No Trivial Pursuit: UWS and Communities of Memory

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 2002

We have not transferred our fi rst interests from persons and scholarship to bricks and mortar. From the fi rst, and I earnestly hope that this will ever be the case, we have sought the best and most distinguished teachers and our aim has been to maintain a continuous improvement in standards. Recent records prove that these things of primary importance are not being displaced or forgotten for a single moment and we realize that as the oldest and largest of the modern universities we have a particular duty to perform by helping to mould the tradition and destiny of the civic universities. 1

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 2013

I'll make a brief economic point at the beginning. One of the things that we're trying to theorize here, in terms of the problems that you've outlined, is what's specific to the Australian environment compared to the US and the South African. We're looking at precise forms specific to Australia of economic determinism, which determine the problems with curricula and within the departments. As a general overview, we've got an incredible relationship with Asia, you know, up until the last year when it's become problematized due to the Asian crash. Australia's gone Asian, in the last ten years or something, as a major policy. There's been an awful lot of resources put into developing modes of communication, business and economics programs around that trade interchange that's so vital to Australia. On the other hand, there is Australia's dependence on primary industry, primary commodity production; the Australian economy is not as developed or as sophisticated as the US. The University of Queensland is one of the Big Seven universities, and one of the ways you understand the huge push towards research in the physical, mining, mineralogical sciences--whose paradigms have an effect on the humanities here--is that we've got so much tied up with the mining industry and its other related industries. So unless it's the same right across the developed world, and humanities intellectuals have the same problems everywhere, we're still trying to work out something specific about the Australian economy which will allow us a certain direction. Anthony O'Brien: Is basic research in the sciences, good science, well-funded, as a result of that? Or is it all channeled into . . . Pure science has taken a kicking. Peter Holbrook: In fact, recently one of the vice-chancellors [college presidents--Ed.] was saying that Australian science is really in danger of becoming pretty second-rate. Carole Ferrier: Our physics department is just not able to do pure research. Peter Holbrook: I have the impression that a possible difference between America and here is that the culture wars in America--this document talks about a right-wing political agenda--are not as strong here; here it's always about money, economics, relevance, this kind of thing, and it's a less openly or overtly political or ideological agenda. It's more about efficiency, what the economy needs. Bronwen Levy: Yes, there was a discourse and a set of practices under the Labor government, even before this new, more right-wing lot got in, which operated in the terms Peter described, so what we've got at the moment is actually a stronger, fiercer version of what we had before, but with some differences. We've been dealing with a kind of managerial-speak for quite some time, all through the Eighties, really. Alan Lawson: There was an attempt round about 1992-93 to engender the culture wars in Australia. It was done through the pages of the higher education supplement of The Australian newspaper, and there were some fairly clumsy attempts to get some disputes going. It really didn't go very far, and I think in that sense Peter's right, that there was more fertile ground for that in the US than in Australia, largely because in the US a much larger number of people--at least that's my impression--care about culture and regard it as a matter for public discussion. Whereas in Australia, as Peter and Murray both suggested, it's so often been seen as a bit of a luxury. Bronwen Levy: We really don't have that tradition of the small-l liberal philanthropist who funds projects . . . [Alan Lawson: "In Melbourne."] But even there it's not as substantial; that tradition really doesn't exist in Australia. Alan Lawson: That is a really important difference, which underlies some of the misunderstandings of privatization of universities. A lot of higher education policy-makers in Australia look at the US as the site of privatized education, look at the course prospectuses and so on, see what large fees are levied, and believe that every student is paying those fees. But there are large-scale scholarships that are contributed to by alumni and other private benefactors, who see some sort of old-fashioned and very critiquable value in making those kinds of contributions to education, I mean to all kinds of cultural capital. That cultural capital here has not ever been very substantial. And so when universities in Australia try to get contributions from private individuals, it can only ever be on a kind of sale contract, as a direct exchange for services rendered. If I can give out a piece of privileged information [laughter, pointing to tape recorder]. . . I'm just trying to work out how many details I can omit . . . as Dean of Prospective Students I was given a proposal a couple of months ago from a private industry organization who wanted, they said, to fund a PhD student. In fact what they were going to do was offer about four or five thousand dollars a year for research expenses, they weren't paying the student's stipend at all; and this was for a commercializable piece of research and so therefore the student was going to have to sign an IP agreement, and also a commercial and confidentiality agreement--those are now increasingly common-but in this particular case the student was going to have to sign these things before being told what the PhD topic was, and so was the supervisor. Part of our procedure here is that part of a student's admission is that a supervisor agrees to supervise the given topic and makes a recommendation . . . [Carole Ferrier: Unless it's for making anthrax.] And in this case, because it was so commercializable and so secret, neither the student, the supervisor, the head of department, nor the Dean of Postgraduate Studies was allowed to know what the PhD project was [laughter]. Now I'm glad to say that the University of Queensland still has enough integrity to have turned that one down, but the fact that somebody thought it was a goer, the fact that it even got to my office, I thought was revealing of a certain creeping insensitivity. Bronwen Levy: It's also a kind of Australian crudity that comes out of that economic difference. Alan Lawson: That's right, yes, somebody thought they could buy the university for a while. At that stage we're not even discussing--George Bernard Shaw's words--we're not even discussing what we are, we're just discussing the price.

Higher Education for the Future, 2018

University as an institution has shown structural and functional uniformity across historical periods and cultures, despite distinct evolution in response to local needs. Historically, social norms, political stability and economic concerns, were the variables that determined objectives of higher education. Today, normative concerns about higher education are exclusively guided by economic rationale. The transformative potential of higher education in cultivating responsive and responsible individuals are ignored. In this context, this paper examines the possibilities that a professor has, as a transformative agent in a university. The author models a professor in four principal roles-as a scholar and public intellectual, and as a reducer of rent seeking and information asymmetry. The normative concerns that build this model have been drawn from historical roles of teachers in universities and experimental models in early education. While the professor as a scholar and public intellectual are traditional roles that need to be revisited in the modern context, reducing rent seeking and information asymmetry are phenomena of a market society that should be countered. By performing these roles, a professor not only creates and disseminates knowledge, but also encourages students to make decisions that are socially productive as well as individually gratifying.

Studies in Philosophy and Education, 2012

Feminist Asylum: A Journal of Critical Interventions

Panel Honouring the late Dr. Gülden Özcan, University of Lethbridge, Women Scholars’ Speaker Series

Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 2021

Mary Taylor Huber (huber@carnegiefoundation. org) is Senior Scholar Emerita at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Senior Scholar with the Bay View Alliance. She has written extensively about changing faculty cultures in U.S. higher education, focusing especially on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her books include Balancing Acts: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers; The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons; and The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact. The University and the Global Knowledge Society, by David John Frank and John W. Meyer. Princeton University Press, 2020. 200 pages. Paperback, $29.95. Also available in hardcover and as an ebook.

Prometheus, 1997

'We ar e all happy, are we', asked Nugg et Coombs at on e of the wartime meetings of the conc eptual planners of the Austr alian National U niversity, 'that it will be a full research university?' On this evocative not e, the authors laun ch their large history of the ANU. The notion of a supra-university, an 'Australian Oxford' , had been floated in the country from the 1870s, reaching some prominence in the 1920s when it was pressed by Melbourne scientists T. H. Laby and David Rivett, the latter of whom, as head of the new Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, envisaged that his own CSIR heads of divisions migh t find a pla ce in it as honorary professors. A Univ ersity Association was formed in Canberra in 1929 with, among others, the young National Librarian, Harold White, histori cal scholar, Laurie Fitzhardinge, and Sir Robert Garran as its chair, and on the outbreak of World War II, the Association pres ented a novel scheme to attract 'refugee professors' from the Continent 'on modest terms', an idea not surprisingly quashed by government, leaving Australia, as the authors point out, to miss the chanc e of starting a research university 'while brains were cheap '. The shaping thrust for a university focused on research and postgraduate study came, however, from a corps of wartime publi c servants, many of them economists, charged with the task of snatching positive social improvement from the exigencies of war, who made far-r eaching plans for the Commonwealth's involvement in postwar education which would include a national university. As the plan took shap e within the close purview and vision of the Director-General of the Department of PostWar Reconstruction, H. C. Coombs, independent manoeuvr es were also afoot for the establishment of a national institute of medical research.

Melbourne University Law Review, 2015

When tertiary leaders reflect on the purpose of a university they reflect not just their educational philosophy, but the spirit and imperatives of their time. Woodrow Wilson and Sir Zelman Cowen were each lawyers and university leaders who became heads of state. Their speeches reveal attitudes and aspirations they would take into public life — Wilson a progressive if rigid agenda, Cowen a more nuanced sense of the limits of authority and the inevitable generational challenge to received wisdom. Wilson helped create a great university but his educational and then political careers ended in disappointment. Cowen remained engaged until the end of a long life, sensitive always to the currents of disagreement, but believing strongly in the power of conversation to find a way to live and work together.

Global Review: A Biannual Special Topics Journal, 2013