CommentaryOn Campus
Pale king or pawn of the system? A look at the academic chessboard
Universities have experienced tremendous change over the years, and academics are facing pressure from many quarters.
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There are two obvious messages to take from this article. Firstly that it’s true, and secondly that its author is an Emeritus. Almost no-one currently on salary in an Australian university would dare write an article like this, because the perception is, rightly or wrongly, that they would suffer bullying or dismissal if their identity were discovered.
And this raises a fundamental flaw in the Australian psyche. Australians are extremely passive and obedient; tell them that a certain group of immigrants constitutes a “threat” and they’ll all obediently fear that group of people, right on cue. Tell Australians that their Universities have to be run this way – there is no alternative – and they’ll passively accept it as a fait accompli.
But does it have to be this way? Is there an overwhelming necessity for the armies of highly-paid barons and princelings in modern universities? Is there a reason why their chiefs are the highest paid in the World? Is it inevitable that their job descriptions and work conditions must be a closely-guarded secret? Teaching students constitutes universities’ major income stream and yet, bizarrely, this primary task is outsourced to casual teachers on meagre pay, as the article indicates; do other “businesses” operate this way?
The parents and students who pay their university fees in the sincere belief that they are funding students’ education should be told transparently what percentage of the institution’s income is actually spent on teaching. The roles and functions of the knights, barons, queens and kings (who are really public servants) should be publicly available, and the fundamental cost-benefit question – has this new feudalism in our universities actually produced benefits? – should be publicly discussed.
But then, this is Australia.
Well said Peter. The current scenario in the Australian higher education system can’t be described any better – with two changes: One, students have no time for sex as they too are too busy juggling shift work and study though they are slightly better off than their counterparts in North America. Two: The peer review system in academic journals and research funding leading to a niche group of academics being able to corner most funds and papers in A* journals resulting in ‘too much research of poor quality’ that has no relevance to the real world as pointed out in a seminar on Responsible Research in Business and Management at the EURAM, 2017 conference in Glasgow.
The analogy by Peter Curson is clever, entertaining and amusing, and I could both hear and equate with his frustration. However in reality, it is a feel good bleat about the current situation in universities. I read it, I agree with his sentiments and it makes me feel good. Thinking more deeply, the underlying cause of the problem has not identified. I believe that the cause is quite simple: a dichotomy of customer base. The customer for the higher echelons of universities is government and government wants to have simplistic lists to justify their spending to the voters. Success for the higher echelons is getting a bigger cut of the smaller government funding pool. I feel certain that this would be reflected in their KPIs. Within the universities, a large bureaucracy is required to identify the needs of the customer and to supply the data required by the customer. Of course, the customer being the government, is an absolute archetypical bureaucracy who have perfected the need for endless lists and a gluttony for expanding their girth in that direction. By having a large administrative presence in the university, the ability to collect data is vast and so the university remains flexible to the changing needs of its customer, the government. The problem is that nobody bothered to tell the academic that this was the game being played. The academic has always thought that the customer was the student and hence their job was to service the needs of the student so that ultimately value was added to society. The premise was that if society left some of their citizens in the hands of academics for a few years then the value added to society would be a nebulous pool of people who could think, collect and evaluate disparate ideas, not follow the crowd and through this, create new ideas so that society would be flexible to an ever changing world. Once it is realised that this is the game, it is absolutely obvious what is happening. Why does the university want us to publish papers? Clearly because it is a measure upon which they are paid. The measure of publications is not on quality but on quantity. Do not get me started on “Oh but it is in a leading journal” when I see what the level of quality is in many articles published in these so called quality journals. Even the papers that are published are more archival rather than really new ideas that in time will change society as others catch up with what is really being said. So why do academics carry out research and publish. Fundamentally because we can, but it is also to get feedback from the few peers in the world who think about similar things and to remain current so that we are able to teach students cutting edge things or at least be aware of what fundamentals need to prioritised to enable the students to get to the level of cutting edge knowledge. For the University what is important in terms of students: numbers, numbers, numbers. The number of students they can get signed up, the number of students that they keep in the system and the number of graduates that they get out of the other end. If “quality” were put before students in the previous sentence (an expectation of academics) it would be not be recognised by the spell checker of the higher echelons of the university and their crones and so would be instantly deleted. To not belabour the point, but rather trust in the academic readers to think for themselves, take any measure used by the University to gauge your value as an academic and any dictate used by the university to control your day to day habits and you will recognise the dichotomy between what is believed to be our customers and what our bosses see as the customers. While you think about this, I also put to you the question of who actually provides the forms to be filled in and then collects the forms once they are filled in and who provides the data and fills in the forms?
The real tragedy is that the general public will lose trust in us because they will recognise that we have not actually added value to society. Worse still, they have trusted us with their best and brightest with the belief that leaving them in our hands for a few years we will add value to society. I thought that this realisation by the general public of our ineptitude would be a slow realisation and so we would have time to change, but it clearly is more like cliff with many of the big employers not requiring people with degrees to fill their positions. The general public is tolerant, but not stupid.
An answer to this situation is not simple, but recognising the difference between the customer of the university and the customer of the academic is a beginning to finding an answer. Some headway might be made if at every committee meeting in the University the question is asked at the pertinent time “who is the customer we are serving”? This just might be enough to change behaviour.