Unarchived: Green Left Weekly interview on RMIT dismissal : Melbourne Indymedia

GLW: RMIT academic Dr Robert Austin is used to being at the forefront of the struggle for progressive education after a life of activism and teaching in and about Latin America. Recently the sharp end of the neoliberal assault on the Australian higher education system, championed by the Howard Government’s hatchet man and Minister for Education Brendan Nelson, became personal for Dr Austin. After receiving full marks for teaching and research at his probationary hearings, Dr Austin has been sacked for his political views. In a climate where universities are selling degrees to the highest bidder and courses are being geared to nurture corporate values, Dr Austin and colleagues from the National Tertiary Education Union are preparing for a showdown with what appears to be a posse of neo-conservative management bent on turning the field of Latin American Studies into an area that focuses on investment opportunities for future tycoons. According to Dr Austin, who began teaching at RMIT at the beginning of this year, it was made clear to him what was on the agenda. “Management advised me to make the course attractive to business students,” he said.

Green Left Weekly discusses the struggle for our minds in Australia’s universities with Dr Austin.

GLW: When and how have things deteriorated for academics in Australia?

Austin: The deterioration, which I define in part as the retreat of critical intellectuals from their role as public spokespeople, begins around the early 1980s. In the context of Australia and Oceania in general, it begins with the election of a series of right-wing Labor Governments. The Hawke Government—through the Wages and Prices Accord of 1983—was able to tame the unions, including those that had been strong voices for Left perspectives, through a series of measures such as the reduction of public expenditure right across the sector. There was also the beginning of a quite concerted attack on student organisations.

This was a radical new phase of intervention by corporations in universities in the region, such that corporate funding from the onset of neoliberal reforms in the early 1980s soon became viewed as a legitimate process, rather than one with highly-politicised strings attached. Now we have only to look to the United States and the influence of the military-industrial establishment on curriculum in universities, and the kind of leverage that it has traditionally bought through huge grants to universities, to see what real politic is at play here.

I suspect that we, as critical intellectuals, need to review our position on this next point: the effect of self-censorship. In order to get grants, seek promotion, even have material published in some forums, intellectuals have been increasingly obliged from the 1980s to follow new fads, new trends within western intellectual debate: particularly post-modernism and post-structuralism. Remember that Heidegger, the father of post-structuralism, never renounced his membership of the Nazi Party and never denied the political links between that kind of work and the intellectual views he represented. Even on the Left those who ultimately went with post-modernism have been quite convincingly rebutted now. A wave of critical appraisal of their political positions that began in the 1980s came from Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Perry Anderson and a group that would congeal around the editorial collective of New Left Review.

GLW: How do you see the Nelson Reforms and what do they mean to you and your colleagues?

Austin: The Nelson Reforms are a further stage in the process of radical neo-conservative reconstruction of Australian universities, and of the broader education sector. Previously, in particular during the governments from 1983 to 1996—all Labor governments—the reform agenda on the Right was a more guarded one. It was a more measured overturning of the liberal university traditions and their replacement with neoliberal practices.

However, the accelerated reconstruction that began in the early Howard years has increased under the Nelson Reforms: the taming of intellectuals, the demands that university administrations subordinate curriculum even further to the interests of transnational capital, the notion that a student is a client and not a student, the idea that there ought to be such a dilution of disciplines that the word “interdisciplinary” really reduces to a proposal for generalism, where we see the great Humanities which have traditionally been promoted and articulated with liberal capitalist society themselves under threat. This acceleration articulates perfectly with the radical right-wing shift in Australian society, which the Howard Government encapsulates. Intellectuals reconstructed as terrorists are not far from the horizon.

With this attack has come a quite critical assault on the trade union movement and in particular on the academics’ union, from the perspective of the Right and from the perspective of public intellectuals, for differing reasons. We’ve learned only this week that the Nelson Reforms for academic activists include that we must now notify the management of our area when a union officer is to come on site. We must cease to register our trade union activity as community activity (on CVs and work reports). We’re being obliged to have meetings with our union officers in our lunchtime. We’re being obliged to register these things in ways that, in effect, make our every waking hour at the workplace accountable to management. It’s probably the most aggressive right-wing move on academic freedom—understood in a liberal tradition, let alone a Left one—since the 1930s.

GLW: What does the Howard government’s “Voluntary Student Unionism” (VSU) mean to you as an academic?

Austin: Student unions have traditionally provided a quite significant and fundamental array of services. Their description as unions is misleading on the day-to-day level, given the service role that they play. If one walks around practically any university, one sees the food outlets run by the student unions, their contributions to health services, student counselling services, psychological welfare, to a range of clubs and societies … and these play an irreplaceable role in the broader and richer non-formal curriculum of the university. At the political level the student unions are responsible for organising around themes of student rights: if you like, consolidating the role of student critique and expression at all levels within the university.

As to the broader political struggle in which we’re all one way or another engaged, the attack on both the service level and the political level of student unions which VSU represents is anything but voluntary. It renders the student unions lame ducks in an area where their participation is even recognised by the Right. It’s recognised, in RMIT’s case, by the Vice Chancellor herself, who’s spoken publicly in favour of student unions as a basic part of university life.

GLW: What kind of solidarity have you experienced in the face of all these changes?

Austin: In the case of my dismissal, the student solidarity that I’ve experienced has been moving and quite wide-ranging. It comes from overseas and national sources: Southern Cross University, Newcastle University, Monash, Melbourne, RMIT itself of course. We’ve gotten support from Western Australia in a couple of places, as well as in Latin America (my real academic home). It’s been touching, significant and quite articulate. We’ve received around 150 messages from students and some from staff who are not only opposed to the dismissal, but see that it is an attack on fundamental premises of the liberal university, and for that reason a threat to all academics.

GLW: How is your case a warning to your colleagues?

Austin: Part of the attack on the liberal university that we’ve referred to touches on the curriculum. In the area where I work—Hispanic and Latin American Studies—the curriculum has moved increasingly to the Right. There’s been a process of exoticisation of Hispanics. A process of, increasingly, a strong rejection of the critical Marxist perspective and its replacement by a post-modernist and post-structuralist perspective, and an anaesthetising of the way Latin American Studies and its subversive-liberatory potential operate. Now that process, it seems to me, is ultimately articulated with the interests of transnational corporations; and with the hegemonic practices that Edward Said, Atilio Borón, Perry Anderson, and varied other authors—myself included—have written about in our academic publications, called cultural imperialism.

Management says that my research is excellent and goes well beyond the call of duty; and that my teaching has done great things for Hispanic Studies at RMIT. These are curious statements and sit awfully uncomfortably with the dismissal. It’s in the non-stated area, the area of political activism and the political ramifications of the sort of critical Hispanic Studies I subscribe to, that the real answer lies. What management hopes to achieve is to intimidate academics—both subtly and overtly—into considering their future in International Studies at this university: in particular, those who may flirt with a critical perspective and labour activism.

Management have also shored up their case by the diffusion of the most heinous lies and misrepresentations. There’s meant to be a grand file on my “collegiality”: I’ve never seen it. I gave management notice to exercise my administrative right to see my full personnel file, and I’ve been shown a series of documents with nothing whatsoever on the dispute. It’s simply farcical. In other words there’s a “witch hunt” mentality, for all to see: an entire lack of evidence to back up management’s claims with the exception of the now-infamous Andrew Bolt article (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, 17 August 05) with its deceptions and misrepresentations; and (curiously) a poster on Latin American Studies which I drew up and management approved. The Arthur Miller evaluation of this, I guess, would be somewhat McCarthyist.

GLW: Have any of your colleagues expressed concern for themselves?

Austin: It’s gotten to the extreme in the case of some sessional staff, where they’ve only been prepared to meet me well off-campus to discuss their concerns. This was due to the effect of the now well-known gate crash of an informal staff gathering in Druid’s Café, beside the university, by the Pro Vice Chancellor and the Head of School on 30 September (2005). The effect has been exactly the effect I think they desire: that is, the outright intimidation of all sessional staff in my supervisory area.

GLW: Do you have a chance of beating this? Do you expect to be in a job here next year at this time?

Austin: Yes and yes. I’d like to be able to say with some definitiveness (that I will be in this job next year). At this stage I’m increasingly optimistic that there will ultimately be some justice in this matter. I’m very grateful to all those who have been supportive, in the most subtle and intimate ways right through to the most overt public intellectual and political ways.