Springtime for Sycophants : Melbourne Indymedia

The intensified spread of economic rationalist (eco-rat) policies and free market ideology within the national university system has meant that control over employment exercised by the various levels of management assumes ever more closed, centripetal and authoritarian forms. Education unions have tended to support this shift, either through an acquiescent policy of “let management manage”—the preferred approach of teachers’ unions—or the contradictory approach adopted by the academic union of insulation from the employment selection process, but integration into the disciplinary mechanisms designed to police the contracting boundaries of academic freedom. These practices are supported even by left liberals who, as Žižek has argued, “like to evoke racism, ecology, workers’ grievances, and so forth, to score points over conservatives without endangering the system.”

One way or the other, the consequences are detrimental to transparent, democratic hiring and tend to complement the practice of mainstream political parties and the entrepreneurial class in further entrenching universities in the private market cauldron. Hence corporate intervention in curriculum modelled on U.S. lines becomes ever bolder, adding to long-standing links between Australian universities and the US military-industrial complex. For instance Murdoch’s News Corporation, Dow Chemicals (a major US producer of chemical-biological weapons, including napalm) and the American Australian Association (a US-based cold war front) are major financiers of the new US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. And Chevron Oil, whose directors include the neocon zealot Condoleeza Rice, now co-funds a chair in petroleum geoscience with Woodside Petroleum at the University of Western Australia. Throughout this haze of “accountability”, “performance indicators”, “client focus” and a check-list of policies where stock market constructs are barely disguised—shareholders become “stakeholders”, “equity” replaces the liberal notion of equality, VCs become CEOs—the historic possibilities for a democratised, open, anti-elitist university of the future have receded.

As successive Liberal and Labor regimes since the mid-1970s cleared away the shaky remains of the welfare state and set up the scaffolding for its wholesale replacement by an eco-rat model, a labour aristocracy developed which was pro-Accord (the ALP’s 1983 neoliberal manifesto), wedded to the apparent permanency of capitalism, and often populated by ex-Left bureaucrats-for-life whose rise very much parallels that of neoliberalism itself; and whose managerialist practice can only be understood in that context. They will never earn the farewell reserved for working class icons like John Cummins; their passing will likely only be mourned by neocon managers and misdirected or complicit colleagues. At the global level, the broader but latent weaknesses of the post-war labour movement have only become visible since neoliberalism went into crisis in the 1980s while Reagan, Hawke and Thatcher—mimicked by Third World dictatorships—landed blow after blow on a union corpus whose decay had been camouflaged by the boom of the 1950s and 60s. David North’s historical placement of these radical conservative transformations is instructive: see http://www.wsws.org/history/1998/jan1998/reform.shtml

Against this background, academic job ads have often become expressions for the reinforcement of established semi-private fiefdoms whose budgets nonetheless continue to be largely provided by the public. The related “searches” are the academic equivalent of insider-trading: positions are publicly advertised as a formality despite internal or privately-anointed candidates; ads are written with specific candidates in mind; positions are re-advertised with additional criteria to exclude promising candidates attracted by first advertisements; approaches to job contacts by potential applicants are ignored; and variations on or combinations of these traits appear. The abundance of often well-published candidates with doctorates has done little to shake entrenched hierarchies determined to retain dominance over curriculum and its subservience to neo-conservative regimes and their corporate clientele. A quick web-page search will confirm the sobering under-supply of PhDs in many Australian university departments, almost two decades after the Dawkins reforms delivered the unified national system and its permanently-lowered horizons. A “level playing field” for existing and newly-declared universities: downwards.

There are of course high-profile precedents for political non-appointments, non-promotions and dismissals. Eminent philosopher Karl Popper was bypassed for a position at Sydney University, and went instead to New Zealand. The exclusion of Russell Ward from a history professorship at Newcastle University on the grounds of his Communist Party membership has been well documented. Distinguished socialist economist Ted Wheelwright was regularly overlooked for a chair in Economics at Sydney University in favour of candidates with lesser academic claims but “safe” politics (opposition to Wheelwright’s discipline of Political Economy appears to have been an unwritten mandatory requirement). In 2002 the University of Queensland sacked Dr George Lafferty, a professor in the Business faculty, only months after he assumed the union presidency and initiated progressive reforms which momentarily re-ignited the branch. Historically, countless women intellectuals have suffered truncated or impeded careers due to patriarchal university structures and conservative ideology, which led US feminists like Anna Spencer to deplore this “monstrously unjust and socially harmful” system as early as 1912.

Some newer universities are hostile to the traditional liberal academic criteria of research, publication and teaching profiles in job selection. This is not to imply that those criteria are sacrosanct or lie “beyond reasonable doubt” as the best predictors of a productive academic career. Rather, the point is to expose the regressive substitute which has entered even the sandstone sector under the guise of making universities more responsive to the market. Experience outside the academy has lately come to occupy a desired place on curriculum vitaes, but it is a specific form of experience that is required, namely in business or at the management level. So administrators can be heard extolling the virtues of suspending the doctoral requirement in favour of managerial-background candidates, or of offering “professional doctorates” whose make-up resembles a Masters degree or the once-scorned US doctorate, re-branded and marketed in the same way that genetically-modified foods can be made appealing and their deleterious effects ignored. Such experience is invariably not theorised, and passes under a series of misleading titles, like “real world” (the slogan of one of its principle homes, the former CAE re-invented as QUT); and “hands on” (re-cast by one QUT academic as “minds off”).

As if the recent history of corruption, nepotism and mediocrity at RMIT needed an epilogue, the revised job description for Dr Austin’s position in Spanish could be read as a tailor-made reward for services rendered ... to his dismissal. The dropping of the doctoral requirement and replacement with “completing a doctoral thesis within five years of appointment” is scandalous, more so given the number of impressive semi-employed and unemployed PhDs in the field of Hispanic Studies, both locally and overseas. And read the fine print: completing does not mean “award of the degree”, which can easily add another year. This in an institution which has been awarding degrees for thirty-five years, and doctorates for twenty. Curiously less than a half of the school in question had doctorates until its forced amalgamation with the better-placed Social Sciences school lifted the averages, just this year.

The anointee was, inter alia, a principle source for leaking notice to management of the now well-known off-campus meeting of Spanish staff on 30 September 2005, infamously gatecrashed by head of school Manfred Steger and pro vice chancellor Alan Cumming: see http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2005/10/98272.php. By union and management agreement, Cumming—whose role in the new job search would have been central—was subsequently excluded from Dr Austin’s probation appeal panel. Rewarding collaborators is abhorrent enough in itself. In our view, anointing an insider who is to be allowed five years to complete a PhD (long the benchmark in established universities) demeans the students and their institution. More broadly, it is an affront to public higher education. Ironically—given Murdoch shock-jock Andrew Bolt’s defamatory article on Austin’s support for student unionism—the Murdoch press itself has finally conceded that the PhD should be an essential job pre-requisite (The Australian, Higher Education, 25/10/06). Insider-trading makes a farce of “academic standards” and the shrill support for “proper process” from the neocons who have orchestrated this conspiracy from the outset. Conveniently, Bolt’s allies will never have their day in court. Management’s legal tactic of blocking jurisdiction at each turn has ensured that the nefarious and unfounded claims which led to Dr Austin’s dismissal will remain forever untested there, and ensconce those who shelter behind the veils of power in the anonymity reserved for insidious opportunists. In ancient Greece, a sycophant was “one of a class of informers”; but the more things change ...

As paradigms go, it would be hard to surpass this “selection process” for an identikit statement on the neocon academic. Underqualified conformists who effortlessly betray colleagues for self-advancement, whose singular career trait is their ostentatious and permanent pact with neoliberalism, are in vogue. As lessons go, one is repeated with exquisite clarity: the more the neocons talk excellence, the more banal their standards. It’s springtime for sycophants.