University of Adelaide: Study, Research and a fabulous library

Last week I visited the University of Adelaide archives, while I was in the area at the recent the ANZHES conference.

Adelaide wins the competition so far for the university that does not appear to be run by its marketing department. This was actually the only overt advertisement I saw. You can kind of see it through the greenery. It says something about excellent education, and it is also nice to see that they remember what the university is for.

I also liked that the library clearly remembered what it was for (note that I am not a photographer):

I liked that this library is supporting plain old study and research, nothing fancy about information services and knowledge management and client liaison. Study. Research. It is solid.

Actually, altogether the Barr Smith library is stunning. The old reading room is a monument to philanthropy - and academia:

The entrance and borrowing areas were spacious, reference librarians visible and plentiful, computers abound and, most remarkable of all, an area in the library to eat:

and lie around reading in beanbags:

I like cloisters. And there were cloisters at Adelaide too...

...only these ones belonged to the students...

...though it seems they need a sign to know what they are:

Technology and the university: two British scientists in Australia

When botanist Eric Ashby arrived in Australia in 1939, his ideas about higher education were already compelling. Ashby’s subsequent experiences in science policy during the Second World War then combined with ideas formed by scholarly networks in the pre-war Empire. These led him to consider how technology, needed for national development after the war, could be integrated into academic traditions.

The war changed everything for the universities. Old networks of scholars were complicated by new relationships with the state and industry and new public concerns. This paper discusses the contrasting networks that influenced the ideas of two British academic leaders after the Second World War. Eric Ashby, influential in higher education throughout the Commonwealth, held ideas informed by a pre-war scholarly environment. Another British scientist who travelled to Australia, John Philip Baxter, though only one year younger than Ashby, was influenced by an altogether different network.

Baxter had spent significant time in nuclear facilities in the United States and contributed to the construction of British nuclear weapons during the war. When the war was over, he was disappointed that public sentiment led his employer, Imperial Chemical Industries, to shut down its work in atomic power. Feeling that he might have more influence in Australia, in 1949 Baxter accepted an academic post in Sydney.  By 1952 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of New South Wales.  Baxter’s goal, like Ashby’s, was the promotion of technology in the university system. However, his notion of scholarship and his ideas about the university were very different. Where Ashby promoted technology while preserving scholarly values, Baxter sought to transform scholarship to align to the values of industry.

Comparing networks of pre-war Empire with post-Empire Australia, this paper examines the emergence of a longstanding uncertainty about the focus of higher education: specific professional competencies or unique, creative intellectualism.

This is the abstract that I submitted to Scholarly Networks in the British Empire for July 2010.

Hannahland Wordle

Image from http://www.wordle.net/

Pictures of Melbourne University

Recently, I posted this picture from the University of Sydney, affectionately representing that institution's tendency to vague and confusing guidelines. The cloister is quite a pleasant place to wait for further instructions, so we forgive the vagueness.

But as far as cloisters go, I thought Melbourne's was beautiful, when I visited that university a few weeks ago, though a little over-cloistered with the chain:

 

I wondered whether perhaps this massively ornate carpark entrance was just a little OTT:

and whether anyone had informed the university that Professor Florey had died in 1968 and would be not be able to walk that way:

But it takes a powerful marketing department to convince the university that it is a good idea to do this:

This poster on a beautiful sandstone tower in no way makes me want to study an executive arts masters at Melbourne and that is only partly because I could not see how a woman sitting with some empty plastic chairs was going to do that. You can see the ad here, an ad I also find disturbing for "At last, a school that teaches you how to think, not what to think" - what was the Arts faculty doing before?

However, the poorly selected picture (and text) is the least of the problems with sticking marketing posters on lovely old buildings.

The problem with this is what it represents - that marketing a new masters program (a program that on the surface, I should say, sounds like a good idea) has a higher priority for the university than intellectual integrity. This might sound silly, for it is just a building, not a textbook, but symbols are important as we know and this really sends a message - and the wrong one - in my view.

I have a feeling that the recent development in attaching equivalent power to professional managers as to academic governance is a part of this problem - for example recent news about universities giving professional managers unearned professorial titles. Another example at Melbourne was this:

The problem with this is not that professional managers do unimportant work in universities, on the contrary (and I've been one myself, so I hardly want to knock them). But universities are communities of scholars and must be run by them.

Just to be clear - the problem is not confined to Melbourne University by any means.

Wrong answers to the right problem

Few things are as boring as listening to a room full of intellectuals whinging. Which is not to suggest there is nothing to whinge about: 50% of university teaching in Australia is being done by casual staff and those with better employment have utterly unenviable working hours and conditions. But whinging, as Meaghan Morris pointed out in today's ambitiously titled 'State of the Industry' conference, is like a reverse Midas' touch, turning every glimmer of gold into shit.

This is probably why our most prominent Higher Education researcher, Simon Marginson, prefers an optimistic approach, emphasising the privilege and pleasure of academic work and the reality that highly qualified intellectuals have more agency in Australian society than nearly anyone.

But I was pretty sure he noticed (I was in the front row) my growing look of horror as this optimism led, very unfortunately, to what I consider to be the wrong conclusions.

Marginson's talk focused on a division of the responsibilities we have to our paid work versus our academic work, wherein the paid work requires the performance measures, which we put up with to do the work we intrinsically wish to do. To me this was wrong conclusion #1: if we're so intrinsically motivated, why all the performance measures?

He said, too, that academics should stay out of management: universities were now so large that their management is a specialised job, best left to the specialists. If we stay out of these things that don't concern us, tick the performance boxes without question, we'll have time to focus on the creative stuff we want. While I agree we need specialist managers these days, wrong conclusion #2 is that academics should stay out of it: if academics stay out of university governance, the nature and purpose of the university will shift to align to the priorities of the accountants that run them. Very bad idea.

We then had a wonderful presentation by Genevieve Kelly, presenting the results of some excellent NTEU research on academic labour. It was during the discussion that followed that Professor Marginson made the final, most threatening wrong conclusion #3. The argument went like this:
a) the only way to improve the situation is to improve the bottom line
b) the barrier to improving the bottom line is treasury
c) all treasury understand is economics
d) we need to demonstrate that university knowledge helps the (knowledge) economy. He acknowledged the risks of utilitarian outcomes, but...

This is a strategy that has been frankly disastrous for universities for 25 years and is unlikely to succeed now. Eventually, universities become what they are funded to be and the reality is that we do not want universities to be for this (and partly they already are, since they've been trying this approach since the early 1980s - this is part of our problem and is definitely not the solution).

We need to demonstrate that knowledge underpins a safe, civil, ethical, healthy and prosperous democracy. We need to alert the public to the danger to Australia's intellectual integrity when 50% of the nation's future professionals, teachers, thinkers and researchers are being taught by substitute teachers.

We need to acknowledge that some academics have more agency than others: and senior professors from Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Queensland universities more than most. Sessional staff, PhD students, early career academics, and aging ex-CAE teachers in small universities do not all have (much) agency all of the time - and those who have more should stand up for them.

We need to show that academics love their work, are inspired to do it and don't want less time doing it - and we don't therefore need to count every minute of their time and measure every ounce of their ideas as if knowledge has a productivity measure. When we do this, we waste their time, we inhibit knowledge, we make knowledge production seem like a fight rather than a delight and we stop universities being everything they so easily could be.

Exams and exploration

It is not often I agree with this man, and I don't entirely here either, but I did think something about this observation of the old exam culture was something I think it is a pity we seem to be losing:

"Exams enable students to put off their work until the end of the year and that strikes me as an immensely valuable thing...if you [have] a system of continuous assessment...you have a pretty hard life. I like for the Faculty of Arts the idea that you sit around for a long time discussing things in coffee shops and pubs and quadrangles and anywhere else that you can get some seating and, finally, towards the end of the year you've got to get some work done... That's a good way, I think, to conduct an Arts education; students educate each other in the course of this."

David Malet Armstrong, Oral History Interview, National Library of Australia

I can't think of a title that isn't rude

"I believe that our national destiny requires us to break firmly with the past."

Don Aitkin, 1987 Copland Memorial Lecture, Canberra