the school manager, who, unlike myself and my colleague, had learned a fearful skill with the AWAMs, and scrutinised all of the spreadsheets, over which they exercised a monopolistic control. At the school manager’s level, this had nothing to do with academic work, pedagogy, students, learning, or any kind of core business: it was one hundred percent about making budget. These budgets were given down from one or two levels higher, and the head of school and school manager lived in fear of not making budget. As this was tied to enrolments, they also lived in fear of preferences and enrolments. Every year, as I came to learn, there was a double-edged panic: the first driven by not having ‘made load’ (recruited enough students to enrol), the second by not having ‘made budget’. For the latter institutional fact, heads of school would always make bullish paper promises to their bosses, above and beyond what was probably achievable – which was already extraordinarily profitable and operationally sustainable for an organisation distributing resources as universities had a decade earlier. There were so, so many students, and academic staff were worked half to death, but somehow we still needed to get more load, because we were still not making budget. After a very persistent bout of structural amnesia where all this was actively forgotten, the panic would ensue. It was construed as if there were actually scarce resources coming in and up from street level – too few students, not enough money coming in – whereas in fact, the social fact of a deliberate overpromise was used expediently to drive panic through the minds and spreadsheets of administrative staff, spurring the school manager on to ever greater feats of WAM scrutiny. These were years in which first-year courses in some high demand subjects under the demand-driven system had enrolments of over 1000 students, overseen by one level A on probation, working 70-hour weeks to clear the email, nearly drowning and too scared to say anything, let alone ask for support.
The role of the school manager became a three-legged race with the head of school via AWAMs and budget. The head of school who played a role analogous to the Head Man in the apocryphal anthropologist’s village. Ours had been a mediocre academic for several years before donning the white shirt and polyester tie and ascending to the level of professor. They had proven their worth through their ability to sit through boring meetings, interpret the management line on the boxes that needed ticking and the heads that needed kicking, and perfectly intuited the right combination of sucking up and punching down. It’s impossible not to recollect the head of school without venturing into Roald Dahl territory and considering their grotesque carnality: the haircuts that looked home done and hurried, the ill-fitting shirts and cheap crumpled suits, the bulbous, bloodshot eyes, the way a strangely perfunctory politeness barely hit a deep rage and loose grip on things. There was nothing of the scholar or academic about this person, only outer suburban middle aspiration and a whiff of Hillsong. They were in many ways like Scott Morrison. The surface talk was all pleasantries and procedures, but in practice, they were a ruthless bully who practised a belief in hierarchy, patriarchy, the company line, and their own career advancement, and ruled over the school with complete and arbitrary rule to achieve this for themselves and their executive superiors. A lot of it came down to whether or not they had taken a shine to you, or a set against you. If they happened to like you, for whatever reason, you were left alone, or it was even chummy. If they didn’t like you, they used all the advantages of their office to punch down in a way that showed so clearly they were doing so knowing it was to a person who couldn’t punch back, and would just cop it. Phone books in police station lock ups in the 1970s, before CCTV.
By 2016 I had got to know my colleagues well enough to discern this general lie of the land I’ve detailed, and the kinds of coping tactics and strategies for operating that people developed in response to the systemic culture and the beneficiary-winners it empowered. A few notable styles of human subjects emerged. There were three categories: the self-seeking careerist; the languishing or quietist academic, and the withdrawn sociopath.
The careerists. At Sandstone I had met plenty of young, whipsmart, sharp-knived people on the make; ruthlessness, monomaniacal self-absorption and unblinking egotism were nothing new to me. But in 2015, for the first time, I met the kind of careerist who was no longer a scholar nor wished to be, and thought it odd that I gave off signs of aspiring to this office. These were individuals trying to build profile, names who had cultivated personal brands attached to one-person empires they presided over as their turf and topic. They tended not to read philosophy, theory, or literature, but they typically had good contacts in government, and flew interstate to meet these contacts frequently. Their work mostly sought impact via retweets, invitations to address news media and prestigious institutions, and policy change. It was primarily written to address politicians, rival names with public profile, news media commentators. Its fundamental purpose was to persuade and recruit people doing policy work in the public service, achieve policy and then change and accrue prominence for the academic as talking head champion of that cause. All of this is surely not without merit, and it’s not as if the old Sandstone model reliably produced great scholars and excellent colleagues and teachers. But it was different, new, and not about scholarship; it was about career and impact, and the people who were making it.
In this milieu academic colleagues did figure, but mostly as competitors or potential co-authors in the game of citation and H factor: the people whose work one had the research assistant cite (without needing to really read it) when pumping out any given lit review, or who one reached out to for a collab. This model of academic knowledge production, imported from the health sciences, was more about reticulation and churn, copying norms where ‘findings’ and ‘results’ are re-produced in several different ways. Their teaching work was delivered professionally, reticulating content from previous years, cool, perfunctory, in business attire. The ones who had made it or were on the make at Suburban Corporates all carried leather briefcases and wore business shirts, even if without a tie, and with chinos and sports coats. None of this group that I met put undue effort into teaching, precisely because being seen as a teaching academic was detrimental to one’s career and workload. They were recognised by management as being on a different career track, quickly given senior roles on boards with actual resources and decisional authority, and of course much lighter teaching and easily accessible time overseas for fellowships and sabbaticals. They were seldom on campus, because they were already on their way, whether to Canberra, the Group of Eight, the United Nations, or, if they were more focused on property and lifestyle, a plumping future in a senior executive role at Suburban Corporate.
Yet there were also an appreciable minority of scholars who languished at Suburban Corporate, or had quietly worked out a modus vivendi. This internally bifurcated group typically remained committed to teaching, as well as to reading books, and so many, those without successful careers in their field, suffered at an institution almost entirely comprised of gridlocked commutes to pay-and-display carparks, and remote work conducted on laptops, tablets and phones. At best, some had been at Suburban Corporate for some time, and were well enough established in the hierarchy not to be swamped by teaching and admin workload, or subject to the arbitrary will of the head of school and school manager. A conspicuous few were people of good reputation and eminent standing in their field, and had managed a way to just quietly do their own thing, teach their courses, read their books, and survive seemingly unscathed. Theirs was mostly a study in quietist resignation. For those more junior, with heavier teaching loads, as well as those with thinner skins or who believed in a different vision of the university, and so resented Suburban Corporate’s norms, the same institution produced a strange and chronic state of alienation and burnout that I had never yet witnessed: these employees hung on for the six figures and superannuation, to be sure, but they also nursed vain hopes they might be able to hold the office their youthful ambition had wished for, that might give them meaning, based on the identity they were still invested in, that nothing in the institution actively encouraged or openly supported, but could still be done – again, because of the complete indifference of Suburban Corporate to reading, writing, and thinking. I felt myself becoming one of this group; I would have become one of these; I did not wish for this becoming.
Alongside this cohort of quietists and melancholics, who tended to be my age or younger, were a third group of older lecturers. This group – who tended to be in their forties and fifties and have children and marriages – had usually stalled at senior lecturer or assistant professor. This bunch seemed disaffected in a symptomatic way that showed. They were hard to deal with as colleagues, as a lot of the surface-level behaviour was unhelpful and unprofessional, at best. But as I got to know their struggles and strivings it usually masked serious mental and physical health ailments as well as long-standing issues of role and employment that had been mishandled or neglected entirely. They had been messed around or marginalised, or they had messed people around and had given it to be known that they were difficult enough to deal with that the head of school and HR would wilfully neglect them. Some seemed to be people struggling with protracted major depression; I heard rumours of some who’d had misconduct allegations levelled against them; there were people who were stuck in unhealthy symbiotic relationships with more senior colleagues who held power over them; there were people unable to clear their workload according to the their AWAM and paygrade who had to be covered for, who were afraid for their futures. Very quietly, it was a grim and seemingly intractable situation which no one in management or HR seemed to do anything proactive about; this enabled several years of low-level bad behaviour that even came to be expected (“Oh, that’s just X… he’s a bit… …just try to avoid him…”), and was nearly always excused – until a restructure. For so many reasons, this group were not capable of being good colleagues, scholars, or teaching academics, even if they’d once been inclined toward this – but nor were they supported to get back to good functioning, or held accountable for all kinds of shitty behaviour. Yet they eked out some kind of existence, mostly by working from home and doing the absolute bare minimum on email. As an afterthought, it’s notable that most of this group, as well as being old timers, were men, some of whom had iffy rumours circulating around them. The women who had struggled at the institution and burnt out, had left. There had been a succession of vacated offices with sad stories whose ghostly traces I discerned.
There are several indelible memories I have of ‘how it was’ at Suburban Corporate in the mid 2010s. In the same year, 2015, when I was yelled at by my colleague for not adhering to the ‘system’ of finding sessionals (that had none), I received an email from the head of school. It had no subject line ,and contained only the phrase ‘checking your out-of-office message’. Apparently, the school manager had deemed my out-of-office too long, and complained to the head of school. I was reprimanded. At Suburban Corporate, even an out-of-office message – which was there to parry the literally hundreds of student emails during a peak period of assessment clarification – was subject to some kind of norm over which an academic had no autonomous decisional authority.
In 2016, I remember we were entreated to ‘go out and get load’ on Open Day by a Dean: load was the collective noun given to our students by that executive. In the same year, while in long haul transit, with a nine-hour time difference, I received threatening emails from the head of school because I had failed to correctly complete my data entry for an insurance form. I was threatened with needing to fly home immediately – from Sweden – without attending the conference, and received multiple URGENT emails forcing me to try to complete forms which I in fact could not access from off-campus internet services outside the country. It was only my colleague, using my logins on the downlow, who saved me from this. On the same trip, a day later, I was forced to phone in to attend a meeting at 4am my time – from the bedroom of an air bnb in the city I was in – in which the same head of school lost their mind at our group, for querying misconduct that was taking place with the administration of one of the degree programs. Our concerns were substantive, had merit, and were respectfully expressed to the head of school as a group, based on our unanimous agreement.
In 2017, I was told by the head of school that they would not allow me to go to an overseas conference to which I’d been invited, in the year of the release of my monograph on that conference’s topic. When I remonstrated that this was detrimental to my interests and career and a seemingly arbitrary and baseless impediment to the free dissemination of scholarly work, it was escalated to the ‘get load’ dean, who uphold the head of school’s Simon Says, and told me to focus on my family.
Later that year, academics lost their bookshelves, as part of a renovation that also included the loss of permanent offices. I was in the minority of employees who pointed out something fundamentally wrong about the idea of academics without books and shelves to keep them. In the same year, Suburban Corporate moved out of the CBD offices they leased, down to a larger space with a vaulted lobby. I knew in my carpal tunnels how much teaching labour was paying for this. Yet academic staff were openly discouraged from using it. I and others continued to do so, but always received a cool reception from the wait staff, whose job it also was to keep the water chilled in jugs and the three towering Nespresso machines armed with single use pods. The atmosphere of the new space was a hybrid of a business class airport lounge and a generic corporate office. It was the space in which Suburban Corporate felt most at home in the world, where it could display its lived values, one hot desking experience at a time.
In 2018 I was fortunate enough to return to Former Technical. At that precise moment, the contrasts were stark: cohorts instantly halved, I had four flesh and blood tutors to front actual classes, and there were no exhausting commutes to remote campuses. I was encouraged to teach in my field of expertise; I had time to read, write and also to do some unstructured reflection and scholarly reading; and I had monies for international travel and a research assistant. A substantial minority of the students did the reading, attended, and genuinely taught me things in tutorials; 20-40% were engaged, capable, keen to be pushed, and clearly had the nous and horsepower to do higher level work. My colleagues were polite and friendly. I had an office with bookshelves, a window, and a door.
Yet in the space of only three years, many of these wonderful conditions had been eroded – by a process of Suburban Corporatisation. AWAMs were introduced; onboarding processes, after being outsourced and centralised, became onerously bureaucratic, as they had been at Suburban Corporate; and my de facto boss was forced, by dint of spreadsheet workload organisation, to take on a role similar to that played by the school manager at Suburban Corporate.
In these same years, there was a huge push toward centralisation and automation at Former Technical: expensive new software platforms were purchased that were hugely deficient, causing a loss in discretion and control. At great expense, a new VC came in and forced everywhere over to a different suite of office tools, all of which were noticeably worse than what we’d been using without any trouble for a few years. Increasing numbers of low ATAR and disadvantaged students were shooed into our main program, generating the all-too-familiar patterns of scrambling to ‘get load’, followed by remedial clarification and mental health triage emails I had lived through at Suburban Corporate. In absolute and relative terms, Former Technical was still a very good place to work, and I felt so fortunate; yet I also discerned the direction of the wind and swell. All it would take, I thought, was the end of the two year gold rush: in the 00s, from international students, then in the 10s, from the demand-driven system, and it could all so quickly turn into the urban and cloud campus of Suburban Corporate.
When covid hit, management chose to adopt an austerity narrative. Sessional budgets where halved, without being pegged to fluctuations in enrolments, which in my corner remained stable, high and triple what they had been in 2012. PhD scholarships were no longer available to us for our talented candidates – but they were up the road at Sandstone, to the same students for whom we could not get scholarships for ourselves.
By 2021, only three years after it first ran, the large undergraduate course I developed and co-ordinated, which had run under conditions that seemed like paradise after Suburban Corporate, now had only one tutor available for a notional cohort of 240 (180 after census date). Marking at high volumes of course still had to be conducted. For this, I needed, once again, to hustle my networks to find capable and available people. In part as a result of covid, but also because demand for this work and the skills it now requires far outstrips the supply of capable tutors in this sector, this has turned out to be no mean feat. Just finding people required rounds of email chase ups over three weeks or so, including repeated explanations of the course, context and marking work to any number of prospective external markers. Once I did find capable people, which I was very fortunate to be able to do, guiding them through the labyrinth of onboarding, with all its handling bottlenecks and mandatory irrationalities, took weeks, just like Suburban Corporate. Many did not get paid for more than a month after beginning the work, just like Suburban Corporate.
In addition to this, there are little-noted implications of the fact that external markers will never front or get to know the people whose submissions they assess. They are also not paid to do the reading they nonetheless must, in order to be across the course and so exercise competent professional judgment. External markers also require further and extensive co-ordination to keep communication sufficient. As of covid, all this work needs to be done via reply all emails, group chat, and weekly Zooms, some of which need to be as long as an hour to attend to the intricacies of all matters. As at Suburban Corporate in the mid 2010s, a big portion of the work at Former Technical in the early 2020s is the administrative load that must be continually cleared, just in order to allow core business to be conducted, as well as spotfires which must be proactively handled – again, mostly over email.
In the midst of this, the senior executive seem to be absent, asleep at the wheel, or talking from a place of impossible-to-fathom social distance: missives from another planet that have no relation to the work and the struggles of employees and students still conducting core business. I noticed that there appeared to be zero accountability for bad decisions; there was no demonstrated change of direction or ‘agility’ in the face of changing conditions (after a decade of MBA norms prizing such agility and disruption). There was also a high rate of churn: the most senior execs with the highest salaries and greatest responsibilities jumped ship sometime between the onset of covid in April 2020 to the time of writing in late 2021. This has transpired as the sector was repeatedly and intentionally excluded from JobKeeper, seemingly based on little more than a culture war animus towards academics by the Coalition, and at a cost of 35,000 jobs across the sector.