Keywords

It is a pleasure to be a part of this discussion with Meenakshi Krishnaraj, Ren-Hao Xu, and Pat Norman (Chap. 20). University work today is normally pressured and demanding—far from the imagined leisure of the Ivory Tower. To take time, to slow down and focus careful thought on one text, to think out its implications is an exercise that is all too rare. More than a pleasure, it is also a privilege for me, as the author of the text in question. I am very grateful to the authors of these thoughtful commentaries.

The commentaries have, I think, captured key themes of The good university (Connell, 2019). They recognise the central argument for the collective character of intellectual work, which remains the basis of university research and teaching—despite the reigning ideology of individualism and the toxic apparatus of output norms, rankings, and league tables. They recognise the interactive character of university teaching, the basis of the real cognitive work done in higher education—despite the traditional dominance of the lecture format and the new pattern of online instruction. And they understand the importance of the political environment of university work, from the budgetary policies of current governments to the worldwide impact of colonial power.

Where did The good university come from? I have written a number of books, but none like this before. I wrote it in the years after retiring from my job, looking back with joy and anger after a long academic career, and drawing from several streams of research and action that flowed through those years. One stream of research, starting early, was about the sociology of education, notably educational inequalities (e.g., Connell et al., 1982). A more recent stream concerned ‘neoliberalism’ as ideology and policy framework, including privatisation and managerial prerogative (e.g., Connell, 2013). I have also done research about intellectual workers, both in Australia and overseas, and became interested in the labour process in intellectual work (e.g., Connell & Wood, 2002). I was increasingly concerned with the global economy of knowledge, research that crystallised in the book Southern Theory (Connell, 2007).

As well as this research background, I had practical experience in universities in several countries and many troubled conversations with university workers. I had been involved in setting up new programmes, trying to democratise university teaching, and trying to create new research agendas. And—still in vivid memory—I was in a group, mainly fellow-students, who set up an experimental Free University in Sydney back in the 1960s.

That was the general background to The good university (2019). There was also a specific impetus. As I explain in the book’s Introduction, in 2013 there was a long industrial dispute at the University of Sydney. I was a union member all my working life, but I could not remember such a ham-fisted series of aggressions and delaying tactics by management, so much anger among the university workforce, or so much distrust of the way the university was being run. I was on the picket line during the strike action and shared in the cultural struggle that the union and its supporters waged. That included a workshop to re-think the nature of the university. I guess the discussions in that group, and across the campaign as a whole, were really the beginnings of the book. I hope I have done them justice.

Pat Norman’s commentary foregrounds one of the main agendas of The good university (2019). This is the idea of the collective intellectual, based on the fact that universities actually function not by command from above by managers, but by coordination from below, guided by what Norman nicely calls the ‘practical wisdom’ of the workforce. Norman recognises the enormous importance of the university operations workers—a good half of our workforce—variously called the professional staff, support staff, general or non-academic staff, or, in the United States, just ‘staff’. Almost all the critical literature about universities is written by academics, and unfortunately some are only concerned with academics. I do not want to point fingers, but I find it embarrassing, even offensive, when academic colleagues write as if the fellow-workers on whose helpfulness, intelligence, and skill they depend every day, either do not exist or do not count.

Norman recognises their importance and understands how their jobs change. Sometimes they expand into the ‘third space’ between academic and professional roles. I love his description of being simultaneously ‘a librarian, a teacher, a research assistant, a publishing adviser, a research metrics data analyst, a networker’ and more. Sometimes these jobs are impacted or even abolished by automation, and sometimes—not recognised enough in the critical literature—they are outsourced to companies external to the university itself. Norman understands the intimate politics of the ‘re-structuring’ that is so important a tool of managerialism and can be so disruptive to the institution and distressing to the workers who get re-structured. He offers a subtle analysis of the cultural change that is set in motion by the models of ‘evidence-based practice’, ‘best practice’, or—to put it more bluntly—the constant importation of managerial techniques from the profit-driven corporate world. Gross consequences of those practices are the casualisation and outsourcing of jobs, the rise of insecurity in university work for the majority, and the outrageous amount of money funnelled to a small cadre of top-level managers. At a much finer level, we see the consequence that Norman points to: the changed definition of professionalism that follows from an emphasis on de-contextualised knowledge, abstracted measures, and so-called accountability.

As Norman argues, this trend de-values the practical wisdom we might otherwise be recognising and celebrating as a basis of university life. He diagnoses, I think correctly, a dangerous result. The de-contextualisation, outsourcing, and re-structuring, endlessly repeated—since none of these changes is ever regarded as final—not only obliterate institutional memory, the everyday know-how that makes the institution run. They also degrade the institutional imagination, the capacity to go beyond the given, and ‘show the rest of society another, better way of being’.

So finally, Norman comes to the very basic question, what are universities for? Just churning out credentials? That is pretty much the vision of current conservative parties around the Anglosphere. He proposes, and I think most of us would agree, that it can and should be something more. ‘Universities have always pressed societies past the boundaries of what is, and instead showed what is possible’. Amen to that!

Krishnaraj’s commentary addresses an existing alternative, a tradition of advanced education created in India, and still present, though under pressure. She describes the Guru-Sishya relationship, a specific teacher-student pattern that I suspect is widely misunderstood outside India, since ‘guru’ has become a loan-word in English. The loan-word is commonly taken to mean an authoritative, even authoritarian, teacher, whose rigid doctrine is supposed to be blindly followed by the disciples.

Krishnaraj describes a significantly different relationship, one that is much more interesting educationally. The guru is indeed a respected authority, a noted practitioner of a body of knowledge, an art, or skill, who gains a reputation for enabling others to acquire it. It is a relationship in which the sishya is active, not passive: posing questions, practising the art, and seeking advice. It is a relationship that arises from an oral culture, and Krishnaraj suggests it has a very long history in India. But it is now under pressure from a much more formalised model of teaching in the schools and universities.

India currently has one of the three largest university systems in the world—alongside China and the United States—descended from the largest of all colonial university systems. Colonising powers faced the task of legitimating their rule and sustaining it through time, and formal elite education was one of the tools the British used. The idea was to train the professional or semi-professional workforce needed to make the Empire function, so there was a top-down pedagogy and a mainly European-derived curriculum. This model was strongly criticised by the great writer Rabindranath Tagore, who just a hundred years ago launched the alternative Visva-Bharati college as a ‘meeting-place of civilizations’—I tell this remarkable story in The good university (2019). After partition and independence, India’s public university system was expanded in a nation-building effort (Australia’s public universities were expanded at the same time, for the same reason). And then the free-market ideology took over, assisted, as Krishnaraj notes, by the World Bank and IMF. In the last 30 years, hundreds of fee-funded private colleges and universities have been set up. They now account for about half of all Indian higher education enrolments.

Krishnaraj describes the pathology of this system: a strong preoccupation with credentialling—basically, access to jobs—which focussed on the passing of assessments rather than the quality of learning. The emphasis on credentials has even invaded the spheres where the guru-sishya pattern of teaching and learning survived, areas of Indian culture that include spirituality, dance and music, and yoga.

So, are we looking at the extinction of a rich Indigenous educational tradition under the pressure of colonialism, modernisation, and global capitalism? Krishnaraj gives us a brief but highly interesting case study that suggests another possibility. The student discussed, a musician, has studied with her guru for many years. She now feels the need to gain formal credentials, both from social expectation and in order to broaden her fields of study, but not as a sharp alternative. Rather, she enrolled in distance education with her guru’s support and uses the skills and knowledge she has acquired with her guru to navigate the formal university offerings. It seems there is not a necessary antagonism between the two models of teaching and learning. They can be made to work together. That might give us hope for the strong agenda of change that Krishnaraj requires when she argues that in India, to democratise university teaching and learning requires the decolonisation of education. There is a growing international discussion of this idea, especially in Africa—there is a notable essay on the subject by the philosopher Achille Mbembe, for instance (Mbembe, 2016). In far too many cases, the idea of decolonising remains a vague aspiration. Krishnaraj has given us some specific meanings and practices, as well as the broad perspective, and I think that combination is a great help.

Ren-Hao Xu takes us to another part of the post-colonial world, Taiwan. No other society had quite the same experience of colonisation: a long-established Indigenous culture with many regional and oceanic connections; informal migration from China over several centuries; contact from the Portuguese empire, trade, and settlement by the Spanish and Dutch empires; partial imperial control from China; conquest and direct colonial rule from Japan; re-occupation from China. That was rapidly followed by the violence of the cold-war dictatorship under the Kuomintang (KMT) regime, which had just lost the civil war on the mainland and escaped to Taiwan, while still claiming to be the legitimate government of China. The process of democratisation in the 1990s was not strictly a decolonisation—Indigenous communities remain a small and marginalised minority—but must have had a similar feeling.

The focus of Xu’s discussion is university research rather than teaching. The turbulence of Taiwan’s modern history has plainly had important consequences for university research. Xu outlines the general trajectory and also gives us a case study of one unit, the Department of History at the institution that is now Taiwan National University. It was set up by the Japanese colonial regime, which wanted knowledge relevant to the Japanese empire’s expansion in south-east Asia—so the historians studied that. Under the KMT, attention was switched to mainland China, under ideological controls supporting the KMT’s narrative of legitimacy. Only after the process of democratisation was well under way, at the end of the dictatorship, was there freedom to diversify historical research and challenge official interpretations of history.

In Australia we should be able to recognise the politics of historiography. We have had our ‘History Wars’ about the British conquest of Australia, its violence, and its legacy of racism. We have had historians’ struggles over the meaning of the attack on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915, supposed by many to be ‘Australia’s coming of age’ as a nation, but capable of very different interpretations. It is not surprising that the cover of The Anzac Book (1916)—the famous memories-of-the-front-line volume that was a best-seller in Australia during World War I—showed a wounded soldier standing grimly in front of a shot-torn flag. The surprise is which flag: not the Australian or the New Zealand flag, but the empire’s Union Jack.

(While I am on the subject, the soldier is shown with a bandaged head, holding a rifle, standing up in full view, and facing away from an infantry fight that is going on in the background—which is about the last thing that any real soldier in Gallipoli with a head wound would have been doing! But it is a heroic pose, and I guess the cover artist had sensibly remained a long way from Gallipoli.)

Coming back to Xu’s account, I think it provides a good corrective for my picture of research work in Chapter 1 of The good university (2019). My picture is too schematic, it does not have much space for censorship, terror, or other political effects. I think it is correct to say that the local situation of the researcher and institution do matter. Xu notes a gain in academic freedom in the time of Taiwanese democratisation, but also notes that the advent of a neoliberal, pro-business policy regime then also affected research. It did so in several ways: tightened public-sector finance, heightened competition between universities, and funding being shifted away from humanities and social sciences.

That too is familiar in Australia, from the Dawkins era, which reintroduced fees and started a chaotic competition between universities, to the Morrison government and its dumbing-down ‘Job-ready Graduates’ package. What we have not yet seen in Australia (this is written in late 2022) is anything like the ‘Higher Education Sprout Project’ that Xu describes in Taiwan. This involves a turn away from the short-term approach to more concern with good teaching, with social justice in access to higher education, and with research in the public interest—though I notice that the Sprout agenda still tries to identify and resource ‘top universities’. For me the most hopeful part of this story is that the policy turn was achieved by pressure from the universities, but not from universities alone. They found allies in a movement or coalition of groups that eventually changed the policies.

So, there is hope for further change. That hope surely comes through in the commentary offered by Krishnaraj, Norman, and Xu. There are resources for change in the rich capacities of the university workforce, in the multiple possibilities of coalition-building, in the many traditions and approaches to higher education that exist in the wider world, and within Australia too. The task now is to put those resources to better use than the current system does.