I’ve always been perplexed, and annoyed, by the tone of much of the conservative criticism of university education in the humanities and social sciences (I deliberately omit the words “logic” and “argument”). Either pundits, pollies and culture warriors extrapolate from some personal or anecdotal experience of a few isolated sociology departments from the 70s and early 80s and imagine an Althusserian circle of hell trapping innocent young minds in the cold dead hands of French structural-Marxism, or completely forget that teaching Australian literature and history was a radical thing to do in the 1960s, and one which many of their forebears opposed.
There never, also, seems to be any recognition that teaching history, “great books” or classics is something that the feared (and largely imaginary) academic left generally support, and that the evisceration of the teaching of these disciplines which are loudly trumpeted as essential to our nation has in fact been the work of managerialism and quasi-market funding mechanisms.
The story of redundancies and the failure to replace history, religion and classics staff at UQ, for instance, is a narrative not of insurgent postmodern hordes, but of the Vice-Chancellor’s creaming departmental budgets for “strategic initiatives”, and the creation of accounting models which allocate funding based on bums in lecture theatres rather than the intrinsic value of subjects and disciplines while seemingly always facilitating a proliferation of Pro-Vice Chancellors and a modicum of marketing staff.
The actuality of the situation is very starkly in view in moves announced by the Vice-Chancellor of QUT last week to close the School of Humanities and Human Services, where I was employed from 2000 to 2004.
Professor Coaldrake said the school was losing between $200,000 and $400,000 a year, which was unsustainable. He said the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Human Services had high attrition rates and poorer employment outcomes than other QUT courses.Professor Coaldrake said QUT’s strength in humanities was its Creative Industries faculty at Kelvin Grove, which was internationally competitive.
“For us, that is the new humanities,” he said.
Peter Coaldrake, in another Courier-Mail report which doesn’t appear to be online, today defended his decision with reference to Julie Bishop’s diversity agenda in higher education. If students wanted to choose a liberal arts degree, he suggested, they could go to UQ or Griffith. It’s ironic that this “downsizing” comes at a time when Melbourne Uni is leading the way in re-valuing the humanities and a generalist undergraduate education.
It’s also ironic that QUT only began teaching humanities and social science in the early 1990s at the time that the amalgamation with BCAE took place. Under the Dawkins agenda, universities which originally had or had evolved from specialist roles (BCAE as a teacher education institution, QIT as a technological and technical college) felt that they had to replicate the classic model of a university.
QUT shifted away from this direction in the early years of this decade, when the Faculty of Arts was abolished, and replaced with the Faculty of Creative Industries. At one stage it was envisaged that many humanities and social science staff would transfer to the new Faculty, but decisions were taken by its Foundation Dean, John Hartley, which meant that this didn’t occur. Only cultural studies and literature staff moved across, and the Arts degree was left in a sort of limbo, existing outside any Faculty structures. Nevertheless, as I recall, promises were made that if research performance could be intensified and student numbers held, and the degree redesigned to be a “vocational” Arts degree in line with QUT’s branding, the School would survive.
Although there’d been announcements about a proposed restructuring, no one knew until last week that the degree intake this year would be the last, and that staff would be made redundant. It’s anticipated about 20 academic staff will go. My understanding from the information I’ve seen is that QUT will no longer teach political science, political economy, sociology, international studies, or ethics.
Some remnants of the School will be collapsed into other Faculties - languages (insofar as they’re relevant to business), and possibly geography and history to allow education students to have disciplinary grounding sufficient to teach SOSE and senior subjects. Some of the human services staff will transfer to the Faculty of Health, where a new social work degree is envisaged (strangely, here, the “duplication” argument doesn’t arise…).
I don’t want to cast any aspersions on Creative Industries - where I know and continue to work on research with a number of excellent academic staff, and whose degrees are very worthwhile. What I lament is the legacy of the original decision which sought to separate out CI from a broader Arts education. There’s no doubt, for instance, that media and journalism students could benefit greatly from instruction in sociology, politics and history. I just don’t think that the dichotomisation of “new” and “old” humanities responds to anything other than corporate branding, managerialism and academic politics at the top echelons of the University.
While Coaldrake can argue that students have options in Brisbane other than QUT for an arts education (he could have also mentioned ACU, a University where I also teach), this is quite misleading. It ignores the value of the research done by academic staff at QUT, which will now largely be lost to the academy and the community as people take redundancies. It also ignores the specialisations that do exist within the degree - for instance in electoral behaviour, social theory, sociology of religion, South Pacific studies, applied ethics, and a number of other areas where other Brisbane universities have less of a concentration of expertise and sparse or no subject offerings.
The cold calculation of numbers, OPs, and attrition rates demonstrates what University management actually prizes - performativity as Jean-Francois Lyotard termed it, and marketability, and vocational outcomes. Universities are prone to a logic of management fads and counting the dollars from clients. What can have a dollar value assigned to it is good, and what cannot so easily is “old”. QUT has just given an honorary degree to UQ Vice-Chancellor John Hay, who’s dismissed those who want universities to retain vibrant research and teaching programmes in disciplines such as philosophy and classics as sentimentalists.
While education ministers, culture warriors and pundits constantly proclaim the need for education to transcend vocational calculations, the hard reality is that the only notion of social value that university managements subscribe to is incredibly narrow indeed. Australian higher education has just taken yet another step towards intellectual aridity and impoverishment.
Well,I am very dry on this subject too.But I do seem to recall Aboriginals in the Northern Territory got a lot out of classical plays in their locations.Maybe your good self should try video and aridity and recite some classic stuff in those terrains.Before cane toads and the unimaginative turn into the ants you could find in a arid Anthill.Standing next to such ant hills with classic and looking at camels and their mouths,maybe you will revive the ancient art of telling a much to difficult story by making it even more complex,but rich in the tapestry that the words and meanings are worth struggling deeply with.Lead by example.
Well I guess John Howard would be very pleased indeed to hear about it. This is the kind of education we can do without in the future. No asking questions about where we are all going and no musing about Truth and Beauty along the Miracle Mile, or in shopping malls and petrol stations. Supreme revenge from all those grim faced students of bean counting courses and boring little revisionist men from the media commentariat who were jealous of all the fun we used to have arguing about poetry or doing ‘happenings’ in Drama like climbing up trees for exams. More bean counting courses please!
But there has been a trend for people to increasingly choose higher education courses that offer jobs at the end of it in the last 10 or more years. Although I notice a lot of Law graduates complaining of not being able to get work lately. Granted there does seem to be a steady demand for creative writing courses at QUT as that is not under threat, but then maybe that is related to people who just want to become rich and famous in this celebrity-obsessed world, want to hear their own voices rather than listen to anyone else’s and are willing to pay for courses such as these. Of course not everyone studying creative writing would be like that, but the current robust commercial viability of the course seems to suggest a fair few of the former.
I guess the increasingly exorbitant HECS debt is one of the reasons behind the new pragmatism although I found my BA course one of the cheapest uni courses around. And it taught me how to think and how to write brilliant (though utterly useless) raves in blogs like this one (hem hem) and how to put up with a boring god-awful job while I figure out a means of escape. The trouble is, in the future people will wonder what the meaning of their inexorably hard working lives are and will find no answer amidst the dusty piles of past university assignments cluttering up their garages or the old books lined up in their shelves - that’s right beancounters sell them whereas I have kept all my English literature books because I still enjoy reading them. Expect more suicides, social dislocation, increased crime and generally more soulless consumerism and even more mass-media focus on damaged celebrity dollies as the damage wreaks its poison slowly over a generation or two and we descend into a new Dark Age….
Well said Mark. QUT was a leader in applied ethics - which may understandably be surplus to requirements after the Howard decade.
Me, Ive always wondered what the exact point of a Commerce degree was. Unless you’re going to be an accountant, isnt it better to just go out there as a rugged individualist and entrepreneur away?
Surely you could read the ‘classics’ of marketing on your own?
The conservative press, and, in particular, the Australian, have several times run the line that ‘postmodernism is evil’. These articles tend to equate ‘postmodernism’ with some kind of ‘anything goes’ relativism when it comes to logic and intellectual rigour. After demolishing this strawman, they cite a few French names as examples of these offences, attempt to link this to alleged declining education standards, and consider the case closed.
Obviously, this manouevre is political. Arts and humanties faculties are more likely to produce material that undermines conservative governments than say, a mathematics or business faculty.
The brute instrumentalisation of schooling, and it’s reduction to mere ‘vocational training’, will inevitably lead to the neglect of canonical texts. The emphasis will always be on students doing enough to get them over the next academic hurdle, rather than actually learning anything much.
It’s just a continuation of the theme of the last 15-20 years: education is for a job, therefore the only qualifications worth having are those that equate to a job (preferably highly paid and enviable).
The concept of studying something in a discipline that doesn’t relate to a hands-on job is portrayed not as a means of self-improvement, or facilitating a better understanding of the world and its inhabitants. It’s a frill, a piece of useless add-on that might even lead one to ask questions - perhaps difficult ones. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?
Thanks for posting about this Mark. You’re certainly much more coherent about it than I’m capable of right now. I’m still trying to graduate from incoherent rage, at this point. Though I will say Lefty E is right about QUT’s applied ethics program being a really good one.
I have issues enough with QUT framing journalism as a “creative industry” and what that says about journalism, but honestly, old humanities indeed. I feel kind of bad for the next person who tries to tell me universities are overrun with socialism.
I mean, it’s the Department of Education Science AND Training for a reason. That reason would be that education and training aren’t the same thing. People seem to have an issue with this idea. Though I am awaiting the government’s creation of a new phrase.
All of that said, I’ve never been more glad that I did two disciplinary majors as well as one of the QUT required and fandangled ‘professional majors’, so that finding somewhere else to do Honours upon graduation won’t result in quite so much “Uh, what?”
It’s interesting that, in response to a piece by Mark condemning the [false] RWDB characterisation of the humanities as being entirely run by po-mo Marxists, we get commenters regurgitating the [equally false] accusation that the right is engaged in some mighty plot to annihilate the arts.
Fact is, the decline of the academic arts is due to universities’ “corporate branding, managerialism and academic politics”, as Mark says, which cannot honestly be blamed on right or left per se.
If you disagree, answer this: do you really think things will improve under an ALP government?
On the specifics of QUT, while I take Mark’s points about the research specialisations that will be lost, I do however wonder whether it is entirely justified for every uni, no matter how small, to have an arts faculty.
Surely (in an ideal world) wouldn’t you try to concentrate your historians and political scientists and so on into a small number of large, really well resourced, departments in the sandstone universities — departments that might then build a world reputation?
Jen, you can at least testify to the soundness of sociology teaching at QUT! Good luck finding an honours programme, and feel free to email me if I can be of any help.
Paulus, I suspect things are way too far gone and managerialism too far entrenched to improve more than marginally under an ALP government. However, federal policy (including policy initiated by the ALP under Hawke and Keating) has very much paved the way for the managerialisation of universities in Australia.
As to QUT, it’s not a small university - around 30 000 students, I think. Most of the figures Coaldrake cites are open to challenge. The attrition rate for BAs generally is high at universities where the OP is relatively low as many students will select the course with a view to upgrading to another degree after a year. To make an accurate comparison vis-a-vis Griffith or UQ, you’d need to disaggregate the attrition stats, and also consider data regarding student satisfaction at the end of the degree.
I’m not as close to the situation as I was when I was working there, but I’d certainly heard that numbers improved after the degree redesign (which was pretty ill thought out - cf. Jen’s comments about “professional majors”), and the OP for entry went up last year.
The “deficit” Coaldrake is talking about is an artefact, really. You could save that much either by removing redundant Pro-Vice Chancellor types and their attendant bureaucracies and redirecting money to teaching, or by adjusting the artificially low EFTSU allocated to Arts teaching at QUT (about half that at UQ). In other words, QUT made a conscious choice to squeeze humanities and social science through allocating a derisory sum from the block grant to arts students which is much lower than at comparable universities. It’s a quasi-market loaded against the School.
As far as I know, the research performance of the School had improved greatly over the past few years, with the new research centre attracting much external funding. That was one of the hurdles that the School had to jump to survive, but it seems the course has been altered at the end of the race.
Maybe so. But there are a few researchers in QUT Arts who are well known internationally, and many who are doing solid and valuable research and younger researchers whose potential might now not be realised. There’s also often more scope, as I’ve been arguing, for interesting areas to be explored outside the grant driven research intensive universities, and in any case, in the US system, liberal arts is taught everywhere even when it’s not a research focus.
Additionally, Paulus, the funding situation for Arts Schools is hardly much better at UQ and Griffith, if not as dire as at QUT.
The ARC focussed research model embodied in the RQF encourages universities to poach “star” researchers from each other, discourages early career researchers, and slants much research money towards projects which can attract an industry partner. I’m by no means opposed to the latter, but there is very little leeway in the system as redesigned under Nelson and Bishop for pure research to take place or for those who are for whatever reason not already within the ARC charmed circle to benefit from funding. Most of us end up as teaching machines. Again, workloads in sandstone universities can be just as skewed and just as intensive.
Ain’t that the truth. The cancerous growth of uni central bureaucracies at the expense of teaching is a lament heard far and wide. (In partial mitigation, much of it has been forced on them by the requirements of the Fed government, but still …)
You know, at Adelaide Uni there’s a lovely group photo of the entire central admin staff of the uni, taken about 60 or 80 years ago. It consists of: the Registrar, and 2 or 3 clerks. That’s it. How times have changed.
BTW One of the commenters on that article you linked to made me smile:
Where do I enrol?
Help! Trapped in moderation, no doubt for my reference to ‘pron’!
Thanks for the support, Mark. I may take you up on the offer when I’m feeling somewhat less defeatist about the whole affair. And of course, I can attest to the quality of sociology at QUT. I’ve got friends who moved from QUT to UQ for their cultural studies program, and they’ve got less complimentary things to say about UQ’s sociology program.
I can also attest to the fact that the response to this will only get bigger, given the decision was only made public to students today, in the direct sense. Honestly, I feel bad for students who have longer than this semester to go (which is where I’m at), because for all the talk of letting currently enrolled students finish, I don’t think it’s implausible to suspect that their learning opportunities will diminish in the coming few years as academic staff start securing employment elsewhere.
There’s also something to be said for the fact that QUT’s the only university with a campus on the northside of Brisbane (and no, I don’t count KG as Northside), and this announcement in conjunction with a lot of talk going on here about Carseldine Campus going the way of Kedron Park (there has been some information coming out of the Police that they’re in discussions about buying the campus) suggests that access to higher education for those on the Northside is going to substantially diminish (though given what I’ve heard of Coaldrake’s attitude to Northside and its socio-economic demographics, I’m hardly surprised, unfortunately) - though it’s hardly abundant to begin with, given both UQ and Griffith’s concentration on Southside.
Paulus, I’m curious as to how the comment you’ve quoted suggests a right-wing plot, it merely suggests that the right’s hardly going to mourn these steps in the destruction of something they’ve claimed is overrun with po-mo Marxists (which I must admit is a term I always find fascinating, conceptually).
This week on campus is going to be interesting, certainly.
Well, I’m one of those students, Jen, still plugging away at my PhD. And I’ve received two emails today - one from my supervisor and one from the director of postgrad studies (neither of whom knew much more than they’d heard at the meeting last week). Nothing at all from the university as such.
The axe fell very quickly indeed.
I anticipate the NTEU will be strongly challenging this decision, and I hope to be able to have more to say about that when the response becomes clear.
I’ve taught at all three, so I don’t want to make comparisons. But I would say that QUT’s sociology major, having been designed when sociology was introduced in 1995 rather than growing without too much rhyme or reason over decades, was well thought out and offered a coherent programme. It became much more difficult to teach when tutorials were basically abolished, and prerequisites with them, when the search for money became desparate.
When I was an undergrad at UQ in the late 80s and early 90s, you had 12 tutes a semester with a maximum class size of 10 to 12.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a real estate windfall on the horizon. As you say, QUT has form.
ACU is on the northside and has an Arts degree. Good offerings in sociology!
[link]
Well, the e-mail that went out this afternoon (at 4pm, mind) looks like it only went out to Undergrad and Honours students. Though that came from the Northern Campuses Director, and reading it again pretty much just covers what was said at Friday’s meeting, and basically confirms that the School itself decided to let students know after stuff had been reported in the Courier-Mail. So yeah, it’s rather telling that Coaldrake was willing to talk to the press before he thought about students being told.
Its a tragedy. And for once I agree almost entirely with your post Mark. Its hard to imagine any university calling itself a university without a designated arts school. The idea of arts being subsumed in a ‘Creative Industries’ grouping to me sounds appalling and testimony to the idiocy of the university bureaucrats. ‘Internationally competitive ‘ - what a disasterous joke of a VC QUT seems to have.
John Dawkins really has changed the culture. When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s no student (or faculty member) would have dared argue the case for universities as ‘degree factories’ which serve industry alone. Universities were intended to be places of learning. It was a bit of a cliche but it was right.
This type of view sounds idealistic and out-of-place these days. But cross-subsidies that cover essential parts of a university that may have meagre revenue shortfalls are commonsense. $200,000-$400,000 is nothing in a university of the scale of QUT - it could probably be funded by the VC and his lackeys flying economy class. I am not joking.
It also sounds dumb policy to me. QUT has real reputational problems without embarking in this seemingly suicidial act of distinguishing itself as a non-university.
Of course higher education in Australia loses out overall with this type of move. It is sad.
Universities often feature unusual architecture so why not rent space out to paintballers? Liberal party politicians could then clean off the paint.
I’m greatly in favour of far more courses on Post-Modernism and Marxism but they do have to be paid for in some way. Thats my way.
Alternatively they could hold chocolate tastings or something.
QUT gave John Hay an honorary degree? Says it all really
Well, I guess I was one of the last of a species to graduate from University. I studied what I did because I was interested in it. In third year I studied “Being, Consciousness, Existence” instead of “Cases in Public Policy”. I guess that makes me some sort of idiot committing career suicide in advance… but at least I made friends who I could talk philosophy with, rather than celebrity gossip and profit margins. That means much more to me than a big salary with stock options. I guess I should commit myself for that kinda talk.
Mark fingers the problem perfectly in his first two paragraphs:
I’ve never seen a really good counter-attack against the usual sort of reactionary university-Left bashing. For instance, when the next Alan Jones story about the next absurd PhD grant comes up, lefty academics should hit the airwaves:
Jones: And now we have Token Lefty to discuss the crazy grant to study surfing that the University of Western Sydney is giving out. So Token, isn’t this grant a stupid idea?
Lefty: (bored voice) Oh, I don’t know. Probably.
Jones: What? You agree?
Lefty: Probably. You know, my (relative/mentor/inspiration) fought like the devil to make sure Australian history gets taught in Australian Unis but that’s all getting squeezed out.
Jones: By stupid courses about surfing?
Lefty: (airily) Surfing, Commerce, that sort of thing. (firmly) Alan, I think it’s really important that all students learn about Australian history and culture, but the people running the Uni obviously don’t agree with me. Did you know that QUT won’t be teaching Australian history any more?
Of course it’s terrible that QUT is cutting its Arts faculty, but universities are expensive places to run and difficult decisions have to be made. There is one - and only one- source of money to get universities properly resourced, and that is student fees, meaning fees that are a lot higher than they are now.
That is a solution that most people who have contributed to this thread would resist, I would think.
Of course, you can argue that the government should fund all universities to the necessary extent, just as it did in the good old days of Harry’s youth, but there is a problem with that solution - it just aint gunna happen.
Cutting out bureaucratic fat from universities is a good idea in itself but won’t save much money in the scheme of things.
But even well resourced universities have to make decisions about what programs they will offer. Not even the super rich US universities offer everything.
So true…i get quite a laugh out of Howard & friends snuffling on about History & the Classics when they bed w/ the Master of ‘low brow’. History demonstrates that gradually Empires dissolve under their own hedonistic, multi-cultural, Machiavellian weight…& Fascist Corporate States eventually get their butts kicked.
Do they really want History taught?…do they really think they can control educators, select the movements & events & characters to be focused on, & limit discussion & debate?…sure, temporarily…but it’s really just a Union busting & privatisation compulsion? User pays, cheap & nasty…unless YOU’RE THE CHOSEN ONES.
and teaching our youth to yell out:
SHOW ME THE MONEY!
My Uni is now the INTERNET.
Better not write any more insightful poems tho…people might think I’m blue & preparing to hang myself…sigh. Aren’t the mainstream media a caring, compassionate Conservative bunch?
Good topic Mark. Needed saying. Luv yer work Megan.
Tho Empires don’t necessarily transform into ‘Dark ages’ full of nasty Monks & religious wars. We’re just told they do…:) - self-fulfilling prophecies are often fed to the starving.
I agree with Uncle Milton. After a decade plus of hearing complaints about ‘managerialism’ I’m yet to work out what it means beyond the fact that in any organisation demands for money exceed its supply and somebody has to make decisions as to how it is allocated. In my view universities have been too inclined to accept the status quo, whatever it is, rather than focusing on areas of relative strength (or trying to create such areas). This is not to say that every judgment is the right one, and I know little about the detail of QUT, but there is no shortage of humanities/social science departments or graduates in Australia so this is an obvious place to start when looking for areas that have more resources than is warranted.
Here’s a primer on managerialism from Coaldrake in yesterday’s Courier-Mail:
To expand, Andrew, you’ve just demonstrated the principles in your own comment.
The question is who makes those decisions and on what principles the decisions are made.
So all courses should be taught exclusively because there is demand in the labour market for their graduates?
Uncle Milton wrote:
Harry Clarke wrote:
Harry’s got the right end of the stick here.
“it could probably be funded by the VC and his lackeys flying economy class. I am not joking”
Very unlikely. Let’s say we’re talking about trips to the UK. $1500 economy class, $5000 business class, $9000 first class. (My guess is that the VC flies first class and the Pro, Deputy and all other prefixed VC’s fly business.) To save say $300K they’s have to make one trip per week.
Anyway, excessive costs are not the problem at universities. Academics are very poorly paid. An associate professor makes as much as a public servant with five years working experience.
Lack of revenue is the problem.
Well, even if that’s so, how many Pro-Vice Chancellors do Universities really need?
And they’re not poorly paid. Axe a few and you’d have your 400 grand very quickly. It’s a matter of priorities.
QUT, I’m told, has the highest ratio of administrative and managerial staff to academic staff of any Australian university.
“Well, even if that’s so, how many Pro-Vice Chancellors do Universities really need?”
Don’t know. It’s hard to find benchmarks, because each university is different in its own special way.
The answer almost certainly is: less than they’ve got now. But it would be hard to prove. You can be sure that they are all very busy. Whether they are busy doing useful things is another question.
That’s the thing, isn’t it? For staff at the coalface of teaching and research, there are endless performance indicators and constant reminders that their fate is in their own hands in trying to reach goals set by the university, but for the managerial aristocracy?
Indeed.
The comments of Milton and Andrew make me depressed. Neither of you can see any difference between a university and a supermarket even though a university is providing public goods and students are in no way informed consumers.
You are basing university structures and unit offerings purely on demand on the assumption that such demand is informed.
Come and do my unit on public policy. I’ll teach you about market failure and why market-driven incentives don’t always bliss anyone out.
Your thinking will leave us with universities where we don’t study english or history but where we vocationally train ’sports management’ and marketing students in areas where academics have no expertise. Its phoney, its fake, its anything but a sensible market impulse and it won’t yield creative and intelligent members of the workforce. It certainly won’t yield intelligent citizens.
The difficulty is that you are ideologically bound-up in the entreneurial values of the vandals who run things in the modern Australian university. These are the John Dawkins of 2007 - never mind if we get it right - lets just make a big splash!
Mark, this is terrible news. Soon to be followed by a ‘rationalisation’ of humanities subjects at other universities, who have been laying the groundwork for some time. You know, not knocking off the faculty as such, but creating courses like ‘ARTS100, ARTS200, ARTS300 and diminishing specialties.
Vive la Humanite!!
But really, you should have finished your PhD by now …
A quick comment from a 2006 QUT Journalism graduate (and first-time commenter). I would have loved to have done more subjects of the kind Mark mentioned - sociology, politics and history - during my degree. In fact I remember longingly looking at the HHB courses when choosing my subjects each year.
I know this is going to sound like a terrible excuse, but the main thing that stopped me from doing more of them was that they were largely based at Carseldine, and I lived on the southside. Thinking of spending hours (and dollars) extra each day on buses, going out to a campus where none of my friends were studying, kind of put me off the idea of doing a major in politics.
I ended up doing two humanities subjects, German 3 and Intro to Sociology (both taught at Gardens Point) and a “political communication” subject in the CI faculty that I enjoyed a lot. There is certainly a lot of humanities theory that gets taught in creative industries. But still I wish we had learnt a bit MORE. When I started doing honours it occured to me that some more classes on social and cultural theory would have really helped me out, more than learning over and over again how to make a webpage (something I knew before I started uni) and the ridiculous primary-school grammar and maths that first year journalism lectures often include.
It almost made me wish I had gone to UQ, where journalism students seem to be constantly complaining that they learn too much theory and don’t get enough practical opportunities. I suppose no university can be everything to everyone, though. And I did get a job at the end of it, for my dream employer no less, where I do tend to spend more time working on HTML and correcting inappropriate apostrophe use than arguing about subcultural theory or alternative models of journalism.
Harry, you’ve completely misunderstood my posts.
I’m all in favour of english and history being taught and researched in our universities, and deplore the existence of sports management and other pseudo disciplines.
Of course, it’s all a matter of where you draw the line. There are old style academics who deplore the existence of engineering, architecture and veterinary science faculties in universities.
My main point was that, like it or not, disciplines like english and history will have a secure existence only when universities are financially secure. That means, in reality, much more money has to come from student fees. Until that day arrives, english and history and other dsiciplines with a high level of intellectual content, but a low level of student demand, will be extremely vulnerable.
Look at the best universities overseas (which means the United States). They have mathematics departments and philosophy departments (etc) that have more faculty members than students. They are extremely cross subsidised. But they exist, safely and securely, because a great university should have a great mathematics department and a great philosphy department. But they couldn’t be cross subsidised if there was no money to cross subsidise them in the first place.
But, even with all that, it is still the case that universities have to make choices. Do you think it would be a good idea if your Vice Chancellor said “LaTrobe University should have a medicine faculty because all great universities have a medicine faculty”? I don’t think you would. Do you think it would be a good idea even if La Trobe had the money to establish one?
Harry, presumably you teach your students about opportunity cost. This is what it’s about.
Rosie, the uni used to run a free shuttle bus that took about 15 mins to get from KG to CA - no doubt taking it away contributed to the marginalisation of the campus and the arts offerings.
Uncle Milton, I doubt that increased funding generally would lead many universities (and obviously not QUT) to allocate more to the Arts schools and faculties. I think the choice has already been made that they have to sink or swim according to various measures of demand, and in some cases the measures are very far from being transparent or fair.
Uncle Milton, Whilst there’s certainly an argument for the idea of the financial security of universities having a major impact on traditional humanities disciplines, I rather find your question about medicine to obscure something important that I think distinguishes humanities from a more specialised faculty like medicine. I’m much more interested in the notion that it’s not just about ‘what great universities have’ but something that goes to the core of what universities are about, in terms of the place of a broad role for humanities within higher education. The department structures in the United States and their place for humanities/liberal arts disciplines isn’t just about cross-subsidisation and finances, but about the fact that the very nature of higher education in the United States contains at least a reasonably broad liberal arts requirement as a component at the undergraduate level. We tend to make the jump to specialisation earlier here in Oz, which I don’t think can be completely discounted as a contributor to the lesser position of traditional humanities in this environment.
rosie, that’s something I’ve heard a lot from KG and GP-based students, actually. I’m actually someone who considered a few CI subjects as part of my Arts degree, but the prospect of going to KG is a massive mark in the ‘cons’ column. Then again, I know a lot of education double-degree students who have finished their Arts component and gone to KG for their education component and find the new campus a rather unpleasant shock (initially) for them. I mean, I’m admitting a considerable bias here, but I think there’s something interesting to be said for the difference between Carseldine’s campus environment to that of KG or GP in terms of what that means for interaction between staff and students and the ability for on-campus support staff to specialise in areas relevant to students’ subject areas. But that’s a whole other set of arguments altogether.
What can be said, particularly re: the relationship between CI subjects and Humanities subjects is that iirc, they did actually co-exist, prior to this whole establishment of CI as a separate entity, so issues like yours as a contribution to the perceived lack of interest in humanities can be seen largely as a product of prior decisions anyway (For anyone who may know - Mark, I’m looking at you - was this whole CI thing driven by Coaldrake also?)
I was talking to some of the staff on campus today, and someone pointed out that other faculties, and even QTAC, have long been suggesting to lower-OP students who wish to do other degrees to enroll in the Arts degree as a stepping stone to what they wish to do (incidentally, there’s perhaps an argument to be made that this process functions as a sort of quasi liberal arts requirement as a way of provided other faculties with students with perhaps a sounder general knowledge base). It’s a time-honoured tradition, really. So there’s an interesting question as to what will happen to that sort of pathway for prospective students outside the school. Not to mention the notion of what basing university success on entrance scores (in the way Coaldrake has) says about how he views student capacities, and what that says about Coaldrake’s greater commitments to equity, for all the official organisational rhetoric and policy.
If you are right, Mark, then Australian universities really are being run by supermarket managers.
But I’m not sure that they are, at least not everywhere. The new Melbourne undergraduate model is a move in the other direction. If you want to study sports management, don’t apply there. If you want to study physics or history or life sciences, do apply there.
I don’t know much about QUT. I seem to recall that a few years ago it started a program in “rugby studies”. (I think I read that in the Oz Higher Education Supplement.) If so, then that alone disqualifies QUT as a serious university, in my opinion. Others may see it differently.
A similar (yet opposite) situation has occurred at RMITU, where they are cutting back on the mathematics department, but the social environmental discourse studies programs seem to be going from strength to strength, presumably because of student demand. For my part, I think that when a university that has a technical charter, as RMIT has, or had, and its starts cutting back on its maths department, it has lost its way.
Oh the humanities!
Well, yes, Jen, I’ve personally found that I’ve enjoyed teaching at smaller campuses such as CA, Griffith Logan and UQ Ipswich because they’ve got a much stronger community feel - and often more motivated students precisely because they come from “non-traditional” backgrounds (which sometimes means lower OPs too).
Yes - note the history in the post.
I understand that the centre was established because of a private sector grant, Uncle Milton.
Wow, this is rough news. Axing a School for a 400k deficit, please. I’ve heard of small departments being in trouble running up a similar size deficit, but a whole school. That is something that can be fixed by some careful strategic thinking. Hell, a couple of ARC large grants and that budget hole disapears overnight.
‘Lefty: (airily) Surfing, Commerce, that sort of thing. (firmly) Alan, I think it’s really important that all students learn about Australian history and culture, but the people running the Uni obviously don’t agree with me. Did you know that QUT won’t be teaching Australian history any more?’
David Jackmanson - What???!!! No Australian history any more? However will Howard and co. get across his ‘three cheers’ view of white Australian history? Oh I know. By teaching it in schools, before the students learn the fine art of questioning the documents they are given to ’study’ and where they also get to learn useless facts like who was the first prime minister of Australia. Obviously teaching History in university would be too dangerous and we might have too many people learning about the Stolen Generations (like I did when studying Aboriginal History at uni and it was a total shock) and all that kind of left-wing stuff and nonsense.
Quite frankly I find the idea of Dawkins Universities having Arts faculties to be preposterous. Get a load of this airhead Arts graduate of University Technology of Sydney (formerly the Institute of Technology).
[link]
Published by Mark on 23 April 2007 at 10:57 pm
Its too late to save the humanities in the tertiary institutions. Contemporary arts is a mish-mash of post-modernist philosophy and identity politics ideology, all bound up with political correctness codes. Beyond intellectual redemption.
Humanities lecturers have no one but themselves to blame for their fall from grace. Humanities used to be considered a classy sort of thing to do, learn a little French, drop a few Latin tags and be able to talk knowlegeably about ancitent and modern history. Humanities dons were typed as absent-minded other-worldy gentlmen treated with affectionate indulgence by members of the public.
That changed post-seventies when the lunatics took over the assylum.
Contemporary humanities students are now treated as a joke by most citizens, both on and off campus. The term wanker is interchangeable.
No doubt the study of contemporary arts in humanities is being replaced by crudely philistine commecial vocational subjects. But the notion of apolitical professionalism disappeared some time ago from the trendier humanities. So the imposition of managerialism is no great harm. And it does not seem to be too bad a trade for the taxpayer, since there is at least a prospect of HECS debt repayment.
The Cultural Right is correct to focus on the basic 3R’s for the populus and the traditional canon for the elite. And the secondary state schools are coming to the party, trashing the fashionable and treasuring the traditional. The Australian reports the state ALP governments are becoming born-again traditionalists:
Victorian Premier Steve Bracks, who will release the report today, said the report advocated a return to traditional disciplines to ensure a well-rounded education.
“It reflects our belief that there are key disciplines that are best taught within the school curriculum,” Mr Bracks said.
This re-conservatism is all part of what Tom Wolfe christened “The Great Re-Learning“. I suggested the same conservative tendency was observable in Australia, expressed as “The Decline of the Wets“.
I tell you the Culture War is turning into a rout.
Hmmm.
You were one of the people I was thinking of when I wrote this:
Do you actually know anything about what’s taught and researched in contemporary arts faculties, or is your opinion solely based on endlessly intertextual columns by the Windschuttles, Bolts, McGuinnesses, Sheehans, and Pearsons of the world?
Righteo, then. Back to the Nineteenth Century.
Where do you imagine this “canon” will be taught in the absence of arts faculties in universities?
In the discipline of English, for instance, the prime mover in the abolition of the traditional curriculum of language studies - ie Old Icelandic, Old English, etc., was budget cuts and managerialism, not any supposed postmodernism. And if we’re talking about the classical canon, refer above to what I wrote about classics as a university discipline.
Jack
Oh there is no doubt the Left has well and truly lost the culture wars they stupidly started. The biggest victims have been the Labor Parties and the lower classes.
The neocons will not accept victory graciously however. I’ve said it once and I will say it again. The neocons are only warming up. We ain’t seen nothing yet.
One broomstick operation that cannot come quickly enough is the sweeping out of all those wretched Cultural/Gender/Communications/Media Studies types from the universities down to Centrelink where they belong.
What a disaster THAT experiment was.
Yawn.
You forgot to use the word “luvvies”.
Do any of you culture warriors actually read the posts you comment on?
Aside from the fact that you’re purveying your endlessly repeated political piffle at the expense of 20 people who are actually facing redundancy, you might have noticed that the areas of study you mentioned are those which are well funded within QUT’s Faculty of Creative Industries and that what is disappearing are the traditional humanities and social science disciplines.
Mark on 24 April 2007 at 10:58 pm
I wish! I would not trade Darwin, Weber and Marshall for all the social theorists published in the past generation. Contemporary social theory is actually a kind of epistemological entropy, negating knowledge.
Mark says:
Muggeridge, when surveying the wreckage of MI5 after the Burgess-McLean spy scandal, concluded that reform was impossible. The only solution was total reconstruction: “clear out the current occupants, fumigate the premises and start again.” If this sounds uncomfortably like a purge then I suppose “the long marchers through the insitutions” are only getting their dues.
Stov used the principle of diminishing returns - reduce the total quantity, increase the average quality - to predict that the introduction of university fees would kill off the sillier parts of Arts. Death by a thousand staff cuts:
…it would probably begin with the re-introduction (imperative anyway) of fees, for Arts students at least. This would greatly improve the quality of students, and at the same time greatly reduce their numbers. The way would then be open for similarly reducing the numbers, and improving the quality of Arts staff.
On its own, of course, this would only serve to cut our losses.
But if even a quarter of the money which is at present wasted on Arts were to be diverted to scientific faculties, there would be great positive gains as well: gains to the nation, as well as to knowledge.
I expect that wealthy benefactors or remnants of the medieval Church will pick up some of the slack. There are plenty of private enthusiasts out there on the web, eager to share genuine knowledge to those who want to learn. Humane Arts will become what philosophy was to Hume: a civilizing hobby.
At some stage down the track, once the Great Re-Learning has been sunk in at the primary and secondary level, we can look into state funding of tertiary Humanities once again.
Then no doubt, the same sorry cycle or reformation, revolution and reaction will start again.
Thanks, Jack, for confirming that your information is based on an article in Quadrant published in 1985.
This is a worrying development, i guess it’ll become fairly typical as unis scramble to lower standards, raise fees, and oblitorate ‘learning for the sake of it’ in favour of ‘how to do make lotsa money’.
Agree with Paulus and Kim that this restructure business favours the bureaucracy and middle-upper management at the expense of academic staff, and lets not forget the outsourced consultants, despite unis having more than enough expertise to do just about anything - even give an Althusserian critique of university restructures and their reverence for the cult of management.
Which reminds me. I reckon a lot of postmodern thinking is bollocks too, but i’d rather read Lacan’s pseudo-science than wingnut bullshit in the Australian.
Radiation-leaks and outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease can be stopped. The disaster in Arts is far more important than those things, but it is not obvious that it can be stopped at all.
Of course. Because destroying ideas one doesn’t like and endlessly pretending that Nineteenth Century theories can completely explain the world and all that exists within it that did not exist at the time those theories were penned is totally more important than shit that directly kills people and other living beings.
Thanks, Jack. You’ve completely cured me of the obvious intellectual brainwashing of QUT Humanities. Now I have my priorities right, I can go back to talking about just how great it is that all of the knowledge of the world is summed up in stuff old white dudes talked about a couple of hundred years ago.
Excuse my ignorance, but what does a Pro-Vice-Chancellor actually do - as opposed to a Dean, or a Head of Department? Just curious, that’s all.
If you stick around Jennifer, you’ll soon get used to our Jack.
He’s basically a goodhearted soul and I think actually fairly acute about some geo-political issues but he does so much like to play the cranky old gentleman contratrian talking truth to power.
However he’s not old, his idea of truth in many cases is as filmy and flimsy as the ‘cultural wets’ pomo excesses he loves to rail against and there is no actual ‘power’ there that he thinks he’s talking truth to. But we all have our faults. I for one often drink white wine with meat, give guests misleading parking directions and play Chic and the BeeGees loudly when drunk.
However, Jack does have the instincts of a gentleman and is sometimes prepared to admit he sometimes gets it wrong, which is bloody rare for an aggressively intellectual male in the blogosphere. Just a shame he has no sense of humour or online social graces.
Also he has no fucking idea whatsoever about how to deftly patronise and so marginalise his online sparring partners.
Why, the same thing a Vice-President or Deputy Secretary for Administrative Affairs does.
Whatever that is.
Kim
While we empathisize with anybody facing redundancy, on the substantive issues we are debating here, your contribution amounts to no more than argumentum ad misericordiam.
“your contribution amounts to no more than argumentum ad misericordiam.”
I used to play the misericordiam! No, wait; I play the accordion. But still, it produces misery, so that counts for something, yes?
I don’t see that at all - we’re talking about the real impacts on real people’s lives of managerialism.
Kim
Organizations have hired and fired since about the Neolithic Revolution. Under a system influenced by so-called “managerial” ideas, at least people can be hired. Ignoring the insights of “managerialism” achieves little more than us putting the pedal to the floor on the road to serfdom.
You are not seriously suggesting that universities should apply some discipline to their spending taxpayer’s money, are you?
Well, there’s no doubt that universities can hire people, John! The point here, as you’d know if you’d read the thread and the post, is that the university in question set artificial targets for the Arts staff which they could not meet because no matter whether they succeeded in attaining the number of students required to enrol in subjects, the amount allocated by the university would still produce a “deficit”. This has got nothing to do with “applying discipline to … spending taxpayers’ money” (and in any case only 40% of university funding comes from the federal govt) and everything to do with choices that university managers have made about what disciplines will be attractive to the “market” and fit with their “brand”. End of story. If you think it’s perfectly fine that areas of study like Australian and South Pacific history and Applied Ethics should disappear from campuses, that’s fine, but at least be honest enough to admit what’s going on.
Kim
The truth is, Australia is only large enough for about ten universities. Far too many of these Dawkins Universities are spread too widely and shallowly.
Well, all I’ll say is that I hope Fred Hilmer at UNSW with his beancounter’s mentality (check out his fascinating tale of how frustrated he was by not getting accurate assessments of costs at Fairfax and how he viewed “content” as the basis of a business model) doesn’t decide that history isn’t “meeting the market”.
nabs and scepticlawyer - in defence of the pro-voce chancellors, I had the impression at UQ that most of them did a hell of a lot more than the vice-chancellor, especially the research pro-vice.
Nabakov on 25 April 2007 at 3:25 am
Oh, so thats what you have been trying so hard to do all this time! Poor fellow, no wonder you sound so cranky. You have my deepest sympathy.