Two days in Broken Hill

I have been in Broken Hill for two days. Hardly enough for my research to be substantial, but I have been in archives and talking to local history buffs about professions and professionals in the town. I am working with the assumption that labour v capital acts as the 'master conflict' of industrialised society but is supplanted by professionalisation (Harold Perkin) - and am trying to identify what this means for social mobility and equity.

The structure of labour versus capital infuses the town, shaping the streets and buildings and telling the story of Broken Hill. 

Along with it is the story of the community. The unions, associations of the workers, the churches and community groups. For the professional elite, there was the Club – I need to know more about the Club – and other types of organisations. The Progress Society that became the Council, the YMCA, RSL, freemasons, professional associations in accounting or law that went beyond BH. There was the sailing club and other sports – cricket – in which they might participate. The elite were made up of the mine managers, the university-trained professionals, the wealthy. They dressed differently, often sent their children away to boarding school in Adelaide or Sydney and they were members of the club. The town remembers them thinking they were better than everyone else.

The mines put money into community activities to keep the workers happy and compliant. The miners put money and effort into community to keep solidarity, to support those sick from lead poisoning or mine accidents. The trades hall rivalled the town hall – honestly, it exceeded it – in grandeur and beauty.

When people talk about what has changed, it is the decline in community. The unions no longer have bands, though one organisation still has one. Where they used to be extremely competitive to get into, now they struggle to encourage young kids to play. They do a good job. The sailing club is gone, so are lots of the other clubs. People put it down to the decline in mining, but they also talk about a change in attitudes. Kids grow up and if they get an education, they don’t come back to town. People are focused on their own holidays rather than their community organisation – their time doesn’t go into the community anymore. There is still a lot of sport though. When people retire, they don’t volunteer for community things [though there seem to be a lot of people doing history in the archives, historical society and family history group] but move somewhere else, go overseas, make their own individual plans. There used to be x pubs [I want to say 91, surely that is too many...], now there are 19. There are empty community halls all over the place: the ANZAC hall near the line of lode is now the gym I’ve been going to this week.

It seemed to me that in the 1950s – 1970s [I think…not sure about where it develops or changes again] the community focus shifted into organisations that linked community building to professional standards. Membership of rotary seemed only slightly wider than the Broken Hill Club [when did that close…?], with esteemed guest lecturers and lofty speeches. Lions’ membership lists include many business owners, including garage owners etc, as well as accountants etc. Apex seems somewhere in between those two. The rhetoric within their weekly bulletins speaks to professional standards, making a name as a man of integrity in your work, linking your occupation to the community – to a kind of professionalisation.

Today I will try and find out if I can get membership lists from each of the organisations over time. I'm also set to look at the educational institutions.

Inequality in education is not the same as inequality elsewhere (though it does lead to it)

This is not really my field of expertise, but as a citizen, vast inequalities in primary and secondary educational opportunity (and thus post-school preparedness) make me cranky.

Inequality in education is not the same as inequality in other things. Wealthy families might choose to buy bigger TVs and fancier cars and that is fine.

They might also choose to be treated in private hospitals, they might buy more superannuation, their children might see more plays and have more music lessons. Those things bother me a little, in that they make things that could be fairer a little less fair, but it is OK.

But when wealthier families not only have the opportunity to buy a better future for their children in education but that the government will use public money to help them do it, that is a very big problem.

This is because segmenting children in schools segments society - school divisions lead to class divisions.

I have to admit though, that I don't mind some private independent schools. If a group of people think the state education system is ideologically or pedagogically problematic, I quite like that they have the right to set up their own system, within reason, and - if they are run at low cost, not for profit and charge modest fees, thus contributing to society, I am in fact happy for our public funds to help them out a bit.

But I find it utterly unacceptable to use any public funds at all to support big, wealthy schools - schools that, through their socialisation, the social networks they establish as well as the educational 'outcomes' they are able to purchase, help perpetuate class divisions and social and financial advantage.

Education is not the same as medical care and superannuation where a gentle mix of private and public is, if not wholly acceptable, only relatively mildly harmful: the application of the same model to education does not make the same kind of sense.

Supporting vast inequalities in education sends a message from any government who does it that they support the systematisation of social and financial advantage based on class.

Gosh I wish our Labor government would stop it. If universities can survive a cut to fund real education for real people*, we can be pretty certain that large wealthy private schools could survive it even better.

* this is debatable. My guess is that some universities will survive it, some will struggle very badly. Worse is what the universities are likely to do with the cuts, but that is a speculation for another post.

The (other) problem with casualisation

Of course the REAL problem with casualisation of academic teaching is how it impacts the lives of the dedicated scholars who live it.

The next problem is how it impacts teaching quality. I've wondered before why the community doesn't get angry that more than half our students are taught by casuals and once I quoted the quotable Eric Ashby that "Australian youth is too precious to be given third rate teachers."

But of course my implications were unfair: the reason NOT to be outraged is that casuals in fact ordinarily do a really terrific job of teaching.

I do think there is a threat to teaching quality, but that threat is not due to the casual nature of the teachers, it is because it makes the whole structure of the university precarious.

To those working towards the top of these huge lumbering organisations they seem permanent, stable and unstoppable.

But there is no reason the university should last forever. Were workplaces to slowly stop trusting in the credentials we sign off on and start instead to draw on the many many many other ways of acquiring knowledge and showing evidence for it that are now available, our authority and place in both the world of knowledge and the labour market would be lost.

And this trust is built on the people who produce and teach and examine. Who can be trusted because their work is independent, considered, built on scholarship and research - that all comes from stable employment and an academic freedom that results from at least some financial security.

And the stability of the university itself, as legislators knew for centuries (and why our universities are mostly membership based) is based on those who teach, profess knowledge, learn and engage in debate and discovery. Casualisation removes their allegiance to institutions and their willingness to support its structures, legitimacy and reputation - the things that keep it going.

See this letter, a resignation from casual academia, which rightly argues:

"your house of cards is wobbling and will topple because you have built no foundation for your institution"

PS there are dozens of newspaper reports, academic articles and official reports on casualisation. I acknowledge them but haven't linked to them, mostly to keep things quick.

Why journal rankings are evil

I have been sitting in a workshop for the past couple of days. This workshop was on universities and markets. So perhaps you can imagine, I have been on a rollercoaster of surging hope, of deep sadness and regret and, sometimes, of profound crankiness. I know, nerd, right?

My thoughts on universities have been popping up here for some time. We kind of know what they are.

One of the things that has bothered me deeply for some time, is journal rankings. Officially we don’t have them. When we did, we blamed the government, pointed at the bureaucrats, all the while converting this system of ranking into an internal economy that regulates, not only allocation of jobs and resources, but the behaviour of academics.

The reason we no longer have rankings is that government looked at this situation with alarm. The rankings were intended to provide information to non-specialists about the quality of the places where we publish.

There were always several problems with this and academics were not quiet about them. Some of the problems were functional. For example, if you rank journals one year, the next year the ranking is true (due to the way it influences scholarly preferences for publishing).

But what is most disturbing is that, despite the official declaration of death for journal rankings, they are still being used in universities. Indeed, their use seems to be escalating – and this week I heard a call for them to be officially reinstated.

This is alarming.

And the reason this is alarming is that some of the problems with ranking are about the ways that it enforces disciplinary complicity and thus – as the economists fear – stifles innovation.

If everyone needs to publish in the same handful of ‘top’ journals, whose content is regulated and edited by certain selections of ‘peers’ (these people, for ECRs, are not really ‘peers’…but that is another story) new ideas will never emerge. We would NEVER have had feminism emerge in the academy under this kind of regime, for example. We need to be allowed to value the journals that will take risks as well as the old reliables – otherwise new knowledge will never emerge and we will keep recycling vaguely different hues to same old ideas.

But university administrators like journal ranking because it gives a numeric value to quality – as money does to commodities – that helps them allocate scarce resources. This has become such a priority for them (mostly because it is horribly hard and strains their relationships with their colleagues) that they will sacrifice nearly anything for tools to help them do it.

They need to find another way.

For if we prioritise means of allocating funds at the expense of structures that enable and facilitate the good production of knowledge we might as well all pack our bags and move out of the universities.

Enlivened learning

For a little while I have been thinking about 'inclusive knowledge' - what a more inclusive university might look like if we add KNOWLEDGE, not just demographics, to the question of inclusion. My as yet unexplored assumption (based on SOME evidence, just not much systematic yet) is that the exclusion of people and the limits of academic knowledge are related.

The idea links to Raewyn Connell's discussion about Southern Theory - emphasising certain kinds of knowledge bolsters power in the locations in which they are made.

Since this has been rattling around in my head for a bit I was excited when yesterday I met this amazing couple, Kelly and Udi, who have 'dropped out' of academic life and are touring the world on their own savings to explore ways that people are 'doing' high education beyond the academy. This includes indigenous knowledge, but also other ways of knowing 'otherwise'. They

They are calling their trip Enlivened Learning.

Somebody needs to give this couple some money. There is really important stuff here.

I plan to spend a good amount of time with their blog.

"the life of the community fifty years hence is today our responsibility"

Last year I stumbled across a letter in the National Archives written to Ian Clunies Ross on 26th January, 1957 by Mrs Dorothy Harden, a widowed pensioner.

Mrs Harden thanked Clunies Ross for his Australia Day address. She included One pound, a substantial sum from her pension, towards a scholarship for Aboriginal students.

She had also written to the Prime Minister, she said, asking “Mr Menzies would he grant a percentage of all the mineral wealth of our land...for the education and rehabilitation of the Aborigines."

"I have no illusions that my faint cry will be heeded, but will not you who can shout and did in your Australia day address, should and keep on shouting, until a fair dealing is showed these, not them, but fellow countrymen of ours.

Today is our Anniversary Day, but although a fourth generation Australian I can take no pride in it when all about us at Lismore are settlements of the original owners of this land pushed into unwanted corners…although we are not responsible for the misdeeds of our forefathers, what place the Aborigine holds in the life of the community fifty years hence is today our responsibility”

Inclusive history: problems for an elite profession

Mike McDonnell, Hannah Forsyth and Tim Allender

For AHA conference

History ‘from below’ made its mark in the mid-twentieth century so that the discipline now readily encompasses groups it previously marginalised. And yet, while history can appear inclusive in this sense, historians themselves tend to be relatively culturally homogenous. This paper draws on research that explores engagement with history in diverse settings (high schools in regions from multi-cultural south-west Sydney to Aboriginal remote Wilcannia) to consider how the practice of history itself – what makes a good historian, or the construction of historical merit – might include or exclude some members of society. The question, we know, is important, for identification with a historical past is key to citizenship and social inclusion. Is history – even history from below – still written by society’s ‘winners’? While this paper links to previous studies in history education and raises some questions about pedagogy and curricula, we aim in addition to explore the question of what an inclusive history might look like in all the ways history is presented and practiced. In this, we seek to look beyond traditions of social and oral history, which, our research suggests, continues to exclude some members of society.