I have been teaching at the Suburban University of South-East Queensland since 1996, and in 26 out of those 28 years have done so on sessional/casual contracts - despite having had a PhD since 2004.
So I think what I describe above is a law specific issue. My understanding in Arts is that most people have PhDs, and most people still can’t get permanent employment. I’m sorry that it’s like that. I don’t want it to be like this. I guess what I should make clear is: PhD is necessary but not sufficient.
Thank you, Katy, for another hard-hitting piece. Some reflection from the admin side of things: I am currently in an admin role at my university where I am one of those "self-service" support person. The job is pretty good in itself - contract based, leave entitlements, decent money, 5PM switch off (much better work conditions than casual lecturing) but these roles are generated through university projects. For some odd reason, top university management keeps taking on random projects (such as students should do exams on a laptop) then they hire admin staff to address project needs. Rinse and repeat with a new project. I realized that the people in the top love taking on new projects which keeps inflating university bureaucracy. Academics are involuntarily jettisoned into these random projects, and they grow resentful of admin staff who chase them to meet project targets. People with titles like change analysts are roped in uni staff, setting KPIs and corporatizing the long forgotten idea of university as a public good. Australian universities need a structural overhaul through improving existing processes rather than aiming to get on Top 100 uni list.
I need people like you when I start weeping because the self-service thing doesn’t work!!!! I don’t resent you existing! (And our uni did “students should do exam on a laptop too.”)
I do think part of this is that people in the hierarchy love to have something to tick off. “Look, I did this. This was my initiative.” Whether it works or not - is actually immaterial.
Low level admin staff like me are the first point of contact for so many academics that if we are not in, nothing gets done as most managers do not know how self service things work. Believe me I was working as a casual and learnt a software and maybe like 6 people in the university knew how to operate a particular software. It is not admin staff at lower levels that seem to be the problem as they are usually casual or on fixed term contracts and provide valuable first point support. The problem is at the top. The one's who lead these projects to say stuff like "We digitized exams and now we saved XYZ kilos of paper!." It is all linked to tick boxing exercises. Bureaucracy begets more Bureaucracy.
I’m retired, but was a staff labor activist in higher ed in the USA for decades, in a liberal-left state. The only things missing in your analysis are 1. the demands that neoliberal economics place on everything in the world are the source of the toxic “colonization of lifeworld by systems” (Habermas) in education, 2. Postmodern disruption results in organizational structures that promote sociopathic personalities, 3. gross corruption, incompetence, waste and inefficiency.
I saw a number of cases of reports by workers to labor unions of $millions of corruption and waste in federal govt grant programs. The audit systems are as compromised as the rest of the system, so nothing could be done to correct the problem. The need for deep, expensive forensic audits and long legal battles (FOIAs in the USA) to get the basic internal data needed to sue corrupt admins is exhaustingly out of reach most of the time.
The structure is fatally rigged against meaningful reforms.
Oversight entities such as legislative funding/policy committees and individual politicians are grossly uninformed about the bureaucratic mess in higher education. There is little incentive for corrupt or incompetent politicians to seek reforms.
And finally, public support for higher education is dropping, but there are still lots of students and parents and corporations that make the choice to perpetuate a disrupted, outmoded institution that is rotting and sinking under the weight of “woke” and other parasites.*
My vote is to burn down, metaphorically speaking, about 90% of higher education and replace it with something better that reflects the reality of this century instead of the previous 500 years.
* yes, there is increasing, effective pushback against “woke” postmodern neomarxism, but there is still a huge struggle ahead against deeply corrupted bureaucracy.
So I think the US is different to Australia. We’re heading your way, but a long way from where you guys are, and I take your system (sadly) as the signal instance of where we do NOT want to end up. (1) Our labour movement has always been pretty baked in as an important part of our polity. Cf the US where a nascent Labor Party never got off the ground. (2) Correspondingly, our labour laws are really strong. One thing that has led to the US situation is contracts-at-will - how can you be free to speak if you can be sacked for doing so - First Amendment notwithstanding? (3) You have all that weird stuff like legacy positions for students (we don’t).
As for how to fix it? I don’t want to burn it down, because I worry that we’ll lose valuable things, but I do really, really, really want us to change the way the system operates. The problem is, I don’t know if politicians care. I did try to write to a politician a few years back to say we have to change, after I got pummelled for saying in the press that we shouldn’t push our political views down students’ throats: our job is to teach them how to think, not what to think. I got no response. It’s not enough to say, “We should have academic freedom” or “We welcome debate”. We have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, and actually model this in how we teach, and how we treat each other. NB: my interest in medieval recursive argument was that it was mandatory to seriously consider the position of those who disagreed with you, and then civilly argue against them. This is how it should be.
One of my friends talks about knowledge being “reality tested”. My area is highly reality tested - it’s commercial law, and we have oversight from professional bodies if we stray too far from reality. If I write nonsense research, a real court will either ignore it or slam it down, and if I teach nonsense, real law firms will stop hiring my grads. Anyway, thanks for comments - food for thought.
In the USA it was clear that Clinton sold out, got in bed with the neolibs, then aborted the working classes and progressives.
You already have deeply corrupt politics, such as Minderoo. You probably just don’t see it yet, but you will. The neolib and neocon interests will only show their ugly faces when they are exposed and can’t hide anymore. That is typically when there is a populist rebellion against the “woke” left, or equivalent.
See Eric Weinstein on the “intellectual dark web”, for one brief mini explosion of interest in heterodox thinking.
Or Rushkoff’s “Life, Inc.”
The main point is that legacy sense making systems are fragile to disruption. See Jordan Hall on the disintegration of the “Blue Church”.
One IT project that was supposed to be more efficient-and-secure and cost $350,000,000 eventually ballooned to over $1,000,000,00 and still didn’t have basic functions needed by the customer.
The corruption between vendors of products like that and the politicians that fund higher education was obvious, but nothing was done.
Oh, and the labor unions are as incompetent, dysfunctional, corrupt and overtaken by insane “woke” nonsense as the rest of the system.
Short version: higher education bureaucracy is inherently incapable of evolving meta-rational (Kegan stage 5) capacities. Thus it will continue to be fragile to disruption by neoliberalism, globalism and postmodern relativism.
See Nassim Taleb on the “Dictatorship of the Intolerant Minority”.
The need for anti-fragile , meta-rational, construct-aware education that can’t be disrupted by the battery acid of neoliberalism and postmodernism simply doesn’t exist in the legacy form of higher education (hierarchies of curated expertise evolved 500-1000 years ago are not anti-fragile to network information flows, resulting in a crisis of meaning and legitimacy).
“Woke” ideology leverages the disintegration of legacy hierarchies of curated expertise and the flourishing of parasitic, bureaucratic sociopathy.
An anti-fragile system of anti-woke moral regulation is needed, and modern-rational, secular systems are inadequate (see Iain McGilchrist).
Strong agree. Is there where I confess that I *might* have been one of the authors of the law school’s open letter. Marketising universities has been a disaster, IMO.
I have been teaching at the Suburban University of South-East Queensland since 1996, and in 26 out of those 28 years have done so on sessional/casual contracts - despite having had a PhD since 2004.
So I think what I describe above is a law specific issue. My understanding in Arts is that most people have PhDs, and most people still can’t get permanent employment. I’m sorry that it’s like that. I don’t want it to be like this. I guess what I should make clear is: PhD is necessary but not sufficient.
Thank you, Katy, for another hard-hitting piece. Some reflection from the admin side of things: I am currently in an admin role at my university where I am one of those "self-service" support person. The job is pretty good in itself - contract based, leave entitlements, decent money, 5PM switch off (much better work conditions than casual lecturing) but these roles are generated through university projects. For some odd reason, top university management keeps taking on random projects (such as students should do exams on a laptop) then they hire admin staff to address project needs. Rinse and repeat with a new project. I realized that the people in the top love taking on new projects which keeps inflating university bureaucracy. Academics are involuntarily jettisoned into these random projects, and they grow resentful of admin staff who chase them to meet project targets. People with titles like change analysts are roped in uni staff, setting KPIs and corporatizing the long forgotten idea of university as a public good. Australian universities need a structural overhaul through improving existing processes rather than aiming to get on Top 100 uni list.
I need people like you when I start weeping because the self-service thing doesn’t work!!!! I don’t resent you existing! (And our uni did “students should do exam on a laptop too.”)
I do think part of this is that people in the hierarchy love to have something to tick off. “Look, I did this. This was my initiative.” Whether it works or not - is actually immaterial.
Low level admin staff like me are the first point of contact for so many academics that if we are not in, nothing gets done as most managers do not know how self service things work. Believe me I was working as a casual and learnt a software and maybe like 6 people in the university knew how to operate a particular software. It is not admin staff at lower levels that seem to be the problem as they are usually casual or on fixed term contracts and provide valuable first point support. The problem is at the top. The one's who lead these projects to say stuff like "We digitized exams and now we saved XYZ kilos of paper!." It is all linked to tick boxing exercises. Bureaucracy begets more Bureaucracy.
Tick the box is such a scourge. And you are *so* right, bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy.
I’m retired, but was a staff labor activist in higher ed in the USA for decades, in a liberal-left state. The only things missing in your analysis are 1. the demands that neoliberal economics place on everything in the world are the source of the toxic “colonization of lifeworld by systems” (Habermas) in education, 2. Postmodern disruption results in organizational structures that promote sociopathic personalities, 3. gross corruption, incompetence, waste and inefficiency.
I saw a number of cases of reports by workers to labor unions of $millions of corruption and waste in federal govt grant programs. The audit systems are as compromised as the rest of the system, so nothing could be done to correct the problem. The need for deep, expensive forensic audits and long legal battles (FOIAs in the USA) to get the basic internal data needed to sue corrupt admins is exhaustingly out of reach most of the time.
The structure is fatally rigged against meaningful reforms.
Oversight entities such as legislative funding/policy committees and individual politicians are grossly uninformed about the bureaucratic mess in higher education. There is little incentive for corrupt or incompetent politicians to seek reforms.
And finally, public support for higher education is dropping, but there are still lots of students and parents and corporations that make the choice to perpetuate a disrupted, outmoded institution that is rotting and sinking under the weight of “woke” and other parasites.*
My vote is to burn down, metaphorically speaking, about 90% of higher education and replace it with something better that reflects the reality of this century instead of the previous 500 years.
https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
* yes, there is increasing, effective pushback against “woke” postmodern neomarxism, but there is still a huge struggle ahead against deeply corrupted bureaucracy.
So I think the US is different to Australia. We’re heading your way, but a long way from where you guys are, and I take your system (sadly) as the signal instance of where we do NOT want to end up. (1) Our labour movement has always been pretty baked in as an important part of our polity. Cf the US where a nascent Labor Party never got off the ground. (2) Correspondingly, our labour laws are really strong. One thing that has led to the US situation is contracts-at-will - how can you be free to speak if you can be sacked for doing so - First Amendment notwithstanding? (3) You have all that weird stuff like legacy positions for students (we don’t).
As for how to fix it? I don’t want to burn it down, because I worry that we’ll lose valuable things, but I do really, really, really want us to change the way the system operates. The problem is, I don’t know if politicians care. I did try to write to a politician a few years back to say we have to change, after I got pummelled for saying in the press that we shouldn’t push our political views down students’ throats: our job is to teach them how to think, not what to think. I got no response. It’s not enough to say, “We should have academic freedom” or “We welcome debate”. We have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, and actually model this in how we teach, and how we treat each other. NB: my interest in medieval recursive argument was that it was mandatory to seriously consider the position of those who disagreed with you, and then civilly argue against them. This is how it should be.
One of my friends talks about knowledge being “reality tested”. My area is highly reality tested - it’s commercial law, and we have oversight from professional bodies if we stray too far from reality. If I write nonsense research, a real court will either ignore it or slam it down, and if I teach nonsense, real law firms will stop hiring my grads. Anyway, thanks for comments - food for thought.
In the USA it was clear that Clinton sold out, got in bed with the neolibs, then aborted the working classes and progressives.
You already have deeply corrupt politics, such as Minderoo. You probably just don’t see it yet, but you will. The neolib and neocon interests will only show their ugly faces when they are exposed and can’t hide anymore. That is typically when there is a populist rebellion against the “woke” left, or equivalent.
See Eric Weinstein on the “intellectual dark web”, for one brief mini explosion of interest in heterodox thinking.
Or Rushkoff’s “Life, Inc.”
The main point is that legacy sense making systems are fragile to disruption. See Jordan Hall on the disintegration of the “Blue Church”.
One IT project that was supposed to be more efficient-and-secure and cost $350,000,000 eventually ballooned to over $1,000,000,00 and still didn’t have basic functions needed by the customer.
The corruption between vendors of products like that and the politicians that fund higher education was obvious, but nothing was done.
Oh, and the labor unions are as incompetent, dysfunctional, corrupt and overtaken by insane “woke” nonsense as the rest of the system.
Short version: higher education bureaucracy is inherently incapable of evolving meta-rational (Kegan stage 5) capacities. Thus it will continue to be fragile to disruption by neoliberalism, globalism and postmodern relativism.
See Nassim Taleb on the “Dictatorship of the Intolerant Minority”.
The need for anti-fragile , meta-rational, construct-aware education that can’t be disrupted by the battery acid of neoliberalism and postmodernism simply doesn’t exist in the legacy form of higher education (hierarchies of curated expertise evolved 500-1000 years ago are not anti-fragile to network information flows, resulting in a crisis of meaning and legitimacy).
“Woke” ideology leverages the disintegration of legacy hierarchies of curated expertise and the flourishing of parasitic, bureaucratic sociopathy.
An anti-fragile system of anti-woke moral regulation is needed, and modern-rational, secular systems are inadequate (see Iain McGilchrist).
Consultants are hired to recommend what is going to suit the bureaucrats who hired them, not what works.
^ This, I’m afraid. They just say what they know the people who hired them want to hear.
Here's another perspective on the strike.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/25/how-did-australias-university-system-get-so-broken-pretty-much-the-same-way-as-everything-else?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR1WWW5qUwq3k_7KdfOd3aZ1gDG2VezfcTRxuOoyaKD0S1ewqpOh2c0vkBI
Strong agree. Is there where I confess that I *might* have been one of the authors of the law school’s open letter. Marketising universities has been a disaster, IMO.