Reflecting on changing roles and conditions of 15 years’ tertiary teaching work: 2006-2021, conclusions (part four)
What then can we make of this fifteen-year set of transformations? How might we distil the key factors, moments, and waypoints, with a decade and a half in the rearview mirror?
The idea of the university and the practice of higher education brings together people with very different needs, interests, aspirations and dreams. It does to in large and encumbered institutions with a complex division of labour and a set of roles attached to enculturated groups: being a uni student was held to be a formative experience and rite of passage in the lives of a few generations of middle class lives. Academia was held apart as a peculiar job undertaken by brilliant, obsessive, dysfunctional, otherwise useless people whose actual work no one really understands. The phantasms of these figures still animate the way people imagine what university is supposed to be about. But what this personal reflection shows me, I think, is that the past fifteen years has substantially destroyed the socio-cultural life experience of being a uni student, just as it has negated the possibility, for all but the tiny minority with the most prestigious lectureships, to comfortably inhabit the office of scholar. If I could boil it all down, I would say that most students are now being denied the social and cultural experience of living as a student, and that, at universities, we deny one another the possibility of a pedagogical relation. Academics, who are by now majority sessional, can now no longer rest assured that their stretched budgets, strained eyes and sore back and shoulders will translate into a vocation.
At the heart of this is the management behemoth, that both students and academics now serve. This entity, that grew at least as big and fast as the resources that rushed in over the past two decades, has been the unambiguous beneficiary in all this – while staff to student ratios blew out, and while academic and professional staff were repeatedly restructured and subjected to austerity claims. Management has trumpeted positive disruption and innovation, the student experience, teaching and learning, MOOCs, Open Day – and now the cloud. Yet on balance, we have little more to show for this than half-empty shiny buildings and a set of automated platforms for centralising administrative procedures in ways that happen to protect a moated enclave of unaccountable careerists earning salaries many times what even the most senior professor is capable of receiving. We are, to be sure, all implicated beneficiaries of this system; but the executive and senior management in the ‘entity’ are the ones most responsible for the biggest decisions, and have drawn down the greatest personal benefit, with unrecognised costs tantamount to institutional vandalism for the vast majority of those who would also make the university a part of their life. In generating a gold-plated skyscraper experience for themselves and paying for their holiday house renovations, management has made the university shittier for students, for academics, and for administrative staff.
The key factors, moments, and waypoints in this, detailed above, are too numerous to reticulate in detail. However, undoubtedly, we can point to the broader societal shift caused-and-effected by neoliberalisations as a root cultural cause, just as the business class (of this selfsame culture) has brought down actually incredibly non-agile, incumbent-favouring bureaucratic managerialism and its lionisation of MBAs, consultants, and the digital. For it is that group who have continued to recommend all these measures.
In this context, it’s digital technology’s cultural uses and ideological value that really strike me. It’s not that the digital has structured or determined anything on its own; it’s an affordance, put together with assembly required by people, whose uses are cultural and subjective, yet that confront everyone as an objective fact that we must serve or accommodate ourselves to. But looking back to 15 years ago, it is meaningful that work which was essentially about the human voice, the written word, and interpersonal contact has been evaporated into the cloud. And it’s also astonishing, yet not surprising, that an executive class who has ordered the two-decades long acquisition of expensive land and the construction of billions of dollars of buildings, now turns 180 degrees and instructs everyone to stay at home and do everything on their laptop. Finally, it is ‘the digital’ that has allowed everyone to indulge the fantasy that higher education can have no relation to numbers of people, to eye contact, to human relationships: the digital is not only a solution, it’s also a fantasy of a world where we can all get rich without accounting for resources, materiality, or enculturated tradition. Most of us accede to this, and continue to pile our resources – enrolment money, data, good judgment, time – into a series of digital platforms, so we can get accredited and paid, while the executive continues to preside over the more lucrative game students and academics fundamentally serve, the transfer of wealth from younger, poorer, more female, and noncitizen students to older, wealthier, more male citizen employees.
What might this mean for me, what’s my place in this, what can I do? I find myself at a crossroads here, ethically and biographically. As an implicated beneficiary of the system I’m critiquing, I’m one of those pulling down a good salary and excellent superannuation from the sector. I can log in to my superannuation and see how it’s ticked up during these pandemic years. Pragmatically, staying in the job is the best way for me to look after myself and my family for the immediate future, especially in the absence of immediately transferrable skills. For now, I am also in one of the most fortunate niches in this ecosystem, meaning that, failing a restructure, I can probably hold on for several years. Things may have changed for the better in that time, or the sector might completely implode and need to be radically changed.
Right now, and every day, I can try to exercise care with my many students – for really, there are two types of people, those who care, and those who do not care. I can look after the people in my orbit to the best of my abilities with the limited tools and resources I have, try to do quality work and be a good colleague, and grant myself the serenity to leave the rest to Fortuna. And it is not as if one escapes one’s own society: most of contemporary Australia remains under the spell of the same set of short-term, me-focused, consumerist, gadget-obsessed, alienated values dominating universities now, with the digital used as a way to solve everything, in the way RoboDebt solves welfare and poverty, in the way that Home Affairs’ Digital Passenger Declaration solves covid risk. The sector is not separate to society, it is in it and of it and shares all its symptoms and the same set of underlying causes. The remedies are always more elusive and fraught than the critique and diagnosis.
Yet I have come to hate the sector and its dominant values, and by extension, the dominant values of contemporary Australian society: and I carry this in my work as an aspect of my office that I both take from and also pass on to my students and children. I dislike this intensely. I do not know where to go with this knowledge, nor if anything can be done here. This is the concluding conundrum I have thus given myself as a result of these reflections. Would abandoning the sector make it worse (the fantasy of my own unique worth); would staying in it, in any case, give anyone a chance of saving it anyway? The lingering feeling I have is that it will take a strong hand dealt by this age of polycrisis – stronger than covid – to change things decisively, and that if they are changed dramatically, there’s no guarantee it would be for the better. I can only do my insufficient best, and hope.